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Mental health starts with you

We coach more than our fair share of primary care professionals here – and they’re often slow to reach out. Our experience suggests there are two reasons for this. Firstly, personal coaching can seem a little self-indulgent when everyone else in the practice is just so desperately busy. Secondly, the training many doctors receive suggests they’re supposed to know all the answers anyway – saying “I simply don’t know where to go from here” is rarely considered acceptable.

Sadly, we pick up many of our clients way too far down the road… by now they are desperate, burned-out, shells of their former selves, and – quite apart from the misery they (and their families) endure – they have become a grievous waste of expensive human resource.

It is our belief that we all deserve to be the very best possible version of ourselves – it is in this way that we achieve ultimate fulfilment and make the best contribution to the communities we would aspire to serve. Often the person we have got used to being is not necessarily the person we really are.

As we begin to help our most damaged clients reverse out of the cul-de-sac which has become the metaphor for their prevailing experience, we typically ask them what they really want and need from their lives. And it used to surprise us that so few people knew that – but no longer! It seems that many of us begin a journey “which seemed the right thing to do” or because the biggest influencers on our careers thought they knew best. As life unfolds, as the environment and our personal needs change, it is very difficult to objectively reassess our position on the map of the world because, as Einstein is credited with saying, “problems can’t be solved using the same thinking that created them.”

So – what are our ‘needs’?

The way we typically position this is to imagine – from the moment we step out of bed in the mornings – that we are driven through our day by nine internal engines (think ‘airliner’, with its multiple engines). Our research suggests that we each have the same engines, but they vary hugely in their relative power. We have named these needs: Meaningful Work, Creativity, Status, Expertise, Power and Influence, Autonomy, are amongst them. These engines drive us through the day, and it is vital that we have our needs met – they are far more important than just ‘wants’.

As we start to explore the lives of our most challenging clients it is almost invariably the case – there are very few exceptions – that they have not understood, and certainly not been meeting, their most important needs for an extended period. Provided our mental health is in good shape, we can all accommodate temporary deficiencies – that’s a situation perceived as ‘frustration’. But over the long term the consequences of this slowly become evident both to ourselves and others. Breakdown is the eventual result.

We encourage all the professionals we work with to regularly appraise their Key Internal Drivers, as we call them – since they typically change dramatically as we transition through key life events. This review becomes a personal compass – decisions become easy: take the option which is going to best support your key internal drivers… because much of good mental health depends upon it.

Prof Mike Ferguson is Director of Professional Development at Developing Professionals International, and a PCC Associate of many years. For more details contact enquiries@pcc-cic.org.uk

Last Updated on 26 November 2021