Me-time – The importance of self-care as part of working and learning (Part 1)

Across more than 20 years’ involvement with collaborative Project-Based Learning, especially capstone courses, something that’s always interested me is the way in which it’s expected that learners will develop and utilise interpersonal (soft) skills to a reasonably high level. While this might be a Graduate Profile item for whatever qualification the course lies inside, their mention in the specific Course Prescription might be limited to evaluation of their use. There may not be anything in Course Prescription which says they should be taught as part of the course so we, as practitioners, can fall into the Tacit Assumption Trap (TAT) that learners will use skills they have been exposed to as part of prerequisite courses or other courses taken on the journey towards the capstone.

There are two important underpinnings to this TAT:

• That the soft skills have been positioned by facilitators, at the time they were being taught and examined, as an important precursor to managing an effective project team for the end-of-qualification capstone project. In other words, there was a specific personal reason for each of them for doing the learning in the first place.
• That, if that positioning happened, learners actually took it seriously, kept all the resources that went with it, and that they will go back to those resources when they need some refreshing to deal with current and future problems.

I’ll talk more about these two TATs in an upcoming blog. What I want to discuss in today’s blog is a third TAT that I think facilitators can also fall into – that of assuming learners will be capable of practicing appropriate self-care as part of their own journey. If we cannot practice it ourselves, how are we going to help others to see the possibilities for themselves? The reason I’m leapfrogging ahead with this third TAT is that failure to self-care is something that, in my experience is an important factor in helping to understand why some people won’t achieve their full potential as part of a project or other areas in life. It’s also something that, in my experience, can affect facilitators as easily as learners, so I’m going to share my own self-care story in the hope that it can help somebody else to avoid the ‘crash.” Understanding something of the lived experience of self-care first will help make sense of the first two TATs, and why their implications are so important for learners engaging in collaborative learning.

Something I’ve experienced myself (more than once), as well as seeing so many times with others, is a failure of self-care. It often happens when people discover how interested they are in something they are doing, or how passionate they are about doing it as well as it can possibly be done. We may be aware that we are “burning the candle at both ends” – we may even be told this by others in our project team, or who are part of our life outside the project. We promise ourself that we will ease off soon – but we just have this other task we need to complete first (maybe more than one task…)

The reality is that we aren’t “perpetual motion machines”, and we can’t keep working at a high level of intensity for a prolonged period of time without performance starting to drop off. The longer we leave stepping away from what we are working on for a recharge break, the more marked the performance drop-off. Work becomes “everything” – relationships and activities outside of the work context cease being important. Continue this insistence on doing the work without a break and the greater the likelihood of “crashing” – reaching the point where you simply can’t function effectively in work of social settings. Your whole identity has become your work and when, as inevitably happens, that work is removed from you, you become something of a lost soul. The development of depression is certainly possible.

Have you ever tried to get anybody to take some time off when you could see they were heading towards a crash if they didn’t change something in their approach, but you didn’t have a way to enforce the request? What was their reaction to this? I bet they didn’t see the situation in quite the same way you did. I bet you didn’t see things the same as whoever was asking you to take better care of yourself either. The difference in perception can lead to development of conflict where both sides think they are more “right” than the other and neither is willing to compromise on their position in any meaningful way. I’ve been the person who thought they were so important in the overall scheme of things that they needed to be there for everybody else all the time. Some of my people probably appreciated the extra support this meant them having to be the best version of themselves they could be, but most probably didn’t. I became so identified with what I perceived my role to be that I wasn’t taking care of myself in the same way that I was encouraging others to take care of themselves. I was a classic case of “Do as I say rather than do as I do”, having created a situation where it was possible for me to give my all without seeing that my ‘all” wasn’t necessarily the same as my “best.”

When the inevitable crash came, it was a salutary lesson in discovering who my real friends were as opposed to those who were only friends and who took the time to care during the good times. I’ve seen similar things happen in teams of learners working on collaborative projects (it happened in my first collaborative team project as well). Sometimes it’s frustrating to see what is happening and know that, as a facilitator, there are professional boundaries I shouldn’t cross when I can see people on the road to a crash. Sometimes teams have invited me in when this is happening, other times individuals have been brave enough to have empowering conversations, and sometimes people have taken such entrenched positions that crashes can’t be avoided.

Earlier I talked about encouraging people to do as I said rather than as I did. At least on a theoretical level, I knew that being so available to support others and to take on so many of their stress factors wasn’t a good thing. I’d got myself into a situation where I’d almost forgotten how to practice self-care. Add to that organisations and teams that were better talking about the need for it than actually helping make it happen, and my crash when it came was probably as spectacular as the ones I invested so much of myself in trying to help others avoid.

There’s one point I need to make really strongly here: Self-care is not a sign of weakness. It is not a sign that somebody doesn’t care about the team and what it needs to achieve. I see it very much as a sign of strength, helping people achieve a more appropriate balance in their lives. That doesn’t mean everything being exactly balanced; it’s about having a balance that allows somebody to have meaningful relationships across all areas of their life and do the work that they need to do in the context of their project team.

Think of self-care as coming in three different “menu items”, each of which has multiple “flavours”, such as:

• Emotional – giving yourself permission to step away from things that are causing you stress; or setting up regular times to do something you really enjoy simply for the pleasure that comes from doing it.
• Physical – making sure you get enough sleep, eating natural rather than processed foods, or making sure you get enough regular exercise.
• Spiritual – spending time out and about in nature just because it’s there, or some form of meditation.

You could decide to do some of these things as team activities. If that’s the case, these are definitely things that should be discussed together before doing, because they simply won’t deliver beneficial results if they are simply imposed. These are also things that you can do on your own, because the choice is totally yours as to what feels right for you. Maybe you end up choosing things from more than one “menu” – that’s totally OK, because the choice is all about what words for you.

Self-care isn’t about spending truckloads of money doing something. Spending truckloads might actually cause you a new stress-point without taking care of any of the previous ones. Grab a coffee with a friends and go sit in the fresh air, maybe in a local park, for half an hour. Smell the sunshine.  Focus on what it feels like to be in the moment with the person you chose to spend it with – enjoy the moment for what it is.

My self-care choice

Choice 1 – I joined a gym. This was something I always reckoned I would never do until I saw somebody genuinely smiling while they were exercising – not the manufactured smiles you see in advertisements for gyms. To my surprise, I’ve enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, and I’m feeling better for the experience. The most frustrating thing: staying away during the lockdowns, because leaving the house/office to go and work out is something that’s become simply a part of how life is. The cost is only the equivalent of a couple of bottles of Coke a week, and the switch from one to the other hasn’t been as difficult as I thought it would be.,

Choice 2 – something I’ve chosen to do came about more as a matter of serendipity than deliberate choice (at first). For a few years before the crash, I’d had abridge camera, because I wanted to explore photography as a hobby. Post-crash, I eventually started making times to step away from my new work and study. The camera eventually wore out, so was upgraded to a DSLR, which now has several lenses and a selection of filters for me to play with. Wednesday afternoons are now deliberately blocked out as See (Camera) Time/Me Time. The name pays respectful homage to some fabulous self-care work being done in the nursing profession by my very good friend and fellow Doctor of Professional Practice candidate, Vicki-Maree Yarker-Jones.

It’s my time to pick up the camera and head out to one of my Happy Places – usually somewhere with lots of flowers, or some moving water for a few hours of what I call “photographic mindfulness”. I’m fully present in that moment of trying to capture the images I have in my mind’s eye. I’m totally aware of how the various parts of my body are positioned, how my breathing is happening, when my mind is pointing towards or away from the image, what my eyes are seeing. Even the culling and editing of images later is still relaxing because it’s like I’m seeing them all for the first time.

What’s important is that, after my self-care time, I’m able to focus more fully on my work or study than I would have been if I just carried on working. I’m feeling better about being me. time spent is time invested, not time lost.

To me, the choice of self-care activity is less important than the fact that self-care happens at all. In Part 2 of the blog, I’ll look at the assumptions we make about what learners will know before they start engaging with collaborative learning opportunities, and why those are so important in terms of guiding them through collaborative learning experiences.