Why are so many employees burning out sometimes before their careers have even properly begun? In this episode of Psychology, Actually, Dr Marianne Trent is joined once again by educational psychologist Dr Adam McCartney to explore the psychology of workplace wellbeing, burnout, leadership, identity, organisational culture and the growing impact of AI on confidence and autonomy at work.

We discuss how modern workplaces often prioritise productivity and metrics over human wellbeing, why early career professionals are struggling, and how organisational systems can either support or damage psychological safety.

The conversation explores mentorship, identity, communities of practise, whistleblowing, emotional labour, compassion fatigue, autonomy, burnout in healthcare and education, and why people thrive when they feel like they matter.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Why employees are burning out
• 01:47 Workplace wellbeing and organisations
• 04:09 Communities of practise and identity
• 06:52 Whistleblowing and organisational culture
• 10:54 Burnout in healthcare roles
• 13:40 Autonomy, competency and wellbeing
• 17:09 Why informal support matters
• 20:39 The pressure of performance metrics
• 24:39 Learning leadership safely
• 27:26 Mentorship and onboarding
• 29:46 Emotional collection and mattering
• 31:41 Identity, roles and belonging
• 35:52 Is AI reducing confidence and autonomy?
• 38:07 Adam’s podcast and final reflections

#PsychologyActually #Burnout #WorkplaceWellbeing

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Sponsored by WriteUpp AI Scribe

This episode is sponsored by WriteUpp. Their new AI Scribe helps clinicians draft session notes in their preferred format, helping reduce admin and reclaim valuable time. Try it yourself with a free 30-day trial and 30% off your first 6 months using code MARIANNE30 at this link: https://writeupp.com/?refid=142336

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 wellbeing in organisations 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 friend of the show, Dr. Adam McCarney, who is a child and educational psychologist. Hi, Adam.

Hi, Marianne. 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 vignettes for the types of work that the ed psychs 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. 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'd be really interesting to have a little bit of a look from a leadership perspective and from an emerging leader's perspective about what wellbeing 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. Historically, we've been more within child as every educational psychologist 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 have to look at organisations. 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 depending on how much money the government puts in. But within that sector, they operate like businesses. Many multi-chemic 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 organisations now operate a bit like the corporate sector. And we have had to then open up, okay, what does leadership look like? What does organisational structure look like? And how does all that filter down into the impact for children?

I have some understanding of that because I was a parent governor 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 the safeguarding lead, which is kind of a lot really for the responsibility whilst also running a practise, 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. 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.

So one of the big theories I came across when I was studying for my doctorate was one called Communities of Practise and it's the full titles, the Communities of Practise of Learning, which you would think that lends itself quite well to education, but it's from Lav and Venger who developed in 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. Company A has to catch up. The way they did it was by organising what they call communities of practise, whereby they'd 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 alignment they became so they identified together more.

The stronger that identity, the greater the collaboration. But what I also found was when you introduce someone new to that community of practise, they start on the fringes and then they learn about new things within that domain and then they become closer and closer into the centre 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 experienced this in our training courses. And then as you learn more about pedagogy and behaviour management and 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 it became Vengers, whether he would like me saying this or not, it becomes very clear that in order for an organisation to thrive, identity is at the core of it.

One of the things I took away from that is identity is linked to wellbeing 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 reevaluate that in the new context. So for children, it's transitions in the key stage three. For adults, it's changing roles, it's changing jobs.

And it's evoking kind of memories of a number of professionals that I've supported 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 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 practise or kind of, I don't know, doing the clinical notes 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, 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 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 just be warmed up into the culture of the organisation and maybe also then become part of the problem.

There's always the risk of that you could become another cog in the wheel and fight soundtracking corrupted yourself. And you're talking about in the extreme sense and the extreme sense is important to pay attention to 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 ... Nick, 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 it the value system I embody has to match the value system that people I bring in. 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 means that has a very small pool of people.

Whereas when you take a large corporation, I'm not saying any of these do this, but 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, it's the churn and burn. 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. The subtext of this podcast is about wellbeing and one of the things we're seeing as entry level employees, those between the agents, say 19 and 25 are struggling with their wellbeing. And it's too easy just to put that down to poor relationships with middle management.

I've seen supported organisations where that's been the case, but 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 wellbeing. And I think it's very important for people like you and IT advocate for healthy organisational 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, 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 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 ... That's like, Adam, when you ask the question 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 is going to probably take you two or three hours and you're just going to have to juggle everything you've already got.

That is not great for the wellbeing, 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, can see why wellbeing is tricky.

I don't know if you fully realised this, but you've opened up a can of worms there and I'll try not to go too much. But in the mid 90s, around 2005 under New Labour, 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 HS. 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 onto that in a moment. What that meant was that you had managers enter in professional domains and taking a reductive approach. And what they were coming in with was the Adam Smith approach of the wealth of nations and Alan Smith was very famous for detail on 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 like you said, a safeguarding issue. 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. 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. We historically spent most of our time supporting head teachers. We would do lots of drop-in 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 specialised 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 a lot. The Children and Families Act changed a lot of that towards assessment-driven things. And this is another aspect of moving away from key immunities of practise, but competency and autonomy are incredibly important for employee wellbeing. Now I think we spend a lot of time looking at entry level employees and not seeing how they progress through the system. Entry level employees need more handholding, 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 procedure driven and you only follow a 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. The famous one being the call centre 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? If you had a call centre person who you said to them, some organisations do open up to this, but you say, we don't care if it takes two hours to do a call, as long as that customer's happy, then that's the soft marketing side. It starts to filter out and 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 organisations, leaders, business leaders need to find out where their balance lies. There's not just one way to do business. And if we're going back to the heart of this podcast wellbeing, 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.

Yeah, absolutely. And 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 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, CCing it to the GP, kickstarting any referrals.

So we were getting in there 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 think with them about different ways of parents and different ways of thinking about the problem, maybe externalising the problem, recommending books, sending them away with resources are like, "If you do this, this is going to be really, really helpful." And then they might come back into next week's drop-in. 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've been a key attractor for the role, but you're not necessarily getting the outcomes. And I would imagine that many ed psychs 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. I'd love your thoughts on that.

Absolutely. And you've just come full circle back around into autonomy. You said that in those 20 minutes 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 commission 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 and schools to do 30 minutes free of charge with me, don't abuse the system to just talk through problems. And they can write their own notes, but it allows me to explore it in a different way that is not set in stone 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 us that regulations, the curriculum.

I've spoken to several teachers who were seriously worried about the space between lines and their daughters based on what Ofsted were going to say. And I'm going, "You have five kids in this class who have serious emotional problems, can we? " And they just don't have the space because they're too worried about, like you say, the task. And what that extremed 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 they said they're going to double down on standards. The head of us that said, "I'm never going to compromise on standards." And what they're really saying is the academic standards.

They're not talking about emotional standards. They're not talking about social standards or anything like that. It's the progress aid for secondary skills and it sats 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, 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 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. As a society, we try to reduce everything to metrics. And in the education sector, those metrics are attainment. Again, what underpins that attainment arguably is subjective. 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, they'll go to their way to learn it. They might need a better 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, they're not going to get on board with 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 organisations. It's what are the values that you have as an organisation? And I don't mean the superficial kind. I mean around how you relate to each other, how you organise your teams, 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? These things matter. HR departments are probably throwing their papers in the air saying, "We deal with this every day, but these things are important." And your earlier anecdote around whistleblowing, how 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 biassed perspective around wellbeing given the nature of my job, but if your company doesn't embody that, employees should be made aware of that.

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 onto and sometimes they can obviously be flung down at you like, "I don't want to do that, you do that. " 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 Marianne. And I was like, "What?" I think it was the agenda before the meeting even happened. I thought, "What?" And 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 been said, "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 support you with what you need to do, but we'd really love it if you would chair please, Marianne." 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 rather than expecting me to just juggle it.

Arguably, it wasn't professional how they dropped it on you. You were a trainee, you're given protected status and thrown into this role and it does happen, doesn't it? Some people like to just say, "Okay, the best way to learn is just to get into it. " But there has to be an element of the experienced staff supporting the inexperienced staff to develop their competencies. You can't have autonomy 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 a professor of green energy or something. I couldn't do that. You know what I mean? I wouldn't know where to begin. I need someone who's walked that field a bit further than I haven't come along here. This is where we begin. And that's going back to Vanguard's communities of practise stuff.

And increasingly, we're seeing issues around entry level wellbeing 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 organisation without feeling overwhelmed. And 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 organisation 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 and work with all these people who you 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, understood the roles in greater depth and it led to some fabulous work around social care and how to support foster cares. And so this idea of being a leader whereby you need to make all the decisions and have some sort of authority over others, 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 wellbeing, people are very aware of their identities. The term identity politics is a given term now, whereas it wasn't when I was a child and companies and organisations need to accept that and move with it. 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.

And it again reminds me of that really lovely term that I first heard in Gable Mate's book, the emotional collection of people. And when we're joining workforces, if we're expected to come going to 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 is 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 child joins and then it all going to pot and then having to rebuild. So I think 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 trainee nurses might only be with people and placement for 10 weeks and an assistant psychologist might be just 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. And there's a really nice podcast that I think I'm going to try and run called 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 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. Going back to what we said about identity, identity and role are 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 broad. Everybody, your age group fulfils that. But once you enter into adulthood, you start to take on roles, you take on different professions, you might become a parent, you 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, basic CBT. And when we think about roles, Finger 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 it 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 by embodying it in a slightly different way, by bringing my own knowledge to the role, 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. And when you jointly create new knowledge, that's a really rewarding experience. If you look at F1 teams, particularly the pit crews, they work intensively together. They solve problems and they become closer aligned because of it. Then within, say like you said, assistant psychologists, 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 psychologist or an educational psychologist because if that jumps too big, then 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 they can't cope, then the role suffers. As an organisation, you got to think of, it's not about just fulfilling this skillset and that skillset. It's about how these skillsets interact with each other and that is a much trickier thing to do and it takes a lot of patience and no ChatGPT 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 and it's that idea that when you're going through your career, especially if you're 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 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 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 creating more productive. So the societal dilemma is how do we implement AI to onboard 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 threatening 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 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 I say, this type in, this is coming up, it gives me some sort of superficial response like, "You forgot this part." I say, "Yes, I did." That is the difference between a professional and AI. Those at the entry level, work with your middle and your late career colleagues on how to apply knowledge. It is not about just being smart and recalling your university stuff. It's taking that and revisiting in a different way, going back to communities of practise, 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 when it comes to living with me. Adam, thank you so much for your time. Let's just have a litle 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 Instagram. Just type in my name, Dr. Adam McCartney and I should come up. My website is dradamccartney.com. I particularly invite you to come and look at that if you are in the education sector. And then my podcast with Mike Lean is Between Two Psychs. Our listenership is growing. We're very excited by it and we've recently cracked 1000 views and we're on our way to 2000 very quickly. So we're very happy with that.

Congratulations. I am looking forward to coming 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 and doing all that stuff, why not check out Dr. Adam McCartney's podcast to Between Two Psychs. If you are an aspiring psychologist, I think 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 whyever you're listening. I think you'll also really like my behind the scenes. 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.

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