The Mindful Helper: Surviving and Thriving in the Helping Professions
Next course to be held in 2024.
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Why attend?
Being in a helping profession is more of a vocation than a job. We care about the work and the people we meet. Working with people going through tough times can be challenging, inspiring, heartbreaking. The work changes us, for the better and for the worse. This workshop offers a chance to connect with others to examine why we do the work, how it affects us and how we can thrive.
Why focus on the helping professional rather than the clients?
‘Evidence-based practice’ is typically used to describe specific treatments and procedures. In contrast, we now have several decades of research to show that the qualities of therapeutic relationship and the helping professional have a profound impact on client outcomes, often far more than the specific interventions we use. Who delivers the treatment and how is as important, or more, than the specific treatment being provided.
And yet much of our professional development centres on specific presentations and treatments. If we look at the clinician, we tend to mainly focus on the problems – vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, burn out. While these are important themes to address, there is so much more to our relationship with the work than that. Clients receive the best care when their helping professionals are able to be at their best.
What’s involved?
The Mindful Helper is a two-day opportunity to take a step back from the day to day work and reflect on our experience – the good, the bad and the constantly evolving. The workshop will be highly interactive using experiential and creative practice drawing on Motivational Interviewing, Positive Psychology and mindfulness to connect with where we are in relation to the work and where we want to go next. The process will also build towards developing a personalised resource to sustain and flourish within our work.
Who should attend?
Anyone whose work is about helping, supporting, caring or advocating for others in need. Counsellors, allied health, medical, community support, corrections workers, activists – if you turn up to try to make a positive difference, this workshop could be for you. The workshop is suitable for early, mid and late career professionals who are at a point where they would like to reflect on their current relationship with the work and explore what they would like to put their energy towards next.
Come and explore, be challenged and laugh with like-minded colleagues, as we examine our own relationship with this complex role of trying to support our fellow humans through life’s roller coaster.