Policy & Practice October 2018

The Making of a Health and Human Services Workforce Advocate PART 5

arly in my career as a clinical psychologist, I recognized the importance of patience. For anyone who has ever been in counseling, a secret about this process is repetition. Clinicians don’t mind repeating themselves. Most of us have been trained to understand that an individual’s growth is predicated on their openness to change, cognitive readiness, and emotional access. There tends to be a “right time” to integrate a new concept or to make a behavioral change. Therefore, therapists expect to have repetitive discussions about the same issues. In other words, quite often we view a client’s resistance or their “no” to mean “not yet.” Our studies of human nature provide us with the understanding that everything has its own timing. This is true for organizations as well.

By Beth Cohen