Today, I create new ways of using psychology to help people, including Attention Maps™ — a new framework for understanding and navigating attention. I like finding different ways of looking at problems and turning good psychological research into something people can actually use.

Let me take you back to when I was starting out as a psychologist. I didn't always feel like I fitted in, and I suspect quite a lot of people know that feeling.

One manager asked me to compare myself with a colleague and work out how I could become more like her. As you can probably imagine, I wasn't getting great performance reviews from them!

The thing was, my colleague was great at some things I wasn't. But I was good at things she wasn't too — I could communicate, train people, think flexibly and see possibilities.

Yet somehow the conversation had become about closing the gap between me and her, rather than asking what each of us brought.

I wasn't getting much development either. So I made a decision: I stopped waiting for someone else to decide what development should look like for me and started finding it for myself.

I volunteered, joined professional committees, took on extra work and paid for courses myself when there were things I wanted to learn. I also built relationships with people outside my immediate team who saw different things in me and gave me opportunities to develop them.

Those things added up. Volunteering took me from organising Psychology in the Pub to eventually chairing the BPS Division of Occupational Psychology, while relationships I'd built continued long after particular jobs ended.

Being interested in people, treating them well and doing good work mattered too. Our paths crossed again and new opportunities appeared in places I couldn't possibly have planned for.

I wasn't becoming more like my colleague. I was finding out what I could become by developing more of what I brought, rather than concentrating only on what I didn't.

That way of thinking developed further when I started working in neurodiversity. It was also around this time that I discovered my own neurodivergence — colleagues were apparently finding me quite useful as a benchmark for dyspraxia!

And, to be fair, it explained a few things about being the less organised, less detail-focused member of the team. It might also explain one spectacular fall during a “walk and talk”. Our route involved walking down a set of steps, across the length of a room and then back up another set of steps. I fell down the first lot.

My spectacular fall led to a spectacular spend when my employer created a flat route instead. A rather expensive demonstration of something I've come to believe about psychology: sometimes the answer isn't fixing the person. Sometimes you change the environment.

But the more people I worked with, the less interested I became in neat patterns. People who looked similar on paper could think, behave and experience the world very differently; their strengths, personalities, interests, experiences and surroundings all mattered.

It made me wonder how often we create one route to success and then try to make everyone follow it. Even our bucket lists can start to look suspiciously similar — are these really the things we want to do, or have we just copied someone else's idea of a life well lived?

Personally, I am not going skydiving, but scuba diving? Absolutely. Different people notice different things, enjoy different things and bring different strengths — and surely that's part of the point.

Put those differences together and we get something much more interesting than everyone trying to live, work and succeed in the same way.

There was something else I cared about. Psychology can have brilliant things to say about people's lives, but that's not much use if nobody understands it — or we've bored them before we get to the useful bit.

Remember Psychology in the Pub? We covered everything from memory to swearing and dance: proper psychology, but in a setting where people could enjoy it too.

I've continued doing that in different ways, including speaking at PsyPub and joining media producers to talk about psychology and television. I've also spoken following a cinema screening of Lee, drawing on my experience at the BBC supporting people bringing difficult stories from wars and conflicts to audiences, including those working behind the scenes in the UK.

Different subjects and different settings, but the idea is the same. If we want psychology to make a difference, being right isn't enough — we need to communicate in ways that help people understand, engage and want to know more.

I've shaped my practice around understanding different perspectives and contexts. I've worked with police officers, firefighters, prison officers, journalists and many others — and I've learned that what works for me may not work for them.

Journalists often love words and writing. Plenty of firefighters and prison officers chose careers where sitting down and writing about things wasn't exactly the attraction.

We notice different things, deal with things differently and even find different things stressful. That's not a problem to fix — those different perspectives are valid, and they should shape the psychology we use.

One of my BBC colleagues was ex-military, and we had a very sensible division of labour. She'd deal with the riot; I'd write the analysis and report afterwards. We both knew where our strengths lay — our own Elton John-Bernie Taupin dream team!

Over time, I realised this wasn't just how I preferred to work. It was the kind of psychology I wanted to practise: curious about difference, shaped around people's real contexts and communicated in ways people actually want to engage with.

That's why I created Your Chief Psychologist. We create new psychological models and experiences that start with the person, understand their context and adapt the psychology rather than expecting everyone to respond in the same way.

I still believe in development — very strongly. But I think we can accept ourselves as the slightly messy people we are and still want to grow.

Trying to become somebody else's version of good made me feel lesser, inadequate and pretty miserable. These days, I'm much more interested in asking: Where am I struggling? What do I actually want to change? And what might help?

Because if we try to be great like someone else, we'll always be second rate at being them. But we can be a first-class version of who we are.

And there's another part of me that I've learned not to edit out. I work hard. I play hard. And I believe in serious fun. High standards and enjoyment aren't opposites. Neither are psychological rigour and creativity.

That's really what Your Chief Psychologist is about: good psychology, individual difference, high standards, curiosity and serious fun. Helping people understand themselves, grow in ways that matter to them — and perhaps enjoy the process a little more too.