NHS Peer Leadership Academy: Day 2

I’d suggest reading my blog about Day 1 first, with you can read here. 

So, today was day 2 of the first residential for the NHS Peer Leadership Academy. What a day it was! We all learnt a lot about our personality type through Myers-Briggs – we had completed the questions yesterday and so today we were evaluating our own perceptions of ourselves in terms of the different domains: Extrovert or Introvert, Sensing or Intuition, Thinking or Feeling, and Judging or Perceiving. We also did some group activities looking at the different perspectives on a story/situation or when looking at an image, to see if this matched up with how our Myers-Briggs questionnaire had classified our personality. In my case, my Myers-Briggs answers mostly matched up, except in today’s initial session I felt I was more of an intuitive person than a sensing person, not massively but slightly, yet my questionnaire revealed that I am actually a sensing person. From your scores and if you agree, you get a personality type – mine is ISFJ. We were then given a booklet that describes individuals of our type – and mine fit me to a T. So much so, I was laughing when reading the description, because it literally was me, down to every last detail. I then let mum read it over lunch and she too laughed at how extraordinarily accurate it is in relation to me. This I will find really useful through my work, understanding where my strengths and weaknesses lie within my personality traits and how these different traits interact, so I will use this most definitely moving forwards. 

“ISFJs are sympathetic, loyal, considerate, and kind and will go to any amount of trouble to help those who need it.”

Later on we had a great presentation from Phil Brough & Joe Fraser NHS England on the first level of the “triangle”: universally available support- Shared decision making; Choice; and Social Prescribing, including a bit on health literacy too. It was really interesting to hear what’s going on, and how it relates to policy and frameworks, and some great questions and thoughts shared, although we had to cut short the presentation so we missed out on part of it, including case studies. Keith suggested a webinar and I do hope they’ll do one. 

I’ve made some amazing connections and friendships. I really look forward to getting to know everyone better, exploring friendships further and potentially even collaborating with people. We had great social time too. 

Molly has made some firm friends, she really broke the ice and brought everyone together and behaved impeccably, she got so much fuss and attention and it was wonderful. She’s my little star, she rises to every occasion. And as always, a fantastic ambassador and advert for Dog A.I.D. 

We’ve had a wonderful few days and I can’t wait for October!