The alchemy of self doubt

Novice and experienced practitioners alike

This post is fundamentally concerned with the question of how we learn. Even more specifically, how we learn to become a better practitioner.

Working as a human services practitioner is inherently challenging. I was asked the other day: ‘do you have self-doubt?’ My response was immediate: ‘yes, of course!’ Self doubt is productive. I would go so far as to say self doubt is protective of good work in human services.

As an example, recently, I have been engaged in a task of trying to work out together with my client how best to help them. I can talk directly with them. They are verbal and there is no strong evidence of cognitive impairment.

However the relationship is still young, I’m going one step at the time, and my job is also to understand the systems around them. This is so I can recommend both individual and systemic responses.

I also have limited hours available for the work. Taking into account the hours, I wasn’t yet ready to lay out all of my emerging directions in the lap of my client. I was worried this would be too intense for the stage we were at in our work.

Yet I still wanted to confirm my overall clinical directions. This would help shortcut some of the assessment and focus my efforts within the remaining limited time available.

As I started to feel directions formulating within me, I decided to engage in a task that would help both develop the relationship with my client and also confirm these directions. The task revolved around the use of images to place in order for what was ‘most important’ to this person. I was fairly confident of the placement of some images and curious about others.

With each picture that was placed by my client, I started to question myself. Could I really be this wrong? Pictures that I was sure would go in one area were determinedly laid in the opposite direction.

Photo by Ross Sneddon on Unsplash

As the overall picture gradually emerged, I paused, full of self-doubt. How could I have got this so wrong? I wondered. I took a picture of the final image, thanked my client for sharing with me, and then went back to the office.

I let the session sit within me.

It would have been easy to let negative thoughts about my practice arise from self-doubt. ‘Maybe I don’t really know what I’m doing’. Or, ‘someone else could do this better than me’. Any number of possible doubts.

Instead, I let it continue to sit.

When my weekly appointment for focused reflective practice came up, immediately this internal reflection of uncertainty arose again. ‘Great, I’ll put it on the agenda,’ I thought to myself. I need to think this through some more.

Which brings me to my central point of this post.