On The Internet! Take the Self Improvement Tour
Malcolm Payne PhD BA DipSS
Malcolm Payne Quick Facts
Main Areas: End-of-life care, self-positioning, social workBest Sellers: Self-positioning, humanistic social work, social work in end-of-life and palliative care
Career Focus: Writer, speaker, policy blogger, educator, social work practitioner
Affiliation: St Christopher's Hospice, Opole University, Kingston University, Helsinki University
Self-positioning is a process of thinking through your position in your life history and in relation to the people around you - family, friends and community. Stimuli such as pictures and gentle self-evaluation generate self-reflection, and facilitate engagement with others. It's good when making a life change: starting a course, changing relationships, retirement, a crisis in your life. It's yours to take control of and allow you to take control of your life. I've been working on this in education and helping practice for many years.
End-of-life care is planning in advance for the human experience of approaching the end of your life, or the end-of-life being experienced by someone close to you. There are practicalities and personal and social tasks to complete. You make the choices - with concern and love for others around you. This has been the main focus of my practice for the last eight years.
Policy comes from governments, big organisations and affects you. It means that people in organisations and social structures plan and act consistently to pursue their objectives. Perhaps their aims are not yours, but where you want to go gets mixed up with their acts. How can you influence policy? How can you participate? How can you meet your needs when policy is against you? I have worked on policy on social affairs for the whole of my adult life.
Humanistic social work claims that core ideas in social work come from the humanism that believes that human minds and skills can overcome any problem, humanistic psychologies and psychotherapies that build the capacity to live with others on our understanding of our selves and commitment to human rights. It has been central to my practice, but I have recently begun to explore and clarify my thoughts.
Favorite Quotes & Thoughts from Malcolm Payne
Loving well takes you to a beautiful place and loving long is a melody playing through your life. - Malcolm Payne
Getting Started With Malcolm Payne
On self-positioning, you can get a daily feed of a picture, some gentle self-reflective questions and some thoughts: http://self-positioning.tumblr.com/
On end-of-life care and various aspects of social work, read my regularly updated blogs:
Social work and end-of-life care (http://sweol.wordpress.com/), Greyamble, on social work and care for older people (http://greyamble.blogspot.co.uk/) Social work around the world (http://intsw.blogspot.co.uk/) and Big Society, social and community work (http://bigsoccommsw.blogspot.co.uk/).
