How training as a psychotherapist helps my work in digital delivery
“While it hasn’t always been clear to me where I am heading career wise, I think I benefit from what I have gathered along the way.”
When you’re a child, people ask you what you want to be. The assumption is that there is one perfect job for you and a clear route towards it. Like many, this has not been my experience and it looks increasingly unlikely that I will achieve my childhood plan and become either a “world famous fashion photographer” or a “journalist who wins a pulitzer prize” (although never say never).
My route into digital delivery included journalism, charity communications, digital transformation in the NHS, teaching yoga and, most recently, training as a psychotherapist. And while it hasn’t always been clear to me where I am heading career wise, I think I benefit from what I have gathered along the way.
Thinking relationally
When I joined dxw a year ago I had just finished a part time masters in integrative psychotherapy. I had spent 3 years thinking about the nature of humanity and how we process and respond to our environment. Crucially for any psychotherapy or counselling training I had also spent hour upon hour reflecting on myself, my life and background and how I respond and interact with the people, activities and environment that I am in.
Psychotherapist and Delivery Lead are of course very different roles but what psychotherapy training has helped me to do, is to take a more reflective stance on the relationships that I am in – professional or private.
In early ideas about therapeutic analysis, the therapeutic relationship was seen as a place where the client would project or transfer other relationships. In this traditional model the therapist was considered entirely neutral, a “blank wall”, and in this empty space a client would enact patterns and ways of being from outside that could then be explored and understood.
These ideas have evolved considerably. While there are a lot of divergent schools of thought with many different ways of thinking about what is happening within the therapeutic relationship, for many there is now a belief that the idea of a ‘blank’ therapist is neither possible nor something to aspire to. Instead, we are taught to consider what is happening in the relationship between the client and the therapist, with an awareness that something is being co-created, that we both come in with subjective opinions, histories and experience. As a therapist I would then use that awareness to support my work with my client.
How this helps me in my delivery role
I find this therapeutic way of thinking, to try and reflect on the relationship that is co-created, as very helpful in my role in delivery. I have realised that while the delivery role requires strong organisational skills and can be very practically focused, booking and facilitating agile ceremonies, putting together plans, checking on budgets, at core the role is about working and communicating with individuals and groups.
Working with people is of course complicated. Sometimes it’s very easy, communication flows well, it can be very fun and rewarding. Sometimes it’s more difficult. I believe my psychotherapy training helps me to try to step back and consider the dynamics that play out in the room and my own role in them (even if I am not always successful in this!).
A year in, I still have a lot more to learn about delivery that will help me grow in this role but I hope that like many others at dxw, I can bring what I have gathered in other roles and spaces in my life to aid me in my work here.