Being Human
At the beginning of July, my supervisor was in Preston, so we met for food, conversation and observation of me in practice. We went out onto the golf course with a client, and my supervisor observed as I worked. We discussed the session the next day. My supervisor said to me, and I’ll not use quotation marks because I can’t remember it verbatim – one of the things I liked best about your practice, was the simplicity of your questions. As well as your ability to converse with the client. From the moment we met, and you introduced me to them, it was clear that they were comfortable around you. I’ll save my reflection of this until later in the blog, but I wanted to begin with that, because it ended up resonating with the psychologist I want to become.
On the 15th of July, I ventured away from the world of sport and into construction. Health and safety is a minefield, it is arguably one of the most mundane things for an everyday person. Culturally, we have an innate ignorance of health and safety, because we all decide that we’re going to produce our own risk assessments in any given situation. We then do something in a way which we believe is safe, even if that goes against a system in place to keep us safe. I delivered a talk to a head of health and safety, a director of operations, and some subcontractors. The point was to introduce them to the psychological reasoning behind health and safety ignorance. When crossing a road, we want to make it to the other side safely. We don’t want to get hit by anything, and we want everyone around us to be safe too. I put a picture of a red traffic light crossing on the screen and said, “who has ignored this when crossing a road”. The entire room, all bar none, raised a hand. We want to cross safely, there is a system in place for us to do so, we ignore it anyway because it saves us time. It’s the same on site. They want to work safely, there is a system in place for them to do so, they ignore it because they can get the job done quicker in other ways. There are many reasons for this: optimism bias, normalisation of risk, and cognitive dissonance. Optimism bias – bad things don’t happen to me. Showing a smoker a picture of some black lungs doesn’t stop them smoking because it isn’t a picture of them, so they can’t see it happening. Show the same person a video of someone winning the lottery and they’ll go buy a ticket. We don’t want bad things to happen to us, so we just pretend that they won’t. Normalisation of risk – an obvious one. You do something for so long without anything bad happening, the risk is normalised. I’ve never been hit by a car, so I’ll continue to cross on a red light. Finally, cognitive dissonance – where our actions contradict our internal desires. Labourers want to return to their families and provide for them, ignoring health and safety guidelines contradicts this internal desire. In my presentation, my point was: to get labourers to abide by health and safety regulations, it isn’t about telling them horror stories and showing them pictures of when things went wrong. It’s about framing the message in a way that gets their cogs turning and has them think about the consequences of their actions. That’s what psychology is, and that is how I transfer my time working towards this presentation back to sport. You only have a limited time with a client, maybe an hour a week say. The work you do with them, therefore, must invoke thought beyond that session to instil change.
Week commencing, the 14th of July, I embarked on a vlogging journey. Having played some good (better than my handicap) golf of late, I thought it made sense to finally enter my first tournament on Saturday the 19th of July. I also decided that, to make it relevant to stage 2, I could vlog the experience, showing how to manage practice as someone working full-time. I thought it would be a good way to show amateur, weekend athletes that time management and planning is a great way to perform optimally. Did this go as well as I hoped – absolutely not. I’ll edit it together next month, and hopefully it will see the light of day. Honestly, I struggled with capturing content; specifically, being able to capture the weekly plan I was following. It became a golf only vlog, which granted, I enjoyed – but it didn’t capture the sport psych aspect as well as I’d liked. It’s somewhat annoying, because I won the competition with a 78 gross, 59 nett (I am defenceless to anyone labelling me a bandit). Clearly, my planning worked, I just need to find a way to effectively document this for public consumption! I reflected upon the round and my take-home was this – 18 months ago, if I was coming up the 17th hole knowing I could afford two bogeys to break 80, I’d have apple crumbled. It only occurred to me when I was back in the clubhouse enjoying a celebratory Guinness that, I didn’t realise I’d broken 80 until I entered my card into the computer. I have played golf for about four years now; for 18 months I’ve taken it a little more seriously. What I’ve realised is that to take golf more seriously as an amateur, you have to take it less seriously – paradoxical, and yet, it works. The mantra is simple “learn not to care about bad shots, the next shot could be the best of your round”. I finished the tournament with a nett 10 under par, guess how I started my round? A topped drive off the first tee which went about 50 yards. 18 months ago, that would not only have ruined my hole, but my round. Now, I view it as an opportunity to hit a great recovery shot. It takes time to shift a mindset, but I now play golf so freely. I shot a +17 the day prior to shooting a +9. Playing sport well is about learning what to remember, what to forget, and what to learn from. Remember the good, forget the number if you shoot a bad round, but learn from the process which led to the score. Why was it a bad score? Act upon it.
On the 21st of July I completed a CPD course, a webinar on exploring barriers to men talking about their mental health. One thing that really made me think was a recurring theme from the stories of men who have gone through periods of having severe mental health struggles. They all referred to one of the main problems with psychological support being the medicalisation of it. This included things such as offices, complicated jargon, psychologists almost trying to prove their worth to them and putting them in boxes. “The stranger on the bridge” is a real account of man whose life was saved by a stranger who talked him down from intent to end his life. It was someone with no psychological qualifications that saved him. Clients aren’t paying you to show off your knowledge, they’re paying you to be seen as an individual. Knowledge of academia is all well and good, but I truly believe that the most important part of this profession is being human when another human needs you to be. To see what someone else needs at a given moment and articulate it to them, that’s what makes a good psychologist to me, and that’s the psychologist I want to be. That’s why my supervisor’s comments made me feel good about the way I was with my client. I felt I’d allowed them to be seen, and that is doing the job well in my eyes.
Personally, I’m up and down with the whole process at the moment. One day I feel like it’s all under control and the next, I want to drop out and forget about a career for a while. I have a training session in Wales early August, which I’m looking forward to. It will be the first time I meet a group of trainees in person; I’m hoping conversation with them about their stage 2 experiences will help me out. I thought about the first blog and how I wrote it. Honestly, it would be so easy to make these blogs a thing of perfection. To narrate a fictitious diary of malleable words, shaped into an effortless experience of the journey to becoming chartered. To stay truthful, since the last blog I’ve tried to look to the future, to put myself in a position where an older me is reading these blogs back. I think: ‘if I read these in five, ten, fifteen years – what will sit me in a place of pride?’ I think it’s the truth. I don’t want to have painted over the difficulties; to read a perfect account of an imperfect journey. I think I’d recoil, I’d sit there and regret not writing an accurate account. I can imagine reading a past experience filled with words invoking positive connotations and thinking, ‘that actually pushed me to a near limit, why I have painted it in that light?’ So, to stay true to future me, I’m struggling a bit as I write this – but bring on the training in Plas Y Brenin, it will all be ok in the end.