Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast Episode: 50: Finding

your tribe

Thank you for listening to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. Finding your tribe whilst navigating on your journey in this profession can be so important. They can help with so many things along the way. Here’s why they’re useful and how to find them.

If you’d like to feature on a podcast episode or have an idea for one get in touch!

The Highlights:

• 00:29: Welcome and Clearing House Deadline

• 01:26: Context for today’s episode & some of my tribe

• 02:30: Loneliness along the way

• 03:41: Tip 1

• 05:06: Tip 2

• 07:00: Tip 3

• 09:24: Get in touch if you’d like to feature in an episode

• 10:22: Tip 4

• 11:23: Tip 5

• 14:33: Reflections on my tribe

• 15:34: Longevity of tribe members

• 16:34: Further reflections on my tribe

• 17:46: Tip 6

• 19:00: Leave me reviews, get in touch and close

Links:

 Grab your copy of the new book: The Aspiring Psychologist Collective: https://amzn.to/3CP2N97

 Get your Supervision Shaping Tool now: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/supervision

 Connect socially with Marianne and check out ways to work with her, including the upcoming Aspiring Psychologist Book and The Aspiring Psychologist Membership on her Link tree: https://linktr.ee/drmariannetrent

To check out The Clinical Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3jOplx0

To join my free Facebook group and discuss your thoughts on this episode and more: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aspiringpsychologistcommunity

Like, Comment, Subscribe & get involved:

If you enjoy the podcast, please do subscribe and rate and review episodes. If you'd like to learn how to record and submit your own audio testimonial to be included in future shows head to: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/podcast and click the blue request info button at the top of the page.

Hashtags:

#aspiringpsychologist #dclinpsy #psychology #assistantpsychologist #psychologycareers #clinicalpsychology #mentalhealth #BPS #traineeclinicalpsychologist #clinicalpsychology #drmariannetrent #newbook #britishpsychologicalsociety #mentalhealthprofessional #gettingqualified #mentalhealthprofessionals #mentalhealthprofessional #mentalhealthprofessionals #workingwithpeople #findyourtribe #findingyourtribe #yourtribe #supportatwork #personalandprofessional #worklifebalance

Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. I am Dr. Maryanne Trent, and I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. So if you are listening to this in the first week of it's release, then you might well be aware that in the UK the clearing house applications have not long closed. They closed on the 16th of November. So you might be listening to this trying to think about, ah, my application's gone in now I've gotta wait till spring. Or you might not have chosen to apply this year or not been eligible to apply this year or not maybe even thinking about going down the clinical psychology route. But you could be experiencing a number of different thoughts and feelings whilst you're listening to this episode. So I just wanted to get on board with whatever you are feeling and thinking and if you want to talk about it, do come and join us in the Aspiring Psychologist Community Group and let's talk about it in there.

So today I thought we'd think about finding your tribe and why that can be so important. So come to a psychology career, you'd usually need to be at least beyond the age of 21, you'll usually post degree. So you might already have had experiences, good or bad in your secondary education, your sixth form education and your undergraduate and maybe even your postgraduate education that have felt either good or bad in terms of feeling well connected, well supported, and well understood by those around you. You might feel like you are in a really good position where you already have your tribe lined up. I certainly spent the weekend with three of my tribe people that I met, undergraduate university. So I had course friends, psychology friends, and I had the housemates that I lived with. And so I was with my housemates this weekend and it was lots of fun and I definitely, as I said, consider them my tribe, but they're not necessarily my psychology tribe because none of them were studying psychology and none of them work in that sphere.

But I know I spoken before in one of the early episode about my experiences of working in a local government agency makes it sound slightly more exciting than it was, makes it sound like I'm kind of some sort of Will Smith character, but not the case. But I was working for local government and yeah, I just felt like I didn't really have my tribe around me at that stage. So all of my psychology friends were living in different areas of the country. I wasn't yet working in a psychology service and I just was feeling quite lonely and quite isolated if I was offering advice to myself Now for then, I think that's what this episode is going to be and it might be useful for you right now. It might be useful for you in the future or it might be useful for people that you meet along the way.

So I'm gonna be taking you through a few different steps and stages that might be useful for you or someone for making the most of where you're at right now to just optimally feel supported, understood, validated, seen, heard, and yeah, people know you, see you and are on your page. That's what I think about as your tribe being. So with no further ado, let's crack on. So I think the first stage is to think about, well, who are they? You know, might want to think about making a list about if you were being optimally supported, seen, understood, validated, who and what would be doing that for you? Would it be stuff professionally, would it be stuff personally or would it be mixture of those things? Might even be something spiritual or religious or faith based for you. But if you had to get a nice big bit of paper and just encourage yourself to free form doodle if you like, or note take, if that's more up your street, who and what areas of your life might that include that you'd want to cultivate?

So for me at the time, I guess I had a partner at the time and we had an active social life in that regard, but I was probably a bit lonely. I think one of my friends who was previously seeing quite a lot of had a young child and so we did that, but we didn't necessarily do the socialising in the same way. So I think I was a bit lonely and feeling a bit career isolated. So this was in the late two thousands and things have moved on somewhat since then. So I'm gonna advise myself and slash you about what things you can do right now that might be useful. So one of them obviously is thinking about whether you can join groups and that might be groups in person, it might be groups remotely, it might be joining Facebook groups, it might be joining, I dunno, different communities online that don't involve Facebook.

It might involve joining clubs as well. So at this stage of my life, I decided that I would drag a friend along and we'd learn to do Chinese cookery. So we went to an evening class and learned that. So there might be some other skills and some other ways that you can connect and have fun and enjoy things that might not look like you might imagine they would look. I was looking on my local recovery and Wellbeing academy for example, recently, and on that there's loads and loads of free courses that you can go to or that you can refer your clients to as well. That sound really exciting, really nice opportunities to learn things and to do things that you might not have experienced before. And similarly in the adult education provision near you. So if you were to Google adult education and whichever is your nearest city or town, there might well be stuff that you can look through there and you know, could learn another language, you could do some cookery, you could do some baking, you could do some craft.

Some of my clients enjoy, I dunno, metal work and glass fusion and all sorts of stuff like glassblowing. There's many, many opportunities for you to do new things and they don't always need to be massively costly things as well. So could you look at what activities or clubs or groups you could join? And of course it might well include looking out for any local research groups or any local assistance psychologist or aspiring psychologist groups. And it, I'd be remiss if I wasn't to say that people have made nice connections through the Aspiring Psychologist membership as well. So that might be a group that you might like to consider. Joining details are in the show notes. What you might find during all of this process is that throughout this you find yourself as well and maybe you realise it was yourself you were looking for all along, but you might exacerbate that by perhaps joining part of a therapy group.

Or I think when I was an aspiring psychologist, sometimes there were dynamic group therapies that you could join and if you were a student there was lower cost options available as well. So it might be worth Googling whether that might be a possibility for you or of course you might be able to enter into a one to one therapy relationship, which might well help you now but might well help you professionally as well. So that's something else to explore. So let's take this opportunity to have a little break and I'll be back along very shortly.

I'm way to get

Qualified, so many to learn, so many things that you can inspiring,

Welcome back along. Thank you for sticking with me. I hope you're finding the content useful. Can't quite believe we are at episode 50. I dunno where the time is going, but it's been a lovely journey and thank you for all of the kind words about our recent episodes. And like I said in episode 49, if you are an aspiring psychologist and you've got a useful or interesting story or take on the world, then do please get in contact with me and we'll see whether we can get a podcast episode happening with you at the centre of it to provoke and encourage important and useful conversations for people. So in the first half we've covered three slash four different points for thinking about finding your tribe and in this section we have three more. So we're gonna go through three more ways that you might be able to find your tribe or things to consider when finding your tribe along the way.

So the next one is saying yes if you can, when you are offered opportunities at work, if it feels a little bit scary, but just about within your comfort zone, then could you say yes? Could you explore what that might look like for you? Or when you're offered chances to do things socially, could you say yes to that? Or if someone does phone you out the blue and say, do you fancy a Chinese cookery course? Could you say yes to that? So obviously make sure you are staying safe, make sure you're looking after yourself, making wise choices. But what could you say yes to? And when you are offered things and you immediately think, no, what might that be about? Of course you get to choose and you get to say no. And if you really don't want to do things, you don't have to do them.

But if we notice that we're having an immediate, oh no, I can't or I shouldn't, or I mustn't, it might be worth just exploring and gently pressing the edges of what that might be about. So just to be a little bit more playful, little bit more curious as you consider what you could say yes to or what you could say. I'm gonna just give that a go and see what I think to rather than out and out saying no to something. So that's just another little option, another little idea. And the next of our suggestions is reflection. So could you use your reflective journal or just your general musings whilst you're stuck at traffic lights or driving along the motorway to think about all of this process really to think about your experiences. You might well find it helpful to listen to the episode where I talk about important people I have met along the way and if you wanted to have a listen to that, that's episode 33 of the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast.

But reflection really is the thing that's going to make the difference for you in terms of, I dunno, being a peace with yourself. I think so I feel like I am constantly reflecting, but in a way that feels really comforting. It doesn't feel critical, it feels helpful and exploratory and I'm on my own team. It doesn't feel like I'm trying to knock myself down quite the opposite. If I have an idea, I think, oh, how could you make that happen? Well, what's holding you back? What's stopping you from doing that? And how might you benefit from having that as you are in a monologue rather than something that might feel a bit more mean. So yeah, if you would find it helpful, please do have another listen to the episode on compassion as well. And that is episode four, knew it was, I had to check again, getting to be quite the expert with these episode numbers, but don't like to falsely sign post you.

So yeah, it's just reflection, reflection, reflection in a way that feels not overwhelming in a way that feels like you're not being overly neurotic. It's just, I don't know, a nice companion, almost like I can have a chat with myself, I can have a chat with someone that has the same values as me and wants the same things. I guess it's about becoming your own best friend. And I never feel lonely when you are your own best friend. But it's also about challenging yourself to get out there and make new friends and to have those opportunities. So absolutely, if you're more of an introvert and you like to keep yourself to yourself, that's okay. But when we do say no more often, there might be less opportunities for us to find the joy or to find new experiences and find our tribe along the way.

And certainly when I was working as an assistant psychologist, many of the people who I was working with as fellow assistants now form part of my sort of daily tribe. Even now I'm qualified. And again, people that I did my training with that were part of my tribe then continue to be part of my tribe now. And even two of those in the last couple of days I've spoken to as well. So these might not necessarily be relationships just for now that you're cultivating, these might be longer term, maybe forever relationships as well. So when we are looking at different qualities of relationships, I dunno if you've heard this, but we can think about friends for a reason, friends for a season, and friends for a lifetime. And sometimes we'll have disappointments when we realise that what we thought was friends for a lifetime became friends for a season.

So friends for a reason, we often think about as being for a specific kind of purpose that you've expressed. So for example, if you're going through grief or if you had someone who's unwell, then you might seek out people who have similar experiences. And so there's a reason that brought you together. A season might be whilst you have kids in the same primary school or whilst you are working in a certain workplace or whilst you are living next door or nearby to somebody and friends for a lifetime could be any of those who then become longer term friends. So your friends for a lifetime might be someone that you went to primary school with. It might be someone that you went to secondary or uni with and they suddenly, they go past the point where it was for a reason. They go past the point where it's for a season because that thing changes and then they progress into friends for a lifetime.

So for example, if I reflect on some of my assistant psychologist friendships, then initially it was friends for a reason, shared a car to the same university to look around an open day, and then it became friends for a season because we used to meet for lunch while we were working there and now it's friends for a lifetime because we are choosing to make time for each other. Even though when we first met, it was fast approaching 15, 16, 17 years ago, something like that. So we weather the storm and we choose to make time for each other and that's how your tribe becomes formed. So when it goes perhaps from reason to season to lifetime, but you can still have a tribe who don't choose to keep in the long term who just use really mindful ways of connecting to this season or this reason. But yeah, it's useful to have at any time, I think a group of people in your life that are reason, a group of people in your life that are seasoned and a group of people that are lifetime because you get a different energy around all of that.

So what do you think to this? I would love to know. And of course the final point is that we can recalibrate at any point. So if we do feel like we are missing some of these people in certain areas of our lives, we can recalibrate and reach out and change it. So yeah, I do hope you found that useful. My whistle stop tour through tribe making. And yeah, I would love your thoughts as I say. And yeah, please do check out what other people also say in the Aspiring Psychologist Collective and the Clinical Psychologist Collective. I've got lots of great guest episodes coming up for the Aspiring Psychologist podcast soon. If you've got any in mind that you would find useful, then please do get in contact with me via the podcast page on my website, which you can find details in the show notes or it is www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/podcast. And then you can also find out how to leave audio testimonials just with a few clicks of your mouse by that same page. That same site. So thank you so much for listening. Please do rate and review the podcast. It's always so appreciated and I'll look forward to catching up with you for our next episode, which is available to you from 6:00 AM on Monday. Don't set your alarm, it'll be there when you are ready. Take care.