The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Neuropsychology, professional & philosophical issues in Psychology with Professor Ingram Wright

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast Episode: 20Thank you for listening to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. Today we are chatting to the incredible Professor Ingram Wright who is a Clinical NeuroPsychologist and thoroughly interesting chap. We discuss all kinds of stuff from pandemic restrictions and its impact upon psychology to traits which make a great Aspiring psychologist and more. The Highlights: 00:29: Introduction for topic and guest speaker01:25: Ingram Wright's role 02:17: We all have imposter syndrome!02:27: Getting into Neuropsychology06:05: Stumbling upon your passion 08:27: Impact of COVID12:05: Relating to impact of COVID on service users   14:08: Positive implications of COVID on practice17:04: Tips for supervising17:59: A podcast run by aspiring psychologists 18:50: Not rushing the journey16:37: Any family friendly courses out there?17:29: An offer for training and reflecting on parenting18:57: Improving access to psychology20:39: Focusing on end goals not the processes 21:36: Bad weather in psychology24:24: Focusing on the needs of the aspiring psychologist28:44: Building neuro experience32:15: Challenges of neuro 34:52: Ingram Wright’s podcast: The Neuro Clinic 38:14: Connecting with Ingram Wright38:44: Thank you, subscribe and connect with me!40:46: Join our membership group!Links: Follow Professor Ingram Wright on Twitter: https://twitter.com/theneuroclinic Here’s my Linktree account: https://linktr.ee/drmariannetrentTo write for the aspiring psychologist collective head to: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/aspiring-psych-collectiveTo get on the waiting list for the aspiring psychologist membership head to: https://gtps.kartra.com/page/membership-interestTo 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-brainTo register for the upcoming free 5-day challenge: www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/aspire Connect on Socials:LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dr-marianne-trent-psychology Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GoodThinkingPsychologicalServices Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drmariannetrent/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrMarianneTrent TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drmariannetrent?lang=enYouTube:

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. Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast.

Today we are going to be talking to Professor Ingram Wright. He is a clinical psychologist, a neurospecialist and an academic. He is also a bit of a philosopher and I found the conversation really inspiring and I hope that you will do too. At points his wi-fi was not too good and so it goes a little bit patchy in parts but I hope that you will persevere with it because it's only affected in very tiny patches. Yeah I hope you find it super useful and I will chat to you on the other side. Okay hi welcome along to my guest for today we are joined by Professor Ingram Wright. Hi thank you for joining us. Hi Marianne. Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got into it if that's okay. Yeah it's fine, so I'm

currently Head of Psychology Services in Bristol at University Hospitals Bristol and Western, so we're a large trust in Bristol. I'm a paediatric neuropsychologist. So in my NHS role clinically, I work with children with acquired brain injuries of various kinds. I've got links with the University of Bristol. So we run a neuropsychology training course for people who are qualified as clinical psychologists and then want to go on to do specialist training in neuropsychology. And also recently appointed by the BPS as chair of the division of neuropsychology and also recently appointed by the bps's chair of the division of neuropsychology so i represent neuropsychology nationally from a clinical point of view gosh so that's who i am well done you keeps me busy marianne i've got imposter

syndrome now well we've all got imposter syndrome haven't we i didn't say i was capable in all of those roles okay well i am confident that you are so we're very very lucky to have you with us but we first crossed paths on um twitter um i hope that's not ousting you that you were on twitter um uh and yeah you uh you know, your interest in neuro really spoke to me because I know that as an aspiring psychologist, it's one of the key kind of things to cover. How did you get into neuro? How did you get into specializing in that? So I think, well, I know I was interested in neuro before, I mean, during undergraduate, during the undergraduate phase of my development, I suppose I, I was interested in neuro, I was interested in developmental psychology. You know, there are things that just grab you, don't they?

And it's sometimes hard to know what it is about that material that's grabbing you. And I'm not sure I've fully worked that out, but it was, I was inspired by the kind of neuro teaching that we, that we had at an undergraduate level. So, you know, part of that was just having some brilliant lecturers that really were able to convey their enthusiasm for the science. So I started off there and then I went on to do an assistant post with adults with learning disability in a sort of rather old and now what would be regarded as rather outdated hospital setting but there was lots of kind of neuro work in a learning disability setting and so I was kind of quite keen to

translate the neuro stuff that I'd done undergraduate into a clinical environment. I went on to do a PhD looking at development in children with down syndrome again with a slight neuro emphasis and I suppose I clung to that all the way through my clinical psychology training so every placement that I went on I would kind of carve out a little bit of a neuro niche so whether it was my older adults or my LD placement or my child placement I ended up being drawn to the neuro bits and I suppose and this this might be a kind of a bit of a regret really I probably neglected some other things I could have spent time doing I mean I relished the challenge of all the other aspects of of what

clinical psychology had to offer but I did find myself pulled towards the comfort of the neuro work that I felt I understood and was naturally um you know so capable of um so I mean that's kind of how that's kind of how I specialized I suppose very early but um and we might go on to talk about this I'm as someone who's kind of now in a leadership role with regard to neuro specialism I'm quite interested in people who are late converts to neuro you know people who don't start out thinking they want to take an interest in but are gradually coaxed into recognizing what it has to offer us as clinical psychologists whether they're psychologists or not so i suppose i don't necessarily want to broadcast a message that

just like if you want to be an international tennis star you've got to pick up a tennis racket at four i don't think the same applies in neuro i don't think you have to enter into clinical psychology thinking you want to be a neuropsychologist if you want to be successful as a neuropsychologist i think you can convert late i think you can qualify as a clinical psychologist and find yourself in a neuro setting and maybe seek to qualify that's going beyond your question marianne isn't it but i i suppose i always like to kind of balance out what i'm saying by you know saying that there are other paths that are available you don't have to pick up a tennis

racket at four definitely maybe you do if you want to be an international tennis star but um but but if you want to be interested in neuropsychology you can leave it a little bit later and i think the incredible power of your story is that you stumbled across someone who was really passionate and really good at talking about what they did and got you on board and got you energized and excited about that which has helped shaped your career had you had a really rubbish neuro um uh lecturer at uni you know you might have come to it later but you wouldn't have got all that legwork in there. Yeah no I agree and I think that you know we talked just before we started about I've got three children and watch them go through various teachers at various stages and you can see and we've all probably had that experience

if you get a bad teacher in a particular thing you all of a sudden you think I don't like history um but you get a great history teacher and all of a sudden history is the best thing and you want to spend the rest of your life studying history so I think we're incredibly influenced aren't we by inspirational people that we that we stumble across who convey enthusiasm for their discipline and so I'm I'm as much a victim of that as anybody else but you know happily so yeah and I think that's partly why I do what I do I'm so passionate about what I do and I like talking about it and I want others to feel energized honestly I believe hand on heart that I forward slash we have the best job in the world like it's so varied and it's so lovely to be able to impact on people in such a positive way and with such variety as well and that's one of the things that sort of in the in the conversations that I've had

you know what's really impressed me is I have a particular you know even within neuro or even within any specialty in clinical psychology or applied psychology, there are some specialties within, aren't there? So I'm a pediatric neuropsychologist. I'm interested in sort of quite acute diagnostic work. But what's been great about the podcast I've, you know, been involved in as a project is I've had conversations with people who are doing things which feels so very different to what I do and it's made me think even within a narrow specialty like neuro there's incredible breadth that I hadn't really recognized in terms of the approaches that people take and the conversations are delightful you know because you learn something about other people's passions

don't you that very distinct from your own but but are really comprehensible to us every day is a school day and you know we should be learning we should be stretching ourselves and before we started we were thinking about what we miss what we have missed out on due to the pandemic by not having you know conversations with new people that we meet um you know so it might be crossing paths um in interviews it might be crossing paths in um you know in um academic settings it might be crossing paths in um conferences and I love talking to random people I'm the sort of person that will strike up a conversation about cauliflowers you know in ASDA I am some people's worst nightmare but i found that i really missed that during the pandemic because people weren't wanting to talk to strangers and our social kind of norms of

smiling and eye contact were often a bit lost and a bit averted because of mask wearing and you know socially distancing so yeah i love a chat with a stranger and it's um we talked a bit about you know how podcasts how informal conversations like this whether they're about cauliflowers or whether they're about psychology you know bring something back in right so it's lovely to have these informal conversations they don't always feel i mean just like talking to a stranger in asda about cauliflowers doesn't always feel like it's lovely to have these informal conversations. They don't always feel, I mean, just like talking to a stranger in Asda about cauliflowers doesn't always feel like it's without risk. I don't think podcasting and informality is without risk, but I think if we strip it out and we stick to the safe stuff

and we stick to the conventional ways of communicating, we'll find ourselves heavily constrained. And that's still continuing, isn't it? In terms of the opportunities for us to get together face to face, they're still very limited and not everybody feels safe and understandably so. So I think we're going to have to find ways to have different kinds of conversations, take a few more risks individually and and and collectively um and benefit i suppose from the looseness of that of that kind of interaction yeah for sure um i'm yeah it was just yesterday that i was thinking oh maybe a in-person conference might be okay that feels like that might be

all right again now and we're also talking that there's not so much in the news about the pandemic currently so we're talking in early March 2022 and there's been a shift to other focuses in the news and so it can be easy to think things aren't still going on but of course we know that they are and people's lives are still being affected a great deal by COVID. You'd said just before we started recording that you've had COVID recently as well yeah and i i think um you know again like you say you learn things sometimes unexpectedly i i am i'm part of a long covid clinic it's a great clinic that's obviously been set up and it's a pediatric clinic um and it's been a real challenge because there's so much we don't know about covid there's so much we don't know about long. There's so much we don't know about long COVID.

And that seems surprising, doesn't it, given how much data we've had the opportunity to collect. But we've had to do the learning in such a short space of time that there are still massive gaps. And I suppose I brought some assumptions around what COVID was and what long COVID would look like, you know, based on, you know, historical assumptions and biases, I suppose that I did sort of acquired over a long period of time. But I found myself with a bit of brain fog, with a bit of fatigue, with a desire to get back to doing exercise very quickly after sort of beginning to recover from COVID and not all of those things worked for me right and I took on too much and I found myself lagging towards the end of the day and underperforming and doing all kinds of things that I thought gosh if I if I hadn't lived through this

I wouldn't really have an understanding of how that can affect a person do you see what I mean I mean I suppose we've all had coughs and colds, but COVID does feel a little bit different to that. In some ways for me, and it's about my personal experience, it did feel like a heavy cold, but there were other symptoms that I had that were entirely novel. And I thought this is something different, something we need to work hard to understand. And I think the same applies to long COVID. It's a complex, heterogeneous constellation to manage in terms of the breadth of clinical management. But I think we need to take seriously some of the findings,

for example, about brain changes following COVID. Those are not necessarily devastating changes, but for some people they will have a devastating effect, right? So the sort of group effects are concerning um but but what that hides is for some individuals these are major life-changing um events in terms of their cognition in terms of their ability and capacity to get on with their life as it was before um so certainly not to be trivialized um but on the other side like you say we're we're having to make decisions about do we run a face-to-face conference do we go to a face-to-face conference do we get on a bus do we get on a train do we take the whole day um we've been talking about this for a while haven't we and i never know whether to talk about covid or not to talk about covid but it feels like

such a big thing um and as you say there are there are other things going on in the world right now, the war in Ukraine, you know, and like you said, we're talking early March and we don't know where we're going to be in early April, do we, with regard to those kinds of things. So I think, but we still need to talk about work. We still need to do our work. We still need to kind of focus on the day job and one foot in front of the other, but sometimes it's quite difficult to do that, isn't it,

when such monumental things are happening all around us? I don't know about you, but the pandemic, for the first time ever in my professional life, has been a great leveller, you know, for me being a human, for my clients being a human. And at the start of pretty much every session, you know, certainly for the last 18 months there's been a well how are you you know how is this and it's felt a bit more okay to say

yeah it's a bit tricky isn't it it's a bit unusual you know how are you managing that um and you know I've always been a human kind of therapist but it's very much been about I'm here for you and for me it is the first time that there's been more of that reciprocal care yeah um and it felt appropriate it's felt it's felt good and I think some of those things we have uh a slight discomfort with don't we so I've had this similar experience particularly running running appointments on, we use a platform called Attend Anywhere, but, you know, people will know various platforms are available that we can use to deliver clinical psychology into people's homes. But, you know, there are things that we can't avoid. I've got an exercise bike, as you know know sat behind me and people will ask questions about that I can try my blurred backgrounds but inevitably there's a degree of a sort of a lessening of the kind of

boundaries would be able to establish in a in a conventional outpatient setting and it leads to a looseness of the of the interaction and in my role in pediatrics I don't find that particularly compromising indeed I've found it to be a an asset um and people do ask me how I'm doing how it's been for me um and I find that quite humbling really to kind of to experience that that that shift in terms of of where people's focus is in those kinds of interactions but I guess we need to be a bit careful that we're also trying to deliver care to people aren't we we're trying to ensure that we're focused on the needs of our clients rather than our own. And I think, you know, I found that quite a struggle. So I found that,

you know, when I'm having a tough day and I'm still trying to deliver my clinical services, it's not always easy. And thankfully, you know, for most of us, we've got the support of our colleagues, haven't we, to check in with with them but when those kinds of support networks have been challenged and rather thin on the ground it's um it's no doubt been challenging for us hasn't it to to continue to do what we do absolutely i think what we're what we're alluding to here is the issue of containment and actually that's a really incredibly important issue for us as qualified psychologists, but also as unqualified psychologists as well and aspiring psychologists. Have you got any top tips for helping feel more contained in careers generally, especially for when you're an aspiring psychologist? What do you find helpful when you're perhaps supervising assistants or junior members?

That's a really challenging question, Marianne. I suppose one of the things that I find is that I probably make all the mistakes that everybody makes around containment. I run a very busy service, whether it's psychological health services or neuropsychology. We run a course in Bristol where people with aspirations are trying to make progress with their research projects, with their learning. And the balance has sort of slightly been lost or at least is being challenged. And I'm not sure I have all the answers in terms of how we find that I mean I find myself scrolling through Twitter sort of news and following politics and stories of war and COVID and those kinds of other things and find myself drawn into cycles that I don't think are particularly

healthy in terms of those those conversations I'm also watching as I'm sure you are given the focus of your interests watching assistant psychologists applying for doctorates in clinical psychology. What I found quite helpful, and I mentioned to you, we ran a podcast with a group of assistant psychologists about working in neuro. What I thought was great is they had lots of ideas about solutions. So when they got together and talked about their experiences and where they're at in their career pathway, they had lots of advice for each other about how they could contextualize the challenges they're experiencing in a way that was really helpful. So one of the one of the best things I heard, actually, there were lots of great things that I heard last week, but one of the best things I heard is your career doesn't start when you successfully get onto a doctorate in clinical psychology. I mean, I've talked about how my interest in neuropsychology started when I was an undergraduate, maybe even started a bit before, but it's hard to

track back further. But everything that I did, particularly the things I did early on, have been incredible foundations for what I've done subsequently. And I'm so pleased that I didn't rush that process. I didn't feel that I rushed into clinical psychology. And I think a lot of the concern I suppose people have about how competitive it is, and it is of course competitive um tends to amplify a desire to to kind of rush the process to to apply early to to to do trial applications and things like that i'm not saying those things aren't valuable and they may well be the best route for some individuals but i also think there's a need for balance in terms of enjoying what you're doing right now and learning for learning's sake and really drinking in the experiences that you're having, whether it's an assistant, a volunteer, a health care assistant, you know, whoever, you know, supportive member of your family or social network. You know, I think those are all opportunities, aren't they, for us to learn things that will stand us in good stead going forward.

They really are. And I love the idea of actually it doesn't start on day one of training. It reminds me of the fact that I've been a home carer and a lot of the things I've learned about dignity, compassion and respect have come from that. That relationship that I've had with all of those clients and it was so humbling and so precious and special to me that I carry that in every every interaction I do as a clinical psychologist and there's so much value in these seemingly perhaps even non-psychology related professions that that can teach us so much yes and I find I I suppose, as I said earlier, we don't, we don't stop being challenged by those kinds of things when we're qualified or when we're on a training course. We, we still focus sometimes on end goals rather than processes. So, you know, in training, in specialist training in neuropsychology, you know, I find myself often talking about the viva and the portfolio that people have to produce. So the end product, if you see what I mean. And actually what we what we what we're now pushing to try and do is have many more conversations about how can you get the maximum value in terms of learning from from everyday experiences? Like you say, every day is a school day.

Even if it's a Saturday, it's still a school day. Right. We can still learn stuff outside of formal education and we might not always pay attention to what we learn from supervision if we're just clocking the hours you know so in neuropsychology we've had this convention of counting the hours of supervision you have a bit like you might do if you need 100 hours of flying experience to fly a plane but actually what really matters is you can take off and land safely and you can cope with bad weather and you can do all of those things. But they won't all be part of the exam, right? So being a good pilot isn't necessarily about getting your pilot's license, although it's in part about that.

It's also about what did you learn from the challenges you experienced in bad weather, tricky crosswinds and all of this kind of stuff and i just think we need to maybe refocus our attention a little bit in terms of that educational developmental process and these are subtle tweaks aren't they right but it's not only about uh encouraging students to think about or people who are in a learning environment to think about things in that way it's also about our responsibilities as leaders line managers supervisors and teachers to to to shift our focus of attention on what it is that we're learning what competencies we're trying to develop i love that idea of bad weather and that so applies in psychology as well doesn't it you know the bad weather might look like a non-attuned supervision relationship it might look like that time you said something awful or let a safeguarding concern you know not register as it should have done it can look like so many different things but it is

the learning we take from that so that it shapes our future decisions you know so that we don't let that safeguarding concern slip next time so that we are just a bit more hot on it. And we're more comfortable with talking about those things with clients and reflecting and reflecting in action, reflecting on action, all those other good things. And like you said, you know, we can learn about people's experience from hearing them talk about it. But, you know, like you said, with with the covid situation it doesn't you don't have to be hit by a bus to know it hurts but it sure does help help doesn't it it does help yeah i think it gives you insights into i mean i suppose i suppose what i would want to balance that out with a bit like when i was talking about how i got into neuro i'm also aware that not

everybody's experience is like mine whether it's having COVID whether it's their journey into clinical psychology and beyond into into a subspecialty beyond that um and that's why having these conversations is great because you can kind of learn from other people about the journey that they've taken and I think we probably have too few conversations about those things. Another great thing I heard last week in supervision was about talking to assistants about what good supervision, supportive supervision looks like. And there's always something we can learn, isn't there, from hearing about other people's,

how other people have benefited from supervising relationships that are different from the ones that we set up and deliver and a part of and and i i've really enjoyed kind of hearing about how i might be able to shape up the kind of supervisory relationships that i have into something that can maybe be more helpful um to assistants one of the things i wanted to say and it's sort of come up naturally for me as a as a thought is and particularly maybe in neuro that i've always experienced as someone who employs assistant psychologists for example a bit of attention between what the organization needs right so it needs someone to fulfill a role to do a job and

do a good job and then there's thinking and i see those things as balanced against what the individual needs and one of the struggles is well how do you kind of achieve a balance which is comfortable both for the organization and the service and for that individual's learning and of course there are tensions that arise but one of the constant challenges is trying to resolve those tensions so that both the system gets what it needs and that individual in that in that role, gets what they need in terms of the support. Yeah. You probably spent quite a bit of time talking about that, Marianne,

do you with, with people on your podcast and in your wider circle? Yeah, it's certainly, yeah, different, different functions for people's existence, isn't it? That can be hard to juggle and it's not you know i say to my kids it's not very nice but you're not the king of the world you know yeah the world doesn't revolve around you and sometimes you need to do things just because you've been asked to do them and um you know even if it's not something that's going to look great on your cv if it's within reasonable limits and it is on your job description,

you know, mate, you may just need to do it. Harsh lessons in your household, Marianne. Because they're only eight and five. Yeah. One of the, I'm not trying to subvert your plan in terms of where you thought this conversation might go, but the other thing that's come up for me, comes up for me quite your plan in terms of where you thought this conversation might go. But the other thing that's come up for me, comes up for me quite a lot in terms of interviewing people with regard to that kind of tension. And who is this role for, right?

What is this role for? Is that often when I ask people what interests them about the role, we sometimes hear an awful lot about how it will benefit the individual applicant if that makes sense and correspondingly little about how they can bring something which really benefits the service if that makes sense so it's a it requires a quite a fundamental mindset shift and I know that when I was applying for assistant jobs and PhDs and things like that it was all about what the role brought to me, very much so. And I really struggled to kind of think about what, what, what are the people on the other side of the table in this conventional interview want, want to hear from me? And it just

hadn't, it hadn't dawned upon me to even think about what they were expecting. And one of the great things about clinical psychology training, particularly I did it is that fundamentally I experienced a revolution in actually being able to think about people on the other side of the table simultaneously with also considering what I was thinking what I needed so there's a kind of metacognitive dawning really which was the entire clinical psychology training experience for me and I think it's probably made me... It's a reciprocal relationship, isn't it? It's a two-way street. Yeah.

But if we're always thinking about, you know, if I'm having this conversation with you and I'm thinking about what I need, it's not going to be a very satisfactory conversation, is it? I think, you know, often when we're interviewed or we're challenged or when we're faced with a particular career aspiration and we see this process as being something we need to win at, you know what I mean? We become slightly narrowly focused, don't we, on a certain way of interacting that probably isn't optimal. Yeah, it's part of that listening to hear rather than listening to respond as well, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, doing a a podcast a bit nerve-wracking isn't it we tend to narrowly focus

a little bit I should be asking you what you want to do if there's if there's anything you were hoping for from me today that you haven't heard me talk about you're doing a great job i'm doing a good job thank you yeah i mean i know a question that i get asked reasonably often from aspiring psychologists is well how can i build neuro experience i'm not getting you know i'm not getting shortlisted for neuro posts i can't get my hands on you know neuropsych tests that are worth thousands of pounds to you know to to sample on my partners or my family yeah I wouldn't recommend doing that in any case Marianne but is there anything people can do to bolster their skills and experience to you know without actually necessarily being employed

within a neuro service I I think I think there's there's probably a, and it's not just a shift that we've experienced in Bristol, but there's probably a shift nationally that we're witnessing in terms of how, say, assistant psychologists get recruited. And my hope is that similar shifts are going on in clinical psychology, that we aren't asking people to demonstrate that they already know all the things that they're going to be expected to do um and i i i i'm equally enthusiastic as an as an employer as a as a clinical psychologist working in the nhs to to employ people who've got enthusiasm and interest in what it is that we do rather than you know a track record of doing this for the last two or three years because people who already know

how to do it have less to benefit from the role and in thinking about what they need i think what we need to do is to give novel experiences to people who are thirsty for those experiences and those those individuals make the best assistant psychologists we've employed they're not necessarily people who are interested in neuro right but they're interested in learning something about a particular specialty in clinical psychology and it's great to witness that learning happening it's really inspiring for us as clinical psychologists in that service and it benefits those individuals far more than learning more of the same if that makes sense so again it's something that came up in the conversation i had last week with the assistants and there's

incredible breadth in Euro. You don't have to be doing tests. You don't have to have tested your partner or your grandmother or whatever else you might think you need to do. What I think you need to do is have enthusiasm for the work that goes on, and the work is often far broader than you'd expect, right? So I'm sure you probably have this experience. If you're talking to someone and you ask them what they think you might be interested in it's often a quite a narrow representation of what they've managed to find out from a website but your interests are far

broader than perhaps you know somebody might recognize from from what they can learn about you so i mean similarly when i'm talking to people um and they're only interested in the brain i think well you need to kind of be interested in the person as well as the person's brain um that's really important because the bulk of what we do is working with people um and it's about being a practitioner psychologist about being a health psychologist a forensic psychologist a clinical psychologist a counselor as much as it is being a neuropsychologist. And one of the great things about the conversations I've had with colleagues in neuropsychology is we feel the same. We don't spend our lives with our heads in test manuals

and moving blocks around on the tape. We do spend a bit of time doing that. It's quite good fun, right? And it's a great thing about neuropsychology that we've got that in our armory, but it's not what neuropsychology is. And we don't expect people to mould themselves on that kind of vision. It's such a broad church. I love the idea of actually, yeah, it's the person you want to recruit rather than necessarily the skills and this is perhaps some of the value of some of the clinical psychology tests for logical reasoning and you know how they think around different problems you want someone who's really good at problem solving and really enthusiastic and you know wants to do this and wants to do this well and wants to learn and as I was listening to you speak i was remembering trying to remember which order

people had tapped blocks in and it was making me feel like oh no i can't do it i got it wrong which one did they touch first which one did they last touch do you do record stuff now these days has it moved on or is it all just memory and trying to know we still we we still do that it's that that test you described called the course he blocks it's a visual spatial working memory task and one of the challenges of doing that is that you have to have the working memory skills to be able to I think it's what you're saying to remember what the person has has done and and similarly we have a kind of sequential learning task we do with children where you knock tap and move your hands in various ways and then you watch whether the child can replicate that it's hard enough to

do the dance let alone mark somebody else's dancing in response to yours so i think some of those things are quite esoteric and and good fun to learn but it's interesting you mentioned the reasoning task because i think we of course we're interested in people's problem solving but i do worry a little bit you must have seen have seen this stuff of how people feel about doing those reasoning tasks that are part of an application process. So I think we do need to think about what we ask people to do, how we ask people to perform, to demonstrate they've got the requisite foundations to be able to perform within the role. We did a great exercise recently around the,

we've got some new trust values and we asked individuals who apply for our post to pick one of the values and talk about how it was important to them. And it was the best interview material that I'd ever come across, you know, in terms of everybody who contributed to that process excelled at doing this and they all excelled in different ways. And I would have had no hesitation employing any of those people. But it really was a very different interview process, if you like, to anyone that we'd undertaken before. So I would happily substitute that for a reasoning task because um because we were able to see the excellence of the candidates that we had in

front of us and i think nothing has matched that that we've done in the past yeah and it allows them to be individuals as well doesn't it so there might have been six to ten plus values and they're able to pick the one that resonates with them and that's powerful having seen some of these reasoning questions i don't know if i'd have got through you know and I'm a really good clinical psychologist but certainly the ones I saw I was like say what now um so yeah your your style of interview would absolutely have suited me better I'm just conscious of the time and let me just think about your incredible podcast could you tell us a little bit about about what it's called and how it got started and um you know what it involves

so i run a podcast called the neuro clinic um and the sort of schedule slightly sporadic but we've probably run about one of them a month uh it's it's something that started as we talked about with regard to covid and the restrictions that we had on the conversations we could have about cauliflowers and other things. And I thought, wouldn't it be great to have some of those conversations? And so in a sort of rather selfish way, it was just a nice way for me to have a conversation and hopefully not ruin it by clicking on record. So it's just been lovely to have conversations with other neuropsychologists um that i would otherwise bump into at conferences um but what's sort of taken things in a slightly different turn which is where you know we stumbled across each other is thinking about the people who are interested in this are also aspiring clinical psychologists neuropsychologists asking

the kind of questions you're asking about what if I was interested in neuropsychology? What should I do? How might I think about the work of a neuropsychologist? Had some great conversations with people about being interested in neuro during their clinical training and where neuro or neuropsychological skills fit in terms of our broader formulation skills.

We spent a lot of time talking about how there's a separateness around neuro and clinical if you like and what we need to do is to think about those being fundamentally things that we need to more effectively integrate and what I've learned I used to do some teaching and I'd say who's interested in neuro hands up and you get and you basically split the room so So a third of the people, half of the people would put their hands up and the other half people would fold their arms and tell you how they were quite fearful of neuro and they were not that interested in it. But it's a ludicrous question to ask that creates this kind of binary distinction between those who are interested and not interested and doesn't

really address the subtlety um that's important to us about what we're interested in and i think where i started with this conversation was just thinking about you know i thought i was interested in neuro but i've discovered and i've realized that i'm interested in everything you know there's so much to learn isn't there so much to learn in clinical psychology and you're interested in humans. Interested in humans, interested in the humans outside of the brains and within their brains. And trying to maintain that balance is what's really important. And I think those conversations that I've been having have helped

to sort of make that real, to sort of help me to understand how people achieve that balance in lots of different ways. Lovely. If people want to connect with you, Ingram, how can they do that? Where's the best place for them to get in contact with you?

So I'm on Twitter a little bit too much. So I think I'm clinical neuro on Twitter and the podcast is called The Neuro Clinic. So I'd invite people to take a listen. And I'll be taking a listen to you, Marianne, in return. Good. Likewise. Thank you so much for your time today. You've been incredibly inspiring and compassionate and thoughtful. And I know people will find this really useful. And I do still feel a little bit in awe of you. So thank you. Marianne, thank you. Likewise. Thank you so much for listening i think you'll

definitely agree that our guest professor ingram wright was wonderfully knowledgeable i could certainly listen to him and his philosophical ways all day long so i hope you enjoyed the slightly more philosophical slant to today's episode. Don't forget, you can catch up on all previous episodes of the podcast. If you subscribe to the podcast, it should drop into your subscriber library at 6am every Monday, UK time. So that is a really great way to make sure you don't miss a single episode. And if you do enjoy it, I'd be really grateful if you could just leave me a rating. And if you've got a couple more moments, a review, which you can do on Apple Podcasts by finding the show, scrolling right to the bottom below the trailer, and you'll see the details there of how to leave a review. If you are following me on my socials, you will be able to see all of my content together, which includes a link to the podcast. It includes replays as a playlist

of the Compassionate Q&A series and also the Declan Sci Application Series videos too. And there is also details on there about how you can write for the next Aspiring Psychologist Collective book, which is very exciting. That is going to be coming out in autumn, in October. So there is still time to get involved if you'd like to be considered for writing your story for the Aspiring Psychologist Collective, do check that out. There's also a link on that Linktree site for details of the Aspiring Psychologist membership. So the extended phase of the membership is going to be opening again on Friday, the 29th of April at 8am, but only if you're on the waiting list. So there are already people there waiting. So if you like me, and you like my ways, and you think I think Marianne,

and a little bit more closer access to Marianne would be really useful, then it will just be you and 29 other people. So it's really intimate really intimate exclusive access we do monthly group zoom training exercises there's also bonus content in there each month and each week there is lunch with marianne where we have a facebook live too so yeah there's lots of good things going on in there. For more information, check out the link tree for details of the Aspiring Psychologist membership. Also on the link tree is a brand new feature, which is support or donate. And if you do really like the free content that I provide, that I create for you, then you can help to cover the costs for the podcast. And for my time in editing it too yeah so that would be really welcome but there's no obligation but yeah until we meet again which

will perhaps be Monday at 6am for the next episode or might well be sooner if you follow me on socials or if you're already in the membership hope you have a wonderful week and I look forward to catching up with you very soon take care if you're looking to become a psychologist then let this be your guide with this podcast that you'll start to be on your way to being qualified it's the aspiring psychologist podcast 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'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.