Compassion Fatigue Solutions

January to April are very busy months for people who, like me, are in the business of offering professional development to agencies and government-funded services.

The key operative words are "unallocated funds" which basically means that if you are an agency who gets to March 31st and you haven't spent your whole professional development budget, you won't get as much funding the following year and you lose the leftover money you had, no carryover allowed. So, all of a sudden, around January/February, agencies are scrambling to find high quality workshops to bring to their staff asap.

So this, combined with the fact that caring managers are very concerned about burnout and compassion fatigue means that I am often very busy on the workshop circuit in the winter and early spring and therefore have to be even more aware of self care and life work balance during these hectic times. Of course, talk to me from June to September, and that's a whole other story. So my "ideal schedule" in the winter months is not the same as what works the other 6 months of the year. Shift workers and aid workers who get deployed for months at a time will likely relate to this reality.

The quest for the ideal schedule is an ongoing one, something that we constantly need to tweak and experiment with. When my kids were very young, and just about to start school, I remember grilling my friend whose children were older: "and what do you make them for lunch? how do you deal with homework? what is the best way to structure the time after school?" this was part curiosity and partly my seeking to nagivate this new regime in a way that was successful and allowed me, a full time crisis counsellor at the time, a way to stay sane and healthy.

Through the EAP(employee assistance)work that I do, I have the opportunity to meet workers from all walks of life: from truck drivers to insurance adjustors, nurses to senior ranking officers in the military, donut shop workers and police officers. I am absolutely fascinated to hear how they juggle and what works best for them. Am I alone in being obsessed with this????