This transcript is not verbatim. It’s been slightly modified (primarily removing “ands” before the beginning of sentences) to be more concise.
Conscious Use of Self
The notion of what you’re doing in your profession and how you do it and how you use yourself is what we call in social work school, the conscious use of self, meaning, you know you are, you’re confident in what you’re doing—not that you know anything, not that you’re not going to be a lifelong learner—but that you’re commonality is humanity and that you can make things happen for the betterment and the learning of everybody. So you start to [have] little thoughts about how you can begin to use yourself in a more conscious way and put your theory and your profession into a practice of whatever it is and transfer whatever you learn one place to the next [be]cause it’s the same process of change and the development of strategies of research and theory to go forward. That is truly what makes it possible for you to get along in the workplace in a much better way because people see different ways of doing things.
We all know about the glass ceiling and we all know what it was like to live in a man’s world. When I first worked, we always had to make the coffee. Sometimes you still have to do that, but you know sometimes you have to change that and the way that you do that is through confidence. And so you learn to use humor to help you along the way, you learn to use whatever your armorment needs to be in order to make changes in your workplace and develop your relationships, to think about your colleagues and what concerns they might have, how life might be for them. And don’t kid yourself; you probably don’t know a whole lot about the real person. Not that you’re going to learn that everyday, and not that you’re not going to respect privacy, but those are the things that are going to help you work together. You have lots of opportunity to do these things. The tragedy will lie only in your lack of ability to be open enough and strong enough to embark on that journey, but believe me, it’s worth it.
