Owning My Naivete

Previous Episode: A New Direction

If you could have a conversation with yourself back when you started your career in healthcare, what would you say? What does that person need to know in order to sustain their mental health over the arch of their career? Would you talk to them about naivete? Or how to approach one's naivete as it comes up in their career? Consider where you're at today in your career. Would you be willing to talk to yourself about owning your naivete?

After 12 years of working in a large hospital setting, in outpatient mental health and substance use disorders clinics, I can admit that I naively behaved and spoke as though I was exempt from the stressors of life, and the stressors on the job. I was naïve to how things would eventually start to breakdown in my personal life. Which they eventually did. Some of the breakdowns were preventable, but my naivete interfered with seeing clearly.

I reference the following paper during the podcast:

Self-awareness Questions for Effective Psychotherapists: Helping Good Psychotherapists Become Even Better” by Samuel Knapp, Michael Gottlieb and Mitchell Handelsman.

The questions they encourage providers to consider to assist in becoming more self-aware:

Do I recognize my immediate emotional reactions? Do I judge my competencies accurately? Do I recognize that I might harbor implicit prejudices? Am I aware that I might succumb to cognitive biases or unhelpful heuristics? Am I fully aware of my values?

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