This blog is focused on providing advice on how to develop your skills as a support worker or assistant psychologist. These might be daunting but are very beneficial.
1. Role play. Honestly, it still makes me anxious thinking about it. Yet, like most things that push you out of your comfort zone, it's a learning curve. Role Playing is when you and another person, or a group of other people, take on roles and act as if you were in a specific situation. It allows you to learn in a controlled setting. Making mistakes can be specifically looked into and reflected on. It enables you to ask the other person, "how did that feel when I asked you that question". It's such a useful resource. Try to explore and have fun with it!
2. Supervision is extremely useful. It's a tool that has shaped me as a person, allowed me to consolidate learning, and reflect on experiences. To me, supervision is a formal meeting, with another relevant professional, that focuses on three areas: client welfare, skill development, and a space to share how work is affecting you (a place to express and reflect among your own emotions). There are different models and frameworks for supervision. Also, different supervisors and supervisees will structure it differently. I don't have scope to go into models and framework within the post. If you don't have a supervisor or want to know what supervision is - try and grab a clinical psychologist in your work and see if you could ask them about it
3. Service user feedback. It is so important to get feedback to the people who you are providing a service to. Whether that's in low intensity therapy, psychoeducation groups, inpatient services, outpatient services, etc. There's different ways you can collect feedback from clients/service users/patients. One, you can ask them to fill out a form that looks into the quality of sessions and asks specific questions about their opinion. Different services will have different variations of these forms. Two, (and the way I like) is by asking them. Whether that's mid-session with 'I just want to check in with you about how you're feeling right now' or at the end of the session 'I value your feedback so if there's anything you'd like to ask or tell me about today's session that could have been different, I'd appreciate anything you'll say'.
4. Reflection is a fundamental skill that clinical psychologists should be aiming to improve. It enables us to process and understand situations we encounter and consider what occurred, how it occurred, our own thoughts and feelings on and during the situation, what skills we used, how we used them, if we should have done things differently, and if we needed to improve. Reflection can take many forms. When I first started, I struggled to reflect and wondered what reflection was. At the time I was on a CBT focused service. My supervisor suggested that I use the CBT maintenance model to reflect both during the situation and afterwards. Having a psychological model to use really helped me develop my self awareness and understanding. I also used DBT mindfulness skills to develop my ability to become an observer. What I'm trying to say is reflection is easier if you have a psychological model in mind to guide you. There's models out there that are designed specifically for reflection. Like Gibbs model etc. It's also a skill and like any skill it needs to be practiced. So don't beat yourself up if it's tricky at first.
5. Research. From how we treat people to ethical decision making there is always a psychological framework that's (hopefully and accurately) based on some form of research. That's why it's so important that when you are wanting to go into clinical psychology you keep up-to-date on how to complete research as well as how you read a research article. In the doctorate application you have to outline your involvement in research and they will ask you research related questions in the interview. You don't need a publication to get onto the doctorate. You do need to keep up to date with these skills.
To recap, the five main skills I cover in this blog is: role play, supervision, service user feedback, reflection, and research. Developing each one of these skills is important when considering if you want a career in Clinical Psychology. - Hope this helped :)
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