Kindness is the Antidote to Burnout (Part 2)
The antidote to burnout, if released in individuals, organisations and societies is kindness.
Where Kindness Flourishes And Flows Burnout Will Not Occur.
Burnout isn’t an individual problem; rather it is caused by a complex interaction between workplace conditions, individual preferences and characteristics, and societal expectations.
Effective prevention needs to address all these layers. Workplace well-being programmes that focus solely on the individual will remain largely ineffective in preventing burnout because they are only addressing one layer of the problem. It is a bit like making a diary free trifle by changing the custard type but neglecting to substitute the cream on top.
Once we start digging into the layers and interactions required for a comprehensive burnout prevention strategy it can become overwhelmingly complex. This is where kindness is so powerful. Kindness is a foundational attitude that can cut through this complexity.
The Strength Of Kindness
Kindness at work is not simply being nice, soft or trying to make everyone happy. Kindness has strength, It doesn’t shy away from honesty, discomfort or hard conversations. Kindness is a sense of warmth and care towards others well-being, it involves considering other people’s perspectives, connecting meaningfully with them and making space for our own and others feelings. Kindness is a blend of attitudes, motivations, feelings and actions.
As an example my physiotherapist is warm and kind, but to treat my frozen shoulder effectively he needs to stretch my frozen muscles, creating a little pain to restore movement. He observes carefully, assessing how much I can handle, using his expertise to guide each stretch, and he offers reassurance through his tone. Sometimes pushing until it hurts is the kindest thing to do, but it can be done with warmth and compassion.
Pro-Sociality In The Workplace
In psychology kindness is part of the theory of “pro-sociality.” Pro-sociality “refers to a broad set of behavioral, motivational, cognitive, affective, and social processes that contribute to, and/or are focused on, the welfare of others” (Hart & Hart, 2023). Pro-sociality includes the study of a diverse range of motivations and behaviour such as why people volunteer, empathy, sympathy, social support and financial donating.
An organisation that has kindness as its foundational value will intentionally create a culture where kindness permeates all levels and corners of an organisation. This is a bit like how the layers of a trifle eventually drip through to the next layer down. So conditions are created in which people can flourish rather than burnout. A kind organisation will strive to develop kind individuals, foster kind interactions, promotes kind leadership, and establishes systems, and structures that support kindness. This foundational framework of kindness within a workplace is then free to flow outward, enhancing client and service-user experiences.
Kind People
In healthcare and social services, staff are generally orientated towards care and kindness. But for these individuals to flourish at work they need to be treated with care and kindness. They need leadership that recognises and supports the emotional complexity of their work and deeply understands the impact of their connection to other’ suffering. Kind staff expect a safe place to express their emotions and to show up authentically with whatever they are carrying from the challenges of their work.
Kind people often need support and training to turn their kindness towards themselves. Their drive to care can lead to self-sacrifice, so they benefit from a solid framework of self-care, self-awareness, and clear boundaries to protect their well-being. Self-kindness is a vital antidote to the weight of their own expectations, which can be a significant source of stress in many in the helping professions.
Kind Interactions
Kindness is expressed in the space between people, whether they’re colleagues or managers and their teams, or a group of senior leaders. Kind workplaces recognise that relationships are essential for both employee well-being and effective work. They allow time and space for interacting, connecting and befriending seeing it as a vital part of employees working life. Kind organisations encourage and support staff to tend to their own stress, understanding that stress can be a source of unkind interactions. They can support kind interactions by providing training and coaching in communication, positive interactions, repairing minor grievances, conflict resolution, diversity and self-awareness. These skills can no longer be taken for granted but must be actively and intentionally cultivated.
Kind Leadership
Kind people and kind interactions need the support of kind leadership. I am convinced that to create a flow of kindness that sustains and protects staff, this flow must start at the governance level and extend throughout the organisation. Imagine if every leader in your organisation committed to creating a kind, healthy workplace that actively prevents burnout. Kind leaders understand that burnout prevention starts with eliminating the conditions that foster it, such as unrealistic workloads and unclear role expectations. This must of course include for the senior leaders themselves who are often facing unmanageable or unachievable workloads. Leader workloads are often exacerbated by the way that leaders tend to have high standards and a deep desire to do an excellent job. Leaders need just as much support as their staff if they’re to lead with kindness.
Staff now expect their leaders to be empathetic and trustworthy, and to support their career growth and well-being. Kindness can be thought of as a bit soft, and misinterpreted as going easy on people or being unfailingly positive. Kindness is not that fluffy. Honesty, integrity and being invested in peoples growth are all part of being a kind leader. This means that having high standards, having boundaries, providing discpline or feedback are all part of kind leadership.
Yet training and support for leaders to develop their human or soft skills and to balance empathy and kindness with clear boundaries and honest feedback are often lacking.
One of the sources of stress for middle managers and team leaders is being caught caught in between competing demands. On one hand they’re pressured by senior management to ensure high-quality service despite fewer resources, and on the other they’re expected to support their team’s well-being. Burnout is not just an issue for frontline staff. A report from DDI earlier this year reported that 72% of leaders often feel used up at the end of the day. They also discovered that leaders were deeply concerned about burnout on their teams but only 15% felt prepared to prevent employee burnout.
Kind Systems
Kind people, kind interactions and kind leadership are supported by kind systems. Organisations aren’t entities in themselves even though we talk about them that way, they’re made of people. These people are often following rules, regulations and guidelines that constrain their value based decision making. A kind organisation has clearly articulated values that are overtly expressed in behaviour. Values go beyond posters on the wall; they’re “live”, enacted and demonstrated in daily actions and interactions creating a feel of the ‘way things are done around here.”
These live values are like the heartbeat of the organisation, enhancing connections between people and providing a cohesion of vision, and guidleines for decision making that enable creativity. Policies and procedures often have a rigidity to them that blocks people who want to be kind. People are individuals with a variety of experiences, constraints and needs. Kindness requires flexibility to meet people’s different needs in different ways this helps establish and maintain equity.
Jason Fried claimed that “policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to unlikely-to-happen-again situations.” In health and social services, organisations are dealing with people in challenging situations, it is essential that leaders understand how trauma and pain can influence organisational decision making. In addition many workplaces are still integrating the impact of covid and recent funding and/or staffing cuts. The emotional impact influences peoples ability to make strategy and decisions. Policies should be created with input from those who understand the impact of vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue and the emotional complexity of care work.
Future Ready Workplaces Must Be Shaped By Kindness
Kindness is a core competency for the workplaces of the future. It’s not just a “nice to have”, it will soon be something employees actively demand, becoming a key element for those who want to be an employer of choice. These workplaces will have kindness deeply embedded in ineractions, actions, leadership and systems, it will flow through every level. By doing so, organisations will eliminate, or mitigate the personal, societal and systemic conditions that lead to burnout, allowing all employees to flourish - and that’s what employees want.
Stay Kind,
Christina
Kindness is the Antithesis of Burnout - Part One
Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone could turn up to work we love, bringing our full selves, expressing our values, feeling like we belong and are contributing to the world? That’s the world I dream of, personally I love working, when its the right work and workplace for me. I believe that engaging in meaningful work is good for our well-being, it allows us to use our strengths, express our passions and satisfy our achievement striving (of course all these things can be found outside of paid work too).
But this isn’t the world we live in. Work (or perhaps workplaces) aren’t always good for us. Something that should be satisfying and life-giving turns, it becomes the opposite, depleting and heartbreaking. Social progress, global pandemics and events of our time have made work something we have to do rather than something we delight to do. Many years ago after I had been studying workplace wellbeing and stress for a number of years, I added to my understanding by getting an insider experience of burnout. I remember trying to share with a family member why I had resigned my job and was taking a break and they were completely unfamiliar with the term, and had no understanding of it at all. That is in sharp contrast to 2023 when it seems like everyone is talking about burnout. It has almost become a catch-all phrase for any experience of stress while working. In spite of all the webinars, information and conversation about burnout; sources of stress, workplace demands and the numbers of unhappy, depleted employees are continuing to rise. The current dialogue isn’t actually helping reduce experiences of workplace stress and burnout. We need to deepen our understanding of burnout, its causes and how we can prevent it, so that more employees can enjoy their work and are liberated to do their best work.
What is Burnout
Christina Maslach had just finished her PhD, and before she settled into her next role she volunteered to help out her colleagues with what was to become the influential Stanford Prison Experiment. This was an experiment conducted in 1971 using US College students to study the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. What she saw when she paid the researchers a visit disturbed her so much that she was influential in halting the experiment early. This experiment also influenced the trajectory of her career, as she became interested in the impact of the work environment, workplace culture and demands on the well-being of workers. As she researched and talked to workers such as prison staff and other human services workers, she realised that there was a repeating pattern of reaction to occupational stressors that she began to measure and research as burnout.
Maslach defines burnout as “a psychological syndrome emerging as a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job” (Maslach and Leiter, 2016).
Maslach and her colleagues have identified three main dimensions of burnout:
Feelings of overwhelming exhaustion.
Growing cynicism and a sense of detachment from clients and the job.
A sense of ineffectiveness or feeling that nothing was being accomplished.
The World Health Organisation has drawn on Maslach’s work for their own definition of burnout which is “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, characterised by feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from ones job, or feelings of negativism and cynicism related to one’s job and reduced professional efficacy”. (ICD-11). Recent researchers (Parker, Tavella, Eyers, 2022) discovered and emphasised a fourth significant dimension of burnout and that is cognitive issues, such as struggles concentrating and difficulties remembering. Maslach’s original research was very focussed on identifying the organisational factors that created burnout. The more recent WHO definition has been criticised, as it does not make it clear that burnout is primarily a reaction to workplace conditions, rather it can make it seem like it is the employees responsibility to manage workplace stress.
What causes burnout
From the beginning of burnout research it has been emphasised that there are particular characteristics of the workplace that increase the likelihood of staff experiencing burnout. The impetus is on businesses and organisations to engage carefully in preventing burnout by considering these aspects of work that make burnout more likely.
Too much work and unclear role expectations.
Not enough control over the work and resources needed to do the work.
Insufficient reward for the work done.
A lack of a sense of connection to other people in the workplace.
An absence of fairness.
Conflicts in values between the individual and the organisation.
Work that involves emotional complexity and a deep sense of connection to the work.
A few years ago when we had a summer drought I planted some drought resistant plants - unfortunately they are not thriving under the current conditions of heavy persistent rain. Plants have different needs, some cope well with drought, others cope well with having wet feet. The characteristics of the plant interact with the conditions in which it is growing, for the plant to thrive and throw off aphids and other pests there needs to be a good match between the conditions and its characteristics. People are like plants, our individual characteristics, needs and sensitivities interact with our workplace conditions. An organisation can be high in all those characteristics and not everyone in the organisation will experience burnout. Burnout isn’t simple or linear. Burnout is created in the interaction between an individual (with their preferences, values, history, personality and skills), the job role (what is required of them) the organisation (with its history, values, systems, management structures and policies) and the society and culture within which they are placed. Research shows some individual characteristics make someone sensitive to burnout. This doesn’t mean that they will develop burnout but like plants they will be more sensitive to workplace conditions. These individual characteristics include:
A tendency towards high expectations and perfectionism.
Emotional reactivity and high degrees of empathy.
Sensitivity to judgement.
Intraversion.
A high sensitivity to stress.
Burnout Prevention
Burnout is top of mind for many professions at the moment, often burnout is presented with a degree of urgency and fear. Most studies show that burnout feelings are common for those in healthcare and social services, it may be that we just didn’t talk about it as much before so a lot of those feelings went unacknowledged. Taking away the fear and normalising these burnout feelings as part of our experience as people helpers can help people to talk more openly with their team leaders and colleagues about their feelings of burnout. Burnout feelings after all are signals that things are not good with our environment and ourselves (or the interaction between), they are signs that restorative actions need to be taken. Burnout feelings become harder to manage the longer they are ignored or suppressed and when no action is taken in response to them. If people begin to fear burnout it becomes harder to discuss openly and to take restorative action.
The current public dialogue about burnout tends to fall into two extreme positions. On the one hand it is all the fault of our current work environment, work is then the enemy and is bad for us and we should spend our days working in the garden, surfing, knitting or some other extreme opt out measure. This position tends to obscure and suppress the delight and joy that work can and does bring us (when we are not burned out). The other extreme focuses on the individual and can have a blaming or shaming tone, these are the articles or opinions that suggest that those people that burnout are unable to manage their own stress - they just need a bit more resilience training and to attend better to their self-care. This neglects the complex interaction between individuals and the work conditions and often results in organisations not making the structural changes they need to ensure their staff are valued and supported and that workplaces conditions are not those that cause burnout.
It is challenging to understand the complexity of the interaction that occurs between an individual, their social environment, and their workplace. It is clear that just as recovery from burnout involves a multi-dimensional approach so too must burnout prevention. It is much more complex than simply providing resilience training.
The Opposite of Burnout
Not burned out is hardly something to aspire too, its a little like saying you no longer want to be unfit. If we want to aspire to the other end of the continuum, we need a definition and understanding of what that positive state is. Engagement has been proposed as the positive pole to burnout (Schaufeli,W., Salanova, M., Gonzalez-Roma, V., & Bakker, A. 2002). Engagement is a persistent “positive fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption”. I can remember times in my working life, where everything seems to fit together, experience, expertise and the needs of the people I am working with - They can be heady and energising days when you think you have found the exact right role for you - that feeling could be described as engagement. Workplace engagement is a huge topic, and one that has generated a lot of theorising and research. While holding an idea of what the positive aspects of not-burned out might look like is helpful it doesn’t give the whole picture for those of us who are seeking to work to prevent burnout. Engagement is an outcome of great workplace conditions (the opposite of whose as identified as contributing to burnout) and great role, person fit, but that still doesn’t necessarily create the whole picture of how to prevent burnout.
Parker, Tavella, and Eyers (2022) found that ‘burnout rates appear lowest in those whose work is simply a job, higher in those who view their work as a career and highest in those whose work is at the level of a 'calling.' Those who consider their work a calling are often highly engaged, but in my experience that high sense of engagement and emotional connection to their work and clients leaves them more open to burnout not less. If we are going to build a society, workplaces and individuals who are resistant to burnout we need to move up a level, from engagement and burnout to a higher principle.
The antidote to burnout, if released in organisations, societies and individuals is kindness.
Where kindness flourishes and flows burnout will not occur.
Do you make sense?
I was definitely not making sense today. It took me three goes to write my email address down correctly on a form. Twice I made a start and got confused between my work and personal addresses. Twice I wrote nonsense. But even when we state that we are not making sense, actually we are always making sense all the time (except maybe for Talking Heads (excuse the 80’s joke :-) ).
Humans are designed as sense-making beings. Although we often hail objectivity as something to be aspired to and attempted we can never be truly objective rather we have woven together a screen of sense-making through which we experience our world.
Our brains are busy and lazy, dealing with a vast amount of information having to sort and prioritise in the blink of an eye. Our brains quickly prioritise safety and belonging, and so often our sense-making thoughts will be focussed on those priorities. This sense-making is about categorising, generalising, grouping and making connections, and of course, we prefer things that connect with what we know already. As we are out and about in our world, seeing, experiencing, thinking and feeling, our mind is interpreting, explaining and simplifying. From very early in our life we are making sense of our experiences. This sense making helps us develop ideas and beliefs around our own identity, how the world works and consequently how we relate to others.
Throughout our life we keep adding experiences, events, thoughts, feelings, we keep weaving and developing the screen of interpretation through which we see the world. We are making sense of things, but often that is through the screen of the sense that we have already made. We explain things in ways that support the sense we have already made. When I wrote a nonsense email address I found myself trying to explain why that might have happened, I hadn’t slept well, I was stressed, I have peri-menopausal brain fog. There was dissonance between my idea of who I am (a competent, intelligent, ‘get-it-right’ type person) and my forgetfulness that had to be explained in a way that left me still feeling competent. We can continue like this building screens of identity, beliefs about the world and how we relate to others looking at the world from the ideas we have built up and explaining away things that don’t fit.
Until something big happens that doesn’t fit into the ideas and beliefs that have served us all these years.
The reality of the world bursts through the screen that we have woven. Positive or negative events or experiences are suddenly too big, too bright and too overwhelming to be contained by our existing ideas and beliefs. The dissonance is too great to just be excused away. This reality that we couldn’t imagine or explain demands a rethink of our ideas about the world, ourselves or others. For many our experiences during the global pandemic have had this effect. We begin to feel lost and unsettled, we don’t know what’s what anymore. When the harsh reality of the world challenges our ability to make sense of everything through our existing screen, we need to bring sense-making from our unconscious automatic processes and into our active awareness. We need to actively and creatively decide how we are going to make meaning out of what occurs. We get to decide the pattern that we are going to weave in our screen. As Victor Frankl says “Individuals are free to choose the meaning they ascribe to a situation, including the most tragic.”
Christina
How to have a refreshing holiday
and just like that, it was holiday time. 2021 was another big, busy and difficult year. If you are like me you probably felt that what you wanted most to end the year was a very long nap. You know that your holidays needs to be refreshing if you are to avoid burnout and be able to give your best to your work when you return to work. However, I have found the reality of messy, noisy, post-lockdown family life has made getting a really long nap difficult. Getting the break I need stuck at home with a restless tween is harder than I expected, and I am a bit over all those advice articles that assume loads of free time (yes I can just remember when holidays were full of naps, meditation and reading!). I may even have heard holidays with families referred to as “the time of intensive childcare and housework.” So here are my 7 tips for the rest of us - those that struggle for refreshment in the middle of kids and household management.
1) Identify Your Needs
We often end the year with a strong sense of tiredness, the feeling of needing a break and our goal is to ‘make it to the holidays.’ We then collapse into the holiday without spending time thinking about what it is exactly that we need the holiday from and what we need the holiday to do for us. Although our work may be tiring, what actually drains you about your work is probably more specific than that, apply your curiosity and identify one or two elements that you need a break from. For some people it may be being around people all day, for others, it may be the emotional impact of our helping work, for others it may be around the responsibility of managing others. These holidays I realised that what I most needed a break from was planning, organising and creating momentum. Once you have identified your needs then consider what makes you feel most relaxed and refreshed in relation to those needs. Perhaps it is alone time that you most need, or like me perhaps you need a break from organising and to just be spontaneous for a while. Think about what activities, people or situations give you the most energy.
2) Prioritise Your Values
Unfortunately, the basic rules of time management apply to holidays as well. We can’t do everything that we would like to do in the week or two that we have off. We need to make decisions about where our priorities lie. After you have included activities that will give you the most refreshment your values can guide you as to other activities that may also be important. Family holidays always require compromises and articulating your values can often help you understand and manage any sacrifices you may need to make to accommodate others needs. I often find that if I am swayed into others agendas without consideration I can feel like my needs are getting overlooked. If I take the time to intentionally think about and share my values and make value-led decisions to prioritise others needs, I can manage a lot more compromise. Simply acknowledging the reasons I have to make this sacrifice and why it is important to do so allows me to be more compassionate and giving with my time.
3) Activate Your Self-Compassion
What if what we most need a holiday from is our own internal world. Those high expectations, perfectionism, worries and anxieties. Sometimes we most need a holiday from ourselves. Our struggles with our own mind messages and internal states can be exhausting. Perhaps you even have an expectation that you will be excellent at self-care and refreshment, that you will use your holiday well and return to the work that you love with truckloads of energy. Even your expectations of how you will use your holiday can be tainted by perfectionism and high standards! Beginning a refreshing holiday starts with showing yourself compassion - opening up to accept just how tired and fatigued you are, and responding to that exhaustion with care and expressions of empathy. Self-compassion is treating yourself with the kindness, care and generosity you would offer others, accepting that we all struggle sometimes and being open and accepting of your emotions. It may be helpful to wonder whether you are having the holiday that you would recommend for your best friend if they were as tired and as worn down as you are.
4) Don’t Make Work For Yourself
Is this holiday the time to repaint the spare room? Maybe, it depends if that activity provides the sort of re-energising that you most need right now. Only you can answer that question. If you are very tired it may be helpful to ask “Do I really need and want to be doing this now?” If you are fatigued making complex holiday plans may not be the relaxation that you need. You may be better to think about all the ways that you can simplify. It may be more important to consider all the things that you are not going to do. These holidays as part of my refreshment plan I am committed to not tidying up after my family members and not going to get groceries (we are not starving yet but the house is a complete mess!) I have read some recommendations that holidays are good times to introduce new habits and make lifestyle changes. If you are very tired and have all the family home this may not be the best time to make changes to your lifestyle. Rest and refresh yourself especially if the new habits you want to introduce require preparation and research. It may just be your internal high expectations kicking in and driving you to get more out of your holiday - it is ok to just rest and do activities that you find energising.
5) Prepare Just Enough
Preparation can be helpful (and essential for travel) but it may be most beneficial to think of aiming for a balance. Being just prepared enough to gain the refreshment you need, but not so much that you are actually creating work for yourself. I relax and refresh best by having opportunities to create, art, crafts and writing preferably. I try and prepare by having the raw materials I need all ready so that I can have the satisfaction of creating on my days off, rather than having to go out and search for what I need. I also find it helpful to have a loose list of what I am planning to create so that I don’t wander aimlessly wondering what to make. If you are juggling family life It can be helpful to have your refreshing activities (books, crafts) handy in a favourite spot. This means you can snack on energising activities throughout the day whenever those random free moments arise.
6) Remember The Power of Little Things.
Having a refreshing holiday doesn’t have to involve grand plans to travel to new and exciting places, or a 2-week silent yoga retreat. Refreshment and re-creation are more effectively gained through little things done intentionally and done consistently. When you are balancing your need to re-energise with family life it is especially important to think about those small moments of rest and refreshment and how you will scatter them throughout your day and week. Making an effort to be fully present and mindfully enjoy activities is a powerful tool for refreshment. I have been enjoying watering the garden in the evening slowing down enough to watch the droplets fall and shine on the grass leaves. Savouring may also be a helpful small skill to introduce into your holidays it is a technique that helps our brain dwell on the good things that happen to us. You may like to introduce a savouring habit with your family each day. For this simply ask each family member to remember a delightful or pleasant moment from their day, to review the event or activity in their memory including as many details as possible (including their senses) and then share it with the rest of the family, including how they felt at the time.
7) Be Aware, Be Mindful and Become Relaxed.
Part of a refreshing break is creating the conditions in which our bodies and minds can be free from stress and relax. This may take a bit of practice and adjustment if you have become accustomed to constant stress. Be curious, open and accepting of all that you are feeling, and aware of the patterns of stress that may be present. Become mindful of what your mind and body are signalling that they need and the conditions under which they feel most relaxed. Find ways to increase the relaxing and refreshing actives and decrease the things that make you feel most stressed.
I hope you are all able to refresh, re-create and re-energise at some time over the holidays.
Christina
Start A Ripple Of Compassion
I was dropping my son at holiday programme on Tuesday and before I could sign him in I had to wait for a mother ahead of me - it was one of those mothers - you know the ones that hold up the whole queue while they do something complicated, and keep asking more and more questions, with no sign that they are winding up. I just wanted to sign in and go back for a client session, and I was getting more and more restless having to wait. She eventually resolved her questions and when I was in the car heading back to the office I began to reflect on the incident and whether my thoughts and restlessness were in line with my values. It has been a hard year for us in Tāmaki Makarau and if I am starting to act angsty in queues and getting easily irritable then it has got bad.
We are finishing a hard couple of years, and we are observing a shared increase in stress and tension, that is often expressed in negativity and hostility to others. The summer break is a chance for the deep refreshment and restoration that we need to withstand the things that 2022 has in store for us. Many of you in healthcare and social services will be wondering what summer break I am referring to, because I know that you will be continuing to work through supporting those that need it most. As helpers we have no hesitation in putting up our hands when we hear the call to heal the world - after all that is our purpose, that is what gives our life meaning. BUT sometimes it is this eagerness that can limit our longevity which is what we need to be cultivating right now. We begin to think that the world needs us. That it is our work that is holding the nation together.
We forget that what we long for is to create a world that doesn’t need our work.
What the world needs most to heal the hurt, struggle, irritability anger and hostility is ripples of compassion. Ripples that start with us, and flow outward to create compassionate teams, and compassionate systems, that can heal the world. Those ripples begin with us, and not with us putting our hands up to heal the world.
Rather it begins with us learning to be compassionate towards ourselves. To be able to recognise and tend to our own needs and to take a compassionate stance towards ourselves. This basis of kindness allows us to be all we can be, to be calm, to grow and learn and to prioritise our own self-care. These actions create a deeper well of compassion in ourselves so that we can sustain the providing of compassion to others. Our modelling and emphasis on self-compassion helps others grow in compassion, they can then grow a compassionate team and work to create compassionate systems so that we can create a new more compassionate world, where we are motivated by kindness rather than by individualism.
Growing our own self-compassion isn’t an easy task. Over December I have challenged myself to practise self-compassion every day and it does require intention, attention and lots and lots of practice. If you are taking a summer break it is a great opportunity to work on your self-compassion. If you aren’t taking a summer break then you definitely need to work on your self-compassion! Here are six suggestions to get you started on developing your self-compassion, but remember to have compassion for yourself in the process - it will take time.
How to grow your self-compassion
Intention:
1) Take some time to develop an understanding of what self-compassion is and isn’t. Kristen Neff defines self-compassion as having 3 components. Including an ability to express warm kindness towards our own struggles, failings and imperfections. A sense of common humanity - struggling is normal and many people struggle, in fact, it is part of being human. Finally having a stance of mindful openness towards our emotional experience.
2) Choose one self-compassion practice that you are going to work on for a week. There are many suggestions on Kristen Neffs website.
Attention
3) Begin by slowing down and building your ability to notice the tone of your mind messages and self-stories./ self-talk. Notice how you talk to yourself (if you do not everyone has an internal dialogue). Pay particular attention to the tone you use in addition to the content of your dialogue. You could ask yourself - is this how my best friend would speak to me?
4) Be open and curious about your feelings. What might your emotional responses be telling you? Allow your emotions to be there.
Practice:
5) Practice taking a kind stance to your feelings, reactions, imperfections and mistakes. Imagine what the kindest person you know would say, and practice using those words to yourself.
6) Practice paying attention to your needs. Stop regularly thought the day and wonder - what do I need? Chose to meet those needs with care and tenderness.
Be as kind to yourself as you are to your clients, and together we can change the world.
