As I type this, it is Volunteer Recognition Day, Afterschool Professionals Appreciation Week and Stress Awareness Month. Depending on what day you are reading this, it is likely a different day of recognition within a different week of celebration within a different month of awareness. In the past few years, we have been persistent and deliberate in setting aside days, weeks, and months to recognize various professions and bring awareness to different causes, making sure to always emphasize the importance of self-care.
Just today, I was on yet another self-care webinar, one of many I have participated in throughout my career. Self-care is talked about a lot in the worlds I occupy: education, social work, and coaching, often in response to compassion fatigue or burnout. In all the trainings and conversations I have been a part of, I have never heard self-care described in any other way than as a personal responsibility to mitigate the stress in response to an organizational inevitability that creates it.
There are so, so many problems with this.
For starters, we accept these outcomes as inherent casualties of the work, particularly in nonprofits. It is rare to challenge this notion as it is embedded in how we are educated and trained into it. When you are stressed, we are coached, preparing and bracing for it, and doing little to prevent it, because we are never told we can.
We are given trainings and voluntold to attend webinars on self-care, the vast majority of which are reactive, and put the burden on staff to do something once the stress has settled in. These trainings become predictable and indistinguishable with examples of deep breathing and reminders to take walks at lunch. Yet they never seem to address the problem with working in spaces that perpetuate that stress and do so without intention of ever changing it.
When we continue to focus self-care on what we can do once we are stressed, we absolve ourselves and our organizations from having to do anything to prevent this stress from happening in the first place.
But organizations have great ability and opportunity to create working environments that do not dismiss stress as collateral damage and operate on a foundation of doing what they can to minimize it while encouraging staff to do so as well.
As staff, you need to be proactive as well and advocate for yourself. Speak up. Say no. Establish your boundaries. Both personally and professionally.
Ultimately, the problem with self-care as we currently approach it is that it is a reactive, temporary approach that will never solve the real issue, which is creating jobs that need so much self-care to do.
I can speak most knowledgeably about my own experiences in the nonprofit space, but I am confident these experiences are not unique. Working long hours and sacrificing vacation days are implicitly if not explicitly rewarded in this work. In the same breath we use to advocate for self-care we create workloads that are impossible to manage and pay salaries that are budgeted to ensure that people are there because they care.
If you are a leader who genuinely wants to create a culture of self-care, you need to create jobs with workloads that are reasonable and manageable.
You need to provide competitive wages, health insurance and adequate time off.
You need to include mental health care in your health care.
You need to respect boundaries and not expect staff to be on call at all hours.
You need to rehire quickly when you are understaffed and not give all the extra work to current staff without extra compensation.
You need to provide consistent supervision and coaching to support the challenging work your team does.
You need to stop glorifying and rewarding overwork.
You need to take your lunch and remind your staff to take theirs too.
You need to take your vacation days and encourage your staff to take theirs too.
You need to consistently show appreciation for your staff and celebrate them often.
You need to provide meaningful opportunities for growth and development.
You need to identify where your staff shine and give them every opportunity to do that.
You need to create a working environment that is equitable and ethical.
You need to lead with honesty, integrity, and transparency.
You need to provide sick policies and bereavement policies that honor the realities of those who choose to work for you.
Stop expecting your staff to do all the work, placing yet another burden on them to manage their own care on their own time through suggestions of bubble baths and deep breathing. Instead, create a work environment that is proactive in minimizing stress and burnout and takes an organizational approach to self-care that is proactive and effective.
This is what self-care looks like. For you, your organization, and your team. This is how you perpetuate and effectively support self-care.
