psychologist here at the university of
east anglia and i’m going to be talking
to you about some of our research on
emotional resilience at work this
morning we’re going to give you some
insights from our research we
particularly focused on the profession
of Social Work it’s a particularly
stressful process and profession and we
were expecting emotional resilience to
be particularly important in in that
profession and I’m hoping that you’ll
take away today a few of our insights
from the social workers coping
strategies to maintain themselves in
their work so life can be a little bit
overwhelming at times and it often has
us on the run emotionally resilient
people I able to bounce back in the face
of these challenges and adversities
they’re able to change the way they
think the way they feel and what they do
in order to overcome these challenges
and by doing this they draw on their own
resources they draw on other people’s
resources as well they’re able to seek
help they don’t do it all on their own
other things that influence the
emotional resilience that we have
throughout life are of course our own
abilities on our own skills we each have
our own unique set of these that we
bring to life they may be things like
persistence conscientiousness openness
to experience and in addition to this
there are lots of other things that will
affect how emotionally resilient we’re
going to be a really important one as
we’re growing up is our family
environment to what extent is our family
available to us how tuned in are they to
our needs do they accept us as a person
rather than as a set of accomplishments
all of these things make our family a
secure base from which we can then
explore and learn the society we grow up
in makes a huge difference to in terms
of the adversities we actually
experience do we live in rich society a
poor Society geographical region so this
will affect the adversities that we face
it will also affect the number of
resources that are at our disposal and
then more locally in terms of our
neighbourhoods where we live the
communities we live amongst where we
work where we go to school this all
influences the degree to which we are
connected to others and that’s vital for
emotional resilience because we can’t
rely on our resources alone so we were
particularly interested in the work
environment for our research and that’s
what I’m going to talk to you about next
so we ran a study that was funded by the
economic social and research council
here in the UK and we worked with eight
local authorities and around 200 child
and family social workers across a range
of different roles and we were
interested to know about how they sort
of coped with their work one of the
first questions we asked was what do you
find emotionally demanding at work and
we used a model that’s well known in the
literature it’s called the job demands
and resources modeled by Becker and
colleagues and these job demands that
you can see here are the the most common
range of job demands that we all
experience at work and they include
things like workload in social worker
terms this would be caseload working
hours the degree of change that we
experienced at work and so on and these
job demands are mitigated by the range
of resources that are available to us so
these are things like colleagues support
supervisor support opportunities for
training and development the resources
available to us to do the work and they
help offset some of the job
in terms of what sets apart social work
and other sort of stressful preset
professions are these emotional demands
that makes it particularly challenging
and social workers told us that some of
the most stressful emotional demands
that they faced with things like
witnessing trauma amongst children and
families dealing with the or living with
the weight of responsibility for the
welfare of children trying to engage
service users it’s all very well but
seeing that some people need help but
they may not actually want your help
when you offer it so you’ve got to try
and engage them as well and in dealing
with these emotional demands not only do
you have to deal with these but you have
to manage your own emotional responses
and manage other people’s responses as
well and this is known as emotional
labor and takes a lot out of us and all
of this makes the work very
psychologically preoccupying so things
are preying on social workers Minds all
the time and this means that it work
very often spilt over into their into
their personal lives so they had to
manage that as well
so a number of things that are quite
stressful in the job and stress gets
quite a bad press but actually we need
to remember that stress is a natural
process we’ve evolved to have stress
it’s an adaptive thing and it helps us
cope with changes in the in the
environment so we need stress to be able
to actually function stress is a
physical and an emotional response and I
think we’ve often particular as adults
we forget about the physical nature of
stress a whole range of things going on
to make us able to either run away from
a threat or face a threat and fight it
and although nowadays we may not need to
run away from a predator a tiger in the
bush or TEVAR
we do
you are very alert to social threats
threats to our status our identity so
stress is adaptive so we shouldn’t worry
about it so much and it helps us cope
with the demands we face and when job
demands are balanced if you like with
job resources then stress is sort of
manageable and helps us function and
perform well that’s work where it
becomes a bit of an issue is where this
there’s an imbalance between demands and
resources so you might lose some
resources and then the DES balance
remains the same but that’s going to
create an imbalance and then we might
suffer chronic stress and then that
becomes a bit of an issue with people
going off sick and so on we were
particularly interested in the
individual coping strategies that social
workers brought to the demands of their
work and that’s what I’m going to move
on to next the next question we asked in
that case was what strategies do you use
to manage your emotions at work and I
just like you to take a moment to think
about the kinds of strategies you use to
manage your emotions so you’d have
brought a few strategies to mind
hopefully and you can think about this
as the day goes on and we’ll come back
to these when I finish the talk in terms
of what social workers told us they
broadly their strategies broadly fell
into what we called engage strategies
and disengaged strategies the disengaged
strategies involved avoiding the problem
pretending sort of head-in-the-sand
approach wishful thinking social
withdrawal so withdrawing from all
normal sort of social activities which
can be assigned a sort of assigned
towards depression very often
self-criticism blaming ourselves I
should have done this I must do that
the kind of negative self-talk and
distraction using alcohol or smoking
these kinds of things to distract from
the problem and these strategies will
certainly work they will distract you
from your problems but they are fairly
short-term strategies and can
potentially cause you emotional or
psychological harm in the long term so
although they work probably best not to
rely on these strategies in Contra are
some of the more effective strategies
that social workers spoke to us about
fell into these six areas and I’m going
to take each one of these in turn the
first one was they would plan ahead so
this involves all the usual time
management techniques using your diary
thinking what’s coming up but
particularly important about this
strategy for social workers was they
thought about how am I going to feel in
a particularly challenging situation is
there anything I can do to make that
better or or change that how might
others feel in a particularly city in a
particular situation can I manage other
people’s expectations so that they
survive a challenge better so a
particular example could be if a family
was going to be have to go through a
court process for remover another child
social workers would make sure that the
parents knew what the court process was
what the purpose of it was who all the
individuals were that were involved in
the process so that even though it was
inherently going to be a stressful
experience for them
at least they knew what was coming up
and what to what to expect another
example from this social worker was in
the face of dealing with challenging
service users if they were worried about
what might go on when they visited them
at home they would arrange for them to
come into the office instead so so
changing small things to make a
difference to how people were going to
feel in the future the second strategy
called reframing and essentially we have
this fantastic ability to change the way
we see the world by just changing the
way we think about it so we can change
the meaning for us by changing the way
we think about things and to illustrate
this there are two great examples from
two different social workers
experiencing a very similar situation
so this first social worker was
receiving a lot of verbal abuse and
complaints made against her a lot of
personal comments from one of her
service users who she felt she’d done
above and beyond to try and help and
this she found to be incredibly
upsetting and it bothered her for quite
a long period of time the second social
worker very similar situation
abuse from from one of her service users
she took a different approach she set
herself a few minutes to try and calm
down and gave herself a little sort of
pep talk to remind herself that this
wasn’t about her personally this was
about the situation that the service
user was in maybe they had a personality
disorder maybe they had suffered from
abuse and that they were behaving in
that way because of that and not because
of her and this helped her get her head
sorted around it and then she didn’t
worry about it anymore so changing the
way we think about things can be very
powerful a third strategy is exercise
particularly important when we remember
the stress is quite a physical response
if we take exercise it helps us
metabolize some of the stress hormones
that are whizzing around our system it
can improve our mood and it can distract
from from anxious thoughts a fourth
strategy was tackling the problem you
remember in the disengaged strategies
people were avoiding the problem in this
case it’s about actually addressing the
problem because if we tackle the problem
it’s not going to reoccur
and we’ve reduced the mountain of
problems that are coming into our inbox
every day so tackling the problem really
useful strategy and in doing so not
thinking that we have to solve all our
problems on our own that we can use
other people’s ideas and resources to
help us solve our problems and and this
was a great quote from one of the social
workers who said she wasn’t afraid to
ask people questions we find that this
very much with our students they won’t
ask a question I’m going to look so
stupid but asking questions absolutely
crucial to be able to learn so ask
questions take any opportunity you can
to learn from others this all helps with
problem-solving a fifth strategy really
important in terms of remaining
connected to people is to seek social
support family friends colleagues and
and this is vital partly because you get
to feel heard feel understood you can
gain advice you can gain a different
perspective by talking to others it
helps us structure our thoughts and make
them a little bit more ordered and if we
can do that we feel slightly less
chaotic and out of control
so talking to others really useful a
final strategy was modifying mood
changing the way we feel by thinking
about things and one of the ways in
which we can do this is to think about
the people that love us their crazy
things our pets do and we all have
mobile phones nowadays which is
brilliant I remember the days before
mobile phones I’m that old but now we
have our family in our pocket
effectively and that and that’s great so
we can refer to them when we feel a bit
low the second strategy is to think
about a great holiday you’ve been on a
great place you’ve been to I love
photography
I love wildlife this is the Norfolk
Broads if you’ve never seen a
swallowtail butterfly I recommend you do
so while you’re here so thinking about
places that make you feel rely
and that you love and then a sort of
final strategy those social workers who
were religious were able to take a
moment out to go to prayer and that
would really help them take a break
replenish and relax and other similar
strategies for those of us who are not
religious would be meditation or
mindfulness so just have a quick think
about the strategies that you brought to
mind when I asked you what strategies
you use to manage your emotions to what
extent where they disengage strategies
to what extent where they engage
strategies what we would suggest would
be a useful thing to do is a increase
the range of strategies that you use it
will make you more able to tackle
problems that you face as you go through
life and if you’re going to increase the
range of your strategies try and
increase the engage ones and maybe
decrease some of the disengaged ones so
we’ve summarized these six engage
strategies for you here and they are
planning ahead reframing taking exercise
tackling the problem seeking social
support and modifying mood thank you for listening