As I write this, I am coming to the end of my presidential year. It is time for me to reflect on the year and to give some thought to the future. This column, however, has been the most difficult to formulate and to write. Maybe there is a psychologist out there who can figure that one out? Something about endings? Maybe...Something about transitions? Maybe when I first got elected, I felt both excitement and trepidation. Excited and nervous about filling such a responsible position. Could I hold it all together? What impact could I have in one year on this division, the biggest in APA and the one filled with the greatest number of diverse voices? Other positions in the division are three years, not one. Is that wise? Can a president have enough time in a year to have any impact at all? As I finish my term as president and go out the hopefully more relaxed position of past-president, I have been thinking about this question.
To answer the question it is important to understand the role of the president. What exactly does the president do? Make decisions about great things for psychology? Great initiatives? I did have the opportunity to launch what I think of as a very important initiative, which is the Task Force on Health Care for the Whole Person. This task force is working on developing programs to study and train psychologists to work in the health care arena, specifically in collaborative care with physicians. At this point in time, despite a health care system that is not a system at all, and the difficulty many independent practitioners have in maintaining their practices, independent practitioners have also been expanding into new practice areas. One of them is collaborative work with physicians. This task force ,which was started during my year as president, will continue during Jana Martin’s term and is already involved in developing some programs and trainings for members. Stay tuned for that. This year has brought some important membership efforts, which you will also see some more of in the next year. Our marketing initiatives are going forward in the form of new educational ideas which are being developed and some other collaborative efforts which will be unveiled by Jana in her term. Running two board meetings is also among the challenges of the president.
However, by and large, a great deal of what I did this year was to hold it all together. I am reminded that for many years I served as the director of a graduate training program. I found that I began to liken the administrative work to housework, mostly clean up and organizing. In fact, like housework, if you do the job well, no one knows you are doing it. If you do not do it well, everybody sure knows and complains.
Attending to the committees, the publications, the reports and data that need attending to, the money that needs to be looked after, are all part of it. Certainly there are committee chairs, a secretary and a treasurer who tend to all of these matters and generally do it well. But the president is the one who looks over it all and takes the questions and complaints. Ah, the complaints!
Then there is the appointment of committee chairs and members to committees. When I first spoke to Jeff Barnett about the role of president, he told me about the appointments. I told him I thought that should not be a problem. He made some kind of comment or noise on the phone which suggested that he knew better. And was he ever right! Every president-elect will tell you that one of the biggest challenges is finding the right committee chairs and committee members. This tells me something important. We need input from members and we need the energy of members who are not typically in the “inner circle” of governance. Getting new people involved is not so easy. In fact, it became one of the biggest challenges of the year.
So I am making an appeal in this column. Let me know that you are interested and I will get your name to the right person, the place where we definitely need people power. And there you have it; the job is not done after all. The second biggest challenge is staying awake for the conference calls when they have to be late enough on Eastern Time so that the California folks can be on after their day of work.
To summarize, I think this is not an ending but part of a process. And since the process goes on, the one year presidency is more than enough. Each president shepherds the division through the year and leaves it then for the next president. But the division goes on. I hope that I can bring some of my experience to bear on future work in the division. I hope also that Jana Martin, the next shepherd will find the division in good order and will continue the efforts that I and those before me have made.
It is not an ending at all, but a continuation of the journey.
Many thanks to all of those who ably assisted me in this journey, to the members of the board, committee chairs and committee members who make the work of the division possible and to our able administrator, Jeannie Beeaff, who made it all possible.
To you, dear members, then, I say so-long as division president, but know that I will continue to devote my energy to its needs.
