8 tips for beginning psychologists

Starting a practice can be overwhelming if you don't know how to get started.

Starting to work with patients in a psychology practice is an exciting experience, but it can also be overwhelming in the first week. There are so many things to deal with, and so many situations that can go wrong, that if insecurity gains ground we can make silly mistakes due to anxiety and hasty decisions.

To make sure that this does not happen, here is a series of tips designed for beginner psychologists who are looking for a way to who are looking for a way to get started in this exciting professional field.

Tips for the beginning psychologist

Take the following guidelines as a way to guide your efforts in applying the knowledge you have been acquiring. Lack of experience may make things difficult, but that doesn't mean you should throw in the towel just when it all starts. Any professional career has its zero minute.

1. Start by building on what you're most proficient in.

Some people believe that psychology is about understanding people in the abstract. As if a profession enables anyone to understand and find predictable any form of human behavior. This myth can lead us to make the mistake of pretending to understand more than what we really know how to do.

That's why, especially when starting out, it's good to to focus our efforts on addressing those problems on which our training has focused..

Specializing in these "niches" will allow us to build the rest of our future competencies from there, which is interesting because in our first months of work the fact of adapting to all that it means to practice as novice psychologists can already overwhelm us, let alone face cases that are totally new to us.

2. Don't compare yourself with an idealization of the perfect psychologist

If you have become a beginning psychologist, it is because you deserve to be where you are: you have earned it. What it's all about now is to start gaining experience consistently, making professional practice add quality to the service we give. It is a process of constant growth in which there is never an end: in a way, all psychologists are novices, always. Human behavior is too complex for any one person to fully understand.

That's why you shouldn't compare yourself to an idealization of what it means to be a psychologist. Don't let the imposter syndrome block you.

3. Work on your way of generating trust

Control of personal space is very important to create a therapeutic relationship in which patients feel safe.

If we are nervous, we may tend to use nonverbal language that shows a defensive and withdrawn attitude, such as crossing our arms, keeping too much distance from the other person, or even putting our hands in our pockets. Avoid this and strike a balance between professionalism and proximity. In principle, to achieve this, you must avoid making the mistakes I have mentioned and, at the same time, follow the guidelines of active listening, follow the guidelines of active listening and assertiveness..

4. Keep in mind that your work has a value

Psychology is an extremely vocational field of work, so there is often a desire to offer our services for free.

However, keep in mind that even if you can occasionally do it for free, the work you are doing has a value, because if you can do it, it is thanks to the effort and money invested in training. If you usually do not get paid, unless you only work with people with very little economic power, the profession is devalued, the profession is devalued. Which leads to the following recommendation.

5. Your job is not to give advice

It is essential to be very clear about this. If you approach your work as a service that consists of giving "knowledge pills" for a few minutes about the philosophy with which the other person should live life, you will be doing things wrong. That means that it will usually be necessary to plan for times and resources that should be devoted to several sessions with the same person or group. Talking only once to each patient or client does not work..

Psychologists can provide information, but when they do, the topics covered are very specific: for example, on how to perform relaxation techniques at home. The part of psychotherapy aimed at helping patients in their deepest and most emotional aspects consists of listening rather than talking, and of offering concrete solutions that allow to satisfy those needs.

6. Anticipate possible conflict situations and their consequences

As novice psychologists it is quite possible that at some point a patient may start to adopt a defensive or even hostile attitude towards us, judging us aloud, and towards us, judging us out loud.

In these cases, there are two possible options: either this is taken as a phenomenon inherent to what is happening in therapy and to the person's problems that emerge in it, so that the situation can be redirected, or it is taken as a fact that goes beyond the therapeutic framework and deserves the cancellation of the session or even of the therapeutic relationship, in case it is considered a clear attack on one's own dignity.

In order not to react in an improvised and inconsistent manner, it is good to foresee this kind of scenario, it is good to foresee this kind of scenario and to delimit certain rules that should not be violated so that the sessions with a person continue to allow the sessions with a person to run their course.

7. Train yourself to avoid biased questions

It is very important to learn not to ask biased questions that already have an implicit answer, because in this way the person who comes to the consultation will not be able to express him/herself freely. A clear example of this is something like: "Do you prefer to ignore your father's problems so as not to get out of your comfort zone, or do you think it would be good to help him? In these cases, care should be taken not to make it too apparent which answer we would like to hear..

8. Above all, remember that we are human

What happens in the consultation context does not happen outside the real world, even if it has its own rules. That is why we should not take these situations as a simulation; a certain therapeutic distance is necessary in order not to treat the other person as we would treat a friend, nor to take possible attacks personally; however, beyond that, it is important not to stop empathizing with the other person, it is important not to stop empathizing at any time.