Are You Congruent?

All right, let's talk about whether you're being genuinely congruent with your patients. This is the third of the three core conditions that Carl Rogers talked about with person centered theory, the precursor of patient centered care. And it's one of the three things I think is missing from a lot of healthcare. And it's why we're getting this wrong. And we're thinking that being patient centered is just being nice and adapting treatment to the patient, which is part of it, but not enough. So we already talked about genuine therapeutic empathy. We. We talked about unconditional positive regard in previous videos. This third concept is congruence. And it's not what a lot of the vitalistic practitioners mean in this context. It's something different. Congruence essentially is, is there alignment, if you'll forgive the pun, between who you are and who you're showing up with and who you're showing up as. Sorry. So are you genuinely being, you know, the true version of yourself now? We get a lot of this wrong in practice partly because we give graduates this idea of fake it till you make it. And, you know, initially you should pretend you're confident until you are. And that makes some sense. You know, I. When I started in practice, I essentially put a mask on, and it was this competent, professional mask. And Chris, who knows what he's doing, because underneath the mask, it was panicked. Chris doesn't really know what's going on. The problem is the mask often sticks around. And I was wearing that mask for a number of years, and then I realized, well, I don't want to be doing this. You know, I was peeking out behind the mask a bit more as I got to know patients, I might drop it a little bit, but there was this disconnect between mask on and mask off. So I thought, forget the mask. You know, I know what I'm doing. I'll just be myself. And that worked for some patients, it didn't work for others. I actually lost some patients because me just being my natural self, not modifying who I am for different people, is not everyone's cup of tea. And I realized with both of these things, the problem was neither of them were patient centered. And the reason for that is I was modifying my behavior or choosing not to modify my behavior because of how I wanted to feel, because of how I wanted the interaction to go. So I was doing it based on my own feelings. I wasn't doing it based on the patients. And that's what genuine congruence is about, because you can be genuinely congruent. And authentic with a patient, but you may still behave differently with one versus another. And the social styles model is a really, really useful way of doing this. So, you know, I think of this a lot like clothing. Like, if I go to a funeral, I'm gonna dress differently to if I'm going to a party, you know, if I'm going to a friend's 40th, I'm gonna dress differently to a fancy dress or a Halloween party. If I go and just hang out with my brother down the pub, I will dress differently to if I'm going to dinner with my in laws. They're all different things that all of them. I'm being the real me. I'm not faking who I am, but I'm dressing appropriate.