You're starting a career in Peer Support. How can you make the most of your early days?

Being open and willing to learn from those around me has propelled my career to heights I didn't know I could at this age. As a peer specialist, it is not my job to be the expert of all things BUT to be the expert of my own experience, while having the skillset to connect those experiences to encourage and support others. I am always learning from my fellow peers which makes my role more interesting and satisfying. The world of Peer Support is so vast, and there will always be room for growth.

There is a lot of room for growth in peer support beyond providing one on one services. We can set out to become more knowledgeable and experienced in any of these area's. One thing remains true however, that additional knowledge doesn't make us experts on the person we are serving. We should continue also to remember where we came from and what our lives were like before recovery, including how vulnerable we were. We have probably come a long way in developing our skills and becoming employable and financially stable. At some point it is important to evaluate why we continue to advance in our careers and determine if our current vision coincides with our original vision for our recovery.

In the early stages of your career as a peer support specialist, focus on continuous learning, networking, and discovering your niche. Engage with peers, mentors, and professionals to broaden your understanding and explore various areas of interest. Building a robust network provides access to valuable insights and growth opportunities tailored to your niche. By staying curious, fostering connections, and honing in on your specialty, you'll lay the groundwork for a successful journey in the field of peer support.

Networking and collaboration are necessary skills for effective peer support. Expanding our network enables us to be stronger resource brokers for our participants while strengthening our ties to our communities. People need people, and the peer support profession is no exception. Without strong collaboration skills not only will your work not be as effective, but you also minimize the opportunities that could be awarded to you. Working as a team and seeing the importance symbiotic partnerships is what keeps us all connected to fight the good fight for equitable resources for our members.

Not everyone in the Peer Supportive fields wants to collaborate to further our goals and good intentions. Many Peers have become very involved in their own careers to the point where they cannot pursue many new opportunities. Some Peers are also naturally distrusting having seen many people enter the field with their own agenda. It is important to be genuine and authentic when networking with Peers and building a relationship and relationship with the Peer Support community over a long period of time. Building a team of people who can contribute dynamic and meaningful support takes time. However, generally people in this field collaborate more than in many other fields.

Carl Rogers who made the first introduction of Person-Centered Therapy was one of the first practitioners who could show meaningful evidence of improvements in offering supportive care compared to the traditional medical model of care. Since that time, we have been tracking the progress of our programs to see what levels of recovery have been achieved. It is important to ask for feedback from our participants about what works in our programs and services and what doesn't. We can experiment with additions and subtractions to our models and do smaller trials of these with different groups of people. When we find that we achieve recovery rates higher than average we may know we have created something meaningful.