The New Social Worker magazine put out a solicitation for articles for Social Work Month 2021. I decided to try and submit something I have gained a deeper, clearer, and stronger realization of over the past year. I was excited to find out that it was accepted and published.
"From a macro perspective, the most essential thing I want social workers to know is that we must work on changing the whole social environment" (Jones, 2021).
You can read more here.
Long story short, I decided to take some classes towards a Master’s in Business Administration. Will I complete it? Who knows…I honestly know. I am just taking a class at a time and focusing on enjoying learning new information. The first class I took was on Marketing for Nonprofits. I’ve always been kind of interested in marketing so I was excited about the course.
I believe it was in the second week we had to watch a TEDx Talk by Simon Sinek. In it, he
talks about how most leaders and organizations know what they do, and then some
go further and know how they do it. Few organizations know why they do what
they do. Sinek refers to this as the Golden Circles; a seeming simple concept,
but very impactful once fully realized.
Inspired leaders and inspired organizations communicate from
the inside out; they start with why. Too often in social work we get caught up
in the what and how. We want to know what we need to do our how to address a
situation or what the issue is and how do we empower clients to address their
issues that the why gets lost. I don’t know if you have every been in a
situation where you do things just because someone has said this is what we do
without explaining why it’s done that way. It drives me up a wall. Some people are
so content without connecting to they why.
I think part of the reason social workers burnout is because
they lose that connect with their why. Our jobs stress the what and how and it’s
usually up to us to connect with our why. This March, social workers have been inundated
with messages about being essential, but the funny thing is I think we already
knew that. Knowing we are essential to the very social fabric of the country
isn’t enough to save us from burnout. In fact, there is no single solution to
the problem of burnout. However, there are things social workers can do to help
prevent burnout such as self-care and appropriate supervision. Check out this
article with some guidance on preventing burnout.
Social work is not a profession for the light hearted. If you are in micro practice you are working with people on some of their worst days. If you are in macro practice it is easy to forget that change takes awhile to happen. We can get so caught up in our daily "to-do" lists or whatever priority has come up. We take a strength's based approach to our work and sometimes we are the only ones looking for the good in others. When society is falling apart, social workers are there advocating for change. It's no wonder we spend so much time focusing on the what and how that put the why on the back burner of our minds.
While not the single solution to burnout, I would encourage
my fellow social workers to spend some time in reflection and reconnect with
your why. Why drives our behaviors. Your why is probably what got you into the
social work profession in the first place. Maybe your why has changed over the
years (and that’s ok), but going beyond the what and how of what you do to
connect with why you are in the profession can be part of the solution to
preventing burnout.
This social work
month- Connect With Your Why.
