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Self-care: the fundamental principles
Stephen
The context
The modern world is a stressful place. Our physical and mental attributes that evolved many centuries ago were designed to deal with a very different world to the one we find ourselves in today. The Industrial Revolution saw the creation of cities and factories and a working day that never needed to stop. Electricity meant the lights were always on and if the lights were always on then the people could always be working and the owners of the ‘means of production’, the bourgeoisie, as Marx named them, could always be earning more money. No longer were we subject to the coming and going of day and night and the turning of the seasons, but rather we were chained to the wheel of capitalism. Then capitalism sold us the dream. The architects of advertising, the manufacturers of consumerism, told us that if we were working hard we could afford to buy all manner of things and in buying all manner of things we could be transformed into the best version of ourselves by surrounding ourselves with stuff that shows how successful we are. I’d argue that we are currently seeing a backlash against this with many people turning inward to find fulfilment internally through nutrition, meditation and minimalist lifestyles. Yet we still live, work and play in the world as it is.
The problem is that once you are on the treadmill it is hard to get off. The bills need to be paid; the mortgage needs to be covered. The repayments for the car need to be found so that you can get to the job that helps you pay for it. In all of that, somewhere, despite the efforts of 1960s counterculture, we lost ourselves. Our identity has become bound up in the things we have rather than the people we are. What we are has become more important than who we are. The first question we always ask at a party is ‘What do you do?’ Invariably we respond by telling the person what we do for a paid job. You probably say, ‘I’m a social worker’. Or maybe you don’t! We could respond differently, ‘I’m an adventurer at the boundaries of the capacity of my mind and body.’ But we don’t. And there it is, we are defined, with all of the baggage that goes with the label and nothing about who we are, of which ‘social worker’ is merely one part.
James et al (2019) say ‘social worker’ is very much who you are and not what you are, alluding to the pervasive, life-absorbing nature of the role. We bring ourselves and everything we are to the job. That means being professional, empathetic, sympathetic, driven, always there for people, sacrificing, giving, going the extra mile and taking one for the team. The problem is that underneath all of that giving of self we run the risk of slowly disappearing. When this happens, we slowly detach ourselves from the very people we came into the job to support. The literature on this subject has defined this as ‘compassion fatigue’. The problems and distress that you hear about and uncover become just part of the job and the risk is that you simply start to process people. The stories feel familiar, so everyone gets the same response. Such an approach, though, is not satisfying and merely compounds the problem, and compassion fatigue leads to burnout which leads to presenteeism. You are at work, but you are not really at work. You are there physically going through the motions but mentally you are detached, distant. If this continues you will burn out. Peterson (2018, p 60) makes the sobering point that not only can a lack of self-care have implications for you, but also ‘mistreatment of yourself can have catastrophic effects on others’. Failure to take steps to care for yourself and be able to adequately discharge your professional responsibilities could have an impact on you, the people who are ‘in your care’ and your family, as a direct consequence of your poor physical and mental health.
Who are social workers and where is social work happening?
Social workers undoubtedly come from a range of backgrounds and the social work role is to support a diverse range of people. The role is steeped in ambiguity and uncertainty as individuals, including you, are unique. We are right in among the ‘messy stuff’ as James et al (2019) put it. Yet despite this, social work, in local authorities at least, is organised and managed in what can be an inflexible, bureaucratic, hierarchical structure (Gibson, 2017). In contrast to this lack of flexibility, social work exists in a constantly changing environment, influenced by emerging theoretical ideas, the political ideology of the day and the nature of the ‘person-facing’ work it undertakes. It is often driven by crisis management and social problems (Deacon, 2017; Griffiths, 2017). These two realities are at odds with each other. Handy (1999) describes a ‘role’ culture that is reflective of the culture in local authorities. In a ‘role’ culture there are clear policies and guidelines, clear structures and clear lines of accountability. Role cultures are suitable in organisations that are not subject to frequent change and where there is predictability. While this may well have been the case for local authorities many years ago, it is not the case now. What is now required is openness and responsiveness rather than the traditional bureaucratic hierarchy (Hughes and Wearing, 2017). Where there is a mismatch like this between the organisational structure and culture and the needs of the wider environment in which people are asked to operate, there is a risk that employees may not thrive and may well experience stress due to competing internal and external demands. In terms of well-being, such an organisation may well have procedural responses to people’s well-being once they are unwell rather than an individualised, person-centred approach that tries to mitigate the problem before it occurs.
The social worker ‘type’
Luetchford (2015) observes that social workers are a particular ‘type’. He notes that in his time as a manager he has had to send staff home who were clearly unwell but had come to work out of a sense of duty. This may well be as a consequence of one of the very things that attracts people to social work practice: the desire to not leave people unassisted or excluded. He alludes to the fact that social workers find it hard to say ‘no’ and states that mechanisms to challenge employers are few. There is a risk here that social workers continue to accept unrealistic levels of stress as the norm and this makes them unwell. Sickness presenteeism (being at work when unwell, physically or mentally) can have both an impact on the quality of the work done by the employee and an obvious negative health consequence. Sickness absence, on the other hand, can be a time for physical and psychological recovery. The risk, however, extrapolating the idea that people are reluctant to be absent from work, is that people may not engage in dialogue about self-care as they may see this as weakness and not want to be perceived as ‘struggling’ with workload (Skagen and Collins, 2016).
The demands of the workplace
Marc and Osvat (2013) report that organisational challenges are predominantly reported as being the greatest source of stress, noting, for example, deadlines, hierarchies, insufficient time, high caseloads, excessive bureaucracy, insufficient resources and poor management as stressors. Interestingly, respondents in their research cite solutions to the problem of stress as being outside of the workplace – for example, movement therapy, family support, conversations with colleagues and friends, walks and unplanned vacations. Predominantly, people seem to construct the problem in the workplace yet solve it outside of the workplace. This seems to suggest that employees do not see their employers as having a role in mitigating the risks of work-related stress. This is reflective of the neoliberal agenda that seeks to place self-governance outside of the state and individualise responsibility for well-being (Crawshaw, 2012). But maybe this is the way it is. There is an inherent reality in this about how much an employer can actually do when self-care does indeed need to be initiated at an individual level. The answer is possibly a two-pronged attack, with employers raising awareness of self-care and mitigating some of the stressors as far as is possible, while people commit to taking personal responsibility for being organised, and for their own nutrition, exercise and sleep.
Reflective task
What type of social worker are you?
What is the culture of the organisation you work in?
What are the workplace demands that create stress for you?
What do you do at work to mitigate the stress you feel?
What do you do outside of work to mitigate the stress you feel?
Leadership
Sánchez-Moreno et al (2015) report that, alongside other factors, structures within social work organisations and the organisational environment, lack of clarity in role and lack of supervision are determinants in relation to burnout. This seems to be reflective of the tension between organisational culture and the requirements of the task environment. In order to adequately explore the impact of the workplace, a critical perspective is required which will ensure an understanding that reflects the employee’s position so that real attempts can be made to find solutions.
Leadership style is important in achieving an understanding of the employee’s position. Echoing the practice development ethos of person-centredness, a leader should make decisions in collaboration, and motivate and lead by example. This ensures a sharing of decision-making power and ultimately a sharing of responsibility (Heyns et al, 2017). In relation to well-being this is essential as many of the solutions to promoting well-being can be counter-intuitive or go against organisational culture. Levitin (2015) observes that ‘the companies that are winning the productivity battle are those that allow their employees productivity hours, naps, a chance for exercise, and a calm, tranquil, orderly environment in which to do their work’ (Levitin, 2015, p 307). This goes against the ‘lunch at your desk’ philosophy that permeates many social work teams. Davidson (2015) reported in The Telegraph research from BUPA that stated that two thirds of British workers are not even able to stop for 20 minutes for lunch. This has an impact on well-being and productivity as we shall see later. Ultimately, self-care needs to be a joint responsibility.
A word of caution
I want to proceed with caution here but need to state clearly what I have already alluded to. It is not appropriate to place the onus to solve all of social work’s ills on the individual. There are clearly ideological, funding and organisational issues at play that are also worthy of investigation and transformation. It is apparent that social care resources and social work practice are underfunded, and it is felt by many that caseloads are too high. My concern, however, is that social work has created and is perpetuating a narrative that says that front-line social workers can do nothing about this. This is not true. There is a need to keep making our voices heard through our regulator and through the ballot box, but in the meantime, how do we keep ourselves well? That is the purpose of this book. We do not propose that the tools and ideas we present are a panacea for all of the problems in the profession but we do strongly feel that they have the potential to transform how we feel about ourselves and the work we do so that we can maintain a level of well-being.
Karen Healy (2014), drawing on Foucault’s writings on power, is clear. Power is everywhere, is productive, and is exercised rather than possessed. This means the power to change the ‘whole’ position we find ourselves in can be exercised through the power we find in ourselves to change and think differently. She talks about power needing to be analysed from the bottom up. Where is your power? It is unlikely you can change the onslaught of caseloads, court of protection reports and multi-disciplinary meetings, in the short term at least. But maybe you change how you approach them, how you plan for them and what you do in terms of your self-care to ensure you are as ready for them, physically, mentally and emotionally, as you can be.
We are a part of the whole
The reality is we are a part of the organisation in which the social work we do takes place. Being part of it and knowing how it functions is an important aspect in what we need to do. Hughes and Wearing (2017, p 80) observe that social workers need to be ‘competent, strategic and ethical organisational operators’, so therefore need to be an active part of the organisation and understand it. I feel that sometimes some social workers take up an anti-organisation stance. The problem with this is that it creates an environment in which hostility can breed. While conflict, in the broadest terms, is an inevitable part of any relationship, it should drive consensus rather than produce a stand-off. Having a negative attitude to work saps your psychological well-being, generates stress and demotivates. This then restricts your productivity. Netting et al (1993, p 123) state that ‘social workers with little or no idea of how organisations operate, or how they are influenced and changed by both outside and inside are likely to be severely limited in their effectiveness’. Or, put simply, you need to know how to work as part of the system with all of its flaws in order to be productive. You need to work with it and challenge it to change rather than be in conflict with it.
Emotional labour
The emotional labour that social work is comes with inevitable tensions. Organisational strategies and the reality of limited resources often feel in stark contrast to social work values and this can have a strong demotivating effect. It seems to be a fact that there has to be some level of acceptance of the bureaucracy that is inevitable in large organisations. We have seen above that the things social workers report as being stressful are the bureaucratic elements. Hughes and Wearing (2017) describe the stress in organisations as resulting from the intensification of work and I’m sure that anyone working in social work can attest to this. Does this intensification come from the face-to-face work or from the paperwork? The answer I hear most is it is the latter.
Providing professional social work support in such an environment can still remain a significantly rewarding profession. It does involve dealing with, and often trying to change, people’s emotional responses to situations that are frequently born out of trauma. Such work clearly does come at an emotional cost to the practitioner (Adams et al, 2006). This emotional component can easily manifest itself as stress, which can be acute (short term) or chronic (long term). The impact of the emotional nature of the role is compounded by workplace demands like case conferences, report writing and tight deadlines as well as stressors of everyday personal life that can seriously impact on the practitioner’s overall well-being and performance (Grant et al, 2014). There is a relationship between work life and personal life.
The focus on the well-being of you as a practitioner is important given the emotional cost of practice (Adams et al, 2006). This cost has the potential for both short-term and long-term stress leading to illness, absence from work and people leaving the profession. The Health and Care Professions Council (2016) reported an increase in turnover of social work staff from 12 per cent in 2014 to 16 per cent in 2016 with vacancy rates up from 3 per cent to 11 per cent in the same period. As Sánchez-Moreno et al (2015) point out, social workers are an ‘at risk’ group when it comes to work-based stress as a consequence of the complex nature of their role and exposure to the distress they often witness.
Stress
Professional work is demanding, and stress is not in essence wholly negative. The Guardian (2019) has recently reported that research shows that stress can improve resilience. When we encounter some pressure, we are motivated to meet the challenge of the circumstances in front of us. It is when we become overwhelmed and our usual coping strategies have run out that we become stressed and ultimately distressed. This has significant connotations for our emotional, mental and physical well-being (Grant and Kinman, 2014) as it would appear the avoidance of stress is also not wholly positive and can lead to inertia. A balance is required. Some of the problems associated with stress can be mitigated through positive self-care and indeed resilience is felt to be something that can be developed and can positively influence physical and mental health (Stacey et al, 2017).
While the people we work for do have a responsibility for our well-being, self-management is also key. Grafton and Coyne (2012) tell us that what does us harm is not the stress itself but our response to it. So, we have to take some responsibility for ourselves. Often in the caring professions we are so busy helping others that we neglect self-care and then are not able to fully engage in the day (Bent-Goodley, 2018). We need to step back and think about what we are doing to ourselves and consider seriously how better to care for ourselves and encourage an ‘attitude and practice of having compassion for oneself’ (Iacono, 2017, p 454) rather than saving it all for others.
A balanced life
It can be difficult when feeling stressed to compartmentalise the impact of work-based stress and personal life stress to figure out where the stressor lies, as each can have an impact on the other. That’s why what we propose in this book is a whole-life approach to well-being and self-care. The separation of ‘work’ and ‘life’ is socially constructed and unhelpful in terms of well-being. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi states:
Once we realize that the boundaries between work and play are artificial, we can take matters in hand and begin the difficult task of making life more liveable.
(Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p 190)
It is true that in order to establish and maintain well-being we need balance. As you will see through this book, how we balance the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of our life is important as they all interact and have an impact on each other. To try to separate these aspects into things that happen during ‘work’ and things that happen during ‘life’ is artificial and misses the point of how connected all of the things in our lives are. The term work–life balance is a fairly recent one. It didn’t really appear in our vocabulary until the 1980s and coincided with an increase in women joining the workforce in large numbers. Work–life balance was then about how women balanced their traditional role in the home with their new role at work. It took men a little longer to catch on to this idea (it usually does!) and it wasn’t until the 1990s that men started talking in these terms. A study of the top 100 newspapers and magazines showed a paltry 32 mentions between 1986 and 1996, rising to a high of 1,674 mentions in 2007. The idea had become firmly rooted in our language (Keller and Papasan, 2014), but it is not a wholly helpful concept.
The problem with the concept of work–life balance is it creates an artificial separation and promotes a psychology of work being the thing to get done and out of the way so that you can get at this thing called ‘life’. This leads to a resentment of work and a desire to not be there. But, as Cannon (2018) says, what we do as a job is a significant part of our lives and provides a sense of achievement, success and pride. It gives us status socially and economically and can promote our self-esteem. The job is more than just a job for lots of us and that is particularly true for social workers and other ‘people’ professions. James et al (2019, p 44) make this notable point, saying that if you find that being a social worker ‘stops for you at 5.30 p.m., then you need to have a good old social work self-reflection session and if it still stops for you at 5.30 p.m., then perhaps it never started at 9 a.m. in the first place’. What I don’t feel they are saying here is that you should be writing up case notes or court reports at 10pm every night or have a life dominated by work tasks. What they are saying, I’d suggest, is that a profession such as social work is all consuming. It is, as mentioned earlier, who you are not what you are. This means you may well find yourself thinking about, reading about and possibly doing social work outside of the usual office hours. This is fine – but it has to be a healthy balance and not to the detriment of your overall well-being. But, and here’s the point, a well-managed professional life and a well-managed personal life can exist harmoniously.
Why not think about a balanced life differently? I look at life like this. There are some things I do that I get paid for. There are some things I do that I don’t get paid for but still do because I enjoy doing them, and there are things I do to recover from the ‘doing’. These three aspects are all important and it is these three aspects I need to balance. I need to get paid for some things as I live in a society where we exchange our time for money and money for things we need. I also do things I don’t get paid for that are about self-development or self-worth, or to support others. I then have to recover from doing all of that. The idea is to live a balanced life not to balance work and life with each other, as what often happens is that they are balanced against each other. When you are working with a family and achieve a great outcome, or when you finish that difficult report you had to write, and you are proud of what you have done – does that not feel like ‘life’? When you are at home and you are doing the ironing, or folding the socks, does that not feel like work? The elements of life that we call ‘work’ exist whether we are in the office or at home and the elements of life that we call ‘life’, those joyous, pleasurable moments of an outcome achieved or a task complete, exist both in the office and in the home. Or they should.
Reflective task
What do you do that you get paid for?
What do you enjoy about what you get paid for?
What do you not enjoy about what you get paid for?
What do you do that you don’t get paid for?
What do you enjoy about what you do that you don’t get paid for?
What do you not enjoy about what you do that you don’t get paid for?
What do you do to rest and recuperate?
What do you enjoy about what you do to rest and recuperate?
What gets in the way of enjoying your rest and recuperation?
In an average week, what percentage of your time do you devote to these three areas?
Developing flow
Csikszentmihalyi (2002, p 3) notes that ‘the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile’. This requires a state of ‘flow’ where the person is engaged in the task to the exclusion of all other tasks so that nothing else seems to matter. If we accept that work–life balance as it is traditionally constructed isn’t what we are trying to achieve, then Csikszentmihalyi suggests that in order to free ourselves from the psychological binds the idea creates we must find reward in each moment. If we gain pleasure and satisfaction from the ongoing stream of our lives, then ‘the burden of social controls automatically falls from our shoulders’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 2002, p 19). We are living a rich life in every moment of it. This ‘flow’ comes from being absorbed in the moment whatever we are doing to the exclusion of other things that are trying to draw our attention. This relies on having a trusted system that contains everything that is in our sphere of responsibility so that we are not burdening ourselves worrying about ‘next things’ but rather we are engrossed in the current thing. The trusted system is something we can return to when we are finished with one moment to see what needs to be done in the next. I talk about this in Chapter 7.
Self-determination theory
Self-determination theory, developed by Deci and Ryan (Pink, 2009), suggests we have three innate psychological needs that drive our satisfaction in the things we do. They are competence (or mastery), autonomy and relatedness. They suggest that when we cannot satisfy these needs our productivity, motivation and therefore our happiness reduce. There is a direct link between being productive and our happiness. We delight in a job done that motivates us on to the next job. This is because our desire to be self-determining and autonomous is innate. Being in control motivates us. We need to create conditions where we are able to learn about what is around us and be in a position psychologically to engage with it. This will promote our competence. We need conditions where we are able to make decisions for ourselves. For social workers this maybe isn’t about next steps with service users, as that may often need some form of authorisation, but rather it’s about being autonomous in how we do what we do. It is about how we do the job to get to the point where someone has to agree a decision. That is the bit we can be autonomous in. I’d argue that social work is a job that has the potential to afford its workforce a great deal of autonomy if we would stop tying practitioners up in bureaucracy. Finally, the job is all about relatedness, or should be. How we relate to service users, our colleagues and other professionals is crucial to getting the job right. So social work has the potential to fit with our innate drives and promote a healthy, happy workforce. The question of why it often doesn’t is cause for concern. That undoubtedly warrants further exploration and research. For us here, in this book, we are going to think about what helps us stay well and helps us focus on what there is to do, no matter what the circumstances.
Resilience
Resilience is multi-faceted. The importance of emotional resilience cannot be overestimated (Grant and Kinman, 2014). But the importance of physical resilience also cannot be overestimated, given the apparent impact of exercise and nutrition on productivity. Social workers, in fact all professionals, also need resilient ‘being organised’ systems to ensure they are organisationally resilient on a practical level, especially given the information and knowledge work that social workers engage in. We need to take care of all three elements – our physical resilience, our practical resilience and our emotional resilience – in order to stay well and be productive.
Emotional resilience
The risk of not being able to manage your own emotions while you work professionally with the emotions of others is that this can be an antecedent to personal ill health, both physical and mental, as we shall see throughout the book. It also leads to compassion fatigue, an indifference to the suffering or problems of others. Being in an emotionally demanding job can lead to a stress response which in turn can lead to ‘burnout’, outlined by Kinman et al (2014) as emotional exhaustion, a cynical outlook and a decline in personal accomplishments. This has an inevitable impact on productivity and how you relate to your clients. Ingram (2015) points out that reflection and support are key to building emotional resilience. Such support could be through quality supervision that moves beyond ‘what next’ case discussion and explores practitioners’ emotions as a response to what they have observed in practice. He also notes though that we shouldn’t simply dwell on negative emotions but should also explore positive emotions as they celebrate the profession and fuel a sense of role and identity. Consideration of emotions helps people reconnect with intrinsic motivators that initially drove their desire to study social work and should continue to drive them in post-qualifying practice. Throughout the coming chapters we shall see how all manner of things impact on our emotional well-being.
Physical resilience
Cannon (2018) states that to promote greater capacity to cope with stress we need to include exercise and relaxation into weekly lifestyle routines. Exercise has positive stress-busting effects, as we shall see in Chapter 4, and relaxation allows for recuperation. Chatterjee (2018, p 152) observes that engaging in exercise should be straightforward, pointing out that ‘the world is your gym’. All too often, people are locked into a view of exercise that emerged with the keep-fit craze of the 1980s and that sits engagement in exercise outside of usual day-to-day life and as something set apart to be done in special clothes in special places. This immediately places obstacles in the way of people and leads to inaction. ‘I need a gym membership’, ‘I need to book a class’, ‘I need the latest training shoes.’ This is not the case. Physical exercise needs to be a part of routine life. Simple changes have big effects. In Chapter 4, we’ll talk about the significant benefits of a 20-minute lunchtime walk.
The other part of physical resilience is nutrition. From Hippocrates in ancient Greece, who reportedly felt food was medicine, to Gillian McKeith, nutritionist and TV show host in the 1990s, we have been told that we are what we eat! Increasingly this is being shown to be true, with very recent research supporting the idea that the gut biome – the bacteria in our gut – plays an important role in moderating mood. Enders (2015) even goes as far as to suggest that our construction of our idea of ‘self’ is determined by the brain drawing on information and feelings from every part of the body including the gut. This brings the impact of physical ‘feelings’ into the creation of self – you are what you feel as a consequence of what you eat. We will explore some of this in Chapter 3.
Practical resilience
We work in a complex environment full of information that needs to be controlled so that we know what to do with it. We inhabit a working world where the idea of ever being ‘caught up’ is probably unrealistic and which therefore demands we know what there is to do so that we can figure out what it is we should do next. We also need to control those uncompleted tasks. We need systems that support us in the ‘doing’ and ‘remembering’ as there’s too much to handle in our brain alone. Allen (2015) says that we cannot ‘plan’ and ‘do’ at the same time. We need a space to take stock followed by a period of activity. Heylighen and Vidal (2007) note that by unburdening memory into a trusted system that prompts you to take action, anxiety, and therefore stress, can be reduced. Taking a consistent approach to figure out what there is to do and then to plan doing it can indeed create the sense of ‘flow’ that Csikszentmihalyi (2002) considers as being essential for control, focus and well-being. This is in contrast to the world that we can all inhabit at times of information overload that leads to confusion and anxiety that in turn leads to procrastination that in turn leads to more anxiety (Heylighen and Vidal, 2007). This is a self-fuelling loop that saps our psychological capacity to ‘do’. We need a plan. A good day starts the previous day, a good week, the previous week, and a good month, the previous month. In Chapter 7 we’ll explore this.
What is self-care?
It is not by chance that we find ourselves at this time in human history talking about and being interested in well-being. Advances in neuroscience, together with psychology’s increasing interest in the positive aspects of mental health, rather than solely the negative, have led to increased research into the relationship between physical and mental health and well-being (Webb, 2017). The importance of maintaining practitioner well-being cannot be overestimated, as stress, as we have seen, can lead to a lack of interest or empathy with the service user’s position – compassion fatigue, burnout, self-doubt and interpersonal conflict in the workplace (Adams et al, 2006; Graham and Shier, 2014). Social work regulators demand of their registrants an understanding of maintenance of health and well-being, the ability to manage the physical and emotional impact of practice and identify and apply strategies to build professional resilience. This surely has to be undertaken within a partnership between the employer and the employee?
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:
When things break down, what has been ignored rushes in. When things are no longer specified, with precision, the walls crumble, and chaos makes its presence known. When we’ve been careless, and let things slide, what we have refused to attend to gathers itself up, adopts a serpentine form, and strikes – often at the worst possible moment.
(Peterson, 2018, p 266)
Self-care is engaging in a combination of activities that promote our well-being, give us a sense of order and control and give us the psychological and physical capacity to respond positively to life. The chapters of this book will help us explore the important elements that define our self-care canon.
Reflective task
What do you do to self-care?
When you think about this question, think about the things that you use to self-care that might be positive (for example, going for a walk) and negative (for example, drinking alcohol). Make two columns.
Think about the positive and negative impact on your well-being of the things in both columns.
the key elements of self-care
There are three key elements to self-care that influence our resilience and productivity. They are sleep, exercise and nutrition. All have a chapter in the book. Sleep is deliberately at the bottom of the triangle (see diagram on page 149) as it is the foundation that all self-care starts from. In order to engage in these self-care elements, we need to ‘be organised’. This being organised stretches across our whole lives, including the things we get paid to do, the things we do but don’t get paid for and our recuperation. We need to think of all of these elements holistically as they all impact on each other. When we are tired, we are less likely to be motivated to exercise. When we have an afternoon slump we reach for sugary snacks. When we eat badly, or late at night, we don’t sleep well. If we aren’t organised, we feel stressed and our body reacts by producing cortisol and adrenaline. If we don’t exercise, we don’t ‘burn’ these chemicals up that were produced to prepare us for ‘fight or flight’. If we don’t sleep well, we can’t muster the energy to make plans and be organised. And on it goes in a co-dependent cycle. We need to break negative cycles and produce positive ones. We need to understand that what we eat, how we sleep, the exercise we take and being organised all have the potential to prepare us for productive lives lived to the full. Peterson puts it eloquently when he says ‘the body, with its various parts, needs to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue’ (Peterson, 2018, p 18).
Having ‘agency’ is having a sense that you are causing, through deliberate action, the things that go on around you. This gives you a sense of control. It is the opposite to feeling helpless. Even if you do feel helpless in some areas there are still things you can have agency over (Hanson, 2018). When your options are very limited, look for the little things you can do, and focus on the feeling of agency regarding them. Build on that. But start to build. I hope in this book we will give you actionable things so you feel you can have some agency over the work you do and the care you take of yourself. That’s what we want to achieve. There is a ‘healthy worker effect’ whereby people who are more robust stay in stressful jobs for longer (Grant and Kinman, 2014, p 21). Social work, as a consequence of its person-facing nature, is stressful. You didn’t study and qualify to be in this profession just to let the job take so much from you that you leave it. We want to help you create a robust and resilient ‘you’ so that you can enjoy the things you get paid to do, enjoy the things you do just because you love doing them, and delight in the things you do to rest and recharge.
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