The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Finding your tribe whilst working in mental health

Starting point is 00:00:00 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,

Starting point is 00:00:32 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.

Starting point is 00:01:36 Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent and I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. So if you're listening to this in the first week of its release then you might well be aware that in the UK, the clearing house applications have not long closed. They closed on the 16th of November. So you might be listening to this trying to think about, you know, my application's gone in. Now I've got to wait till spring. Or you might, you know, might not have chosen to apply this year or not been eligible to apply this year or not maybe even thinking about going down the clinical psychology route but you could be experiencing a number of different thoughts and feelings whilst you're listening to this episode so I just wanted to to get on board with whatever you are feeling and

Starting point is 00:02:20 thinking and if you want to talk about it do come and join us in the Aspiring Psychologist Community Group and let's talk about it in there. So today I thought we'd think about finding your tribe and why that can be so important. So come to a psychology career you'd usually need to be at least beyond the age of 21, you're usually post post degree so you might already have had experiences good or bad in your secondary education your sixth form education and your undergraduate and maybe even your postgraduate education that have felt either good or bad in terms of feeling well connected well supported and well understood by those around you. You might feel like you're in a really good position where you already have your tribe lined up. I certainly spent the weekend with three of my tribe, people that I met at undergraduate

Starting point is 00:03:21 university. So I had course friends, psychology friends, and I had the housemates that I met at undergraduate university. So I had course friends, psychology friends, and I had the housemates that I lived with. And so I was with my housemates this weekend. And it was lots of fun. And I definitely, as I said, consider them my tribe, but they're not necessarily my psychology tribe, because none of them were studying psychology and none of them work in that sphere. But I know I've spoken before in one of the early episodes about my experiences of working in a local government agency. Makes it sound slightly more exciting than it was. Makes it sound like I'm kind of some sort of, yeah, Will Smith character. But that's not the case. I was working for local government and yeah I just felt like I didn't really have my tribe around me at that stage so all of my psychology friends were living in

Starting point is 00:04:15 different areas of the country I wasn't yet working in a psychology service and I just was feeling quite lonely and quite isolated. If I was offering advice to myself now for then, I think that's what this episode is going to be. And it might be useful for you right now, it might be useful for you in the future, or it might be useful for people that you meet along the way. So I'm going to be taking you through a few different steps and stages that might be useful for you or someone you know for making the most of where you're at right now to just optimally feel supported, understood, validated, seen, heard. And like, yeah, like people know you, see you and are on your page. That's what I think about as your tribe being. So with no further ado, let's crack on.

Starting point is 00:05:17 So I think the first stage is to think about, well, who are they? You know, you might want to think about making a list about if you were being optimally supported seen understood validated who and what would be doing that for you would it be stuff professionally would it be stuff personally you know or would it be you know mixture of those things might even be something spiritual or religious or faith-based for you. But if you had to kind of get a nice big bit of paper and just, you know, just encourage yourself to free-form doodle, if you like, or note-take, if that's more up your street, who and what areas of your life might that include um that you'd want to cultivate so for me at the time um I guess you know I had a partner at the time and we had an active social life in that regard but I was probably a bit lonely you know I think one of my friends who I've previously seen quite a lot of had a young child and so we did that but we didn't necessarily do the socializing in the same way so I think I was a bit lonely and feeling a bit career isolated so

Starting point is 00:06:30 you know this was in the late 2000s and things have moved on somewhat since then so I'm gonna I'm gonna advise myself and forward slash you about what things you can do right now that might be useful so one of them obviously is thinking about whether you can do right now that might be useful. So one of them obviously is thinking about whether you can join groups. And that might be groups in person, it might be groups, you know, remotely, it might be joining Facebook groups, it might be joining, I don't know, different communities online that don't involve Facebook. It might involve, you know, joining clubs as well. So at this stage of my life, I decided that I would drag a friend along and we'd learn to do Chinese cookery. So we went to an evening class and learned that. So there might

Starting point is 00:07:18 be some other skills and some other ways that you can connect and have fun and enjoy things that might not look like you might imagine they would look. I was looking on my local recovery and well-being academy, for example, recently. And on that, there's loads and loads of free courses that you can go to or that you can refer your clients to as well, that sound really exciting, you know, really nice opportunities to learn things, and to do things that you might not have experienced before. And similarly, in the adult education provision near you. So if you were to Google adult education, whichever is your nearest city or town, there might well be stuff that you can look through there. And yeah, you could learn another language, you know you could learn another language you could do some cookery you could do some baking you could do some craft um

Starting point is 00:08:09 some of my clients enjoy i don't know metal work and glass fusion and all sorts of stuff like glass blowing um there's many many opportunities for you to do new things and they don't always need to be massively costly things as well so could you look at what um what activities or clubs or groups you could join and of course it might well include looking out for any local research groups or any local assistant psychologist or aspiring psychologist groups and i'd be remiss if I wasn't to say that people have made nice connections through the aspiring psychologist membership as well. So that might be a group that you might like to consider joining. Details are in the show notes. What you might find during

Starting point is 00:08:56 all of this process is that throughout this, you find yourself as well. and maybe you realize it was yourself you were looking for all along but you might exacerbate that by perhaps joining part of a therapy group or I think when I was an aspiring psychologist sometimes there were like dynamic group therapies that you could join and if you were a student, there was lower cost options available as well. So it might be worth Googling whether that might be a possibility for you. Or of course, you might be able to enter into a one-to-one therapy relationship, which might well help you now, but might well help you professionally as well. So that's something else to explore. So let's take this opportunity to have a little break and I'll be back along very shortly

Starting point is 00:09:45 so many tips and lessons to learn from so many things that you can try. The Aspiring Psychologist Collective. The Aspiring Psychologist Collective. welcome back along thank you for sticking with me i hope you're finding the content useful can't quite believe we're at episode 50 um i don't know where the time is going but it's been a lovely journey and thank you for all of the kind words about our recent episodes and like i said in episode 49 if you are an aspiring psychologist and you've got a useful or interesting story or take on the world then do please get in contact with me and we will see whether we can get a podcast episode happening with you at the centre of it to provoke and encourage important and useful conversations for people. Okay, so in the first half, we've covered three

Starting point is 00:11:06 forward slash four different points for thinking about finding your tribe. And in this section, we have three more. So we're going to go through three more ways that you might be able to find your tribe or things to consider when finding your tribe along the way. So the next one is saying yes. If you can, you know, when you're offered opportunities at work, if it feels a little bit scary, but just about within your comfort zone, then could you say yes? You know, could you explore what that might, you know, look like for you? Or when you're offered chances to do things socially, you know, could you say yes to that? Or if someone does phone you up out of the blue and say, do you fancy a Chinese cookery course? Could you say yes to that? So obviously, make sure you're staying safe safe make sure you're looking after yourself making wise choices but what could you say yes to and when you're offered things and you immediately

Starting point is 00:12:11 think no what might that be about you know of course you get to choose and you get to say no and if you really don't want to do things you don't have to do them but if we notice that we're having an immediate oh no I can't or I shouldn't or I mustn't it might be worth just exploring and gently pressing the edges of what that might be about so just to be a little bit more playful a little bit more curious as you consider what you could say yes to or what you could say I'm gonna just give that a go and see what I think to rather than you know out and out saying no to something so that's just another little option another little idea and the next of our suggestions is reflection so could you use your reflective journal or just your general musings whilst

Starting point is 00:13:01 you're stuck at traffic lights or driving along the motorway to think about all of this process really to think about your experiences you might well find it helpful to listen to the episode where I talk about important people I have met along the way and if you wanted to have a listen to that that's episode 33 of the aspiring psychologist podcast but reflection really is the thing that's going to make the difference for you in terms of I don't know being at peace with yourself I think so I feel like I am constantly reflecting but in a way that feels really comforting. It doesn't feel critical. It feels helpful and exploratory. And like I'm on my own team, it doesn't feel like I'm trying to knock myself down, you know, quite the opposite. If I have an idea, I think, oh, you know, how could you make

Starting point is 00:14:01 that happen? Or what's holding you back? What's stopping you from doing that? And, you know, how might you benefit from having that as your inner monologue rather than something that might feel a bit more mean? So yeah, if you would find it helpful, please do have another listen to the episode on compassion as well. And is episode four knew it was I had to check um okay yeah getting to be uh quite the expert with these episode numbers but don't like to falsely signpost you so yeah it's just reflection reflection reflection in a way that feels not overwhelming in a way that feels like you're not being overly neurotic um it's just I don't know like a nice companion almost like I can have a chat with myself I can have a chat with someone that has the same values as me and wants the same

Starting point is 00:15:01 things I guess it's about becoming your own best friend um and I never feel lonely you know when you're your own best friend but it's also about um you know challenging yourself to get out there and make new friends and to you know have those opportunities so you know absolutely if you're more of an introvert and you like to keep yourself to yourself, that's OK. But when we do say no more often, there might be less opportunities for us to find the joy or to find new experiences and find our tribe along the way. And certainly, you know, when I was working as an assistant psychologist, many of the people who I was working with as fellow assistants now form part of my sort of daily tribe even now I'm qualified and again people that I that I did my training with that were part of my tribe then continue to be part of my tribe now and even two of those in the last couple of days I've spoken to as well so these might not necessarily be relationships just for now that

Starting point is 00:16:06 you're cultivating. These might be longer term, maybe forever relationships as well. So when we're looking at different qualities of relationships, I don't know if you've heard this, but we can think about friends for a reason, friends for a season and friends for a lifetime and sometimes we'll have disappointments when we realize that what we thought was friends for a lifetime became friends for a season. Okay so friends for a reason we often think about as being for a specific kind of purpose that you've expressed so for example example, if you're going through grief, or if you had, you know, someone who's unwell, then you might seek out people who have similar experiences. And so there's a reason that brought you together. A season might be, you know, whilst

Starting point is 00:16:58 you have kids in the same primary school, or whilst you're working in a certain workplace or, you know, whilst you're living next door or nearby to somebody. And friends for a lifetime could be any of those who then become longer term friends. So your friends for a lifetime might be someone that you went to primary school with, it might be someone that you went to secondary or uni with, and they suddenly, you know, they go past the point where it was for a reason they go past the point where it's for a season because that thing changes and then they progress into friends for a lifetime so for example if I reflect on some of my assistant psychologist friendships then initially it was um friends for a reason shared a car to the same university to look around um an open day um and then it became friends for a season because we

Starting point is 00:17:56 used to meet for lunch while we were working there and now it's friends for a lifetime because we're choosing to make time for each other even though when we first met it was you know fast approaching 15 16 17 years ago something like that so you know we weather the storm and we choose to make time for each other um and that's how your tribe becomes formed so when it goes perhaps from reason to season to lifetime and And, you know, but you can still have a tribe who don't choose to keep in the long term, who just use really mindful ways of connecting to this season or this reason. But yeah, it's useful to have at any time, I think, a group of people in your life that are reason, a group of people in your life that are season, and a group of people that are

Starting point is 00:18:44 lifetime, because you get a different energy around all of that. So what do you think? What do you think to this? I would love to know. And of course, the final point is that we can recalibrate at any point. So if we do feel like we are missing some of these people in certain areas of our lives, we can recalibrate and reach out and change it. So yeah, I do hope you found that useful, my whistle stop tour through tribe making. And yeah, I would love your thoughts, as I say. And yeah, please do check out what other people also say in the Aspiring Psychologist Collective and the Clinical Psychologist Collective. I've got lots of great guest episodes coming up for the Aspiring Psychologist podcast soon. If you've got any in

Starting point is 00:19:32 mind that you would find useful, then please do get in contact with me via the podcast page on my website, which you can find details in the show notes, or it is www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk forward slash podcast and then you can also find out how to leave audio testimonials just with a few clicks of your mouse by that same page that same site so thank you so much for listening please do rate and review the podcast it's always so appreciated and I'll look forward to catching up with you for our next episode which is available to you from 6am on Monday. Don't set your alarm, it'll be there when you're ready. Take care. With this podcast at your side, you'll be on your way to being qualified. It's the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast.

Starting point is 00:20:33 With Dr. Marianne Trent. 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 with 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 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.

The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Finding your tribe whilst working in mental health

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