Other Networking Opportunities:
Stay on the zoom call at 12:30pm with Shaina Kumar if you are interested in networking with other scholars or clinicians doing work in positive psychology.
See below for an opportunity to join a peer-consultation group led by other doctoral students as well as hear more about the kind of group Sara and Kirk will describe.
Peer-consultation Opportunity
Hello! Our names are Sally Lee and Sabrina Zuniga. We are Counseling Psychology Ph.D. students at Georgia State University (Sally) and University of North Texas (Sabrina). Starting February 2025, we will be hosting an online support group for female clinicians of color (COC) currently completing their graduate training in a counseling-related field.
The purpose of this group is to hold a space where female COCs can come together to share unique personal and professional experiences related to identity, power/oppression, and cultural comfort. Some topics for discussion include self-advocacy and professional boundaries, imposter syndrome and self-confidence, and resilience and career development. Additionally, the space will be used to engage in peer consultation around clinical cases with complexities at the intersections of culture.
This group will be hosted biweekly in a virtual format from February to May 2025. Meetings will be 60-75 minutes long. The specific time/dates will be determined based on group members’ availability and timezones. We plan to fill about 10 spots.
If you are interested, please sign up at this Qualtrics Form.
Greetings,
We wanted to make people aware of an initiative of the Good Life Research Network, a collaboration between MSTAR and the Frost Center, as well as the Division 17 section on Positive Psychology. Positively Psyched is a speaker series started by Joel Wong and hosted by Donnie Davis in the upcoming year.
Save the Dates
Here are the dates to save. This is free. You may join as many of the calls as you like. We are also looking for labs or other groups who would like to be listed in the network this year. Filling out this form will get you on the email list when we send out the zoom link for the calls.
Involved Groups (labs, centers, clinical training, pedogogy, etc.)
Let us know if you want to be included in our list of involved teams or groups.
Rationale: The Challenge
One of the things that is most important to supporting creative work, such as writing and research, is the opportunity to share ideas during formative stages. We need high quality feedback to do our best work.
Nothing can replace the benefits of small, in person gatherings. The problem is that meetings with 15 to 20 people from around the country and world are expensive.
Nothing can beat the convenience and cost of working at home in your pajamas, as all workers everywhere learned in 2020, and have never forgotten. But we need a little more to form relationships, and calls make it hard for groups to develop the burstiness of ideas that can happen in a good team.
Experimenting with Ways of Making the Early Career Phase Easier to Navigate
Maybe it is possible to combine the best of both. This kind of network could provide a relational space that would make it easier for early career scholars (or people wanting to explore new areas of work) to develop professional friendships that can energize their work.
We are experimenting cadence where we take advantage of in-person meetings such as national conferences or the MSTAR meeting each May for forming stronger professional friendships. Then, we want to get interested labs, centers, and other groups (focus on things like clinical training, peer-consultation, pedagogy) on a similar cadence.
At these quarterly meetings, people can send in 10-15 minute talks for feedback and reaction from the broader network. We have streamlined the length of each call to 30 minutes, with 15 minute for an invited talk, and 15 minutes for discussants to engage the talk, as well as any other presentations sent in for consideration that period.
After the call, we expect people will spend a little time with a group of their choosing. These could be labs focused on specific grants or papers, combinations of labs working on a similar idea (e.g., advancing research on hope), clinical training groups, or program-specific seminars (e.g., Counseling Psychology, School Psychology, Counselor Education and Practice).
We used this cadence to support some of the MSTAR fellows (e.g., life worth living, New Zealand Grant, Measurement Development) from last year. Email Donnie if you want additional support connecting.
Although Donnie is a Counseling Psychologist, this group is for anyone interested in applied positive psychology. We already have people from social psychology, clinical psychology, and counselor education and practice. Within APA, we have leaders from division 17, 29, 35, 36, 44, 45, and 51 (and would be interested in others). We are interested in helping people find highly generative scholars and clinicians across subfields of psychology and counseling. A spirit of generosity, hospitality, and encouragement are key to doing high quality interdisciplinary work of any kind.
APA is working on revising its ethics code. This first talk includes two people aware of that process. This is a good subcultural “opportunity” to think about how training could be more strength-focused. There are many interesting trends in how the field is thinking about developing multicultural skills, and we see an opportunity for greater integration of MCO into ethics training through one’s career.
Last year, MSTAR commissioned a group of early career psychologists and counselors to think about how to integrate the “Life Worth Living” pedagogy approach into clinical training. We are exploring a possible grant angle to build peer-consultation into the habits of professionals from the very beginning.
If you want to read along with us, here were a few books that got our conversation started:
Raubolt et al., Opening hearts, Opening Minds-Sara joined a consultation group with these authors and found this an important structure for flourishing as a clinician.
Sandage et al., Relational Spirituality, Chapter 10, Therapist Formation-This is an outstanding chapter to begin thinking about a new vision for a sustainable practice that leads to growth even with all of life’s challenges.
Newport, Slow Productivity-This book reminds us that the things that matter most may not happen unless we defy the currents of business: (1) do less; (2) work at a sustainable pace; and (3) obsess over quality.
We have a number of scholars in our network interested in how virtues my require dialectical thinking and balancing. They require wisdom, especially given power dynamics. D’Asha Barnes is planning a line of work on radical hope, so we wanted to hear from some of the leading scholars in counseling psychology in this area. Here are a couple of papers to read before this call (French et al., 2019; French, 2023).
Last year, MSTAR commissioned a group of early career psychologists and counselors to think about how to integrate the “Life Worth Living” pedagogy approach into undergraduate teaching. The HAPPI lab developed an initial structure for such a course that started with cultural and humanities critiques of positive psychology. We invited others to help us frame their own version of this lecture in 15 minutes or less.
We are also inviting anyone else into the fun (and we’ll give an honorarium and award to one of the talks). There are many books and articles piling up. Later in the year, we’ll send out an additional reading list, but here is a good place to start.
Because religious change has accelerated, it is increasingly important that clinicians have a comfort addressing spiritual, existential, religious, and theological (SERT) themes as they arise within psychotherapy. A broader framing is that clinicians can be ready to engage life worth living themes related to mattering—what matters to clients and how clients matter to others in their lives. It can be challenging to know how to come alongside clients who are repairing their idea of what it means to live a good life, especially if they are reworking their existential understanding of their lives. We will have discussants who can address how leaving religion may also intersect with other cultural identities and developmental processes.
