The rainbow after the storm!

I have not always been someone who thought positively, practiced self-love or even had a lot of confidence, but there was one experience in particular that led me to realise I could not continue the way I was and here it is...

As apart of my Occupational Therapy degree, we have to go out on clinical placements in each year. I had completed placements before, during my college course, but boy was this placement different. This placement took place at the end of my 1st year at uni, I had passed all my other modules, I was enjoying my course, everything was great! Then I started my placement. I was in an acute stroke setting which first off, is a very intense placement for a first year student, and guess what? I was the first 1st year student this placement had ever had!

Now despite all this, I wanted to give the placement my best shot and embrace the experience. Everything was going really well at first (so I thought). I was having weekly supervisions with my practice educator (PE) to discuss goals and monitor my progress, and so far so good! A few weeks into the placement a tutor from the university visits you on placement to make sure you're on track but also make sure your PE is doing everything they're suppose to. This is where things started to take a downward turn.

So we're in the meeting, all 3 of us, we've gone through the checklist and all the paperwork, fabulous! Then my PE asks to speak to my visiting tutor alone. *cue instant panic* from this point I knew something wasn't right.

After they had finished their meeting, my PE pulled me aside and basically offloaded a whole list of things I was doing wrong. Eh where has this all come from? Prior to this meeting everything was going seemingly fine! This was a week before halfway marking which is when you basically find out whether you're passing or failing or not. So now I'm panicking at this sudden bombshell that I am failing the placement.

So from that day forth, not only did I put a ridiculous amount of pressure on myself, so did my PE! All my weekly supervision meetings became completely negative, I was receiving 0 positive feedback and her comments just kept chipping away at me "Why are you not able to do this" she would snap. Baring in mind the stuff I needed to do was stuff I was able to do, but when you are someone who already lacks self confidence, having someone continuously put pressure on you and give you negative feedback was not helpful for me at all! I started to go backwards. The small amount of confidence I had at the beginning of this placement was slowly disappearing, I was becoming quieter and more awkward around patients. I was now only telling myself negative things "You're so stupid why can't you just do it" "I can't do this". To the point where I told myself should I even be on this course? I am I even cut out to be an occupational therapist? At this time I had been working as a healthcare assistant in a dementia care home for a year and a half. I knew how to talk to patients and overcome barriers to communication. I already had some of the skills I needed to demonstrate on placement from having this job, but now I completely believed I was incapable.

At the worst point, I was overthinking so much that I physically could not speak in front of patients because I felt so anxious. I knew what I wanted and needed to say to them but the thoughts in my heard were saying "that's not the right thing to say", "you're going to sound stupid". These thoughts were so loud and aggressive in my head that no words would come out at all. I would just freeze and feel embarrassed and ashamed afterwards. I began overthinking every little thing I was doing, this extended into my personal life as well. I could not confide in my PE about my struggles because I felt so worthless and terrible that I didn't feel comfortable enough to talk to her and I also did not think she would understand; I didn't even understand myself. I had never experienced or felt anything like this before. I was going home and crying on the phone to my sister multiple times a week telling her I was going to dropout of the course all together because I can't do it. If I can't get through the 1st year placement, how am I gonna cope in my 2nd and 3rd year I told myself. I was drained both mentally and physically, and I felt hopeless. But I continued to go to placement holding on to hope for some sort of miracle, although mentally I had checked out. If you did not guess already, I failed the placement in the end.

In all honesty there was a slight feeling of relief when she failed me because of the thought that I did not have to go back there! But another part of me felt embarrassed and ashamed that I had failed, so I blocked it out of my memory and enjoyed my summer pretending everything was fine. I felt OK again for a while, due to blocking the whole experience from my memory - so I thought. But then roll on 2nd year of uni and a module that brought everything back up! We had a module where we had to role play completing an initial assessment with a case study patient. After my whole placement experience, I had been made to feel like I was terrible at speaking to patients. After anxiety and overthinking leading me to freeze in front of patients several times, I was like great, I'm gonna fail! I had such a lovely lecturer for this module who also happens to be my personal tutor! I have a really good relationship with her, so arranged a meeting to speak with her about my worries. And let me tell you this meeting did not go to plan! I went to this meeting feeling pretty nervous. She asked me what my worries were and I burst into tears instantly. Hysterical, uncontrollable tears. The poor woman looked so shocked and in all honesty, it came out of nowhere! I explained my whole placement experience to her whilst crying hysterically. We talked for hours about everything from things I'd been through in my personal life to my uni experience. I felt so much better afterwards! She advised me to seek support from the health and well being team at the university and gave me some tips on how to manage anxiety and overthinking. **

After this meeting I told myself that A) I am never going to let myself go through anything like I did on placement again and B) I should have reached out for support a lot sooner! This is when I really realised I both wanted too and really needed to learn how to cope with anxiety and lack of confidence, because the main reason I didn't speak up was because I did not have the confidence to do so. So from that day forward I decided to work on myself. Every time I caught myself in a negative thought I would snap myself out of it and try to think of a positive one instead. It was baby steps but it helped.

It's coming up to a year since I went out on that first placement! Since then I have completed my role play assessment and achieved my highest grade at uni so far and this was all from changing my thought patterns, telling myself "I can do this"and seeking support when I needed it. I have also now completed and passed my placement resit and had a completely different and incredible experience! Myself and my PE both believed in me but at same time pushed me to reach my potential, and it made such a difference! I had my own case load of patients and was seeing them on my own! I have learnt and changed so much in past year looking back on it, I feel like a very different person. My whole mindset has changed for the better and I'm overall a lot happier within myself.

The purpose of this blog post is to show that you can turn a negative experience into a positive learning curve. Everything happens for a reason. I obviously wish I didn't fail the first placement, but if that hadn't have happened, would I be on this positive self love and confidence journey now? Probably not. Life works in mysterious ways and I feel like this needed to happen to send me on the right path!

Tyra's Top Tips;

1. Do not be afraid to seek support and ask for help. - If I had the confidence to seek support from the uni whilst I was going through my struggles on my placement, I may have had a completely different experience. Also seeking support can lead to progress and development within yourself.

2. Following from that, stand up for yourself! Some of the stuff my PE said to me was uncalled for and could have been addressed in a much more professional way! I HATE confrontation but standing up for yourself is sooo important and shows self respect and boundaries. After this placement I realised there have been so many other situations in my life where I've let people belittle me, patronise me and just be down right disrespectful, especially due to my quiet nature. I do not stand for it anymore!

3. Kick those negative thoughts to the curb! Don't let them consume you the way I did! You are more than your negative thoughts! You will see big changes when you change your thought patterns.

4. Believe in yourself! You can achieve so much more if you believe in yourself! Baby steps are still progress, keep going!

5. Learn from your mistakes! There's so much I would have done differently being in that 1st year placement scenario now, but I'm not going to beat myself up about it! It was a learning curve, and now I can carry these lessons forward into future experiences!

6. Do not ignore your feelings! I am so guilty of this but ignoring your feelings without actually dealing with them is an unhealthy coping mechanism, as you can see it can creep up on you in the future! Address them as soon as you can, offload with someone you trust, or in a diary, however you feel most comfortable. Cry if you need to!

7. Don't be ashamed of failure and failure is not the end of the world! If anything, failure is a lesson, it helps you grow! I genuinely feel like I will be a better OT in the future because of this experience. Reflect, learn from it, and try again! You will get there!

**If anyone would like more detailed information on tips to manage anxious feelings and overthinking let me know!

I hope this has been helpful to at least one person out there! Next week i'll be talking all things social media! Look out for polls on my instagram story in the coming week @ty_blogsx !

Thanks for reading! x