You can be imperfect, occasionally disorganised, need to look things up, ask for help, get things wrong sometimes, and still be a good psychologist.
I’ve recently started working with early career psychologists and it’s made me think a bit about what actually makes a good psychologist, especially when you’re starting out and wondering whether you’re actually going to be any good at this.
A lot of that comes from comparison – which is normal, and very human.
There is always someone who seems more academic, more organised, knows the DSM criteria inside out and upside down, or just seems to know exactly what they are doing.
I understand this because I have done a fair bit of this comparison myself, and still do … becuse it’s normal and very human 🙂
I am not, and have never been, the psychologist with the most beautifully organised administrative systems.
Some of the paperwork and organisational parts of being a psychologist have taken quite a bit of work for me, and I’ve certainly beaten myself up about that at different points in my career.
There have also been plenty of times where I have looked at other psychologists and thought they were probably doing it better than me. More organised, more academic, more clinical, more polished.
Obviously there are parts of our job that we have to get right.
We have ethical and legal responsibilities, we need appropriate records, we need to understand our scope of practice, and we need to know when we don’t know something and go and find out.
I’m not suggesting any of that is optional.
But you don’t have to be a perfect practitioner to be a good psychologist.
I certainly don’t feel like a perfect psychologist and I am still learning all the time.
Over the years though, I’ve probably started valuing some of the things that are much harder to measure.
- Can you sit with the person in front of you and actually notice what is going on for them?
- Can you realise that the way you worked with the previous client is probably not going to work with this one?
- Can you change your language depending on whether you are talking to a teenager, an athlete, a parent, a coach or someone who is completely overwhelmed?
- Can you let go of what you had planned for the session when it becomes obvious that something else matters more?
- Can you develop enough trust that someone is willing to tell you what is actually going on?
Sometimes doing all the “right” things isn’t enough.
I was reminded of this recently when I actually found myself on the other side of the room, seeing a psychologist to talk through some personal stuff. And it was interesting.
I could see that she was trying really hard to do all the right things, follow the process, get through what needed to be covered in the session.
But I came away feeling like there had been quite a few opportunities to actually get to know me, the real me I guess, that had been missed.
And I don’t say that as though I would have done a better job. Maybe I wouldn’t have.
In fact it probably made me think more about my own practice and how often I might do exactly the same thing without realising it.
You can be doing all the technically correct things and still somehow miss the person sitting in front of you.
And for me, that connection and genuine curiosity about who someone actually is, is such an important part of the work.
Being a bit of a chameleon
I sometimes think being a psychologist requires being a bit of a chameleon.
Not in the sense of pretending to be someone you are not, but in being able to adapt to the person and the environment in front of you.
I work quite differently depending on whether I am sitting in private practice, talking with an athlete at training, working with a sporting team, teaching, supervising, or sitting with someone who has experienced significant trauma.
The psychology underneath what I am doing might be similar, but the way I deliver it certainly isn’t.
And I don’t always get that right either.
Sometimes you walk out of a session and think yep, that landed.
Other times you walk out thinking, well… that probably wasn’t my finest work.
That is part of it too.
People are much messier
Clinical judgement develops over time, and I think part of becoming a psychologist is gradually getting more comfortable with the fact that there is not always a “right” thing to do.
Which intervention?
Which diagnosis?
Which question do I ask next?
Which therapeutic modality should I be using?
Unfortunately (or fortunately), people are much messier than that.
The scientist-practitioner bit really matters. We should know the evidence and use it. We should understand diagnosis, know our therapeutic modalities, and keep learning.
But the evidence still has to be applied to the actual person sitting in front of us.
And this isn’t just me saying that connection matters. Evidence-based practice in psychology is actually meant to bring together the research, our clinical expertise, and the characteristics, culture and preferences of the person in front of us. In other words, being a scientist-practitioner isn’t just about knowing the evidence, it’s also about knowing how to apply it to an actual human being.
None of those things remove the need to notice the human being in front of you, understand what is going on for them, and respond to that.
And there is actually some pretty solid evidence behind this. A review by Norcross and Wampold (2018) pulls together meta-analytic work showing the importance of adapting psychotherapy to the individual person rather than simply applying the same approach to everyone, and a large meta-analysis of more than 30,000 clients found a consistent relationship between the therapeutic alliance and outcomes. So yes, the science matters – but the relationship and the person sitting in front of us are part of that science too.
There is a fairly large space between being unsafe and being perfect.
So if you are questioning whether you have what it takes because you are not as academic as someone else, because you find the administrative demands of psychology difficult, or because you don’t always feel completely certain about what you are doing, I don’t think those things automatically tell you what sort of psychologist you will become.
Of course, if your notes are inadequate, your systems are unsafe, or you are not meeting your professional responsibilities, you need to fix that.
Being disorganised is not an excuse for poor or unethical practice. But there is a fairly large space between being unsafe and being perfect. I wish I had understood that a little earlier in my career.
You can be imperfect, occasionally disorganised, need to look things up, ask for help, get things wrong sometimes, and still be a good psychologist.
I am still working on plenty of this myself.
But more and more, I think the qualities that matter are things like curiosity, warmth, judgement, humility, flexibility, willingness to learn, and the ability to genuinely connect with the person sitting in front of you.
Those things are much harder to capture on a rubric.
And I suspect they matter more than we sometimes give them credit for.
And yes, because I am imperfect, ChatGPT helped me with the structure. The opinions, the rambling and the actual writing are all mine 🙂