November...Here We Go!

I am so happy to see the start of a new month. I am hoping that it will be an easier month than the one before it, and I am renewing my dedication to my goals and desired outcomes for the rest of this year right here, right now.

Of course, this post is happening at the beginning of the month, during a full moon period (where I tend to be happier than in other moon phases), after recovering from a nasty infection that was fed by the wrong medication for a week and then finally responded to the right medication, and after an hour of extra time between waking up and actually having to do anything. We will see what my energy and interest levels are during the new moon phase, during my hormonal surges, and around the holidays when my clients and co-workers are stressed to the maximum and I get to soak up all that extra angst coming from all corners.

Right now, though, in this moment, I am feeling good about all sorts of things.

Of course, if I went back to the first post in October, I bet I would find a post that says very similar  things. It is difficult to make goals in an up mood to last through my down mood. Perhaps I should change my goal setting focus to correspond more to my down rimes than my up times. Hmmm. There are no "rules" for having to do all of this, so I can certainly make my plans in the middle of the month rather than at the start.

I wonder what will happen to my goals when I make this change? I think I will do it. I will hold off on making my goals until the 15th of November. I will plan on tracking my progress from the 15th to the 14th of December. I can still use the month as a format, but I will change when the month actually happens. The shift in time should help encompass my predictable emotional cycles and offer me a glimpse of how I make goals when I am not full of energy and verve!

This is not at all what I envisioned this post to be about this morning when I sat down at the computer. I intended to state what I was going to do during this month, and then I realized that i have written this post before, and it was a farcical attempt at best.So, a moment of clarity this morning may lead me to a better outcome -- we shall see.

This is one of the reasons that I blog. I find that I can process thoughts differently when I write them down than any other time or process. 

I was reading an article from the latest edition of Voices from the World Federation of Music Therapy about the Certification Board for Music Therapy certification examination. Here's the link, if you are interested in reading it. the authors, Tony Meadows and Lillian Eyre, talked about some of the perceptions of academic directors about the examination itself.

I am very interested in how our profession measures and ensures clinical competence in our professionals. I have always been interested in this topic and intended on making it the center of my "significant contribution to the knowledge" when I was in my failed PhD attempt. I have studied competency-based education and developed my own format for competency-based internship training as part of my interest and passion for my profession.

In 2018, I wrote a post about some of the questions addressed in the aforementioned article, but I took the stance that I am most comfortable with in this life - I wrote about being an internship director. I also made a video in 2019 about another one of my revelations that you can find here. I feel that there is a disconnect between academic professionals and clinicians and students and our associations and certification board.

I hope that some of you take some time to read the article by Meadows and Eyre. It was interesting. I always find that these types of surveys leave me with more questions and I want to know how the survey information is changing what we are doing right here and right now! My frustration is that nothing ever seems to happen, and if something actually comes out of all this, it does not happen quickly! (Another disconnect between academia and the clinical world - a VERY important one in my experience) If anything does come from this, I expect that the internship directors and supervising music therapists who are essential in linking information and practice with students and future music therapists will continue to be ignored in the development of strategies and systems. 

So, I've made a personal choice and offered a professional opinion in my blog. Not a bad way to start off this month.