Kate Anthony

OTI Europe Ltd | Consultancy, Personal Training and Research for Online Therapeutic Services

   

First Steps to Training!

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OK, the decorations are down, the fireworks are burnt out, and the new year resolutions are under way for the forseeable future at least. But have you thought of your Continuing Professional Development (CPD) needs as we charge into 2015? Do those needs include a feeling of how you really (really) ought to take your skills into the digital world that your clients inhabit but that you just haven’t been able to get around to yet? Would you like some guidance as to how easy this is even at an introductory level?

We’ve revisited our small courses about the world of Cyberspace and Online Therapy, and now offer them at a two-tier price level depending on just how much mentoring you desire from the experts in the field! We don’t pretend these are full trainings (see our wealth of that sort of thing here!), but they are there in case you want to know more about a specific technology, more about an area of Cyberspace you are unsure of, or even in case you want to dip your toes into our teaching methods and see how we roll!

These short courses can be taken with full lesson-by-lesson mentoring for just £150, or with no mentoring at all for just £75! You get full access to our resources and your CPD Certificate either way – we just want to be sure we meet all needs and all budgets!

And if you are ready to take your learning a step further at some point down the line, you can deduct the cost of these courses from our full CCF or PGCert trainings once completed if paying in full!

Start by checking out the list of small courses here, give Kate a shout if you have any questions at kate@onlinetherapyinstitute.com, and start 2015 by taking that first step into the world of online therapy!

 

No, YOU hang up!

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Ending conversations can sometimes be awkward, particularly if we are online.  If we are in the physical presence of someone, there are clues from our body language that we are about to move away – sometimes a kiss on the cheek, a handshake, or a facial expression that denotes a cheery farewell or that the situation is at an end.  But what is the protocol when we are online? Have we got used to the often unfamiliar ending of a communication, or do we need to take more care to ensure we have prepared for when a chat comes to an end?

A colleague of mine once told me that she found the end of a social conversation with her daughter on Skype unbearable because she had to ID-100146553actively turn the camera off, even though this was done by clicking a phone-down icon.  She felt that she was somehow clicking an off button on her daughter herself, leaving the teenager statically in place for ever, rather than ending a call.  Another felt that her continued presence on a platform such as Google, denoted by the green “available” dot, meant that she felt pressured to make herself invisible after a chat session, despite a clear goodbye once the chat session had been ended.

And yet, when texting via our phones, we rarely actively end a conversation, leaving an endlessly open channel of communication which remains formally unended!  And now we switch from platform to platform and device to device to communicate – just yesterday I held one conversation via my laptop, smartphone and tablet via text message, GoogleChat and Hangouts.  I don’t dare download SnapChat…

I’ve been thinking about this because we need to prepare clients for the end of a session which by its nature has less formality than closing a door behind someone, as we generally do after a face-to-face session.  As part of their learning, Online Therapy Institute students learn how to do this effectively, both for synchronous communication and for those exchange-of-message situations that don’t take place at the same time, such as when we use email. Our face-to-face clients have the formality of a clock denoting a set time, getting up from the chair, a door opening and closing, and then the journey home to mark an ending.  When working online, we tend to be in the same position with the same screen after therapy has ended – this doesn’t tend to foster the sense of closure that we need to hold the client until the next session.

Or perhaps I am over-thinking this!

But before I say goodbye, take some time to consider how that your last goodbye at the end of the session may have felt to the other person.  Was it too abrupt, leaving them uncared for and brushed off? Or did you over-compensate for the lack of physical presence, wanting to be the last person to speak before the camera went off or to have the last word in the overall therapy contract via email?

It’s sometimes a fine line to manage closure – perhaps a little mindfulness of how we actively do it may be in order to ensure the other person isn’t left hanging!

Goodbye!

P.S thanks to FreeDigitalPhotos.Net and Stuart Miles for the image!  Goodbye!

On Being A Columnist

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I’ve been thinking about both my contributors to TILT Magazine and my own role as a columnist recently.  This was inspired by the departure of my good colleague Anne Stokes over at TILT Towers, who has been with us from the inaugural issue right up to the present day – that’s 20 columns submitted for our readers pleasure and education (or, to look at it differently, nearly a whopping 20,000 words!).  Anne’s topic was CyberSupervision, and I doubt we could have found a better UK expert to offer her words of wisdom (not to mention her being a pleasure to work with and her ability to meet deadlines like no other author I have come across in my time as Editor!).

Anne is handing her baton to another of our dear colleagues after the Winter 2014 issue of TILT to Cedric Speyer, another fine example of a CyberSupervisor we are very lucky to have on board, and perhaps with a very different style and passion – so while I am sad to say farewell to Anne, I’m also excited to welcome Cedric.

Our columnists receive no financial gain from their contributions, and nor have I over my years contributing regular columns for other editors.  I do try to be a regular columnist for only one publication at a time because of this (otherwise I can’t afford to feed the cat), but what is it about contributing our expertise to a wider audience that keeps us doing it for free?

Here are some thoughts:

We reach new audiencesCAW

My current regular column is with the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy’s Workplace Division ( download it now! 13559_cyberwork CAW Autumn 2014). Not only does my work on Cyberculture and the impact of online services reach a new audience by doing this, I reach people who actively pay for a subscription and so are invested in reading the Journal.  Sure, they may skip over my part in it, but I am sure that the topic will surface in some part of their work one day and cause them to think “oh! I can find out more about this can’t I? – my journal covers it in every edition!”  I also receive a .pdf for my own distribution, as do all our columnists in TILT.

We receive new areas in which to market

Every columnist with a good editor will have a chance to provide the context in which they work in return for their wise words.  My by-line contains details of who I am, what I offer (and where), and how to get hold of me.  Readers of the journal are those involved in or contributing to the emotional and psychological health of people in organisations, including workplace counsellors, trainers, team leaders and welfare staff, occupational psychologists, HR managers and those with an interest in employee counselling services and skills.  How else could I each these people without investing in financial ways of marketing? And if your column makes it to the online version of the journal – as mine does – then that’s a whole new way of increasing your SEO!

We add to our publication lists

We all have a Curriculum Vitae or Résumé to maintain and our columns do just that.  Keep your links fresh from your up-to-date list of publications online and you have a handy resource to disseminate your work without resorting to a scanner or – dare I say it – a photocopier (that is SO 2008!).

Finally – you keep the Editors of the world very happy!

Really you do!  My role as co-Managing Editor of TILT Magazine is a labour of love, for all the reasons I outlined in an earlier post – and my regular columnists make my job 100 times better just by being willing and able to contribute with a cheery email when sending their work.   I am terrible with deadlines, and yet I rarely hear a peep of complaint about that!  So thank you to you all – past, present and future – for keeping me and my readers happier in our work!

🙂

CyberSupervision – Updates and Revamps (or what the inside of my head looks like!)

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One of the things that DeeAnna and I joke about being at the top of our technology development wish list is a USB adapter for our brains.  When we plan a course – from one of our smaller special interest modules right up to our 60-hour Specialist Certificates – one of us generally has the entire basic structure and content in our head right from the start.

Of course, then we have to extract that course from our brains and into our training platform, JigsawBox, before we can offer it to our students!  And one of the beauties of the platform is that we can edit the course once finished, meaning that the moment a new resource or updated information about any aspect of the content turns up, we can add it or amend the course within seconds – ensuring that our students only get the most up-to-date information available.  Any course that involves the use of technology needs to have that functionality – the days of emailing out handouts and lessons are long gone.

I’ve just completed the overhaul of our Online Supervision Specialist Certificate: checking links; replacing out of date articles; adding new videos; designing new written assignments… the list of blended technologies we employ in our courses reflect the Online Therapy Institute ethos of blending technologies to better meet the needs of the clients we serve.  Along the way, I’ve restructured the 30 hours to flow better from the introductory definitions, through the ethical considerations, on to the clinical aspects of supervising online, and ending at advanced readings encompassing private practice, internships, one-off supervision models and using avatars in virtual worlds as part of a supervision service.

Sometimes when finishing up a course, I wonder how it got from the inside of my head to the training platform.  And then I realise I am generally staring at one sheet of A4 that shows me.  Look!

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What a mess, huh?  And yet every scribble on that one piece of paper (and I only EVER need one piece of paper) links to everything else in my head around that specific topic, from random thoughts to newspaper articles to online jokes to the academic papers that Google Scholar throws at me every morning.

Sometimes the human brain just stuns me. As Einstein said, “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.”  Of course, he also said that technology has exceeded our humanity, but that’s a point I disagree with anyway 😉

I love technology.  That’s not a secret.  I also love my profession. Slamming those two things together in a coherent and ethically delivered way – not only educating others to advance confidently into the CyberCulture we now live and work in but also mentoring the innovators of the future to ensure the helping professions remain current and relevant in society – is my life’s work.

And if all you need is a pen and a sheet of paper like I often do, with no plug socket or wire in sight, remember that you are still using technology.  Douglas Adams taught me to think that way about chairs back in 1999. And in my world, you don’t get a better teacher than him.

🙂