Someone once said to me that, if you can manage the stress, change can be an opportunity. They argued that a time of confusion is a good time to put forward ideas that could be seen as potential solutions, as nothing is set in stone yet. Derren Brown (the skilled TV hypnotist, cold-reader, sleight of hand maestro and showman) said something similar when he talked about how confused and stressed people are at their most suggestible. I think he said it whilst persuading bookies at the races that he had won on losing tickets, which was not something I felt was ethical to replicate (even if I had his skill-set) but I do have some anecdotal experiences of this being true. I remember a few years ago going shopping in early December and queuing up to pay in a very busy clothes store. I had a loyalty card which gave a discount for the event at the store, but when I got to the till I couldn’t find it. The poor cashier was on hold to the accounts department to see if they could find my details when, whilst making small-talk, I asked if the discount was the same as the student discount. The cashier then decided it would be easier to put my purchase through as a student discount (which did not require a card number), so that she could deal with me more quickly. Thus I got the discount without the card, and she was able to move on to the next customer. I could see that my comment had unintentionally introduced the potential for an easy win into her mind. Of course as soon as I left the crowded store I was able to find the card, but it made me think about the attractiveness of offering an easy option when the demands are overwhelming. I find this a reassuring concept to think about when the public sector organisations seem to be constantly in a state of organisational change, demands that exceed resources to meet the need, and a pervasive level of uncertainty and confusion! This idea that sometimes a suggestion with serendipitous timing could influence change in a positive direction offered an interesting alternative perspective to my pessimism about how difficult it can be to get even solid, evidence-based, cost-saving ideas accepted into practise (see previous blogs).

I’ve also been talking about the need for change in how I work in my personal development coaching sessions. I’ve previously blogged about feeling a bit burnt out by the emotionally harrowing content of some of my work, the need for me to get better at prioritising and how I am trying to get a better work-life balance. One of my motivations to start the coaching was my sense that I have so many plates spinning I have almost lost track of why I am spinning them and what my goal is. I wanted to re-evaluate what my goals were, and to find the joy in my work again. As I have begun to clear space in my life to reflect on this, I have recognised that my beliefs about what my career would look like have not really kept pace with changes in the public sector and in my own interests and ways of working.

At some level, my template for a good career in psychology was based on my Mum. She worked in child psychology and CAMHS, and was Head of Child Psychology for a county at the point she retired a couple of years ago. I had always assumed that was pretty much how my professional life would pan out. I had qualified in 2000, worked my way up the bands to make Consultant Grade and be part of the CAMHS management team in 2008, and expected to end up as Head of a Child Psychology service somewhere. In metaphorical terms, that was the train journey I bought a ticket for. But something changed when I had kids and went through a lot of stress related to the organisational changes when the CAMHS contract was won by a competing trust and we were TUPEd over. In the end I left the NHS and did something different. In the metaphor, I got off the train. My early plans for my company were very much based on wanting to replicate what I was doing within the NHS, but without the systemic problems I experienced in the NHS trust that I left. So in the metaphor I caught the bus, but I was still headed for the same destination. At various points I meandered, detoured to explore things I had heard about, joined groups to see the local sights, even hiked across country with my own compass, but underneath it all my destination was still the same.

Of course once you are going off the beaten track, sightseeing, hiking and choosing your own route, the journey becomes a bit more scary but much more interesting. In turn, the destination becomes less fixed and also less important, because it can continue to change and there may be steps beyond each destination to another. You can also grow in confidence and tackle bigger challenges and find new things inspiring, so you end up setting goals you had not considered at the beginning of the journey. Once I was off the train, I didn’t need to follow the tracks, or try to make my way by other means to where they led. I didn’t need to replicate CAMHS or to try to set up a LAC service outside the NHS, and I didn’t need to be Head of a Child Psychology service. Indeed I was offered an NHS post with this title last year, which was my expected destination, but I declined the offer. I learnt things about the post that made me concerned that I’d be jumping back into a train on a route where everything was running late and all the passengers were unhappy, whilst I was no longer afraid of being off the rail network and doing my own thing – in fact I had remembered how much I could enjoy the journey if my focus was in the here and now and not about trying to get to the destination ASAP. I started to think of myself as being a much more adventurous person and put my skills to use in much more flexible ways.

Sadly, the kind of NHS I envisaged spending the next 25 years in isn’t there any more, and the jobs at 8C and above bear a lot of the brunt of the change by having to take on the new political and financial pressures, whilst the lower banded staff continue to do much the same work (albeit with increased pressures of throughput and whilst hot-desking). There are good services remaining, and some people will still think that is the best career option for them, and I’m glad about that as I love the NHS and want to see it survive and hopefully thrive in the future with more investment. But for me it isn’t the only option any more. There are other opportunities for adventures outside of the NHS that hang on to my core ethics and values, and put my clinical psychology skills and experiences to good use, but without some of the constraints of the NHS. I can write my own job description, choose my own working pattern and be paid for what I do, rather than on a fixed set of salary points for a set number of hours. Perhaps surprisingly to me, I’ve learnt I’ve got competencies and ideas that are useful and marketable in lots of places. Despite the austerity in the NHS, I continue to have more opportunities and offers of work than I can accept, and some of these are quite well paid. In short, I have learnt that I can actually think much more creatively about what options for my professional life will make me happy if I let go of the template of how I expected my career to be.

With that insight, I’ve got a growing desire to start afresh and do the things that have most impact and bring me most joy. That means I need to look hard at all the options in front of me, and all the plates I have been spinning, and figure out which of those I want to focus on, and which I want to pass on to other people or drop. There may also be entirely new projects that I can develop because they are interesting to me, but I can recognise a future market or source of funding for.

There is big change ahead. But my business is small and agile, I’ve got an entrepreneurial attitude, and I’m lucky enough to have some interesting offers on the horizon. I’m in a position where I can embrace the change, so I am seeing it as an opportunity.