What I’ve realised over the last couple of weeks

I’ve got another coaching session to reflect on for this post, this time it was my third coaching session with Nathan Castle. This session didn’t involve behavioural rehearsal, as I decided I only wanted to talk about Rest. I thought this would help me take rest more seriously. As always, the time with Nathan was enlightening, our discussion helped me realise that I was very much intellectualising the role of rest and found myself automatically wanting to calibrate my rest to “maximise it” and “get the most out of it” – so I was being very performance focused.

As the discussion went on Nathan helped me turn towards the importance of emotions in rest and allowing myself to rest for the sake of enjoying and appreciating it; not to maximise my continued performance.

This was incredibly powerful for me. How do I know? My mindset and behaviours have changed since the session. I realised that over the last few months I had been obsessively pursuing how to follow the proposed Deliberate Practice (DP) systems in better results with as much precision as possible. My reasoning behind this was that because I’m early in my career, it would be a perfect time to make DP hyper habitual, so that I could embody the systems proposed in the better results book for the rest of my career. What changed for me in the coaching session is that I realised I’m not a professional athlete or musician, so it would be very challenging to embody DP to match the standard I had in my head, plus while I love my work, I want to be more than that and live life beyond the work I do.

So I decided to take a step back and allow myself to slow down from following DP so religiously and instead “embody the spirit of DP” (as Nathan put it), which I take as being more guided by the principles of DP instead of trying to be the gold standard.

I’m still glad that I did get so into the DP system, as I think doing so has helped me internalise it and I do think that I have developed some great tools for improving how I work, that suit me. So for that I am very grateful.

What I’ve managed to do since my last post

With the above realisations in mind I’m still doing a lot of what I did before, I’m just not pressuring myself as much and I’m following the DP system at a slower pace. For instance, I’ll still be doing the my session reflections and solitary DP sessions of approx 15 minutes, but instead doing both every Friday I am going to create a 15 minute ‘slot’ in my calendar each Friday to do either of those activities; not both, but also allow myself to remember that it’s not the end of the world if I don’t do it on a given week.

Professional Identity

All this did have me reflect on what kind of Psychologist I want to be and what I want to focus on in my career, if I’m going to have some room, in not following DP like a mad man. In thinking about this I started typing out the below document, which lays out the treatment modalities I want to focus on, where I want to focus my stretch goals and listing the individuals in various fields that I want to learn more from.

I decided that I want to focus my development first and foremost on improving my effectiveness in the 5 areas the research currently suggests are the most important therapeutic factors that influence client outcomes. If the research pivots and suggests other factors overtaking these, then I will change my focus. Next, If I want to master anything in ACT therapy, I want it to be teaching creative hopelessness to clients, as it seems to be the greatest barrier to acceptance. Finally, I want to explore if mastery based learning, popularised by Sal Khan of the Khan Academy can be used with clients in therapy.

I realise for the second post now I haven’t got to exploring Self-Doubt. I wanted to strike while the iron was hot with my thoughts on the above and didn’t want to overstretch myself trying to fit in what I wanted to on Self-Doubt as well. I don’t see myself having any pressing realisations by next time, so I’m sure I’ll get around to it in the next post.

Till next time and as always – thanks for reading.

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