Occupational and coaching psychology in independent practice with Christine Hamilton

Christine is a highly experienced occupational psychologist and leadership development consultant. Her career to date has spanned across the public and private sector and she has held several positions in the British Psychological Society. 

The highlights

• I introduce Christine and she tells us about her career path and the road she took to independent practice 00:17
• We discuss the importance of talking to people about our careers and asking for help 04:23
• I ask Christine what it was like to be in a management role and introduce psychological thinking 07:20
• Christine tells us where her career went next, after developing her competence as an occupational psychologist in a management role 09:58
• Christine talks about her move into self employment and how she knew what she could do independently 13:56
• Christine talks about the growth of her independent practice 19:25
• Christine tells us about the coaching side of her work 27:26
• We discuss the difference between therapy and coaching 30:00
• I ask Christine how people can skill themselves up to work in this area 36:32
• Christine tells us the first steps for occupational psychologists who are thinking about starting a private practice 40:22
• I thank Christine and she tells us how to find her on LinkedIn 45:32

Links:

Linked In - Christine’s profile 

ILM - coaching qualification accrediting body

EMCC - coaching qualification accrediting body

ICF - coaching qualification accrediting body

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TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKERS

Rosie Gilderthorp, Christine Hamilton

Rosie Gilderthorp  00:01

Welcome to the business of psychology podcast, the show that helps you to reach more people, help more people and build the life you want to live by doing more than therapy. 

Rosie Gilderthorp  00:17

Today, I'm talking to Christine Hamilton. Christine is a highly experienced occupational psychologist and leadership development consultant. Her career to date has spanned across the public and private sector, and she's had several positions in the British Psychological Society. There's so much I'm keen to talk to you about today, Christine, so thank you so much for coming on and welcome to the podcast.

Christine Hamilton  00:38

Thank you very much Rosie, I barely recognise that introduction, so thank you for it.

Rosie Gilderthorp  00:45

Well, something that I hear a lot from members of the Do More Than Therapy community is that it can be really difficult for applied psychologists who aren't clinical or counselling psychologists to visualise what an independent practice would mean for them. I've also been having lots of conversations recently with students on Psychology Business School, about the difference between coaching and therapy, and what role we can take in leadership development. So I think there's going to be a lot of listeners today who are going to gain a lot from hearing from you. So firstly, it would be brilliant to get to know a little bit about your career path and the road that you took into independent practice.

Christine Hamilton  01:26

It was very much a sort of tacking away and then a tacking back, I would say, when I look backwards at my career, so after my degree in psychology, it was the early 80s, there were no jobs, so definitely resonance with these days, and took clerical jobs after I left University, thought, I'm never going to be able to apply my psychology. So did some personnel management qualifications. And again, there were no graduate roles that I could find in South Wales at the time. But by by chance, applied for a management training scheme, in the Department of Employment and started to see connections between psychology and employment. They're very obvious connections, but it really came home to me that we were in a situation where we had to enable vast amounts of people to get, one, get jobs, retain them, and two get some training that would get them out of dead end occupations, and into new ones. So it was a fascinating time to be involved in large scale schemes to enable some of that transition for a lot of people. So started to tenuously see my psychology in that frame. And then moved on, moved up and managed all sorts of offices and schemes in the southeast of England, and then moved back to Scotland, and happened to see an advert that was about graduate training schemes, and thought, in the NHS, and thought, oh, that's fascinating, that's an interesting area, and discovered that a lot of it was about assessment for part of the year, and then about development. Bringing these young people in to parts of the NHS, helping them acclimatise, and also get professional qualifications. And of course, that's at the heart of occupational psychology. Who is suited to a role, who could deal with the complexities of this particular kind of the public sector, part of public sector, who could become a manager and a leader of people? So I was again, tacking my way back to assessment of people, young people, and got drawn back into the world of psychology through my network. And I thought, you know, this is really an area I need supervision on, spoke to local psychologists, built up my knowledge, used some of their services, piggybacked on their expertise. And then gradually thought, now I really need to go for my chartered status. So it was very incremental forwards and backwards as the job required, and as my interest was piqued, I'd say.

Rosie Gilderthorp  04:23

I really love the method in there about talking to people and being open about what you're doing, and what you'd like to be doing. Because I think often, you know, we're not sure where we're going. We're not sure what we can do with our qualifications, but there are people out there who are doing inspirational things. And usually they're quite happy to talk about it.

Christine Hamilton  04:44

Yes. More often than not, unless they're very very up against it, people enjoy having a cup of coffee when we can do that, and just talking and listening. They love it. I don't think I've had many refusals, personally for me or for anybody else, when I said, would you mind talking to this person about? I could count the fingers on one hand, of people who have said no, and it's been for very good reasons.

Rosie Gilderthorp  05:15

Yeah, me too. And I think if you think about our own behaviour, I think certainly recently, I've been getting messages on LinkedIn, from people who are applying for the clinical psychology doctorate. I always try and help. Because I think we all know how privileged we are, to be able to call ourselves psychologists, it's certainly not an easy route, and you need a lot of luck and other things to get there. So I think there's a lot of goodwill in psychology and in therapy, that means if you reach out to somebody, it's really likely they're going to try and help you. 

Christine Hamilton  05:48

Very much. I think, I think we all have either been there or know close relatives who are there, so there is a lot of appreciation of that. But I think I would say that, and this is my ignorance of other divisions, but I'd say occupational psychology has particular problems, in that we have very, very few, and it's getting even less, opportunities to be trained as occupational psychologists and paid at the same time. Usually, we have to do HR roles, training and development roles under the banner of another another job title than psychologist, and get those pieces of expertise and competence under our belt, and then find another way, in that role, or in a part time role, to acquire the other aspects of our training to acquire enough expertise for our portfolio to get our chartered status. So where we have to kind of be very creative, and determined to stretch our roles when we get them to make sure we get the the the domains covered in terms of occupational psychology. And that can be very challenging because employers want their piece of work done. They don't really want many of their new starts to, to go into areas of their interests where it can be quite challenging to get that x that that range of expertise.

Rosie Gilderthorp  07:20

Yeah. And something else that I was going to ask you actually about your journey was kind of what it what it must have been like to be in a management role and introducing psychological thinking at that time. How was that received?

Christine Hamilton  07:35

I think people are intrigued by psychology, a wee bit daunted sometimes, but genuinely intrigued. And as long as, and this is not to be patronising, as long as it's made relevant, so how is this going to make our task more effective? I think on the whole organisations want to use best practice. They want it to be effective. They want to get the best people for the role. So they're very interested in what does the evidence say, but they will not give you much time to explain it. So they expect you to do the research and then refine it and get it right. So yes, I think we are intrigued, but they need it, not exactly translated, but they need to be engaged. They need to find it relevant.

Rosie Gilderthorp  08:29

Yeah, that's interesting, because I was thinking one of the tensions might be that often, we feel we need to experiment, butt you can't know exactly what's going to work in a particular context, you can kind of you might have an idea and want to test it. But I imagine there's not that much room for testing.

Christine Hamilton  08:47

Not really, particularly if you're doing something in mass scale, like like recruitment, you need to determine your approach, refine it, and particularly as one of the many things you want to do is engage the potential employers of the trainees. So you might involve them in the assessment process and in the interviews, and you have to go through some sort of consistency of standard and confidence in in that in that sort of large group, that large cohort of helpers, and you can't overstretch them, so you can't use them too much. So you've got a large body of people, that you're trying to get to do pretty much the same thing. And of course, you would have ways of checking on consistency and standards, but it has to be very practical, in terms of the processes you use. So yes, we used to have to put a lot of effort into explaining ensuring people felt clear what they had to do, confidence sometimes give them tuition, but it was about masses of people being able to do good practice was was often what we were asked us for.

Rosie Gilderthorp  09:58

Wow. So Where did you go from there? So it sounds like you kind of carved out a management role for yourself, which allowed you to develop your competence as an occupational psychologist. Where did your career go after that?

Christine Hamilton  10:14

Well, because I was looking at what did these new people in the organisation need in terms of building up their management competence, we would think about the placements, but we would also think about what knowledge did they need. And so we put together with a couple of universities, management modules, how to lead small groups of people, teams of people, larger groups of people, what that required internally for the individual for them to find their own style, their own way through, how to deal with difficult situations, difficult people, new policies, etc. So we we identified the key areas that they would have to build their competence in over a couple of years, and we put together management and leadership modules of which built their their their knowledge, and also bit of skills development, we put in there as well. So I was doing that for the graduates. And then I was asked to do it for some of the clinicians, some of the more senior managers, because really, it was just the sort of same sort of stuff but higher level. And again, it was just very interesting to think about. So after somebody is built their foundation management, leadership career, what do they need next. And the most fascinating areas where people who would touch on management, now and again in their careers, but had to be leaders of large numbers of people, so often clinicians, non managers, where they didn't have much time to learn, they had vast resources and people to lead, very, very bright. So what you had to present was something that they could see the relevance of almost immediately and apply it. But also have a sense of I'm intrigued by this, I want to get good at this. So again, it was our psychology in terms of so what is it that will bring this group of people slightly reluctantly sometimes, towards this subject matter? What's in it for them? Why would they want this? And how, from their position to we build their competence? Because you can't take them through months and months of, of a Master's course on leadership, you have to think about how do we get that inefficiently. So that was fascinating. Really enjoyed that. 

Rosie Gilderthorp  12:41

Yeah, I bet because I think, you know, definitely, from my NHS experience and my experience in the prison service as well. Often, it's when somebody is a really amazing clinician, they get promoted out of their clinical role and into management, when that's a totally different skill set. And I always kind of wondered, how on earth are people supposed to make that jump?

Christine Hamilton  13:01

Yeah, I think too little attention is paid to it. I think often, professionals find themselves engineers, all sorts of disciplines find themselves in these situations. And it's quite a tricky thing to say, d'you know, I haven't a clue how to. So I think, I think the HR department, the training department has to be quite delicate and astute about, actually, when you look at this role, if we're going to move somebody who hasn't had the opportunity to lead lots of people before, big resources, we've got to give them something judicious. And we've also got to manage their pride. We have to make sure it feels commensurate to their level. So again, a lot of psychology.

Rosie Gilderthorp  13:53

Absolutely. Yeah, that sounds really fascinating.

Christine Hamilton  13:56

It was an it is. And then after that, that that department that I worked for was closed, in the NHS in Scotland, and I was pregnant with my first child heavily pregnant when this was announced. And so I decided I had to go into self employment, and spoke to some of my contacts who I've been working with over the years saying, or when I returned from maternity leave, what might there be? Might there be projects I could do, etc. So that was my, it was kind of propelled into self employment, independent practice at that point.

Rosie Gilderthorp  14:36

Yeah, that's interesting, because, you know, I was propelled into independent practice as well. And I think, often the questions that I get asked from members of Do More Than Therapy, who are either in occupational psychology or something that isn't, you know, clinical or counselling typically, is you know, how on earth do I do this independently. Because maybe they've been in a clear defined role in an organisation for a long time. And so how did you go about kind of piecing that together? How did you know what you could do independently?

Christine Hamilton  15:12

It's the same thing as you were saying before, Rosie, it's very much about talking to people, talking to people that you used to get to do work. And of course, there's a sort of, not exactly an awkwardness, but there's an ethics around that because we're rarely suddenly told we're going to be made redundant, there's usually a sort of halfway house happening of uncertainty. And so that's when people need to put the feelers out in a way that is ethical for them and for everybody else, they're speaking to. Just say, well, I'm not sure what the future is going to bring, but can I speak to you about what your knowledge is of what's out there? People feel awkward in those situations, if you say, I think I'm going to be made redundant, can you give me something to do? And none of us would do that. But equally, there's no point in not using those contacts. And people, as we've said earlier, are only too happy to have a discussion, they can sometimes think oh crumbs as it's going to get a bit tricky, or they're going to ask me for a job or something? And as long as it's clear, no, that's you know, I just want to send you out on the market. What's out there? What do you think? And more often than not, people will do that, and they will often say, well, I don't have... nothing's coming to mind, but do you, do you know, such and such? Because I heard they might be doing such and such. So it's, it's that way that you build up. One, your knowledge of what's marketable out there. And two, how to pitch against that because that that is a skill as well. So yes, you, one acquires these...