Hi All,
I'm Stew Friedman, and I'd like to thank Prof. Stein for inviting me to post here. My Web site is http://www.totalleadership.org/, but I'm not yet posting blogs there. I will be soon.
In the meantime, I also blog at harvardbusiness.org, and here's my latest:
http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/friedman/2008/10/resilience-what-neil-young-can.html.
I'd love to get your comments.
/Stew
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14 comments:
Hello, Mr. Friedman!
On several occasions our seminar group has discussed how to combat “burn-out.” What can be most difficult is not finding work that we love or have passion for, but continuing to love it and keeping that passion alive for years. Many, if not all of us, are dealing with difficult populations of people. During our last seminar Professor Stein said that workers in our field can start hating their clients/patients. We have pondered ways to prevent this from happening. What we need, as workers in the Criminal Justice field, is exactly what you discuss in your latest blog: resiliency. The definition of resiliency: the power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed, or stretched; elasticity (dictionary.com). This definition seems to refer to a physical state, but it can also apply to our mental state. We need to learn how to “rebound,” or recover, from the negative experiences of our jobs - which for some of us may occur every day, or even several times a day. I think one way to do this is through constant assessment. We have to question why we initially chose (or will be choosing) the work that we do, and check-in with ourselves every so often to see if those reasons still hold true. Also, working with others who love their work and are passionate can really make the difference. During past internships and the Vera Fellowship I have been fortunate enough to meet so many people who “focus on what they love, and love what they focus on, and who insist others do so too,” and so I know what a difference it makes to be surrounded by resilient co-workers.
After Prof. Friedman's and Amanda's thoughtful reflections, I can't help but wonder: What is resilience? If it is the ability to "bounce back", perhaps a core generative component is elasticity: the capacity to remain flexible in circumstances that trigger our desire to control people and situations, or induce a kind of creative and emotional paralysis around our work.
In class this week, we spoke about partnering or forming relationships with clients rather than hierarchically imposing our supposedly superior knowledge on their situations, and the way that this might actually reduce our frustrations, rage, guilt, etc. toward the clients.
Almost every time I time I speak with practitioners who provide services to mandated clients, they are incredibly focused on small ways in which they can exert control over the clients: e.g. making the client take off his hat because it is "disrespectful". It seems to me that practitioners who are too rule-bound actually suppress the creative enthusiasm that clients need to rebound, by merely recapitulating the same rigid (often abusive) disciplinarity that the client experienced in earlier interactions with both intimate others and social institutions.
Although it isn't the first word that comes to mind when you are dealing with people who are seemingly so broken, I have tried to find the remarkable core of resilience that has kept them alive, sometimes against incredible odds. If I connect with this part of them, it nurtures the mirror instinct in me: our resilience becomes mutually reinforcing.
I too believe resiliency is important for continued success especially in a working environment or even worst, a stressful and demanding working environment. But I also think resiliency alone is not enough, just like I believe love alone is not sufficient to maintain a successful relationship. In a relationship, there maybe abundance of love, but without respect and appreciation and having financial security, this relationship is bound to fail. I believe the same applies in a working environment. People work harder and put their soul in their work when they feel that they have a vested interest in that work/company. And if not a vested interest, then they feel respected and appreciated by their boss.
I have an aunt who worked as a seamstress for a factory. She loved and respected her employer and whenever she was asked to stay overtime, she would, because she knew that if she had to go to a doctor’s appointment and could not make it to work on time, she would not be penalized and her boss would understand and show compassion. The company was eventually taken over by a new management who scrutinized everything and everyone. She felt she was hardly accommodated with any of her needs and therefore whenever she was asked to stay past her shift she would refuse. She eventually became unhappy and quit.
She told me that she did not feel that her boss cared about her or her troubles and therefore she made no accommodations for them either. She did her 9-5 and was gone the minute 5pm arrived.
I believe that for a working environment to be productive there has to be mutual compassion. To give more of themselves, workers want to feel that they too are getting something out of it, even though they may love what they do. Likewise, clients want to feel that they matter and that their best interest is considered.
I have heard of various companies who have invested in day cares in their facilities and notice improved productivity. Or allowing children to accompany their parents to work on rare moments when the parents maybe having childcare issues. Having resilience is important. Making people feel like they matter is also important.
"Burn-out" is something I've been facing everyday during my internship. After several discussions in class and heart to hearts with Prof. Stein and Prof. Reitz, I realized part of the solution is the necessity of compassion as described by Kerry-Ann and mutual reinforcement as described by Prof. Stein. A major component of the solution to fighting burn-out is to take stock of your own feelings and goals. A few of our assignments have forced us to write out a succinct list of our goals and ideals. Knowing your ideals and your future goals are an integral aspect of fighting burn-out because they are a daily reminder of what we want out of our current job or internship. Like Kerry-Ann's aunt who knew to quit if she wasn't getting what she deserved, reviewing the reasons why we joined our particular fields strengthens our desire to work harder at finding solutions for our clients and helps combat the feeling of frustration and hatred towards our clients. Whether it is quitting and moving on to the next opportunity, or creating your own opportunities, it is important that we find the solutions within our ideals and goals.
Last week at a training, the NYC Sexual Assault Alliance's Community Organizer stated to us as rape advocates that we must take care of ourselves to keep the movement strong and going. This woman's words truly impacted me and hits the topics of resiliance and preventing burn-out. As Stew Friedman ends his piece in with we need to look back at the muse that inspires us.
However, I still sit here and question how is it that when you come across some of the most horrible instances and circumstances that happen to people, how do you REALLY PREVENT BURN-OUT. Resiliance is an answer but how resiliant can I be when I am being called to the emergency-room to see a survivor who has just been raped. While at that moment, I must let the assault survivor know all the options they have. I wonder am I putting up a front of resiliance becuase when I walk out of there, I know a part of me will never be the same again. At my internship, I just found out about a case where I was sitting in the room when a client who had a case walked in with her father. Her father was highly supportive of her. The other social workers all complimented him for supporting his daughter. However, my mind went through a series of thoughts that said he is molesting her, something is wrong with this picture. Sadly, I just found out recently that the father admitted to molesting her and her brother. So, I apologize for being up-front but how should I be resilient? How do I spring back to the same form that I came into all this work when I know that with every case, every instance I know a part of me will never be the same. We speak of success as the result of resiliance. With rape survivor, assualt survivors and domestic violence survivor, how do I measure success? I always refrain from saying victims becuase we couldn't help them when they were being aggressed against. We work only with the survivor and what has been done to them cannot be undone.
Wow! I am so impressed with the depth and seriousness with which you've responded and expanded on this post.
Thank you for taking the time to do so. You might consider adding to the discussion at harvardbusiness.org, too; I believe your perspectives would be valuable and valued there as well.
I worked in a psychiatric hospital for 3 years in the mid-'70s (yes, I'm that old!), and so I have some sense of what the strains are for people who do what you do. I was also a NYC taxi driver, before that -- talk about the need for resilience!
My main thoughts in response to your notes here are two: (a) it's essential to have people you trust with whom you can speak about the emotional strain of the human suffering to which you're exposed all the time and (b) in whatever ways make sense to you, I urge you to find time to connect with people with whom you can speak about how the work you're doing aligns with your core values, and to generate ideas for making it more so.
I hope these reactions are useful to you.
/Stew Friedman
As we know, being resilient can mean many different things. As we have touched upon in class, resiliency can often be obtained through experience. However, when working with said populations, experience can work both to benefit one and to "burn" one out.
I think, sometimes, resiliency is something that takes time build. It is something that can be built not only through academia, but also through personal experience. As a "survivor" of dating abuse (I do not generally use this term to describe myself, but it best fits here)I once experienced many doubts concerning my career goals. With goals of eventually counseling a criminal population, I would ruminate over how I would react after this experience.
How would I react to someone who admitted to abusing their significant other? My overall fear was that I would become uncontrollably afraid, and that my client would be able to "see right through me". For a while, I contemplated the necessity of abandoning these goals.
Inintially, my childhood instilled in me a sort of resiliency, as I was taught to "never give up". However, I knew getting over this hurdle would require a great deal of willpower of my own. My first internship was at a Domestic Violence awareness and prevention center (Day One New York), and this experience helped me through a lot of what happened to me. While dealing with the material was personally difficult (leaving me feeling very frusterated and sometimes depressed at the end of the day)it gave me the ability to embrace my career goals with an even greater passion. It was this combination of academia and personal experience that made me as fervent as ever about helping a population that had done wrong (indirectly) against me.
Sometimes, in order to be resilient, we have to be willing to encounted situations that elicit strong emotional responses (Like Day One did for me). Like a garden that must be burned in order for it to better flourish, we sometimes have to work even harder to mend our wounds, keeping in mind that such struggles will make us more resilient. However, we must allow some time to pass...
As we have covered throughout our seminar, we need not hide from our past, but rather use it to direct us.
As a leader resilience is imperative to continue what matters most in ones life. There are times when individuals undergo this "burnout" that many of you have mentioned. What comes to my mind when I think of burnout is what necessarily drives a person to this burn out? In my intership I feel that every individual has this passion to serve these ex-convicted offenders. Is it because the majority of the staff is young and they haven't experienced this sense of burn out? What happens when these clients time and time again return to jail and have not succesfully reintegrated back into society. If I would constantly see the same individual return to the program it could cause a sense of burn out. It would cause me to question myself if I did everything possible for this individual. Having resilience requires the individual to increase their self esteem and the individuals are then able to bounce back from risks, stress, and crisis. For a leader to have resilience it benefits not only himself but those he serves as well as other staff members
"Only connect..." is the epigraph to EM Forster's novel "Howard's End," one of my all time favorites. I'm constantly struggling with "only connect" and try it out here--tying resiliency to structural obstacles to personal dreams and goals....
I’ve been reading over the papers you have written on the topic of “structural violence” and the ways in which you see structural violence impact on the populations you serve. The same paper also had you write about the important “stakeholders” in your own life. While most of you could define the abstract concept of structural violence, I found that many had difficultly connecting the abstraction to on-the-ground realities—-whether in your own personal life or in the experiences of the folks with whom you work or who your agency serves. I’m not surprised by that. I know that the workings of the larger political-economy doesn’t get our attention often enough (inside and outside academia) so we barely scratch the surface when we start to talk about how structural forces differentially impinge upon the lives of the people with whom we work—and on our own lives too.
I was very struck by something one of you wrote in her essay, and Professor Stein’s response to it. The student wrote, “I do not want to use my economic circumstances as an excuse for not being the best that I can be.” Professor Stein responded, “Are there ways to see the road that would remove some obstacles?”
I wonder what would happen if we reframe the student’s concern that she not “use” structural obstacles (and difficult economic circumstances IS a structural obstacle) as an excuse, and think about such obstacles—those things that get in our way, that get in our client’s way—in different terms…..
What if we reframed it something like this…..
I recognize that the social conditions within which I find myself constitute a big obstacle to my success. I also realize that these circumstances are not of my own making—they are “set” by systems and structures out of my control. Farmer quotes Bertolt Brecht’s poem “On Violence”: The headlong stream is termed violent but the river bed hemming it in is termed violent by no one” (Farmer 2003: 11). In other words, there are forces out there that determine the shape of the social field within which I find myself—a social field that’s an obstacle course for someone like me (because of my social positionality as determined by class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion), only it's so hard to see it--to see the "river bed" hemming me in.
I don’t want to succumb to those obstacles, but work my way around them to reach my goals. Even though my circumstances are difficult and my social positionality may put me at a certain kind of disadvantage, I want to muster up as many of my internal and external resources as possible in order to get to where I want to go. I want to look around me, and identify what is getting in my way. If I am doing certain things that are getting in my way(i.e., are self-destructive), I want to become more aware of them so that I can make the changes I need to make. If there are external forces getting in my way, I want to change those (or participate in changing them—i.e., participate in collective efforts for social change) or, if I can’t change those things—or if the change is too slow, I want to find ways to maneuver around them. Also, I want to understand the obstacles and put them to my advantage as best I can. After all, the obstacles, difficulties, struggles, I’ve experienced can inform me in many ways. These experiences can help me better understand social and interpersonal suffering, help me be more empathic and compassionate to the suffering of others, and for myself, help me be more resilient (i.e., recover more quickly from setbacks). If I start to see the world this way, I may also come to recognize that my “success” needs to be assessed by different criteria. Perhaps my success is better defined by all of the efforts I make in the process of becoming “the best that I can be” rather than arrival at the end-point.
This topic of resilience really brings together so much of what we’ve been discussing the last few weeks. I found a second definition for resilience “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change” (taken from www.m-w.com). For me, this definition is a somewhat more accurate for our discussion. The one Amanda cited implies that we must be able to return to our original state, which is necessary to a degree but is not completely true. It is important to be able to “bounce back” and return to our original level of ambition and even core values, however, often resilience is more about taking on challenges and extracting something from them rather than resisting them. In this way, we are transformed by challenges and the ability to adjust becomes essential.
It is impossible to prevent our experiences from changing us. If we stay grounded in our core values and use them to navigate the search for what really matters to us, times of crises will become times of growth. While reading the other responses I noticed that it is often traumatic and negative experiences that reveal the most profound sense of duty and calling to a particular cause. Perhaps, one’s resiliency is directly correlated to self actualization and success.
I think it is passion that gives us strength. If you do not love what you do, things around you lose their attraction. We all talk about the burn-out effect we encounter in criminal justice field. I believe that it is here where resilience comes into play. We need to continue to love what we are doing, but we need to distance ourselves from factors that can harm us. In order for us to continue to be there for these people, we need to find a way to reshape our attitude but not give up. Resilience for me is not giving up on what you love, but pursue what you love in a different way. The burn–out effect is not necessarily the result of negative experiences in a new job, but rather comes from our understanding that sometimes it is hard, or even impossible, to change the state of things. In class we discussed that we are not out there to help these people, but to support them. If they don’t want to change, it is very little we can do to change them.
It is true that everything you do should be consistent with your core values. However, our current society sometimes forces us to go against our core values. If we want to do something we love, but also make money, we have to give up our compassion and love to help others because this may not pay enough. In so many circumstances our core values enter in contradiction with the 21st century society core values. Resilience would help us stay strong but will inevitably affect our core values.
Mr. Friedman,
Thank you for your post.
I immediately reacted to the line: "You might not believe it, and I can't say for sure, but I think Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer -- and your boss, too -- is looking for the same thing." My first (rather Marxist) reaction was- pssh, bosses aren’t searching for hearts of gold, they’re searching for profit. After I had a second to think about it, I realized how unfair I was being. My second reaction was: if my boss were only after money, then I am the one at fault- I am working in the wrong company.
I am listening to my cassette player crooning Pink Floyd’s High Hopes, trying not to get drawn in by its cynicism: “Encumbered forever by desire and ambition/ There's a hunger still unsatisfied” (which is, by the way, like telling a fish not to swim). I am thinking about my own need for resilience, inspiration, or maybe a swift kick in the behind. I’ve spent a good part of this week “enhancing my resilience” by evaluating what is important to me- and what I need to do today, tomorrow and next year to move forward.
It is so very easy- no matter what side of production one is on- to get stuck, lose motivation, and to stop looking for those “hearts of gold”. In spirit of not giving up, I thought about the questions you posed (what I am searching for and what it is that I love), though couldn’t (yet) find the answers.
I think I still have a lot of work to do.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings about this critical issue. I really like what Amanda advises. It's good to know that your group has each other for support--peer-to-peer coaching is so important. /Stew
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