My first year as a nutritionist: Successes, challenges and why no one will read this.

Saturday marked one year since I began my first full time job as a Performance Nutritionist, at Hartpury College and University. I think it would be fair to say it’s gone unimaginably quickly, and I’ve learnt a phenomenal amount in the time I’ve been there- as both a practitioner, but also about myself as a person. Part of this short blog will be my reflections on my time at Hartpury so far, part of it will be my thoughts on a couple of the nuances of applied practice, and some of it will certainly act as a guide/warning to new and aspiring nutritionists working in the applied field.

As I’ve just eluded to, I have learnt an incredible amount in the short time I’ve been working in nutrition, and as such I couldn’t possibly list every valuable experience or piece of gold that I’ve picked up along the way. I will however list a few, and possibly provide a little information on how I learnt (often the hard way) the importance of each of these lessons.

1) Relationships are everything

When I first undertook an internship in nutrition, those in charge of the internship could not emphasise enough the importance of relationship building with coaches, support staff and athletes. There’d be times where we’d have hour long meetings as an internship group, where we’d solely focus on soft skills and the importance of good communication and relationships.

‘Coaches and athletes will more than likely not care about the science- they’ll care about how you can make them win’.

Yet I still didn’t get it.

I didn’t heed the advice, and went in with the mentality that ‘If I find it interesting, so will they’.

They didn’t.

And combined with an inability to communicate (due to my inherent introversion and lack of soft skills), this set me up to fail pretty early on. Looking back, I would not rate my performance in my internship, particularly in the first few months, very highly at all. This did improve, and when I worked with new individuals towards the back end of my internship, I started to understand and improve these skills.

I also found that in a year out between my internship and full time nutrition work, that these soft skills can be developed anywhere- probably the most useful time for my communication development was a four month stint in a coffee shop, where I’d chat to regular customers to pass time and deal with the monotony of the job, and I found myself improving greatly as a communicator.

By the time I arrived at Hartpury, I was 100x better than the intern that left Loughborough- but probably had about 1/100th of the communication skills that I have now, one year on. And that’s not to say that I now consider myself an excellent communicator, or that I think my soft skills are the best they could be- they’re certainly not. But I’ve certainly improved, and I’d attribute much of that improvement to consistently making mistakes at the beginning of my stint at Hartpury, but by reflecting frequently on these mistakes and how I could improve them. Two of the highlights of my time at Hartpury are related to comments made about my ability to work with people; one athlete told me I was the ‘one of the best people person they’d met’, and another described me as ‘a natural at public speaking’. I include these not to blow my own trumpet, but to highlight to myself how far I’ve come, and to show you, the reader, how malleable these skills are.

Coming back to relationships, these underpin everything I try to do at Hartpury, and are essentially the backbone of behaviour change and influence as a nutritionist. Again, this is something that at times I’ve been successful with (particularly with athletes that I have had regular interactions with)- but it’s also something that I feel I could do much better with, and there are things I’d do very differently if I could repeat the past year. I’m content that this is the case, as it’s all part of the reflection process and gives me things to focus on and change in the future.

2. You only have so much time- prioritise it

This is something that I really struggled with, and I still don’t think I have right. It’s quite context specific, but we all only have so much time and so many resources, and need to find the best way to use them.

For me, the challenge was pretty evident. I worked 4 days per week, and I had to oversee the nutritional support to 420 athletes across a number of different sports. Obviously, I was not going to be providing 1-2-1 support to every single one of these individuals, so how could I best use my time to educate and inform?

In truth, it took me a few months to get to grips with the fact that I couldn’t operate in the way that I normally would have liked to. A big issue I had during this time was analysis paralysis- I’d spend so long trying to think of the best way to use my time- when could I be at each team’s training, when could I get my reading done, when could I go and meet the coaches- I’d end up not using the time productively for any of them.

Looking back (and looking forward), I think it’s really important to prioritise how you can best use your time. This probably has two components, with the first how can you help the individual as effectively as possible (always a goal in a 1-2-1 situation). The second was a big goal for me, that I don’t think I’ve really managed to hit yet, and that’s ‘how can we provide nutritional support and education to all of the athletes, without having to meet with them face-to-face’. Moving forward, I’ll be looking to improve the educational workshops and resources that I produce in an effort to do just that.

3.  Networking and CPD are crucial

This one is the reason for the slightly ‘click-baity’ title of this blog.

Another message that has been reiterated to me since the beginning of my university career is building contacts in your field, as well as in other areas of sport science and life in general. The message has been relayed in various guises, such as:

 ‘a lot of jobs aren’t advertised, they’re just given to people that the employer already knows’

‘You won’t know the answer to everything, so it helps to have connections to people that can help you’

Or the classic, ‘It’s who you know, not what you know’

Now obviously in true me-style, I did not heed these warnings (are you beginning to see a theme?)

Although I did engage with some CPD (I became a Graduate member of the SENr), I did next to no networking. No conferences attended, no meeting other practitioners, no getting a quick coffee with someone. Nothing.

Hence the title of the blog- this might have got considerably more engagement had I built up my connections by devoting sufficient time to networking and meeting new people.

This is something that I’ve looked to change a lot over the coming Summer. I recently attended the SENr showcase, which was a fantastic event with some great speakers. But it really struck me how everyone knew everyone, and I didn’t really know anyone. Meeting other practitioners and discussing their practice or research with them is one of my biggest targets for this coming year.

One thing I do pride myself on is my willingness to learn, and drive to get any relevant accreditation or experience that could improve my practice in any way. I am currently ? of the way through the Talented Athlete Lifestyle Support course, with a view to contributing to the Performance Lifestyle delivery at Hartpury next year. I am also undertaking the Mental Health Awareness Level 2 course, to better understand the support available to those with mental health issues, something that is very topical in both university students and athletes. In the long-term, I aspire to be able to work with athletes with eating disorders and disordered eating, and as such I am looking into the best pathway for me to qualify to do this (if anyone is reading and can help, please get in touch!)

4. Nothing will improve you as a practitioner as much as frequent reflection and complete accountability

I’ve already touched on reflection several times, but it’s such an important part of my practice. I’ve made more mistakes in my one year at Hartpury than na?ve first year undergraduate me thought he’d make in his entire career. This is fine, providing they are mistakes that are only made once, and are learnt from.

Accountability is something that we have spoken about in depth as a department. I think it’s fair to say that a lot of the support staff look forward to ‘Filosophical Fursday’- a 1 to 2 hour meeting per week where we discuss abstract ideas that @Owen Satterley presents us with, related to how we practice, and the issues that we come across with our various teams and disciplines. One important discussion topic was ‘Every problem or grievance in your teams is your fault’. Although this was something that I argued with (mainly with the semantics of not being able to control everything or everyone’s feelings), however I do agree that viewing every problem as something you can change is healthy. It is all too easy to pass the blame or put your hands up and say, ‘I can’t control that’, but this isn’t all that helpful in a performance environment. You never know the effect that one small change or contribution can have on the bigger picture.

5) Experience is hard to come by, so help out where you can

This is something that I feel quite strongly about. This is probably a combination of my fortune in securing an internship at Loughborough that set me up so well for my current role, the difficulty in getting experience anywhere else during and after university, and also the limited time and resources I had to work with this year.

For half of this year I ran an internship programme with six students from the undergraduate Sport and Exercise Nutrition course. Looking back I could certainly have ran this differently, and possibly had more success from both mine and the interns perspectives. Despite this, the interns contributed some very important work- including provision of support for our successful Men’s AASE Rugby Tour to South Africa, and our Women’s AASE 7s win at Rosslyn Park. Providing experience for up-and-coming nutrition students and practitioners is something that I will always look to accommodate where I can, because I know how difficult I found it to find experience.

6) I love what I do

Just as a nice summary, I’ve had a fantastic year at Hartpury that has really reaffirmed that I have made the right career choice. I consider myself extremely fortunate to be able to work with extremely high calibre athletes, coaches, and support staff, and it comes as no surprise to me the success that the various teams have had over the season. The experience has completely changed me as both a practitioner and as a person, and I hope to be able to contribute even more, to even greater success in the coming years.

For anyone that has got this far, I hope you've found this blog somewhat interesting or informative! If anyone has any questions, would like to know anything else or fancies grabbing a coffee and having a chat, please get in touch!