The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Creating Opportunities for Teaching, Training & Consultation as an Aspiring Psychologist

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast Episode: 5Creating opportunities for teaching, training & consultation. Thank you for listening to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. Teaching, training and consultation can be core skills for an aspiring psychologist. Today I will be talking about how you can create opportunities for these and also make the most of the ones around you. Please like the video, subscribe to my channel and click the bell button to be notified when I publish new videos. The Highlights: Welcome: 00:30 Behavioural Observations: 01:30Optimisation of the Qualified Psychologist’s time: 03:00 Teaching Skills to others & group work: 04:00Beth: 07:00Opportunities for attending teaching: 09:00 11:30: Developing your confidence 12:30: Summary & Close              Links: To check out The Clinical Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3jOplx0To check out The Grief collective Book: https://amzn.to/3pmbz5tTo check out The Our Tricky Brain Kit: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/tricky-brainConnect on Socials:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GoodThinkingPsychologicalServicesInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/drmariannetrent/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dr-marianne-trent-psychology Twitter: https://twitter.com/GoodThinkingPs1

Hi there, it's Marianne here. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to quickly let you know about something exciting that's happening right now. If you've ever wondered how to create income that works for you, rather than constantly trading your time for money, then you'll love the Race to Recurring Revenue Challenge with my business mentor, Lisa Johnson. This challenge is designed to help you build sustainable income streams. And whether you're an aspiring psychologist, a mental health professional, or in a completely different field, the principles can work for you.

There are also wonderful prizes to be won directly by Lisa herself. And if you join the challenge by my link, you can be in with a chance of winning a one-to-one hours coaching with me, Dr. Marianne Trent. Do you want to know more? Of course you do. Head to my link tree, Dr. Marianne Trent, or check out my social media channels, or send me a quick DM and I'll get you all the details. Right, let's get on with today's episode. If you're looking to become a psychologist, then let this be your guide. episode. With Dr. Marianne Trent Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast. I, as ever, am Dr. Marianne Trent.

Let's think today about opportunities for you to do teaching as an aspiring psychologist. Of course, it can be one of the really useful core competencies to demonstrate your readiness for becoming either a trainee clinical psychologist or other types of psychologist too. It's really helpful if you're able to demonstrate that you've had experience of teaching information to others. It might look like actual teaching, perhaps you've done English as a foreign language stuff maybe you've had time in Japan or something teaching English maybe you've done Camp America type stuff and done mentoring and sort of leadership and nurturing and child care or maybe actually you're

retraining and you have been a teacher teacher before it might be like me my teaching experience when I got onto clinical training had been from doing training within the private hospital that I worked in. I was in a forensic service and I mentioned in a previous podcast episode that one of my responsibilities was doing behavioural observations for a specific tool, which we called the Mod overt aggression scale. It was a little fiddly and the idea was that actually in order for it to be valid and for the data to count that everyone really needed to be using the tool in the same way. We were needing to make sure that they were interpreting it in the same way so the levels of aggression or violence or anger and I seem to recall that if someone had been really really angry you know kind of ended up breaking someone's leg for example which would obviously be extreme um you know the most extreme sort of score that you could

get um that you want them to obviously report it in a certain way but if someone for example had kicked a chair then that would be less extreme. So we needed to make sure that people were recording consistently, if that makes sense. Because it was a bit fiddly, it was important that we were communicating to the unit staff how we needed that to be done. We would do that at the induction, which happened when people joined the hospital. But also, if you work for a private hospital or you work for any large organization you will likely be oh so familiar

with refresher yearly training. We decided that actually it wasn't great use of the qualified psychologist's time to be doing all this training because actually it was predictable absolutely the psychologist had a hand in designing the training and supporting us with that we decided that actually yes our time would be well placed and it would be good for our experience and for our developing relationships with people in the hospital in our units to do that training ourselves It was in a training venue in the hospital and it was quite a formal situation to sort of 20-30 people at a time but it gave me and my colleague the opportunity to be able to tick teaching off on our competencies for the big form. It might be useful for you to think about whether anything that you're doing in your day-to-day job that you

could help upskill others on either as a repeatable predictable thing or maybe you could do some sort of consultation or some sort of formulation session for people regularly or actually you know teaching them some skills in some nice maybe some nice soothing breathing that then they might be able to teach their clients could you maybe pick some strategies that you currently use and help teach them to the staff that you work with or maybe you've got the opportunity to run a group when I was in my assistance role I ran a group for old adults who had dementia diagnosis and we implemented the cognitive stimulation therapy group which was fully lovely but there's teaching elements in that as well of course. Groups are of course a great experience for you as an aspiring psychologist and great experience for you as a qualified

psychologist too. It's just useful thinking about actually if there's a protocol or a manual or some book or approach that you really like and you think would really resonate with your clients then it can be worth thinking through in your supervision about whether that's something you could use and to bring to the service and to teach others about. So don't be afraid to ask and to think outside the box and to think actually about the benefits of what you are offering to your service, but you are allowed to benefit too. Actually, I think the pandemic certainly caused the NHS to modernise by about 20 years within the space of about a year. It meant that we were able to bring online more flexible ways of working, which meant that I was able to bring online more flexible ways of working which meant that I was

able to host zoom groups and actually had I stayed in the NHS it was my plan to create a waiting list group where people could come along monthly and do stabilization work with me there was no need to book and anyone who was either male or female on the separate list depending on which week it was who was on the waiting list for psychology would be able to come along via zoom at this set time on a set date and come along if they were free and if they wanted to do stabilization work as a standalone session and I would have been really super excited to do that so maybe if that's something you think your service could benefit from then you could run that with a qualified psychologist.

Or if you actually feel like you have the skills and experience to be able to do that yourself with the assistance of a more junior member, perhaps, or someone else too in your team. Because it's useful to run groups in twos just to help with things you might miss, especially when it's via Zoom, because you can't have eyes everywhere. But could that be an opportunity for you to do some teaching and so you know some sort of group work so there's absolutely a crossover between teaching training and group work because you need to make sure that your style is such that people can engage with what you're saying stick around and I will be right back after this quick advert. qualified. So come and take a look. It's right here in this book. It's the Clinical Psychologist Collective. It's the Clinical Psychologist Collective. Hi, my name is Beth and I'm a psychological wellbeing practitioner from Newcastle.

I just wanted to say the biggest thank you to the contributors of the Clinical Psychologist Collective book. I've enjoyed reading this so much and I've loved having an insight into the range of backgrounds and experiences people have prior to applying for the doctorate and it's been really interesting seeing the potential barriers to the application as well and how I can try and work around this. I really started to doubt myself and whether I was good enough to apply for the Clinical Psychology Doctorate but this has really given me the confidence boost that I needed to give it a shot so the biggest thank you ever This is the old guide filled with lessons and experience that will help you get qualified. So come and take a look.

It's right here in this book. It's the Clinical Psychologist Collective. It's the Clinical Psychologist Collective Is it just me who ends up singing those jingles in the shower when I'm chopping food? I just love them. So it can be useful to think about the ways that you can tap into teaching too. When I was on the doctorate sometimes we had people who were like local assistant psychologists coming along to some of our teaching sessions and I recall that happening at least on a couple of occasions. So it might be worth you making contact with your

local course and asking if any of the teaching sessions are kind of more open forum because that certainly was the case when I was there. It was the specialist teaching modules in the third year and if they were under subscribed and where I was there was like two different universities that you could opt into the Friday teaching in year three but it meant that sometimes there was like two different universities that you could opt into the Friday teaching in year three but it meant that sometimes there was just you know a few people on the course on that day and they might have loads of empty spaces it makes sense for people to benefit from those so it might be that there's a similar option for you in your local area and then you can get your experience really up to date really useful teaching and see how it's done and

think about whether you might be able to do some teaching, some training or some consultation. So I hope you found that useful. Just don't be afraid to think outside the box. If you think this might be useful for you to thicken up this particular competency, then could you, you know, decide to take this on? Maybe you could think about, you know, reading a particular book, maybe that your whole department might not have time to read, and then like do a little digest for them, or a research paper, or go along to some training event on behalf of your department and then teach it to them. Disseminate the pertinent points in a much shorter period of time. And you could get a bit, you know, whizzy here on your PowerPoint or your Canva, whatever floats your boat.

But could you demonstrate that you have the ability to teach, to, you know, to do what we call comprehension and so to comprehend what's been said and put it across then to others in a way that helps them in a meaningful way. I think this flexibility and this thinking outside the box-ness is one of the things that we're particularly good at in the psychology field and for you really to start building and thickening those competencies for your own career as an aspiring psychologist. And it might well just be the type of thing that you can use, if only to develop your own confidence, before then going on to do something a little bit more formal in terms of teaching. And if you've done your psychology undergrad thesis, perhaps you could present that to your department, if there's any useful learning points there for them too. It's about thinking about creating those opportunities. Why did I

just say creating so weirdly? Sorry about that one. If actually you recognise that there's a lot of skills and talents in your department, then could you maybe put together a monthly programme where you all teach each other? You could perhaps be the lead. You could hold it together, head it up. And you might maybe do more spaces in the year than other people because it's your baby. And yeah, I hope you have some fun with this and that you find it helpful. If you've got any other ideas for how you can cram some teaching training and consultation into your work then do give me a shout and I'd really be happy to expand on this further I hope you find it useful and if you do

please leave me a review rate it and of course subscribe take care and I'll catch up with you very soon if you're looking to become a psychologist then let this be your guide. With this podcast, you'll be on your way to being qualified. It's the Aspiring Psychologist podcast with Dr. Marianne My name's Jana and I'm a trainee psychological well-being practitioner. I read the Clinical Psychologist Collective book. I found it really interesting about all the different stories and how people got to become a clinical psychologist it just amazed me how many different routes there are to get there and there's no perfect way to become one and this kind of filled me of confidence that no I'm not doing it wrong and put less pressure on myself so if you're

feeling a bit uneasy about becoming a clinical psychologist, I'd definitely recommend this just to put yourself at ease and everything will be okay. But trust me, you will not put the book down once you start.