For each of these advances, there are imposing barriers to our providing quality service. There are higher demands for productivity, stricter controls on the spending of third party dollars, and greater insistence upon customer value for persons we serve. My mentors, my colleagues, and even those young SLP's who i have encouraged and supported: all of them i have overheard saying, how can we survive?
I can assure the reader of this blog that: staying well and productive is possible, that burnout can be prevented, and that there are proven ways for the SLP at risk for burnout, to meet her/his career and life goals.
Burnout: loosely defined as exhaustion that comes as the byproduct of soul - grinding stress. I have been affected by burnout twice in my career. In both cases I survived by taking a job outside the professions, until I knew for myself I needed to work as an SLP. I needed and received healing and recharging. Though i felt initially i had been defeated by my burnout, there were instead lessons to be learned. What were the lessons I learned that made chronic burnout less likely?
Most SLP professionals beginning or near the mid point of their careers, may not give much attention to can staying healthy and focused. You are in your 20's or 30's, in relatively good health, with graduate school and your CF (clinical fellowship) each fresh in your memory. You devote your days to learning work site routines, building expertise with disorders, and making increasingly sophisticated judgements about what the persons served need.
My first burnout period came soon after I finished a year as a doctoral student in Iowa. I was a year removed from receiving the master's degree. The critical factors were easy to see: I had had no research background; I was attempting a very high level of competition with my peers; and I had not previously lived outside my southern birthplace. When the perigee of my graduate career had arrived, - did I fall into the abyss? No. I secured a job as a CNA at the University hospital, first in ENT then in General Surgery. What worked to keep me alive?
* no animosity - I left the doctoral program, but was not shut out of the community within the communication sciences and disorders department. I then made a place for myself in the community of the university hospital.
* physical activity - doing CNA work is physically demanding through the shift, so completing a day is a matter of pride as well as nourishing for mind and body.
*reminded of who I am: the interactions with medical, nursing and other professionals caring for our patients; they all told me that I was ready to re-enter the professions;
Nineteen years elapsed, and my career took me to grade school and residential DD programs in Louisiana, community DD programs in Idaho, and a hospital program in Iowa. Managed care had crashed through the edifice of health care financing, and we had started to see that the world had changed. SLP was charged in my hospital with covering services for early intervention, acute, SNF, acute rehab, outpatient, home care and hospice. Wow! Work was going home every night. Days working with persons with traumatic brain injury found me cursed, kicked, slapped, punched, urinated upon and bitten. I did not have the gas in my tank needed for the demands of the job. A local human service agency needed a service coordinator, for adults with traumatic brain injury. What saved me then?
* not living in my head - there was little time to get lost in paperwork or pity parties: Many varied tasks were the order of the day - staffing a group home; giving consumers rides to community appointments (school, work, medical, vocational); staff meetings; care conferences; getting residents into/out of the law enforcement or mental health systems;
* learning different skill sets and knowledge bases - switching and sustaining focus is not only healthy for the persons we serve, but also for us. Learning the intricacies of SSI/SSDI filings alone - sheesh! Managing group home residents' drug administration records - critical!
* using my SLP training - when group home staff appeared to overload the information processing capabilities of the adults with TBI, I could help them devise personalized strategies for verbal expression, memory processing and emotional control - and other things, too. The success we had told me that, I needed to be back in clinical SLP.
Sixteen years have passed since that period, and I appear to have retained many of the lessons learned from my burnout periods. Since this blog is a personal view, some occupational hazards may be less scary than they appear in your rear view mirror:
* Have a life outside the job.
* Pursue physical and mental activity that keep you well not only for the job, but for all the parts of your life that keep you healthy.
* Develop career goals for the short and long term. Have concise plans to achieve all these goals.
* Use mentors and peers to advise you on your goals. Be part of a supportive community.
* As Max Ehrmann wrote in 'Desiderata', Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
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