Stepping Down and Moving Forward

Entry for 31 Oct 2021:

  

Today my 15-year position as professor of counselling at the University of Strathclyde comes to an end.  I’ve been tailing off for several years now, a slow wind-down.  First I went from 5 days a week, actually more than full time, to 3 days per week, but distributed in a feast or famine kind of way: a month full time while I was in Scotland, alternating with a month in California, notionally working one day per week in Zoom meetings with colleagues and students. That worked well and produced some important writing projects.  However, it fell apart went the pandemic started, stranding us more or less by choice in Scotland full-time.  After that, a year ago, I cut back to two days week, planning to fully retire on this date.

 

However, I’m not going anywhere right away!  Instead, what happened was the two year EmpoweringEFT@EU project, funded by an EU Erasmus Plus grant. This was developed by Carla Cunha and colleagues at the University of Maia in Portugal, during the early days of the pandemic last year, as an initiative to develop training for EFT supervisors and trainers.  Carla gathered a collection of us, including Laco Timulak (Ireland), Lars Auszra & Imke Hermann (Germany), Rafa Jadar (Spain), and Joao Salgado (Portugal).  Most of us (myself included) were quite surprised when it actually got funded, and I found myself suddenly responsible (with various colleagues) for two of its key pieces, essentially curricula for training (a) EFT supervisors and (b) EFT trainers. The result is that I’ll be continuing to work one day per week for the next year for the University, supported by the Erasmus plus grant in an associate researcher position.

 

I’m actually very pleased to have this additional transition period.  It’s a fun project, which is producing quite a nice and useful framework for training EFT supervisors and trainers. We were slow starting, because we first had to develop a competence framework for EFT therapists as a basis for the frameworks for EFT supervisors and trainers. The supervisor framework is also almost finished, and we are making good progress on the trainer framework.

 

So this seems like a good time to do some more blog entries.