Ella Guerin

We are delighted to have Ella Guerin, Assistant Professor of Mental Health Nursing, on this episode of It’s Notts Just Physio! Ella shares her incredible journey into teaching, along with some amazing insights into mental health nursing. Whether you’re a student, a practitioner, or just curious about the field, you won’t want to miss this one!

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Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

so

SPEAKER_01: 0:10

Welcome back to It's Not Just a Video with James Coghlan. Listeners by now should hopefully be aware that this podcast is designed for us to get to know our wonderful staff and students better here at the School of Health Sciences. And I'm delighted to have Ella with us today, who we've been wanting to get on the show for a while. Hello, Ella. How are you?

SPEAKER_00: 0:27

I'm good. Yeah, I'm all good, thanks.

SPEAKER_01: 0:29

Thanks for coming in. We're quite excited to do this podcast and listen to a little bit more about you and what you do here at the school and things like that. So why don't we just kick off? Okay. tell us let's go from there shall we take it from

SPEAKER_00: 0:42

there um yeah so I'm Ella I'm a mental health nurse by background and I'm an assistant professor of mental health nursing here which I've done for four coming on five years which is exciting um and so yeah I suppose that's the best place to start

SPEAKER_01: 1:00

and um no it's great so been here sort of four or five years how did you how did you how did you get up working at the University of Nottingham

SPEAKER_00: 1:08

so I studied the the mental health nursing course here. So I started in 2015 and over that time found my area of interest, really deep dived into it. I am a massive nerd, became a massive nerd about that. And then when I left, I got a message from my colleague, Dr. Nicola Wright, who was one of my lecturers at the time and is now a friend and colleague. And she was like, hey Ella, we wanna write a class for the nursing students on trans health. You know a lot more about this than we do. We know how to write a class, but you know the content. Can you come and help us out? And I was like, yeah, no problem. And that was my focus. So anything LGBT health, particularly like mental health, health inequalities is my bag. So I was like a relatively new graduate, came in, helped them write and create this e-learning session. And then while we were doing that, Nicola was like, hey, have you seen there's a day a week job advert going on? for you to be what we called a practitioner health lecturer so that would be teaching clinical skills and teaching classes that other people have written that I could go in and do or lead in clinical supervision and so I applied for it, I got that job, that was great so that would have been September 2019 and then over that autumn I was doing that work for a day a week while also working in clinical practice and around that like November December a full-time job post came out to be a teaching associate and someone was like hey Ella you should probably apply I think you'd be really good at this and I was like I had lots of doubt lots of self-doubt I was only a year qualified I didn't think I had the skills or the knowledge or the expertise to do it because I was surrounded by all these people who had worked in academia for so long and I really admired the work that they did I was like no you guys are ridiculous like I can't be a full-time lecturer like what you want about and then I had lots of people sort of nudge me and say no you really need to apply um do that and then I said okay do you know what the worst thing they can do is say no and that's what I'm expecting anyway uh but actually they said yes and I really remember that call because I was on night shifts at the time so they rang me I said like if you're gonna whatever the news is can you ring me as late in the day so that you don't wake me up while I'm sleeping. And then, yeah, I just remember being absolutely on cloud nine the rest of the night for the night shift when I got the job. And so I've been doing that since. I left clinical in April 2020, which was quite fortunate timing for me, as you can imagine, because it was all starting to change.

SPEAKER_01: 4:03

Yeah, absolutely. And, well, I mean... I think in terms of it's a really interesting story. So you've been a student here.

SPEAKER_00: 4:13

Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 4:16

Come back in now teaching here.

SPEAKER_00: 4:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 4:19

That's absolutely amazing. So are you enjoying the role and what you're doing now? Did you think you'd end up... I mean, you said there's a bit of self-doubt at the beginning

SPEAKER_00: 4:28

of all this. There was a lot of self-doubt and that's a theme. Yeah, I absolutely love what I do. I love my students. I love teaching. I think... In my head, it was what I wanted to do, but the timeline that I'd written was much longer. Like, I'm still ahead of schedule. So what I used to do when I was working clinically, when I was newly graduated, was planning what do I want my career to look like and really trying to manifest what it would look like. And so on a very quiet night shift at three or four in the morning, I would write down, okay, it's 2020 now. Oh, it's 2019. now what do I want 2020 for me to be doing what roles do I want what responsibilities do I want by 2021 what do I want then by 2022 and I did it for like 10 years so somewhere at home I have this piece of paper that I wrote in the middle of the night and I repeated it I wrote it out a few times and I think when I got my assistant professor job I was a good four or five years ahead of schedule so I'm just a bit surprised but it was absolutely what I wanted to be doing i love teaching people stuff i love sharing the stuff that i know about and like now that i'm doing it also having that moment where you see it click for your student like that is the best thing is where they just go oh i get it now um in the same way as like with a patient you suddenly see them have that improvement and you're like oh my gosh this is amazing like you're doing these things you're feeling able to get up and about you're able to recognize your signs and symptoms and what you need to do to help that. It's a really similar reward feedback.

SPEAKER_01: 6:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 6:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 6:16

Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 6:17

Do you see that as well?

SPEAKER_01: 6:19

No. Yeah. You're spot on. And you're right. There is this patient clinical feedback, which is one way. And then, yeah, there's a sort of a student feedback in another way. And they're different, but they're quite magic at the same time. And I've no doubt you, you know, you get some really good, you know, you can implement that with your teaching styles. What I was going to ask with it, as being a student and also being a clinician, do you feel sort of going through a programme of teaching and then also being in that clinical, that communication way, do you feel like that's impacted or developed or enhanced or moulded your teaching, shall I say? A little bit. How you deliver and how so how?

SPEAKER_00: 6:59

I think... like and we joke about it a little bit in our team but like the thing that I think my clinical practice has made me really good at is thinking on the fly and just rolling with whatever's going on so now I can be in a classroom someone can say something completely out of left field and I can respond to it in a sensible way and make use of it how I want so I find that I can just go into something and just make it work and sort of think on our feet make it work and it turns out to be even better than something that I planned really rigorously. Yeah, I think that's probably the best way, like, my clinical feeds in. And then... When would it have been? Three years ago, I started a master's in research methods part-time on top of work. That was a lot to do both at the same time, as well as the rest of life happening. But I did that for two years. And actually being a student at the same time as being a lecturer was so interesting because the people that I was learning from were super experienced. Most of them were full professors super experienced at teaching, super experienced in their subjects, and exceptional educators. And so as well as learning the content that they were teaching me, I was also sat there taking notes on teaching style, activities that they had us doing, all kind of other stuff, like in the corner of my notebook behind whatever the content they were teaching us about research methods was. And to be able to take notes those bits of my learning into the classroom that was really cool as well that fed in

SPEAKER_01: 8:44

but i think that's testament to yourself in in terms of having that awareness to take that

SPEAKER_00: 8:51

yeah

SPEAKER_01: 8:52

opportunity i think that's really insightful and i think it's really good planning to go on like i could sort of do a few things here but that kind of multitasking you mentioned that sort of adaptability again yeah from a clinical it's probably a similar part

SPEAKER_00: 9:07

to that very likely that's having sort of three thoughts all at once and working between them all, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 9:12

Yeah. And would you say like your teaching style now is, do you feel that you've got Ella's own style here or do you think it's kind of based on a number of people you've seen or do you think it's continuing to change? Just interested to see where you feel you are.

SPEAKER_00: 9:26

I think all of those things, yes. So I think I do have my own style and I have my own mentality of what I want to get out of a class. and it has evolved a lot over time but I think a lot of that has come from building confidence so when I first started it was mostly online and I essentially wrote myself a script and put it on my screen like a teleprompter because I was so nervous that I would say the wrong thing or I'd forget what I wanted to say and in theory that was a great idea but then as soon as I lost my place I floundered I panicked it was a nightmare um and as I've got more confident I've been myself and I've realised that actually that's the best thing and I was talking to a colleague of mine about this so I have one of the things that drew me to mental health nursing was my own experiences of mental illness and like that is a really common thing that we see in healthcare professionals people have had care and they want to pass it on they want to pay it forward and so when I talk with students openly I will often use myself as the first example if I'm like oh this is how depression can manifest and And here is what that looked like in me. And I'm very happy for them to ask me questions. And like anxiety, I'll go through a model and be like, here's the five areas model. Here's what it looks like. And here's what the textbook would say. And here's what it sounds like when someone is in each of those five areas. Here's an example. And for me, that radical honesty has been really liberating, but also breaks down a lot of barriers between me and my students. But it also means we've got a really good tangible example of actually they can ask me questions about that and I can give them a specific answer rather than having a hypothetical patient character or using a patient that I've met years ago and forgotten the very small details. I'm like, yeah, I know exactly what I was like a few years ago. Like it's interesting. And that, I think, has informed my teaching. But any time where it can be relaxed, conversational, like that's all I'm about. They made us talk about this in the PGCHE module. They were saying, so at the teacher training, they wanted to know what our teaching philosophies were and they wanted a visual of it. And a lot of the class put up what I would describe as like corporate-y word art that said stuff like synergy and... communication and like you know the ones you know

SPEAKER_01: 12:04

yeah

SPEAKER_00: 12:05

very apprentice style corporate word art and i was like oh that's not me at all and what i found was a gif of spongebob and patrick high-fiving and that is my teaching philosophy and if i can feel like spongebob and patrick high-fiving in a class then i've then i've got it right

SPEAKER_01: 12:25

I love

SPEAKER_00: 12:26

that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 12:26

I love that. No, I think it's amazing. I mean, you know what they say, it's your pedagogy. Yeah. It would be SpongeBob and Patrick. I'm never going to forget that. Could you tell us, not to make this sound like a lecture, but you mentioned this five areas model. I don't know what that is. So what's that?

SPEAKER_00: 12:41

What is that? So it comes from cognitive behavioural therapy and it's this idea of actually something will happen and you will have a thought about it. And with that thought, you will also have emotional feelings about it. you will have some bodily sensations, so some physical feeling about it, and you will, as a result, behave in response to that. So those are those areas. And all of those are interlinked. And often, one will domino into the next one. So if you have a negative thought about something, you'll probably have a negative emotion attached to it. You'll react, your behavior will be as if it's a negative thing, and you might get bodily sensations that are panic and stress related. Whereas if that thing happens and you think a more positive thought, whether that is voluntary or not, your emotions are going to be positive, your behaviours are more likely to be helpful and fruitful and successful, and then your bodily sensations are more likely to be relaxed. And so talking about how... often if you're really unwell um it's hard to change your thoughts or your emotions or your behaviors so sometimes we have to change the bodily sensation so some medications that we give to de-stress people are muscle relaxants because it tells the brain by forcing the muscles to relax okay we can stand down a little bit that can open the thoughts to change from stressed thoughts to clearer thoughts to more rational thoughts can reduce that emotional impact so illustrating like how medications work and why do we use sedative medications in healthcare to help people when they're stressed but also about um so cognitive behavioral therapy is about and I hope I don't butcher this, it's about how you think in response to things. And if you can be malleable in that and change how you think about something, recognising where your brain's playing tricks on you, these cognitive biases, that you're like black and white thinking. I've not got 100% so I've failed. I didn't get a first on my assignment so it was a nightmare, it was terrible. And like, I'll hold my hands up, I'm very guilty of that. And so The example I always give is one from my life, which is in periods of anxiety when my partner's been at football practice, he does data science for a football team. If he comes home late, it's not he's just chatting to someone, there's a bit of traffic on the road. No, no, no, he's dead in a ditch somewhere. And that, as you can imagine, spirals into panic, fear, worry, the whole lot. Whereas if I force myself to think something rational then actually my response is a lot more calm and steady and appropriate to the experience because he'll walk through the door in 10 minutes and I know that that will happen rationally but obviously when you're not well having that clarity of thought is really difficult.

SPEAKER_01: 15:54

Yeah well thank you for explaining that so well and sharing that and I think you've hit you know some really interesting points I mean often I think my experiences of students they can be exactly what what you've just said they sort of think I'm not getting a first I'm failing

SPEAKER_00: 16:10

and we know

SPEAKER_01: 16:11

that isn't true and like you know there's always a continuum of marks and things like that and I'm sure you've said you've experienced some of that yourself and you must see that in your teaching as well have you what advice would you give to your students to sort of say to them to try and not get to that you know as best they can is there anything you tell them

SPEAKER_00: 16:33

sometimes I would with students say a pass is a pass because a pass is a pass and that's ultimately all that matters at the end of the day and often I find with students if they failed an assessment they often think they're the only person to have ever failed anything ever and that's not true so I'll often say well no I failed an assessment as an undergrad and I failed one in my masters and I reset it and it went much better because I checked in I had a tutorial and I made it make sense and then the next time it did a a lot better and so that recognition of you're not the only person that's asked for an extension you're not the only person that's ever failed a module you're not the only person that's ever just scraped through on a 40-41% it happens to us all and it's absolutely fine and that is easier said than done I know as someone who's had perfectionist tendencies that that is really hard to do in practice and that was something that plagued me through my masters was I've got to get this grade so that I can get this overall and that did play out that worked in the end but it caused me a lot of stress and I don't know if all of that stress was worth having this magical sparkly grade that I got.

SPEAKER_01: 17:53

Going into, obviously, you've gone to clinical.

SPEAKER_00: 17:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 17:57

So do you remember by any chance when you went for your clinical job?

SPEAKER_00: 18:02

Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 18:03

Did they ask you what you got on your degree by any

SPEAKER_00: 18:06

chance? No, nobody has ever asked me. The only people that asked me have been when I've applied for my academic job. And nowhere in clinical, and I speak to students about this when they apply for jobs. I speak to people that have been working as clinicians for a long time. Has anyone ever asked you? No. If you've got your registration, you've got a registration. So whether you graduated with a three, with a third, or you graduated with a first, they don't know and they don't ask and that is for your like that grade is for your pride that grade is for your perspective as long as you've got a registration they want you as a registered clinician um yeah the only time i've ever been asked for academia

SPEAKER_01: 18:49

and and even then it's actually quite it's kind of a it's a quite it's yeah you want this experience they usually ask for a 2.1 but that is not set in stone you can have people who've had two twos coming in you've got this experience and they are absolutely fine for that as well so you know thank you for confirming that because I do think this is where students can often get themselves really tied up thinking well if I don't get a first I won't get a job or getting a first will mean I get a better job coming out if I got a two one or a two two

SPEAKER_00: 19:22

and

SPEAKER_01: 19:22

it really degrees a fantastic achievement whatever that is isn't it huge achievement that that really is what you want to get at the end of it is you get through it and the rest can go through i just want to bring a point in you mentioned about your um you might have to edit this bit out george but your partner being a football analyst yeah i saw something the other day which has got me thinking oh yeah i'm obviously a big pep guardiola fan okay so not everyone will be but i'm a huge fan and it was interesting because he was asked a question about why do you pass the ball so short? Why are they so short? Why would you not hit the ball long

SPEAKER_00: 20:00

into the channel?

SPEAKER_01: 20:02

Because as a typical fan, and football mechanics are so weird, we clap at strange things and we think that's great. So usually it's a ball into the channel. We're like, oh yeah, brilliant. And then other things we seem to not like. And Pep's answer was, the likelihood of success, if you pass into someone's five yards, is very different if you're trying to pass it 15 20 yards now don't get me wrong we all love it when a player hits a 20 yard ball into the space it looks great but the likelihood of it coming off isn't great so he talks very much about he gets his players to do this passing passing passing person they get so rehearsed at it so confident at it it sets the basis for when he is with those players three four five years down the line they look like they can just do it in their eyes in the most stressful situations and it's that foundation even though they're sometimes you get players who go, oh, they look pretty good then. But it's like when the pressure counts, they seem to, they can't, they're the ones who often can't do it, if that makes

SPEAKER_00: 21:00

sense. Yes, 100%.

SPEAKER_01: 21:01

So the mentality I'm trying to get in time-made decisions is to say, look, as you say, of course, if someone offered you a 100% mark, would you take it? Of course, I think we all would. Yeah, that'd be lovely. Of course we would, but you've got to sort of detract that from actual fact. Even if you're passing and you get the confidence, you pass a module, you pass an exam, you pass, you pass, you pass. Step by step. Yeah, would you say that confidence? Your confidence grows, would you agree with that? Or fine to disagree, it might be an awful analogy. I think your confidence

SPEAKER_00: 21:27

grows as you go along. And I think the idea of building up four five-foot passes rather than one 20-foot pass does play out in academia in strange ways and i think essay writing skills would be one of them so like writing with a really good structure having planned your essay before you start going and building on your referencing if you've got those bits down which are really small things to do if you've got those bits down the whole thing comes across much better you might have the same idea but how it reads and how it will be marked huge difference if i'm reading an that's not got paragraphs and it does sometimes happen. It's so much harder than one that's got like a beautiful flow to it. And you can tell when someone has or hasn't planned. And so I think you can have all the best ideas, all the reading behind you, but actually if you don't get the foundational stuff right, that you've probably not done and thought about since your GCSE English, actually it makes it a lot harder. And I had to take my own advice. um doing this so as an undergrad I just kind of wrote an essay hoped for the best it could get better over the three years because I realized these were the issues I was making but I didn't really plan anything and I would do what would be an academic sin of I would write stuff and then I would try and find a reference that fit what I wanted to say and you're meant to do it the other way around and so when I went to do my master's I was like right Ella you're gonna have to follow your own advice you've been telling students to plan their essays and do the reading before the writing for the last few years, you're now going to have to do it. And I had to have a talk with myself. I was like, we're going to do this properly. And do you know what? I was so mad because after the first essay, it was that much easier to write because I'd done it properly, because I'd followed my own advice. I was so mad because I was like, no, I'm going to have to do it properly forever now. And do you know what? The quality of my work showed for it. The quality of my work was so much better once I started following my own advice so I was a little bit mad because I had proven myself wrong but at the same time the outcome was so worth planning thinking about what I was doing and doing the reading before I put anything down on paper

SPEAKER_01: 23:51

and that strikes to me as that level of consistency you mentioned confidence earlier would that be fair to say with that new structure your confidence grew that when you handed in a piece of work you were more confident that it was going to pass rather than being, oh, I don't know what I'm going

SPEAKER_00: 24:09

to get here. 100%. Like I knew I had the ideas in my head, but I wanted to be confident that when they would read it, they would, my markers, my lecturers would know what I was trying to express, but also would be able to see the connections that I was making. And the expectation at that level was that we were making new and unusual connections. So I was trying to make sure that that was clear enough it didn't come across as disjointed and scatterbrained yeah um and that i was able to do that successfully yeah

SPEAKER_01: 24:41

and i think also i'd like to get your opinion on it i also think what you've said is really really valid for for clinical career as well so from my experience the real good clinicians are often the really consistent ones they are

SPEAKER_00: 24:54

they you have to be consistent so in mental health care we have a lot of gray area we have a lot of you can have two people with the same conditions, same symptoms, and they will still present totally differently. And so we spend a lot of time in the grey. We're wading through the grey. Nothing is black and white in mental health care. It's all very grey area. Very qualitative rather than quantitative as well. And because of that and because you're working with people who at that point probably also have limited consistency in their life because they're not well and they don't always have the networks to support that. If you are consistent in the rules in the systems in the approaches to things in your demeanour in how you communicate people respond so well to it and it seems really obvious but actually having that consistency in shift by shift so you get issues if oh well yesterday the other nurse let me do this why aren't you and actually one of you is following what's meant to be and one of you's not whichever way round that is it causes upsets and people are already emotionally dysregulated when they're unwell. So I worked in acute mental health care and in forensic mental health settings with people who were either very, very poorly, intensely unwell, and we were trying to get them well enough to go home, or had been in services in the forensic setting for a long time. Most of them had significant criminal history behind them and quite significantly traumatic upbringings, which meant their emotional regulation skills were limited and their relational stability growing up was limited because many of their relationships were in institutions, were with health and social care professionals rather than friends and family and so that inconsistency was very normal to them but it was also destabilising and so we had to be as consistent as possible to help them build healthy attachments and help them learn that a healthy attachment is a thing that is possible um because many of them hadn't had opportunity to access that

SPEAKER_01: 27:05

yeah yeah that's just really i mean thank you for showing us that that kind of that sort of read that clinical reasoning i've always found that fascinating on how you can approach something and i thought what you're saying is consistency is is key

SPEAKER_00: 27:20

huge

SPEAKER_01: 27:20

yeah um and i guess sort of again now with your teaching hat on um no doubt you'll have you know our students who are thinking they might be listening to this going blimey this i feel a little bit like i need to get some consistency in my life you know i need to sort of do that is there any advice that you would give them and sort of say academics say writing or anything like that you mentioned about the structure sort of helped you have there been any sort of university support services that you've often used for students and if so how would a student go around that

SPEAKER_00: 27:53

um so university support that i've made use of that i think not enough students make use of is one-to-one tutorials with their lecturer so one thing I often find is if a student has gone in a different path with an assessment it's just because they've misunderstood the question they've given me something that's lovely and interesting but it's not the question that we've asked and a tutorial a 20 minute half hour tutorial would have saved that all that time all that effort all that anguish and so when I was a student I would often be very proactive at asking my lecturers can you check this can I talk to you about the assignment can I talk to you about what we've done in class to clarify the understanding and get supervision as much as possible and that I think has been really really helpful in developing my writing particularly when I was preparing my dissertation both undergrad and postgrad but also just in general and I think that is really helpful but there are lots of things that are like even smaller than that so simply being really consistent with your attendance and being really consistent with with asking questions in class. Even if you're too nervous to ask everyone, wait until the end, drop them an email, ask your friend to ask it for you, whatever that is. But that hugely, you can see when a student is proactively engaged in the classroom, how much more confidently they understand something and how much more confidently they can express that idea than if somebody is saying, that hidden away and that's not to mean like an introvert can't do successfully um at all but it's about finding ways to even if it's the tiniest question get that answer because often people ask something and they think it's really minor and then you're like no that's the most clever thing i've heard all week you're a genius great point

SPEAKER_01: 29:52

yeah it's the crux isn't it can sometimes be that what they call the paradigm shit it could be you can literally you get that bit right you go one way it could be slight change it goes like the other and it's interesting i'm really glad you said about that questioning i was hoping on the summer school the other week and i decided that the first time i did it was i used a um a qr code for the student to say look if you've got it's often is the end of a presentation any questions any questions and then there might be a confident person who puts around up and often people

SPEAKER_00: 30:21

yeah

SPEAKER_01: 30:22

so i put a qr i said look if anyone wants to write a question on here go for it i've got 10 questions and i was like oh that seemed to work quite well but I'm so glad you said because I thought yeah there must be people sitting there going oh I really want to ask that and then they don't get the answer and you don't know what that then means down and yeah I agree with you often as teachers we want our students to do well

SPEAKER_00: 30:44

right yeah yeah always and when

SPEAKER_01: 30:45

they're doing the presentation you're urging them to go please just you know and when you see sometimes they do go a bit off and you think but I find the same the ones who have made that time and asked those questions it's very very unlikely that they are the ones

SPEAKER_00: 30:59

who often And it's what we're here for.

SPEAKER_01: 31:01

Yeah, exactly. It's what we're here for. It's what we're here for. It's what my job is. Yeah, it makes it a much more pleasant

SPEAKER_00: 31:06

experience all around. Like, please ask me about referencing. I love talking about referencing.

UNKNOWN: 31:11

Yeah, well.

SPEAKER_01: 31:12

I mean, it actually is a really good skill to have and to know, and you can learn more from it. And that might, I don't know, you find it might inspire more questions, I guess, sometimes. They come in and ask one thing and you

SPEAKER_00: 31:23

end up talking about... And then you talk about something forever, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 31:25

Yeah, yeah, no, that's great. I'm conscious on time. That's fine, okay. But a couple more things, if that's okay, to ask. You mentioned your confidence at the beginning. Seems to me, in the way that you talk, your confidence has arguably grown

SPEAKER_00: 31:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 31:43

Is there anything in particular you can put that down to? Would you put that just to time? Has there been any other bits you'd say, oh, you know what, this really, this was a bit of a game changer for me?

SPEAKER_00: 31:53

I think a lot of my confidence, a lack of confidence and poor self-esteem that I've had came from not believing in myself and not realising I was as good at things as I was. And some of that was perfectionism related, but also some of that was just not believing in myself at all and I really didn't believe in myself for a long time and that over time I think teaching has really helped me feel confident the more success I had with teaching any time a student has said something encouraging about what I'm teaching or they've said oh can you change how you do this yes please tell me tell me it has just those tiny little micro boosts to my confidence is the feedback from students because it's immediate You can see if students are noddling along or if they've got what I call quizzical eyebrows. I'm like, can you give me a smile? Give me something. Give me some quizzical eyebrows if you're not sure. Because it's really immediate feedback, that's given me a confidence boost. And seeing my students enjoying my classes, huge confidence boost. Getting through a class and having the answers to the questions, that used to fill me with fear. I'd be like, they're going to ask me something and I'm not going to know I'm allowed to not know even on my specialist subject and sort of allowing students to remember that they're also allowed to not know like even as a relative expert in the field of health inequalities there's loads that I don't know about and so as relative novices they can absolutely not know stuff but yeah I think it was lots of micro boosts of reassurance I do know what I'm doing and I am actually quite good at what I'm doing or at least my students tell me that so I think so has been huge but because I'm so ready to doubt that truth. I have kept anytime someone's written something on paper, I've got any emails, I save them. And above my desk, I have a piece of paper where a student wrote, Ella's lectures are fun, always engaging, and I really enjoy it. And like little things like that as reminders to myself, no, you do know what you're doing and you are quite good at this. And the feedback that I get from colleagues and from students has also helped me really grow that confidence. I got the opportunity to teach the physios not long ago and that was really good fun. They're a really nice cohort. And afterwards they gave me a round of applause and I was absolutely floored. I didn't know what to do. I did bow because I really didn't know what to do. I was like, okay, let's do it. But they were absolutely brilliant as a group to hear from. But the fact that they were so... positive in how they received what i taught and how i taught it just meant the world yeah

SPEAKER_01: 35:01

i think it goes both ways i think you you know undoubtedly go into that environment with the energy and the planning and the preparedness you know all the things you talked about you know and i think that's a big part of it too this stuff good teachers like yourself it might look to others it's easy

SPEAKER_00: 35:20

you know it's not it's a skill it's a skill it takes

SPEAKER_01: 35:23

time practice repetition Repetition, which again is also, I think, things that our students need to be okay with. I think this is often the thing we talk about, you know, repetition is somehow seen as a negative thing or whatever. And it ain't.

SPEAKER_00: 35:38

Because I've taught some of the same classes three or four times now, year on year, and each time they get just that bit better. They get

SPEAKER_01: 35:44

better, don't they? A bit more polished, a bit more like, oh, okay. And that consistency comes back to that again, doesn't it?

UNKNOWN: 35:52

Huge.

SPEAKER_01: 35:52

Last little thing, Ella, we often ask our, I mean, I could talk to you for another hour, I have to try and get you back, actually, for another episode, would be just, is there any Ella advice you would give to, and I know this is, you know, not to put you on the spot with it, but, you know, it could be advice for students, it could be advice for life, it could be something really philosophical, it doesn't have to be by any chance, I think we've had some great stuff, very varied in people's ways, just interested, if you had to bestow some advice out there, what would your advice be Yeah,

SPEAKER_00: 36:23

I'm going to pass forward a piece of advice I was given as a first year student on my first placement. And I distinctly remember being in a car on community placement in workshop. And the nurse that I was shadowing said, Ella, what do you do at the weekend? And I was like, oh, I like doing this. I like doing that. I'm going to the gym. I'm going to see my friends. I'm going to go see some music. And he was like, good. keep doing that and it stuck with me because I still remember that conversation nine years later and I would say have something in your life that isn't your healthcare or your work whatever it is it doesn't have to be like I don't care what you do just have something that isn't just being at work or being at home do something constructive do something productive do something that fulfills you because if you're in if you've had a stressful day you need something to do to decompress in the evening so that you can go back in tomorrow but also for that relief for that fun for something nice and bright even if you've had the best day cool celebrate it and go and do the thing that you enjoy and I think for me that's made a huge difference to my experience as a clinician outside of clinical practice but it's made me better at being a clinician because I can show up confident as my whole self rather than being this drained person that's not got anything else going on actually having all that other stuff is so valuable so yeah do something outside whatever that interests you but have a hobby keep up your hobby as a student go to the societies that's a really nice way of keeping that up that was huge for me as a student yeah do other stuff in summary

SPEAKER_01: 38:15

that sounds sounds great that's perfect it's been absolutely delighted to have you yeah it's

SPEAKER_00: 38:20

been

SPEAKER_01: 38:20

great I hope

SPEAKER_00: 38:21

we can do

SPEAKER_01: 38:22

this again

SPEAKER_00: 38:22

soon

SPEAKER_01: 38:24

yes please yeah we can do that stay

SPEAKER_00: 38:27

in

SPEAKER_01: 38:35

touch thanks