543 hours, reconstructed from old emails — Beyond Practice, Part Two
Worth Pondering
Real conversations about professional development, from the people who live it.
543 hours, reconstructed from old emails
Part Two: What it takes to keep professional development going across twenty years
Clinical, Educational & Developmental, and Forensic Psychologist
Zahia Chaaban holds three endorsements: clinical, educational and developmental, and forensic. She earned the forensic endorsement without a degree, but rather through years of hours in supervised practice and professional development. She has been fully registered for just over twenty years, works in the criminal justice system alongside private practice, and supervises a team of psychologists across several states.
In part one, Zahia Chaaban described the shift from learning because you feel like an imposter to learning because you have a stake in the outcome, and what it takes to make peer consultation worth attending.
Part two is about the harder half. Finding the time. Keeping the record. And what she would say to a psychologist who has stopped asking whether they are getting it right.
Key takeaways for Ponder
Aleks and EllaLogging CPD isn’t just about being ready for the audit.
Zahia’s experience emphasised something we already knew, but had not seen play out at this scale. What happens when you want to apply for an endorsement, or for further learning that requires you to demonstrate your professional development? Keeping adequate records is not only about compliance. It is a testament to your hard work and your dedication to the work you do, and it is very hard to reconstruct after the fact.
We can’t do it all.
As she pointed out, you need to know your limits at whatever point in life you are at. Sometimes, as Zahia has right now, you have the capacity to stay up late or read at odd hours because other commitments allow it. Sometimes you don’t. Make CPD work around your schedule rather than against it, and get creative about when it fits. Some of it can run alongside something else, like a podcast while you exercise. And some of it is better attached to a habit you already have, in the way James Clear describes habit stacking: the reflection you write straight after your supervision session, or the log you update right after your morning coffee.
Missed part one? Zahia on the shift from learning to fill a gap to learning because someone is relying on you, and what makes peer consultation worth attending.
You don’t balance it. You prioritise.
Asked how she finds the time, Zahia answered in two words. You don’t.
You are always prioritising one thing over another, she said. She was open about the periods across her career when CPD came second, and about the seasons when family or relationships needed her more than the extra reading did. Family comes first, she said, without qualification. That has meant different things at different points, and the demands have never been static.
She was also direct about who carries this unevenly.
“It's not an easy thing for us to do, and especially for us as women. We have a lot more expected of us, and it's difficult to balance a career and family and a relationship and our health.”
“My advice would be, don’t try and do it all and balance it.”
But she does not leave it there. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, she said, because a lot has been made easier. She can listen to a psychology podcast at the gym. There are note-taking apps and logging apps. Sessions and training that once had to happen in a room can now happen wherever you are, so a webinar can run while you get something else done. Ten or twenty years ago none of that existed, and the choice was one thing over another.
The record is for future you
If you want a single argument for logging CPD properly, this is it.
About two years ago Zahia decided to apply for forensic endorsement. This was not a matter of counting up training and calling it equivalent. She had to demonstrate that her two prior masters, along with her earlier law and criminal justice study, were substantially equivalent to a forensic masters, and she completed a two-year registrar program in a forensic setting. Part of that case meant assembling evidence of every piece of specifically forensic training she had done, including static risk instruments, malingering assessment and offence-focused programs, separated out from the clinical and the ed and dev.
Twenty years of it.
She trawled old emails for conference agendas. She went through saved folders. She contacted her boss, who keeps every agenda from every year, but who started in 2014, when Zahia had been there since 2007. Seven years of records she had to find another way.
The final table ran to 543 hours. What each activity was, how many hours, who presented.
“I put the table together. Twenty years of forensic training, 543 hours. And it was a nightmare. And then I thought, I probably should have started this a long time ago.”
Her explanation for why documentation slips is not about motivation. It is about consistency decaying, and systems changing underneath you. You start out intending to log on the APS system or in a spreadsheet, she said, but the consistency fluctuates.
The technology shifted around her too. Supervision began as handwritten notes, because there were no systems and no apps. APS logging arrived, but there were periods she was not a member, so nothing went in. Devices were not permitted in custodial settings. Then everything moved online and became typed.
The irony is that she is meticulous about other people’s records. She keeps supervision notes for every psychologist she supervises, going back years, because in a forensic setting she may need them. If something goes wrong five years on and a supervisee says they were advised to do something, she can point to what she actually advised in 2016. A former supervisee recently asked her for the dates from three years of sessions, and she had them.
Her own webinars and training, she has to go looking for. It’s there somewhere, just not organised.
The reason to log for yourself, she said, is not the audit. It is that it did not become important to her until she needed to evidence it for career progression.
“Guess what, you won’t need it now. But you might need it twenty years from now, when you’ve decided I want to apply for this, and now I need evidence of it.”
Prepare for the case that keeps you up
We asked what she would say to a psychologist who treats CPD as an admin obligation, who puts the webinar on in the background and ticks the box.
She did not reach for compliance. She reached for what happens when something goes wrong. A client who takes their own life. A client who commits a serious offence. A client discovered years later to have been misdiagnosed or given the wrong treatment. As a psychologist and, more importantly, as a human, she said, your conscience holds onto the question of whether you did the right thing, and whether you did enough.
“Did I invest enough time into this person, who’s an actual human being, who is relying on me, has come to me as a vulnerable person needing help, and I was the person they came to for help?”
The second thing she reflects on is what clients bring with them. People who engaged in therapy years earlier and found it ineffective at the time, and who arrive carrying that.
She was careful here, and the distinction matters. This is not about someone early in their career who has not learnt something yet. It is about what happens when a clinician has checked out, too overwhelmed by what is going on to ask whether they are doing the right thing, or whether the treatment plan still holds.
That is worth sitting with rather than moving past, because the profession does not talk about it often and the research is not comfortable reading.
Zahia’s phrase for what she sees is checked out. The literature calls it depersonalisation. Either way, the clients feel it first.
The example she gave lands hard. A twelve-year-old on ADHD medication for years who had a language disorder, missed because the original assessment was not comprehensive. That assessment may not have been done by a psychologist at all. By the time it is caught, even intervention will not stop that child falling behind. And you will feel responsible.
This is where peer consultation comes back, as accountability rather than compliance. The value of someone external, she said, is that they remind you why you got into the field. Nobody entered psychology for the money, because there are other jobs that pay far better with a fraction of the emotional load. People do it because they genuinely care about helping.
What that accountability looks like in her own sessions is specific. She will tell a supervisee she has read their clinical notes and the treatment plan has changed three weeks running, and ask why. Or that she is confused about how intervention started after two sessions, when there has been no case formulation and the problem has not been identified yet.
On the annual self-assessment step, which AHPRA does not mandate, her view was nuanced. It is really important, she said, for someone who is not spending a lot of time reflecting on their practice. Some psychologists do that naturally and constantly. For those who do not have the time to self-reflect, a structured pause is genuinely useful.
Getting out of your own way
Zahia works in a field where language has to be precise, defensible and deficit-focused. The law requires impairment for people to be diverted out of the criminal justice system. NDIS reports require functional impairment, and sounding positive can cost a client their funding.
So she was sceptical of neuroaffirming language. She had watched the terminology arrive through social media and different groups, and had not been particularly concerned with using it.
Then she did MIGDAS 2 training, delivered by its author, Dr Marilyn Monteiro, who she described as lovely, and as very neuroaffirmative. The training was about changing the wording clinicians use, the context they use it in, and making sure the language is more positive.
It landed differently than she expected, and she said so plainly.
She has been a fairly cynical person for much of her career, straight to the facts, because how else do you get someone funding, or skills support, or the chance to learn adaptive strategies. So it surprised her that the training had the effect it did.
“This isn’t about being politically correct, or about new trends that have emerged. This is genuine care for the client you’re working with, and ensuring that it’s a positive experience, including that the report they’re receiving from you is a very positive experience, and not just the data that’s required to get them financial support.”
“I’ve let my own biases about the changes and the trends get in the way of me actually changing my perspective and learning from that.”
She changed her practice, and worked out how to hold both requirements at once. A report written for the client, and a separate letter setting out functional impairment where a funding body needs it. That way, she said, the client’s first impression of their own assessment is not a heavily negative document written to get them as much funding as possible.
Twenty years in, three endorsements, and she is rewriting how she words a report because one trainer changed her mind.
The reason to bother
Near the end, Zahia mentioned a quote. It has stayed with her for years, and it is the closest thing she gave us to an answer for why any of this matters.
Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul, be just another human soul.
Carl JungWhat matters is what it changed for her. When she is with someone now, she said, it is not about whether she is getting it right. It is that this is an actual person putting their trust in her. They might be another patient on someone’s list, but this is their entire life. And for the parent in front of her, a problem they have been carrying for years, feeling unheard.
“Someone that you have a genuine human connection and empathy for, you are more likely to do more for them than if they are just another client on your list. And therefore more likely to want to know more, to improve your skill set, to better help them.”
Beyond Practice is a series of conversations with psychologists about professional development.
CPD is one of the few parts of the job that everyone does and almost nobody discusses. How you decide what to learn. How you find a supervisor worth having, and what to do when you have been assigned one who is not. What happens to your learning plan when life gets in the way. How you keep a record of any of it across twenty years of changing systems.
Most psychologists work this out alone, by trial and error, and rarely get to see how anyone else does it. So we are asking. Across career stages, settings and areas of practice. What they have refined over time, what they have abandoned, and what they wish someone had told them earlier.
Not best practice handed down from above. What actually works, from people doing the work.
If you would like to be interviewed, or you know a psychologist whose approach we should hear about, get in touch.
Keep the record now, so future you does not have to trawl old emails.
Ponder logs your CPD against the PsyBA framework, tracks peer consultation and learning goals, and exports an audit-ready logbook.