After working as an OT in adult mental health for a number of years, I had the opportunity to manage a psychosocial project in Uganda. It had been one of my childhood dreams to live in a mud hut and do humanitarian work! (I still don’t know why)! My experience in Uganda changed my perception of OT and what OTs can offer. I had the opportunity to design an create a psychosocial program focusing on the needs of children, their…
“I qualified in Glasgow and in 2004 thought I had done my dash with OT, after nearly 10 years. I was and am still in New Zealand. I loved OT and it meant so much, so before giving away my Profession I felt I needed to be sure it was OT that was not working for me. I saw an ad in the local paper about adult education classes and attended night school for 4 weeks. The class was called…
My name is Awele Odeh and I’m based in East London/ Essex border. I’ve worked as an OT for 11 yrs. In 2007 I decided that I needed to rejeuvenate my passion for OT (we’ve all felt this way, I know), so I invested in a new set of skills and I studied to become an NLP Master Practitioner. This then developed into further study and I completed my diploma in Psychotherapy in April 2010.(I really enjoyed learning- and learning…
“I did it!” These words came spontaneously out of my mouth on Christmas Eve 2014 when I left the office of the mental health team for the last time. My career with the NHS began in 2003 when I started an Occupational Therapy (OT) degree at Sheffield Hallam University. Prior to that I had been a support worker for a private Brain Injury Rehab company and I always liked the idea of health care outside the NHS. I also had…
As a newly qualified OT, I took on a huge challenge developing a brand-new role for an Occupational health, health and wellbeing service. The idea was to provide telephone based intervention for teachers who were absent from work with mental health and/or physical challenges. My intervention packs focus on stress, anxiety, fatigue management, lifestyle coaching, condition management and work-life balance. I felt as if I had been thrown into the deep end, trying to make sense of my learning from university and rummaging through reflections from past placements.…
The ICF has a great blog resource and whilst is doesn’t have a health coaching category, I found this interesting blog (and several others) under their research section! I was immediately drawn to it for obvious reasons: Such a big, sexy title “Narrative Healing, Salutogenesis and the Wellness Paradigm” and there are many resonant factors with OT: we constantly engage with our clients narrative and how occupational meaning is constructed through narratives; salutogenesis literally means the creation of health and ofcourse we understand how occupational engagement can create health. Within this blog, the coach and author Dr Joel Kreisberg, cites the work of Antonovsky andhis Sense of Coherence model (he hasn’t referenced this…
I have long been interested in how moving our bodies physically and a change in physical environment, can really create a much needed shift and evoke different insights during coaching. (There are examples of this in my Coaching Creativity book and elsewhere). Whilst coaching professes to shift outside of the medicalisation of other “helping” therapies, its practice often mirrors the medical model: Pre-planned 1 hour sit down sessions, “see” your coach, leave, come back at regular intervals. Nothing wrong with that, but coaching occurs in between sessions…
There are times in your life when you feel like you are running a marathon, except you are not physically running, you don’t have the training, the right trainers and sometimes there doesn’t seem to be an end! This is how my life has felt for the last year – I hit the 6 weeks school holidays exhausted. I had been looking after my teenage daughter full time since February and whilst she had been given a place in anew supported school, that wouldn’t start until September. I…
Occupational Therapy enjoys an important relationship with the domain of work, with work being a primary occupation for human beings and one which gives identity, meaning, security and wellbeing. In the UK the role of OTs in vocational settings has grown alongside a general growth in vocational rehabilitation services as a whole. Work has been a significant interest of mine both personally and professionally. Professionally, my last regular OT jobs were in vocational settings including a role as an…
This short musing was inspired by Bob Garvey who wrote a paper on the “Cowboys of Coaching” a few years back and it prompted me to consider what might mean in relation to OT. Having spent the last 10 years working, not only independently, but also in a “new” area of practice and one that is not regulated (coaching), I often wonder if I might be considered a bit of a Cowboy…. Whilst I maintain my HCPC registration (worked hard…
