Tag Archives: practice

Unrealistic deadlines & nurses feeling guilty

challenging behaviour, human rights, safeguarding, , , , , , ,

We nurses aren’t perfect. We generally spend our time trying to sort out problems that we didn’t cause. That’s more than most people do. It’s more than the majority of our critics.

But no matter how hard we try, sometimes we fail. Sometimes we don’t fail but people place such unrealistic expectations on our practice, make such unrealistic demands of us that we face criticism, insults, even threats of violence for not living up to the demands of others.

People can disregard our efforts, they can slander us on social media and dismiss us as incompetent, callous fools if they like. That’s their right…

But we don’t have to agree with them!

Jugglers do it with practice :-)

mental health, techniques, , , , , ,

Many people think they have no control over how they feel. They think that their emotions are caused by other people and by events. But that just isn’t true. People can learn to feel OK whatever other people do. It’s all about learning to take direct control over our own emotions. That’s a skill, just like any other and just like any other skill, it can be learned.

Learning to manage emotions and learning to juggle have much in common. Both seem mysterious and difficult to master until we understand the principles involved. Both require a fair amount of practice to become ‘expert’ but equally, we can make some improvement in just a short time if we apply the right methods.

This short video will not make anyone master either of mood management or of juggling. The emotional stuff is covered in other videos. Here we look at some of the most basic points of emotional management to help set people along the road. There’s nothing particularly easy about emotional management but for most people there’s nothing impossible either. It takes time and it takes practice. Subscribe to this channel and over time we’ll cover most of the other principles of emotional management too.

As for the juggling – well that’s up to you.

MTCT Learning to juggle.png

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Course design 2: The 6P rule

training, , , ,

I have a friend who takes every opportunity to taunt me with what he considers to be both an amusing and accurate summary of what I do. It’s a cliché that has become so tired and familiar that it doesn’t even get a reaction from me any more, however witty my friend considers it to be. The cliché is this…

“Those who can do, those who can’t, teach and

those who can’t teach, teach teachers.”

My friend (we’ll call him Peter) is not unusual. There are many people who hold this opinion of teachers and trainers and it’s not difficult to see why. Training is a skill and it takes preparation and real consideration. Putting together a genuinely useful, engaging and interesting course requires a lot of hard work. Without this preparation the course will fail.

Unfortunately a lot of practitioners seem to think that if they can do the job themselves then they are qualified to train others in it. They don’t do the groundwork and their training falls flat. Not only is it useless for the participants they inflict it upon but it also inevitably makes them look incompetent. The result of this is that many people who have been exposed to this sort of training form the conclusion that trainers are just failed practitioners who’ve read a book and wittered at them…

“Those who can’t, teach….”

I would argue that the best trainers are also the best practitioners. They know the subject intimately. They also understand the difference between theory (which always exists in the ideal world) and the realities of practice. More than that, they’ve put in the hours to think how best to help their trainees tread the same intellectual and experiential path that they followed to develop their skills. This is much more than merely spouting information or wittering at an audience in front of a power point full of pretty pictures but very little else.

If you want your training sessions to work then you need to know your subject, you need to understand the stages of development that participants need to go through to achieve the goal of the training sessions and you need to have worked out precise ways to get them from A to B. You don’t need to be a qualified teacher with a PhD in education but you do need a clear plan and an equally clear sense of the purpose of the course you’re writing. You need to know what you’re trying to achieve. As Steven Covey once wrote – ‘start with the end in mind’.

And you need to prepare. Remember the 6P rule:

Proper Planning Prevents Particularly Poor Performance