How to Thrive in Professional Practice. Stephen J Mordue
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