Happy Holidays from Pass the ASWB Exam

Happy Holidays from Pass the ASWB Exam! Here's a holiday-themed Eye on Ethics column about how to handle gifts from clients. It begins:

Raise your hand if a client has offered you a gift. That social work club has lots of members, especially this time of year. Did you accept the gift or politely refuse it because you thought accepting the gift might complicate the boundaries in your professional-client relationship?

However you handle clients gifts (in reality or on the exam), here's to a happy season. Take care. Next year, you're licensed!

Virtual Study Group

Check out PTAE's new Pinterest group board: ASWB Exam Prep. Write to join in, then post whatever you think will help people see a PASS result on the social work licensing exam. Certain material lends itself to visual learning--especially anything you can throw into a chart. That means the various developmental theories (Freud, Erikson, Piaget, etc.)...the clusters of personality disorders in the DSM...all that jazz. Also, as ever, links to helpful sites (this one, for instance).

Come for the infographics, stay for the exam passing! See you there.

Social Work Exam Practice Gets Less Expensive

The spending that it takes to get to becoming a licensed social worker can be daunting, if not downright overwhelming at times. School + fees + more fees + not getting paid much = grief. Happily, exam prep itself just got cheaper. SWTP has introduced their third ASWB practice exam, and along with it, a three-exam bundle that brings SWTP's usual per-exam price down from an already-low $35 all the way to $30. Hard to beat!

You can also put SWTP test prep on your holiday list by sharing this PayPal Gift Certificate URL with caring, cheerleading loved ones.

Happy Holidays and good luck with the exam!

Mindfulness and the Social Work Exam

Mindfulness meditation may be something you're already recommending to your clients for all kinds of symptom relief. But are you practicing mindfulness yourself? There's good reason to--not just to relieve test anxiety and the general sense of overwhelm that can hit when you're prepping for the licensing exam. See Mindfulness Can Aid in Focus and Working Memory. Mindfulness ed and practice were studied. The result:

[S]cores indicated that the mindfulness group significantly improved on both the verbal GRE test and the working memory capacity test. They also mind-wandered less during testing.

What works for the GRE should work for the ASWB exams (LCSW, LMSW, etc), right? Big, vexing, standardized tests take lots of focus, verbal skills, and working memory. So, good reason to get to it. And so what if it helps you be more calm, centered, and all that other good stuff?

Here are some free mindfulness resources on the web to get you started:

• UCLA Free Guided Meditation
• Tara Brach Guided Meditation
• Video Guided Meditation Search

Breathe, half-smile, and get licensed!  Good luck.