Beyond Burnout: A Gathering with One Another and Friends
Path Connect X With One Another Event
There is something heartbreaking about asking someone who is on the edge of burnout “What more could you be doing to look after yourself?”. Being told to meditate each morning to prevent burnout can sound exhausting or impossible when you have a million other things taking up your attention. Most of us working in allied health already know a lot about wellbeing, regulation and self-care. So perhaps the question isn't why we aren't doing enough of it. Perhaps it's whether caring for ourselves always needs to involve doing more. Centring around the theme “Beyond Burnout”, we recently partnered with the wonderful Laura Maguire at Path Connect to gather a roomful of allied health clinicians together, not to solve the big problem of burnout, but to listen, be heard, and to think differently about how we as clinicians can support ourselves and one another in this work.
During this evening of food, drink, and chatter, we explored a shift in perspective - what if self-care isn't always about doing more for ourselves? What if it could also mean efforting a little less, noticing ourselves a little more, and creating relationships where care can move between us?
Where Might we be "Efforting"?
One of the ideas we kept returning to throughout the evening was “efforting”. By efforting, we don't simply mean being busy. We mean all the additional energy that can go into trying to be the clinician, professional or business owner we think we're supposed to be.
For clinicians, efforting could look like:
Constantly appearing perfectly regulated
Trying hard not to show tiredness, hunger, or tension
Moving quickly from one client to another
Responding to every demand or being always available
Sometimes bringing more ease into our work isn't about adding another wellbeing strategy. It might be about taking away some of the effort involved in performing how we think we're supposed to be.
How do we want our work to feel?
We recognise this in ourselves, too. There are still times when we find ourselves losing sight of what we originally wanted One Another to be, caught up in funding worries, systemic changes or all the things we're told a business should be doing. When that happens, we often come back to a very early memory of One Another: the two of us sprawled out on the living room floor with a large piece of butcher's paper between us. That day we asked ourselves:
How do we want our work to feel day to day?
How do we want to relate to our work?
What might we notice when me move away from this?
While we wrote those questions down years ago, we still return to them as our work and the industry around us continues to change. The point isn't really the butcher's paper itself. It's having enough awareness of what feels like us that we can begin to notice when we're moving away from it.
What happens when we turn that attention towards ourselves?
This idea of noticing came up in another way during the evening. As allied health clinicians, many of us are incredibly practised at noticing other people - their facial expressions, changes in tone, body language, or needs. We spend so much of our working lives paying close attention to what might be happening for somebody else in session. But we can become much less practised at turning some of that attention towards ourselves and asking: What's happening in me right now?
During our event, clinicians shared some ways that they override their own needs, such as:
Swallowing yawns
Ignoring a growling stomach
Putting off going to the bathroom
Noticing tight shoulders or a stiff back but continuing anyway
Finishing a heavy session and immediately opening the door for the next person
Over time, we can become very good at overriding ourselves in order to remain available to somebody else. Perhaps this is one place where we can think about self-care differently – not necessarily as another activity to fit in, but as paying a little more attention to ourselves.
What if care doesn't need more time?
Rather than asking what else we need to add to an already-full day, we might become curious about:
What's already happening in my day that I could bring a little more care or spaciousness into?
For some of us in the room, that looked surprisingly ordinary, clinicians discussed:
Deliberately slowing down the moment you get into your car between appointments: sitting down, slowly putting on the seatbelt, pausing before starting the care and not immediately checking your phone
Stepping outside with the dog
Taking the long way home and noticing the air around you
Listening to music while moving your body or driving in the car
Paying attention to every part of making and drinking your morning coffee
None of these things are the answer. The point was something smaller: care doesn't always need another thirty-minute space in an already-full day. Sometimes it can be threaded into what is already happening.
One person spoke openly about the pressures of being a sole-trader clinician: admin, finances, changing systems and the feeling of doing everything possible but still finding it so hard. As they spoke, other clinicians around the room were nodding, people understood. If only for a moment, we listened to each other’s experiences without trying to solve any one problem. Our experiences didn’t have to be carried by ourselves anymore, no longer isolated clinicians but connected in the same understanding.
This brought us to another part of the conversation that feels particularly important to us: care isn't only something we have to provide for ourselves. Sometimes we need to be the person receiving care.
Care can move between people
Sometimes support isn't another strategy or piece of advice. It might be somebody noticing that we're carrying a lot. Making space for us to speak honestly. Sitting alongside an experience without immediately trying to fix it. Or helping to hold part of the load.
In many ways, the gathering itself became an example of what we were talking about. Not because community is the solution to burnout, but because for a couple of hours, people who understand something about this work were able to be together in it.
An invitation....
Perhaps the invitation isn't to leave with another thing to do.
It might simply be to become a little more curious about our relationship with work: how we want it to feel, where we're using more energy than we realise, what we're overriding along the way, and where care is able to reach us too.
We've created a short reflection for clinicians to help make some space for those questions. It's not a wellbeing plan or another self-care checklist. It's simply somewhere to pause and notice how your work feels, how you're relating to it, and what might help make it more sustainable.
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