The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Why So Many Employees Are Burning Out | Psychology of Workplace Wellbeing

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, my name is Beth and I'm a psychological well-being 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 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 client. 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.

Starting point is 00:00:39 We've built workplaces that measure performance obsessively, but barely measured whether humans can actually survive within them. And now, employees are burning out sometimes before their careers have even really got started. In this episode, Dr Adam McCartney, educational psychologist and I explore why well-being in organizations is getting harder, how leadership and identity shape mental health at work, and why AI might make all of this even more complicated. Hope you find it so useful. Hi, welcome along to psychology. Actually, I'm Dr. Marianne Trent, and I am joined once again by a friend of the show, Dr. Adam McCartney,

Starting point is 00:01:22 who is a child and educational psychologist. Hi, Adam. Hi, Marian. Great to be back. So lovely to have you here. And for anyone who's like, I've never heard of Adam, Then we have done two episodes already. One was about what is an educational psychologist and kind of looking at kind of vignettes for the types of work that the ed Sykes would do. And the other was about something very interesting called emotionally based school non-attendance, which you might hear discussed as EBSNA or EBSA.

Starting point is 00:01:56 So there'll be links in the description to that. But with no further ado, let's think about today's topic. So we were chatting in the DMs again on Instagram. So if you don't already follow us on there, please do come and follow us, come and connect with us, share the episodes and tag us too. We love that. So we were thinking actually it would be really interesting to have a little bit of a look from a leadership perspective and from an emerging leaders' perspective about what well-being in organisations really is. So can you tell us a little bit about that, Adam? Yeah, well, as an educational psychologist, this isn't something I thought would be my bag.

Starting point is 00:02:37 You know, historically, we've been more within child. Every educational psychologist would be cringing, I just said that. But we've increasingly focused on the context of children. And that has meant that we've essentially started having to look at organizations. And the biggest change we've had in the last 20 years is the emergence of multi-academy trusts. and these are essentially businesses that operate within the education sector. And the difference with the education sector is what's called a quasi market is dependent on the amount of funding that a government body gives towards it. It can do little bits and pieces to earn extra pieces, but by and large, it's dependent on how much money the government puts in.

Starting point is 00:03:20 But within that sector, they operate like businesses. Many multi-chemy trusts have CEOs. and they act like CEOs. They advertise like CEOs. They make business partnerships like CEOs. And that means that a lot of these organizations now operate a bit like the corporate sector. And we have had to then open up, okay, what does leadership look like? What does organizational structure look like?

Starting point is 00:03:47 And how does all that filter down into the impact for children? I have some understanding of that because I was a parent-guerate. for two years for a primary school. And thankfully, because it was an Academy Trust, I wasn't responsible for the finances because there was an overarching kind of person or department that did that. But I was a safeguarding lead,

Starting point is 00:04:12 which is kind of a lot, really, for the responsibility whilst also running a practice, working for the NHS, having children. But this is a way that people can start to develop their own leadership experiences, is thinking about doing voluntary opportunities like that, if they're interested in learning more about this and sharpening their skills to think strategically, really.

Starting point is 00:04:36 That's what it helped me to do. Okay, thank you, Adam. So tell us about how some of the theories translate into education and perhaps into other settings as well. Yeah, so one of the big theories I came across when I was studying from my doctorate was one call communities, of practice and it's the full titles, the communities of practice of learning, which you would think that lends itself quite well to education, but it's from Lav and Venger who developed in

Starting point is 00:05:08 1991, I think. And they actually started off in the industry, the commercial sector. And they give this very good example in their book or in their research around how to solve engineering problems. And so company A is not competitive against company B because company B has a new product. So company A has to catch up. And one of the, the way they did it was by organizing what they call communities of practice whereby they would be given a problem, which Venger calls a domain. And then they have to discuss that problem in depth. And what Venger found, as his research went deeper and deeper was that the more they discussed, the more ideas that were generated, the closer in alignment they became. So they identified together more. The stronger that

Starting point is 00:06:02 identity, the greater the collaboration. But what he also found was when you introduce someone new to that community of practice, they start on the fringes and then they learn about new things within that domain and then they become closer and closer into the center of it. So the simplest way for me to take that into the education sector is a new teacher. You start off in the training sector and both you and I have been, have experienced this in our training courses. And then as you learn more about pedagogy and behavior management, emotional regulation, you then start to identify with other teachers and your identity then shifts. And it went from this sort of problem solving model to this humanistic model whereby

Starting point is 00:06:50 Epicay, Venger's, whether he would like me saying this or not, it becomes very clear that in order for an organization to thrive, identity is at the core of it. One of the things I took away from that is identity is linked to well-being. Because when you enter a new community, you're being judged to a certain extent. you have to look introspectively as to what you're about and then re-evaluate that in the new context. So for children, it's transitions into key stage three. For adults, it's changing roles. It's changing jobs. Yeah, and it's evoking kind of memories of a number of professionals that I've supported

Starting point is 00:07:37 who've started new jobs and then gone through whistleblowing procedures. Because actually, when you come into an organisation with fresh eyes and I guess if we're thinking about clinical services or kind of, yeah, things that psychologists might work in, obviously people might be listening to that from other industries, but you would want a service to be effective, efficient, safe for the staff, safe for the service users, and to be not engaging in risky practice or kind of, I don't know, doing the clinical notes like in a routine way so that all of the staff can access it. And I think when you join a team for the first time,

Starting point is 00:08:18 that's almost the most powerful time for you to be able to really think, right, is this a safe service? Do I want my name attached to it? And if it isn't safe, then, you know, we have that impetus to do the whistleblowing procedure. But it sounds like what you're saying is that the longer you stay, the more likely you are to kind of just be warmed up into the culture of the organisation and maybe also then become part of the problem.

Starting point is 00:08:49 There's always the risk of that. You could become, you know, another con in the wheel and if it's sound too draconian corrupted yourself. And, you know, you're talking about in the extreme sense. And the extreme sense is important to pay attention to you. because we live in a world now where corporations have tremendous power to the point where some corporations are arguably stronger than states. And that has an impact because things, both you and I run small SMEs, small and medium sized enterprises. And that is a very different experience to run a corporation because in order for me to attract a team, I have to make, the value system I embody has to max the value system, the people I bring in.

Starting point is 00:09:43 So, for example, I need someone who's highly skilled in psychology or teaching, but who also wants to go along with the same mission statement. That has a very small pull of people. Whereas when you take a large corporation, like, I'm not saying any of these do this, but like you've got Pricewater Cooper, you've got Apple, you've got Google. they don't have to worry about the same things. They have, we're so big, therefore we can attract a lot of people in pursuit of our mission. Therefore, if you don't want to be a part of that, we just, it's the churn and burn.

Starting point is 00:10:21 You know, you turn them up and turn them out and bring in someone else. And large corporations can do that. And as employees or people on the entry level, we have to be aware of that. And we're seeing issues around that. You know, the subtext of this podcast is about well-being. And one of the things we're seeing as entry-level employees, those between the age of say 19 and 25, are struggling with their well-being.

Starting point is 00:10:49 And it's too easy just to put that down to our relationships with middle management. You know, I've seen a supported organizations where that's been the case. But it is the structure of society. is changing and the speed of which it's changing with the emergence of AI is going to have a tremendous impact on well-being. And I think it's very important for people like UNI to advocate for healthy organizational systems and for the listeners of this podcast to be aware of when you enter into a new job that these are some of the risk factors and you have to be aware of your value system as to why you're doing that. Yeah, and I obviously do a lot of work for early career psychologists,

Starting point is 00:11:39 but I do speak from a position where I am not newly qualified and where I now am not employed, I am self-employed. I sometimes think, am I a CEO? Do I step into my CEO identity? And I think I'm trying to do that more and more. But also when I speak to people that are early in their career, and they're doing, you know, 37 and a half hour weeks, but they're doing maybe 30 hours of face to face clinical time, or 30 sessions, should we say, because they're not all kind of hours. That is a lot. It's a lot to hold in mind alongside MDT meetings, alongside all the clinical notes for that, alongside the risk planning, alongside, you know, what's like, Adam, when you ask the question

Starting point is 00:12:21 and you think, oh, God, I hope the answer to this is going to be, yeah, everything's fine, because I literally don't know where I'm going to have the time to make a safeguarding referral if they tell me that something's not right. And we'll have both been there when you've heard stuff. And of course, you've got that duty of care, you've got that compassion. And you want this adult or child to be safeguarded. But you also know that to fill in that documentation, it's going to probably take you two or three hours. And you're just going to have to juggle everything you've already got.

Starting point is 00:12:51 That is not great for the well-being, especially if you're then left holding the mental load until you can pass that on until you know that that case has been accepted for safeguarding. It isn't easy. and if you then got 30 clients that you might be having potentially to drop safeguarding concerns at any point, and then you're having to hold that in mind and access supervision, I can see why well-being is tricky. Yeah, and, you know, I don't know if you fully realize this, but you've opened up a can of worms there, and I'll try not to go too much,

Starting point is 00:13:22 but in the mid-notties, around 2005, under New Labor, there was this sort of emergence, and the NHS was, highly impacted by this of new professional managerialism. And it was the thought that you could have these professional managers manage professionals within NHS. So the likes of yourself as a clinical psychologist being managed by someone who isn't. Now, that still exists to some degree, but not entirely. There's something called hybrid professionalism that's emerging. But we'll get on to that in a moment.

Starting point is 00:13:56 What that meant was that you had managers enter in professional domain. and taking a reductive approach. And what they were coming in with was the Adam Smith approach of the wealth of nations. And Adam Smith was very famous for detail and how to make a bunch of needles or nails, I can't remember which, by specialising roles. The difference between our fields and other fields is that professional roles have to have an element of autonomy and application of specialised knowledge. And that is a safe, like you said, a safeguard issue.

Starting point is 00:14:36 So you cannot just say that your entire role as a clinical psychologist is just to do face-to-face therapy sessions. It's too reductive because, like you just highlighted, safeguarding issues can come out of that. Also, that's a huge amount of the load to sustain over a long period of time. Human problems are not machine problems. You know, a machine doesn't need a break, a human does. And that's just some of the issues. But what was happening over time was that the professional role was becoming increasingly siloed, streamlined. And it was happening in our sector too with educational psychology.

Starting point is 00:15:17 We historically spent most of our time supporting head teachers. We would do lots of dropping sessions, just checking in on people. We knew they were going through a tough time. and we would have the autonomy and competency to apply our specialized knowledge in a way we seem fit. And then with, I don't want to get into it now, because people have heard me speak about this. The Children and Families Act changed a lot of that towards assessment-driven things. And this is another aspect of moving away from communities of practice, but competency and autonomy are incredibly important for employee well-being. Now, I think we spend a lot of time looking at entry-level employees and not seeing how they progress through the system.

Starting point is 00:16:03 Entry-level employees need more hand-holding, so to speak, less autonomy, but they still need some level of autonomy in order to assimilate that new identity. And if you come into a role where everything is siloed and everything is, you know, procedure-driven and you only follow a screen, script, there's no growth there. There's no autonomy. So without autonomy, there's no learning. There's just, well, machine learning. You learn to replicate what the script tells you. And many jobs are falling into that trap. You know, the famous one being the call center stuff, they literally follow a script. And you get promoted based on how well you know that script. But you don't get promoted on the soft skill stuff. How do you manage conflict? How do you know, if you had a call center person who you said to them, some organizations do open up to this, but you say,

Starting point is 00:16:59 we don't care if it takes two hours to do a call as long as that customer's happy, then that, you know, that's the soft market inside. It starts to filter out and, you know, you have good experiences and then that becomes your reputation. Whereas if you go through a script, like, we want you to get through 600 calls. That is the quantitative, reductive end of it. And organizations leaders, business leaders need to find out where their balance lies. You know, there's not just one way to do business. And if we're going back to the heart of this podcast, well-being, I would argue less on the metrics and more on the humanistic side of it. It's better to have five small companies where everyone's happy than one massive company where you're constantly worried about churn.

Starting point is 00:17:49 Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think you mentioned that the old model would be that you could do consultation for people that wasn't linked to a specific piece of work and wasn't linked to assessment because you wanted to check in, you wanted to check that your schools were thriving. But also it made me think about one of the most enjoyable pieces of clinical work I ever did was when I worked during training, I worked in a service that had a weekly drop-in on a Wednesday lunchtime and any parent could either bring themselves to discuss their child's problem or to discuss a problem they were having linked to their child or they could bring their child along as well

Starting point is 00:18:29 and they would get 20 minutes with somebody in that service to think through their problem, send them away with answers and then in the afternoon all of us clinicians would write letters summarising what had happened ceasing it to the GP, kickstarting any referrals. So we were getting in there at a really early stage and it felt so good because you were helping people with problems right then. They haven't sweated it for six months before going to the GP so it's already entrenched. So you really are able to get systemic support to kind of think with them about different ways of parents or different ways of thinking about the problem, maybe externalising the problem, recommending books, you know, sending them away with resources are like this is, if you do this,

Starting point is 00:19:12 this is going to be really, really helpful. And then they might come back. into next week's dropping, you may never see them again. But clinically, professionally, maybe egotistically, you were actually able to make change within 20 minutes. If nobody else turned up, which was rare, you could sometimes extend your session. So there'd always usually be at least one first appointment. Sometimes if there wasn't anyone else waiting, you could extend it. But the idea was, is that single session intervention to be able to be clinically helpful in 20 minutes and I loved it. So I think if I'd been working in that service still now and they took that away, that would have been a key attractor for the role, but you're not necessarily getting

Starting point is 00:19:56 the outcomes. And I would imagine that many ed sites or people working in schools really like the ability to be able to work more informally. Think about what problems are cropping up now, to be able to make those changes rather than getting stuck with the more entrenched problems that are more task-specific, I would say. Love your thoughts on that, Adam. Absolutely. And you've just come full circle back around into autonomy. You said that in those 20 minutes,

Starting point is 00:20:24 it was like a lovely piece of work that you got to do because you had the autonomy over it. Without having to worry too much about the commissioning process, the commissioning was sorted. And the cognitive load end, the reporting end, was also sorted. Similarly, I've actually embedded that into my own model whereby I allow practitioners in schools to to book 30 minutes free of charge with me.

Starting point is 00:20:51 Don't abuse the system to just talk through problems. And it's not, you know, they don't have to, they can write their own notes. But it allows me to explore in a different way that is not set in stone like through the EHCP process, which is very much you have to go through certain criteria. And you mentioned there around teachers. Increasingly, teachers are beholden to Austin regulations, the curriculum. I know I've spoken to several teachers who were seriously worried about the space between lines and their jodders based on what offsted we're going to say. And I'm going, you have five kids in this class who have serious emotional problems, can we?

Starting point is 00:21:36 And they just don't have the space because they're too worried about, like, like you say, the task. And what that excreed to me was, not that these were bad teachers or anything, they got quite the opposite. They're quite dedicated. But the system wasn't allowing them to be autonomous. The system wasn't allowing them to make decisions. The system wasn't allowing them to experiment. The system wasn't allowing them to learn about the children. And that perpetuates. And it's going to continue perpetuating. I don't want to get us into an offset bashing thing. But, you know, they said they're going to double down on standards. You know, the head of us that said, I'm never going to compromise on standards.

Starting point is 00:22:16 And what they're really saying is the academic standards. You're not talking about emotional standards. You're not talking about social standards or anything like that. It's the progress aid for secondary schools and it's sat for primary schools. That's what they're talking about. Yeah, it's interesting. But I think when I reflect on one of the reels that we created for to go alongside a previous episode, I asked you what the most important thing was as a child and educational psychologist, and you didn't think it was attainment.

Starting point is 00:22:45 You didn't think it was, you didn't think it was grades and performance. And so there's that mismatch then between Ofsted, children and young people, teachers and families. Absolutely. And, you know, we're flipping between health, education and business. But really the themes are the same. If you don't have a motivated staff team, you don't achieve anything. You know, we measure, we try to, as a society, we try to reduce everything to metrics. And in the education sector, those metrics are attainment.

Starting point is 00:23:26 Again, what underpins that attainment arguably is subjective, you know. Your GCSEs doesn't necessarily translate into IQ, does it? We know that. but when you have a dedicated staff team, you can achieve so much more. One, because fundamentally, they're coachable. What they don't know, if they're behind the mission,

Starting point is 00:23:48 they'll go to their way to learn it. They might need a bit of direction from you. However, if you've just got someone who's highly intelligent but doesn't care about, say my mission, which is the support the education sector, but they're more interested in, I don't know, Lamborghinis

Starting point is 00:24:05 they're not going to get on board of everything I say, but they could have an IQ of 250 for all I know. It doesn't make a difference. And this is what we need to start thinking about in terms of organizations. It's what are the values that you have as an organization? And I don't mean the superficial kind. I mean around how you relate to each other, how you organize your teams,

Starting point is 00:24:28 how do you support autonomy, how you support competency, how do you challenge incompetency, where someone may be incompetent but doesn't have a clue that they are. And can you do that in a soft way or do you have to do that in a hard way? You know, these things matter. How, you know, HR departments are probably doing their papers in the air. We deal with this every day.

Starting point is 00:24:52 But these things are important. And, you know, your earlier anecdote around whistleblowing, why you support whistleblowers so that one, they may feel confident enough to come back to work is another thing. And obviously, I'm coming from a very biased perspective around well-being, given the nature of my job. But, you know, if your company doesn't embody that, employees should be made aware of that.

Starting point is 00:25:19 Yeah, absolutely. And even thinking about this, if people are listening, thinking how can I encourage future leaders, or how can I become more competent and confident and hopefully not incompetent at being a leader. And I think sometimes responsibilities and roles can be tightly held on to. And sometimes they can obviously flung down at you. Like, I don't want to do that, you do that.

Starting point is 00:25:47 But I think it needs to be safe. So I had this experience of being on training. And the first ever MDT meeting I went to, it was said at the end of the meeting, and the next chair of this meeting will be married. And I was like, what? Like, I haven't even, I think it was like the agenda before the meeting and even happened. I thought, why, I don't, what?

Starting point is 00:26:12 And I just, that put me on the spot and I wasn't expecting it. And I just think that could have been handled in a different way. It could have actually, we really like our trainees to be able to learn things. We don't expect you to be perfect. And as such, we rotate the chair of this. And don't worry, we'll be sort of. And don't worry, will we support you with what you need to do? But we'd really love it if you would chair, please, Marianne.

Starting point is 00:26:35 Then I'd have been prepared, rather than thinking, as a trainee, I need to be perfect. And I'm being judged by all of these new people that I've never met before. It felt a little bit like being thrown under the bus. And I was spoken to about my response as well, privately, that it didn't seem very contained or professional. And I then internalised that at the time. but actually I think maybe it could have been handled in a more contained or compassionate way

Starting point is 00:27:04 rather than expecting me to just juggle it. Arguably it wasn't professional how they dropped it on you. You know, you were a trainee, you're given protected status and throwing into this role and it does happen, doesn't it?

Starting point is 00:27:20 We like to, some people like to just say, okay, the best way they learn is just to get into it. But there has to be an element of the experienced staff supporting the in-experienced staff to develop their competencies. You can't have autonomy

Starting point is 00:27:39 without competency. The two speak to each other. Go and do whatever you want. That's great. But I haven't a clue where to begin with research. And you want me to be, you know, a professor of green energy or something. I couldn't do that.

Starting point is 00:27:54 You know what I mean? I wouldn't know where to begin. I need someone who, walk down field a bit further than I, having come along here, this is where we begin, and I'm going back to Venger's communities of practice stuff. And increasingly, we're seeing issues around entry-level well-being, and one of the aspects is probably around mentorship. And I don't mean that in the soft woolly way or your line manager has to be really warm and enticing. No, it's about gradually introducing you into an organization without a lot.

Starting point is 00:28:27 feeling overwhelmed. And, you know, if I leave my current role and go join another educational psychology service, I'm probably going to refine simply because I've gone into several services before. I have an expectation. As a trainee, though, that's my first time doing it. I need some sort of onboarding that will be robust. And the best onboarding I ever had was with an organization called Five Rivers. and they basically said, we're going to give you a full month with no responsibilities, but you go and get to go

Starting point is 00:29:04 and work with all these people who will then be leading. So the people who I would be leading were actually leading me first. So we got to build a rapport, got to build a relationship, I understood the roles in greater depth, and it led to some fabulous work around social care

Starting point is 00:29:20 and how to support foster care. And so like this idea being a leader whereby you need to make all the decisions and have some sort of authority over others that that kind of needs to leave we're in a world not a digital world we're in a world where by people are very aware of their well-being people are very aware of their identities you know the term identity politics is is a given term now whereas it wasn't when I was a child and companies and organizations need to accept that and move with it

Starting point is 00:29:56 I get sent books all the time around leadership. And the overwhelming theme is that people want to move towards a more compassionate form of it. Some people do it well. Some people articulate it very well. And others don't. In the education sector, we talk a lot about compassion. But then when you actually see the pressure that they're under, it's hard for these leaders to actually embody that. And they burn out.

Starting point is 00:30:24 Yeah, and it again reminds me of that really lovely term that I first heard in Gabel-Mate's book, the emotional collection of people. And when we're joining workforces, if we're expected to kind of be working under someone more senior than us, it's actually really lovely to be able to give chances to see that person operate so that you are emotionally collected by them, but also, you want to work hard for them because you respect them and you like the way they work and you want to do well. And I think the same happens in schools as well. If the teacher has that experience, the child wants to work hard for you rather than just putting on the thumb screws as soon as the

Starting point is 00:31:09 child joins and then it all going to pot and then having to rebuild. So I think, yeah, when we're joining organisations or if you have people joining your organisation, I think really thinking about having this chance to cultivate a relationship, even if you've got someone just with you for a short period of time. So I know that, you know, trainee nurses might only be with people on placement for 10 weeks. And an assistant psychologist might be just, you know, a few months, a year, maybe a little longer. Trainees might be four to five months. But what if we can do our job so well that these people then want to come back when they're qualified to work in our team because they love what we do, what we achieve and the way we make them feel in that organisation as a valued part of the team.

Starting point is 00:31:58 And there's a really nice podcast that I think I'm going to try and run called, you know, mattering. And I think that's part of this kind of conversation as well. In order to thrive in any organisation, whether it's a family, whether it's, you know, as a parent, whether it's in a school, whether it's in an organisation you're delivering healthcare, you need to feel like you matter. Yeah, you need to have a defined role. And I don't mean that in the role of this is what we're giving you. It's a role that you embody yourself.

Starting point is 00:32:30 Going back to what we said about identity, identity and role interlinked. They're not exactly the same because when you're a child, you can have identity, but your role is being a student and a child essentially. And they're pretty much brought everybody at your age. growth fulfills that but once you enter into adulthood you start to take on roles you know you take on different professions you might become a parent you

Starting point is 00:32:56 might become a care and these roles then influence how you see yourself and how you see yourself matters because when you feel a particular way about yourself you then behave in a particular way you know basic CBT and when we think about Rose Fenger was ahead of the game in my opinion around this because he understood that a role is developed by how you interact with other people, not based on what your job criteria is. And then how you take that role and extrapolate out into autonomy and competency, whereby I'm interacting with George, Susan, and they're teaching me different things. I'm taking nuggets from each of them and I'm changing how they see the role.

Starting point is 00:33:47 by embodying it in a slightly different way, by bringing my own knowledge to the rule, my own actions, my own interactions, and then I'm going to change that into something slightly different. We're all called, say, they're technicians. They're all called technicians, but they have slightly different takes on problem solving, and that creates new knowledge.

Starting point is 00:34:09 And when you jointly create new knowledge, that's a really rewarding experience. If you look at F1 teams, particularly the pick crews, they work intensively together. They solve problems and they become closer aligned because of it. Then, you know, within, say, like you said, assistant psychologists, you know, they have to gently enter into the profession. But at the same time, there can't be such a jump between their role and the role of a clinical

Starting point is 00:34:41 psychologist or an educational psychologist. Because if that jumps too big, then the, the competency. element becomes under attack and then the identity element comes under attack because they feel that they can't cope. If they feel it can't cope, then the role suffers. So you've got, as an organization, you've got to think of, it's not about just fulfilling this skill set and that skill set. It's about how these skill sets interact with each other. And that is a much trickier thing to do. And it takes a lot of patience and no Chachy BT will not tell you the right answer. I love that. And you've really nicely given us a framework for something I speak about a lot.

Starting point is 00:35:22 And it's that idea that when you're going through your career, especially if you're, you know, in a training role or you're just in the number of teams for a short period of time, it's that idea of talk the talk and walk the walk in that service. Try and use some of the approaches that they want you to use. But also know that ultimately you will take with you what is a good fit for you. but you'll also have blended it and made sure that it works for you and the clients that you work with and the teams you're alongside. And then ultimately when you look back at your career, I think any of us now, if we just took a moment to look back at our career and some of the things that we do now, if we were to think, well, where did that start? Where did I first see that? It might be so much earlier in our career, but it's stayed with us and we've made it our own and we've helped new people to experience that as well. And it's just really powerful because we're not, we're never a finished clinician, are we? And I think if you are, I would invite you to consider whether it's time to retire because

Starting point is 00:36:19 I don't think I'll ever be finished. All right, Adam, just before we finish, let's think a little bit about how, in your opinion, AI is threatening competency and autonomy. Oh, the AI debate is an important one. So when you interact with AI, it does things, at least on a superficial level, very well. As an entry level employee, you will feel that you are not as competent as an AI output. AI is very good at helping those in the middle level of their career or the late level of their career be more productive. So the societal dilemma is how do we implement AI to onboard.

Starting point is 00:37:05 new people. So for people who are experiencing threats around AI, they're going to experience things with their identity. Am I good enough to do this job? Say they're being a solicitor. This AI machine can do everything I can do and it can do it quicker. And this is threatened in my competency and it also makes me think I can't do anything myself without AI. The important thing to remember is that AI cannot do creativity to the level that a human can. And that's is where we are different. We have to focus on the application of knowledge. You and I as psychologists, AI can do a lot of the superficial stuff we can, but it cannot unpick the deep-rooted stuff. The number of times are this type in, this is coming up, and gives me some sort of superficial response. Like, you forgot this part. I said, yes, I did. That is the

Starting point is 00:38:02 difference between a professional and AI. There was a at the entry level, work with your middle and your late career colleagues and how to apply knowledge. It is not about just being smart and recall in your university stuff. It's taking that and revisiting in a different way, going back to communities of practice, how we talk to each other matters. It really does. And AI is, I would think, infinitely more frustrating than humans are but my husband may disagree if it comes to living with me. Adam, thank you so much for your time. Let's just have a little think about where we can find you on social media and please do tell us about your podcast and website too. Great, thank you. Social media, you can get me on LinkedIn and

Starting point is 00:38:51 Instagram. Just type of my name, Dr. Adam McCartney and I should come up. My website is Dr. Adam McCartney.com. I particularly invite you to come and look at that if you are in the education sector. And then my podcast with Mike Lane is between two sites. Our listenership is growing. We're very excited by it. And we've recently cracked 1,000 views and we're on our way to 2,000 very quickly. So we're very happy with that. Congratulations.

Starting point is 00:39:28 I am looking forward to come. and recording an episode with you soon too. Thank you for your time. And if people are finding this episode helpful, please do tag us on our social media, screenshot, tag us in your stories. We would love to hear from you. Thank you so much for your time, Adam. Thank you for having me again. You're so welcome. Thank you again for listening or watching. If you don't already follow or subscribe to the show, Psychology Actually, please do so now. And whilst you're in your phone tapping away subscribing and following doing all that stuff why not check out dr adam mccartney's podcast to between two sikes if you are an aspiring psychologist i think

Starting point is 00:40:09 you will love the aspiring psychologist membership which you can join from just 30 pounds a month with no minimum term and whoever you are and whatever you're listening i think you'll also really like my behind the scenes kind of you know it's like just sitting down and having a coffee with me inner work episodes, which you can access via Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Patreon. And on Patreon, you can even check out little snippets of the show for free. And on Apple, you can get a free, three-day trial. I would love it if you would let me know what you think to the content. Let me know if you've got any ideas for episodes, which you can do by coming and contacting and communicating with me on any of my social media platforms. I am Dr. Marianne Trent,

Starting point is 00:40:57 Hi, I'm Max and a worker's assistant psychologist in the learning disability service in West Yorkshire. Like most people working in psychology, I'm slowly but surely working myself up to that seemingly impossible goal of getting onto the clinical doctorate. With that angle in mind, I thought I'd have a look at what's out there and see what books might be helpful for this. I came across Marianne's book, The Clinical Psychologist Collective, and decided that this would be a great for me to help me on my journey. I found Marianne's book really informative, most insightful.

Starting point is 00:41:36 I especially liked how the stories reassured me that you don't need to be academically perfect to become a psychologist, and that as long as you have good interpersonal skills, such as compassion and empathy, you will get there. I would highly recommend this book to all aspiring psychologists, and also those who want to know a bit more about the world of clinical psychology and made me want to work in that field one day.

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