Category: Burnout

Heal Thy Boundaries (Drop the Myth of Work-Life Balance and Save Your Sanity- Part 5)

As someone who has worked for the past decade in front line social work, I have seen a lot of crazy stuff. I have witnessed boat-loads of grief. I have heard tales of trauma and deep sadness and absolute terror that would make your skin crawl. I’m sure many of you can relate. Working in direct practice with clients can be really hard. Yet the thing that nags at me the most is this:
I hate watching social workers turn themselves into emotional pretzels because they can’t see where they end and the client begins.
Does that sound harsh? Please let me explain myself.
A few weeks ago I promised to lay out a few practices that, if taken, would ensure a reduction in your subjective sense of overwhelm and an increase in workplace serenity. My motivation is that I want you to feel better and I want you to stay in the game. One of the most significant stressors I have witnessed is a tendency by dedicated, good-hearted helping pros to become emotionally over-involved with the people they serve. Now, we can expect that when you get to know a family you will become attached. That’s a pretty human process and I don’t want you to feel bad about that.
Trouble comes when we subtly cross an emotional line of responsibility. Here’s what I mean: if you are a child protection worker and a child on your caseload experiences harm in some way, whose fault is it? Assuming you did what you could based on what you knew in line with the mandate of your position, it is categorically NOT YOUR FAULT. If you’re a crisis line counselor and you get a call from a depressed person, perhaps you try your absolute hardest to respond to that caller compassionately and with deep empathy. The call ends when they tell you that you just don’t understand them (or something meaner) and they hang up on you. Is that your fault? IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT.
And yet we can feel the pressing guilt of failure, as though we caused their abuse or we caused their depression.
I frequently have workers confide in me that when things go wrong on their caseload they feel personally responsible. I have watched countless social workers burn out, quit, or simply endure significant suffering because they truly believe that on some level they were responsible for their client’s grief or they could have done more.
If you can relate to this, please be gentle with yourself. You probably come by it honestly. What I mean is that as a helping professional I am willing to bet that you were called to this career because of vivid formative experiences. Perhaps you “became the emotional parent” for your younger siblings or even for your mom when you were a kid. Maybe you simply found that your classmates in high school regularly confided in you and it felt really good. There is no shame in any of this. What we need to keep in mind, however, is that we may also carry longstanding misbeliefs into our professions that can reek emotional havoc on our hearts in the here-and-now.
Boundaries 101
What is a boundary? It is where you end and another person begins. Let’s look at some more obvious ones. I can’t take off my coworker’s shoe. Why? It’s her shoe and her foot, not mine. I have my own shoe. I can’t expect my friend to pay my cell phone bill. That’s my bill, not his. It is my responsibility.
Boundaries become a little trickier when children are involved. For instance, if your two year old runs across the street and gets hurt, who’s responsible? I’m afraid it’s you. Entirely you. The reason is that the little guy is only two and you are fully responsible for his safety. Now fast-forward 20 years. If your 22 year old runs across the street and gets hurt, who’s responsible? Is it you? In NO WAY is it you. Why? Because now your little guy is a grownup and is completely responsible for himself.
Our boundary relationships develop more or less instinctively. For example, if you saw someone else’s two year old bolt out onto the street, you may jump in AS THOUGH you were their parent. You’re not actually responsible, but it just feels like you should be. The same happens with our clients. We watch them live their lives at a range of capacities. Sometimes, those capacities are marginal at best.
The result is that we may unconsciously become the “parent” in a parent-child type relationship.
And if you are the parent in a parent-child relationship, guess what- in your head and heart you’re responsible! Let’s take this a little further. If you are responsible as an actual parent to your clients then what of your lunch break? No, parents don’t get lunch breaks. What about leaving at 5pm? No, parents don’t get to leave their job at 5pm. What about suffering verbal abuse from your client? No, parents have to just take it (actually, if your client was really your young child, you would be granted the power to step in and train that child so that they stop verbally abusing you. But they are only your client, remember?).
What I am saying is that it is so easy to find ourselves in an emotional quagmire of messed up roles and boundaries. This, in turn, is a recipe for compulsive work behaviours, feelings of overwhelm, and eventually emotional burnout. The hard fact is that if you think that this applies to you, it’s actually your job to correct it. You need to sort yourself out and perhaps re-establish healthy boundary lines.
If you are feeling overwhelmed about where to begin with repairing your boundaries, here is a simple plan of action that I have plucked from my Recover Your Resilience course that I think could be a good start in terms of rethinking your practice:

Discerning process from outcome.
As a helping professional, you get paid for process, or what I call “process commitments”. You are paid to show up, to work with your client population, to think about them, to strategize with them, to partner with them to achieve goals, and to hopefully be an agent of change in their lives. Of course you are invested. You desire great outcomes. This is why you got into your field- you want to help people to recover/heal/grow/get better. However, you are not ultimately responsible for the decisions of your clients. You owe a duty of care to them and you may even hold a statutory office, such as a legal mandate to protect children on your caseload. Those are significant responsibilities, to be sure. Yet at the end of the day, 99% of the time you are really not responsible for your clients’ ultimate outcomes (There are a few exceptions, such as if you are directly caring for a child or someone with an intellectual disability and hold direct responsibility. Even then, we may take on extra guilt that is not ours to endure).
When meeting with your supervisor or with clients it is important to get straight what your goals are. I never begin working with a client until I am clear with myself, my client, my supervisor, the referring social worker, or the agency, in writing, what the goals are. Having the goals put in writing and signed by all parties allows you to defend yourself later if needed (The good news is that many agencies already have these goal-based systems in place). Remember that if an item or goal in the contract is listed as an outcome, it should only have the client’s name attached to it. If it is a matter of process it can also have your name attached (if you have truly agreed to it).
Here are some examples of desired Outcomes:

  • Client will maintain sobriety
  • Client family lowers risk factor X
  • Client’s global assessment of functioning goes from 17 to above 40.
  • Client will return to work by the end of March

Here are some examples of process commitments:

  • Client will attend all scheduled appointments
  • Therapist will liaise with school to discuss support options
  • Client will enroll and attend Positive Parenting Program
  • Social Worker will schedule one hour per week with client

Notice that only the client is responsible for outcomes but either client or worker can be responsible for process commitments. So then, you can be held responsible for, say, not calling the Drug and Alcohol Rehab Centre as agreed upon to see about enrollment for your client. That does not make you responsible for your client’s commitment to sobriety, however.
When clients feel the negative effects of their choices, it makes sense that they will sometimes look for other places to place blame. Actually most of us do this- it is a way to preserve our sense of self or dignity in the face of failure. It can therefore be a frequent occurrence when a child is apprehended from a home for a parent to say “This is your fault! You didn’t meet with me enough!” or “I didn’t know that X was your bottom line- you didn’t tell me!”
I know that this section may come across as somewhat adversarial or “lawyer-ish”. In other words, it sounds as though it assumes the worst about people- that our clients will be manipulative, that our bosses will blame us, that we will have to fight for our vocational lives in an unsafe system. The sad fact is that to some degree this is true. Hurt people hurt people. Dysfunction and its consequences are central to our profession. However, the primary reason for having goals and expectations set out in writing, every time, is to actually facilitate functional, trusting relationships. Fences exist between neighbors to keep pets and shrubs on the right side and mark out everyone’s territory. That does not assume animosity between those neighbors, but instead it lays a groundwork for a fair and mutually beneficial relationship.

How are your boundaries? What lines have been crossed in your life by your family members, clients, or friends? Let us know in the comments section below.

Zen And The Art of Paperwork (Drop the Myth of ‘Work-Life’ Balance and Save Your Sanity- Part 4)

When I was the tender age of 18 I traveled up north to try my hand at tree planting. Let me paint a picture for you- it is grueling, sweaty work. The job basically consists of slogging a large bag of baby trees up and down a mountainside, stumbling around to find suitable “micro-sites” on which to plant each sapling, digging a little hole and and planting them one by one. We would work from 6am until about 5pm, have dinner and then go straight back to our tents to recoup before the next day’s grind. I remember working 13 hours the first day and planting less than 100 trees. At $0.12/tree, minus $25 per day camp fees, that meant that after an impossibly hard day I earned about negative $13 dollars!
While toiling along, I noticed another guy who looked sort of like a Buddhist tree-planting monk. I would watch him float up and down the mountainside planting trees. He never seemed to sweat. He was always in a good mood. His work looked…..well, not like work. Even though he seemed to be expending almost no calories, he commonly planted 2000+ trees per day! I remember staring quizzically at his serene countenance one day, pondering his magical secret.
I eventually asked him to reveal his secret, to which he replied, “I have practiced these skills for so long that I don’t even think about the work anymore. My body moves along, and my mind is mostly somewhere else.” Since then, I have marveled in a similar fashion when watching veteran social workers and counselors serenely go about their days, apparently unbothered by the demands of their work.
Now, after obsessively interviewing these long-surviving front line workers, I have gleaned many insights which I plan to share with you in the coming months. These veteran helping professionals consciously or unconsciously do many specific things that not only keep them in the game, but keep them relatively at peace as well. But for today, I want to share about one little-talked-about attribute shared by most highly successful helping pros: they have developed and use systems for managing their work-lives.
They do not rely on their minds to do the heavy lifting their job requires. Here four basic tools effective professionals use:

  1. A day planner
  2. A to-do list
  3. A daily, weekly, and monthly routine
  4. A personal filing cabinet

Let’s quickly go through these one by one. If you have no tolerance this morning for technical “shop talk” you can just skim them. But fair warning- I’m going to geek out a bit on these.
1. The day planner
I know that this should seem obvious, but you would be surprised how many social workers don’t use their planners to their full potential. If, like me, you are required to report what you do- the phone calls you make, whether the client showed up or not, etc- then the day planner is not just about remembering future events, but keeping a running log as well. For example, I am required to electronically log every call I make to a client, every text, every meeting. At the end of the month, those stats are passed up the chain to the program funder to ensure my agency is meeting it’s deliverables. When I first started out, I would get to the end of the month and then have to piece together who called me. It meant going into my phone’s call display, looking in client folders for notes, going into my work cell phone for texts. It was a nightmare!
Now my day planner never leaves my side. Every time, I get a text from a client I write a shorthand note about it corresponding to the line for whatever this moment’s date and time is. This practice drove me nuts in the past because I perceived it as tedious, but now I see the light. Now it is pure zen. I am just the tree planter floating along. When month’s end comes, it’s all there. No crazy searching.
I also write case notes in my planner (I have a big 8 X11 one with one day per page). The notes go right beside the scheduled appointment entry. This forces me to be economical with my words and get to the point.
2. The to-do list
I keep two lists, actually: one for the realm of work tasks, and one for home tasks. Do you know where I store those lists? In my day planner! The home list is there because throughout the day, items from my home-life just come up, and the list allows me to put the item out of my head until the end of the day. My practice is also to order work tasks from hardest to easiest, and tackle the hardest one first. These tend to be fairly short lists because of the next system. I learned that my Buddhist tree-planting friend had a similar structure. For example, he always kept every tool he used in the exact same place. He always did every step in the exact same order. This made the process mindless for him. A to-do list similarly frees your mind for other things, while ensuring meet your professional obligations.
3. The daily, weekly, and monthly routine
Routines are prescribed and deliberate actions that effectively remove the need for willpower. Routines are a procrastination killer. Conversely, a lack of routine feeds procrastination. Have you ever kept putting off that report until the deadline and then stayed late to get it done the night before? Not only is that extremely stressful, but it causes ongoing anxiety the entire time you’re avoiding the job. I have learned (though I’m not perfect at it) to schedule my common work tasks and then stick to that schedule. For instance, we have just seen how my custom is to enter every step I make into my day timer as I go along. My habit for writing my notes is that I write them in my car after each client session. I enter my mileage and expense receipts at the end of every day without fail.
I also answer almost every email the moment I read it if I can. You should only have to deal with an item ONCE. Not multiple times. I batch enter my notes onto the electronic case management system once per week. I typically do this on Thursday mornings. By performing these tasks on a schedule, I reduce the randomness of my job thereby reducing my stress levels. That way, when things go sideways (as is normal in the world of child protection) I can respond from a place of strength rather than a scattered place.
4. The personal filing system.
This may be the biggest time saver I have. Unfortunately, my world is still one filled with all manner of paper-based reports, notes, and records. I just don’t have the mental energy to handle large, unmanageable piles. So I have developed a two-drawer filing system comprised of just a few crucial folders. The bottom drawer contains all of my case files. Not the agency case files, mind you- just a single, thin file folder for each client containing their referral document, my latest report, and only the most crucial documents.
In the upper drawer I have only a few folders: one containing many copies of all of my intake docs, one with copies of commonly used referral forms, and one that contains the various flyers and print outs for social service resources that come across my desk from time to time. Aside from that, I have a small “inbox tray” on my desk that I empty every day. From the tray, those documents either go to recycling or into a file folder. Again, my goal is to only touch it once. Finally, I should note that I also have a similar filing system on my computer.
Okay, wake up! 
I’ll forgive you if your soul escaped your body for the last eight paragraphs! The nitty gritty can get dry, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? I resisted the dry for years and the result was emotional chaos and suffering. I felt alot of unnecessary pain as a tree planter until I learned to be radically efficient with my trade. The same holds true for me as a helping professional. My hope is that you figure out and use some of these systems a good deal sooner than I did.
Here’s my main point:
Your work, especially the tedious parts, need to become automated through systems.
Think about the things you do every day that require no willpower and cause no stress, and yet are objectively boring or tedious. Is brushing your teeth fun? No. Is it hard, though? Not at all. In fact, you don’t have to even think about it. You go upstairs to prepare for bed and pick up your toothbrush- that’s it.
You see, boring is a strong emotion. It is actually a form of anxiety that emerges when we less-than-consciously say to ourselves “My life is passing me by. I’m missing out on something better right now.” Similarly, feelings of tedium arise when we get frustrated with the complex requirements of something that offers very little immediate return in exchange for our efforts. Yet they have to be done (teeth and paperwork). Now when we were little kids, brushing our teeth was hard.
If you don’t remember, look at your kids- they do a pretty bad job when they’re first learning! Sometimes they even lie and tell us they’ve done it when they haven’t. Why? It’s tedious! When you’re little it takes alot of mental energy to carefully brush each tooth in a certain way. Eventually- I mean after years of practice- we come to peace with the fact that we must brush every day. Our muscles learn to be very efficient and we can do the deed without much thought and it stops being stressful. In fact, we start to even feel good when we clean our pearly whites- we like how it feels, tastes, and we are satisfied with the knowledge that our dental hygienist won’t lecture us.
This is all I mean when I speak of systems. They don’t even have to look the way I laid them out above. Once we have accepted their necessity, have practiced them (maybe for a few years or more), and they have become almost unconscious for us, they lose their malicious effect on our souls. If we persist we will find our paperwork zen.
What systems have you developed over the years that serve you? Let us know in the comments section below.

Get Your Ducks in a Row (Drop the Myth of Work-Life Balance And Save Your Sanity- Part 2)

Let me get something out there right now. I could be wrong, but my guess is that if you’re reading this you’re not so much of a black and white thinker. As a helping professional you resist all or nothing language. You’ve embraced circular causality. You can accept multiple yet opposing points of view at the same time. I’ll bet that at your finest Rogerian moments you can even empathize with ax-murderers and Westboro Baptists. On top of that, you can manage the life narratives of thirty clients and remember each of their genograms. Your brain is simply wired for non-linear thought. Which is great…most of the time.
The last post introduced the idea that “balancing” tasks sounds good metaphorically, but not practically (btw, if you haven’t read that post yet, you can read it here). The reason for this is that our brains can really only do one mindful task at a time. The problem comes when we try to do many things at once or try to keep too many unfinished things in our heads. Can you relate? I spent many years “going with the flow” with no systems to help me order my life. What I mean is that if someone told me something that I needed to remember, I would just try to remember it. Appointment on Friday at 10am? Got it. Buy some eggs on the way home? Done. But then I became a social worker. My magical “flow” plan died a horrible death within weeks of receiving a child protection caseload.
Soon, feelings of overwhelm started to wash over me at work. My mind would spin from thing to thing to thing, as I unproductively (and hopelessly) tried to put out one fire after another. My world crumpled into a messy pile of unfinished stuff in short order. I began to procrastinate, distract, and dissociate from the mounting pressure of it all. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I needed a better strategy. That strategy is tactic number one on the list of actionable steps designed to chill us out and foster a sense of steady productivity. Here it is:
Write stuff down.
Not just some stuff. All of your stuff. Take 45 minutes and write every last thing down that’s in your head. Quantify it: the groceries you need to get, every to-do item, all of your work tasks, every random idea or goal. Everything. Just the simple act of putting absolutely everything on paper is almost guaranteed to offer you some relief, even though you haven’t actually dealt with any of it yet. Don’t believe me? Think it’s too simple? Just try it. The moment that swirl of stuff is out of your brain and onto paper, your mind can mellow. That basic act sends your deluged noodle the message: “I can let go of the burden of carrying all of this”. The result is almost always a reduced sense of overwhelm.
Now back to your snazzy non-linear cognitive abilities. They really are great…I mean it. When working with clients- talking through traumatic memories, discussing raw emotions, creative problem-solving- those mad skills of yours are pretty effective. However when it comes to the tasks of life, let’s face it: non-linear often falls pretty short. Thing to thing to thing just doesn’t work. Sometimes linear is better.
Here’s another linear concept- Step Two. After you’ve put everything down, rank them in order of importance. If your list is really long, pick out your top ten. Now choose one of those items and tackle it. Don’t choose two or three. Just choose one. Two or three is what gets us into trouble, because three equals “thing to thing to thing”. Decide when you will accomplish your ONE TASK. After and only after you complete your single list item, you may choose another. Wash, rinse, repeat. Keep it linear. Before long, you will have made a real dent in your list and hopefully your sense of well-being and personal efficacy will increase. It just feels good to chew through a tough list.
I promise you that getting your ducks in a row by putting your whole life on paper will reduce much of your stress to “water off a duck’s back” 🙂
Do you have a list-writing idea? Share it with us in the comments section below.

Drop the Myth of Work-Life Balance And Save Your Sanity- Part 1

Metaphors can be helpful. They help us explain complex things quickly. When I say “The ball is in your court” I am able to quickly convey the fact that I am handing over my responsibility for something to you. We aren’t playing tennis- I’m just letting you know that something is no longer my problem, and therefore you should probably take action! When I say “Don’t quit your day job!” I really mean “You aren’t super awesome at that.” When we speak of work-life and home-life, we use the word “balance,” which is also a metaphor. After all, we aren’t talking about a real scale- we’re using “balance” to convey a more complex idea. But there’s only one problem.
Balance isn’t real.
I mean, it’s real if you are talking about being on a seesaw. It’s real if we are speaking about the number in your bank account. If you’re talking about your ability to shuffle from the nightclub to the taxi on Saturday night, I’ll give you that too. Yet when we think about all the demands of our lives, from client meetings, to getting the groceries, to remembering to ask our partner to take the car in for an oil change, to the eternal parade of dishes, laundry, and kid toy cleanup, the metaphor of balance falls short. But why?
Simply put, we can’t do all of that stuff at the same time. In fact, human beings can’t really “balance” more than one action or thought at once. Instead we shift from thing to thing to thing. We may even be able to make that shift quickly- like having a conversation while making dinner. I am actually pretty good at timing out the spaghetti and the meat sauce and making a salad while asking my son about his day at school. But it’s not accurate to say that I am balancing anything. I am just doing many different things lined up in a quick series.
When I really think about it, I have noticed that my “multitasking” abilities essentially allow me to do one mindless thing and one mindful thing at the same time, that’s it. For example, I can stroll down the sidewalk (mindless) while talking with a friend (mindful). I can drive (relatively mindless) while listening to a podcast. If I try to do two mindful things at the same time, like watching Netflix and talking on the phone or doing my taxes or reading a blog post, I end up doing both poorly. It just doesn’t work.
So what does this have to do with work-life balance?
When most people say, “I need to have better “work-life balance” what they’re really saying is that either stuff from work is making them feel overwhelmed or crappy at home or that stuff from home is making them feel overwhelmed or crappy at work. Maybe they’re getting hit in both directions. The problem is that when we think of this problem as a “balance” issue, we are left with only a vague sense of what’s wrong. The metaphor actually masks the truth about the nature of the problem we’re having, leaving us with exactly zero actionable steps we can take to solve the problem.
In the coming weeks, I will present five actions that when taken will lower feelings of overwhelm, while increasing both productivity and subjective well-being. The ultimate goal of this series is to help you “feel less crappy” about all the stuff you need to get done so that you can enjoy your life.
What have you found to be so overwhelming about work in the last year that it has spilled into your home life? What family or personal things have you been unable to leave at home? Leave a comment below and let’s keep talking.