How to Thrive in Professional Practice
Описание книги
The world today is fast paced and societal expectations for impeccable service are high. This leaves organisations demanding unrealistic elitist performance from their staff with the same, and often fewer, resources available. This widespread ‘more for less’ attitude is seeing a dramatic rise in work related stress, with a high ratio of staff sickness, that not only creates a fiscal impact upon the organisation and the broader economy but also has the potential to create significant long term mental health issues for the staff affected. An engaging yet undemanding read, this book pulls together the various individual strains of self-care, spirituality and common sense, housing them under one external literary jacket, in a ‘whole system’ approach. A one stop ‘bible’ to give social workers and other professionals an uncomplicated, easy to read, go to resource that empowers them to manage and maintain their wellbeing through personal responsibility and self-care. We cannot alter professional, or indeed life’s demands, but by actively pursuing well-being in the professional population we can enhance skills to support open discussion in supervision, (or in personal reflection) so that individuals, (and organisations) can successfully rise up to meet challenges head on and reduce the risks associated with ‘burn out’. This book brings together different aspects of the four elements of wellbeing, which the authors have explored and tried for themselves within their own working lives. Their personal experiences, which they will share, will help to dispel the belief that everything has to be done to perfection. A little self-care on each of the four levels is better than none at all.
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Meet the authors
Acknowledgements
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There is an important relationship between environmental, organisational and individual factors when considering the well-being of social work practitioners and exploring how they self-care to enhance resilience (Antonopoulou et al, 2017). Resilience, well-being promoted through self-care, and the activities engaged in to promote these things are personally defined (Graham and Shier, 2014) and initiated but there also needs to be a person-centred approach to supporting people in the workplace. Organisational change may be required to create the appropriate environment. This has been demonstrated in companies which have a keen focus on productivity and includes such things as opportunities for exercise, meditation and even naps (Levitin, 2015). As in social work practice, the voice of the individual needs to be the starting point.
Self-care is ‘the practice of activities that individuals initiate and perform on their own behalf to maintain life, health, and well-being’ (Grafton and Coyne, 2012, p 17). Such activities need to be driven by internal motivation. Self-care is firstly about attending to ourselves. By attending to ourselves we create inner order. Secondly, we need to attend to the things that are in our sphere of responsibility. These will be things that need planning and organising and then doing. By attending to these things, we create order in our sphere of responsibility. Finally, we can decide what we let into our sphere of responsibility from the chaos outside of it. Where we can’t control some of the chaos infiltrating our order, we need to develop a mind like water (Allen, 2015). When a rock is thrown into a perfectly still pond it creates ripples. Eventually the pond ‘controls’ the ripples as the stone settles on the bottom of the pond and the pond becomes perfectly still again. This is what we are trying to achieve in our lives. When something is thrown at us, we take it and order it, returning to a calm state after a period of activity to get it under control. Jordan Peterson puts it more beautifully:
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