GET REAL!!!
What’s the most annoying thing about corporate training sessions? 🤔
We think it’s when people pretend there are easy answers to difficult problems.
We’re realistic, pragmatic sort of people at The Carvalho Consultancy.
And take the view in our work, whether that’s training or counselling, that people are intelligent.
And that, if there were easy answers to their problems/challenges they would have found them already!
This is particularly so around anything to do with mental health/well-being for lawyers and how to square that with the demands of the workplace.
The *🔟 TOP TIPS* for conquering this stuff might sound attractive.
But they’re often an over-simplification of a complex problem.
We’re in the midst of planning a session for the Industrial Law Society Conference in Oxford on working with vulnerable people (and looking after yourself). And it’s that second bit of looking after yourself that’s got us thinking.
Because it’s not simple.
That’s why our slide shouts ‘imperfectly’! 📢
Because it’s true.
There are no easy answers!
And anyone who tells you ALL you need to do is:
have better boundaries 😆 or
become more resilient 😊
and then you’ll be impervious to pain
…is telling you porkie pies 🥧 (albeit with good intentions).
All is not lost though!
There are useful concepts you can learn about.
And some brilliant techniques from the therapeutic world to help you gain a little emotional distance from the work. Rather than being slap bang in the middle of the drama yourself.
But it’s absolutely not about becoming a robot 🤖. Far from it.
Because here’s the rub.
All those reasons why we get overly emotionally involved in our work? They’re also what make us really good at our jobs.
Empathy, attunement, perceptiveness.
Humanity.
But we have to learn to harness them in the right way. To find the precarious balance. It’s like dancing on a tightrope!
Understanding our own psychology can help us to do that.
A friend of ours works with vulnerable women. Something he said has always stuck. He said that he hears some really brutal stories in his work. There’s no way he could scaffold himself emotionally to become emotionally unaffected by that work. But that he felt he could take a shard of his clients’ pain and keep it. And that that was OK with him. It was almost an act of service to those clients ❤️.
Being a therapist is different to being a lawyer. But some of the same principles apply.
So let’s not overegg the pudding when we talk about emotional boundaries (or limits as I prefer to call them).
You will never be able to practice this stuff anything other than imperfectly.
You can model that imperfection to your clients!
Yes, resource yourself with lots of support 👍
Understand your own psychology and how you get hooked by certain situations 👍
But always always remain a human first ❤️