Speaker 2 (00:00.568)
This podcast contains themes that may be upsetting to some listeners. Please listen with caution and look in the show notes for resources if you need some help.

Speaker 2 (00:16.536)
Kia ora, I'm Alexia Black, host of The Difference, the podcast for mental health and addiction support workers in Aotearoa. Each episode we dive into the real issues facing our workforce, from worker well-being and vicarious trauma to leadership and lived experience. You'll hear practical insights, inspiring stories and honest korero to help you feel connected, supported and empowered in your mahi. Let's get started.

Speaker 2 (00:46.498)
This episode we're talking to Jonathan Miller. Jono is a team coach with Mental Health and Addiction Service Provider Pathways. Like many of us, he started his career in mental health working as a community support worker. Based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, he now manages a team of community support workers. Jono's passionate about vicarious trauma, burnout and compassion fatigue in the health sector.

and in 2022 he wrote a thesis for his honours degree on support worker well-being, one of the very few bits of published research that we've got on support worker nā o te rua.

Speaker 2 (01:23.01)
Hey Jono, tell us a little bit about you.

Yep, live in Auckland, work in Auckland Centre, so a bit of a struggle to go through Auckland traffic, but that is what it is. Got a little daughter. It's really fun at the moment because she's very much into gardening. And so every weekend we kind of make a little trip to the local garden store and do some stuff around there. She sits in a little shopping cart and kind of drive up to the lake or can drive her in little shopping carts, things, speaks little flowers, picks the ones that she likes. So her favourite colour is yellow. So recently we brought a whole load of marigolds.

Awesome, so now we know what you do in the weekends, what do you do during the week?

Well, I'm a team coach for Pathways, or otherwise known as a service manager. So I look after a team of 10. I've got nine support workers and one social worker on my team. Our team is a mobile team, so that means we support people in the community. They've all got cars, take them out, they go and meet them in their homes, and just support them to be the best that they can be.

Yeah, that's awesome. And how long have you been doing that role?

Speaker 1 (02:22.126)
So I've been in this role for what, coming up on three years in July. This time is flowing by so fast.

Yeah. And you started off though as a CSW, yeah, a community support worker.

Well, actually, I was a casual support worker before. I was both CSW and acronyms. I was a casual support worker in a respite for a number of months until I joined another mobile team. I fixed a contract, turned it to permanent. And then for a couple years, I went across a couple of different mobile teams and gained a lot of experience, a lot of various things over that time. And then after a little while, ended up as a team coach of a mobile team.

That's awesome. And I'm sure you've seen a lot of things along the way. At what point did you decide to do some study?

So before I came into support work, I was doing a Bachelor's of Health Science and Psychology. I was thinking about becoming a psychologist. The undergrad was pretty rough and I was working in a cafe, hospitality or any to try and find a job in the sector. So I became a casual in the sector, kind of enjoyed it a bit. Then a fixed term opportunity came up. for six months after that, I look at study and then it turned into permanent. I was growing a lot in the position. Pathways is pretty cool to work for. So I just stayed around.

Speaker 1 (03:30.286)
We got a pay rise with the pay equity settlement that came in, so that did encourage me and me to stay on for longer. And then does one thing, keep on leading to another and I keep on getting new opportunities and stuff and new skills to learn and develop. So I just kind of stayed on for quite a while.

and keep going with your studies at the same time though.

Yeah, so I finished up my degree and then later on I went back and did my honours.

I'm really interested in the topic that you chose for your honours thesis. Yes. Yeah, because we know that there's hardly any research that's been done on support work in Aotearoa. Your research is one of the few and it's on a really great topic. I'm interested to know a little bit more about the topic and then what led you to choose it.

Yes, so I did an honours degree in psychology at AUT and as part of that we have to do a 45 point dissertation, it's like a 15,000 word, 12,500 word thesis as a way to put it. And they basically said you can do any topic you want as long as it's related to kind of therapy or counselling. And so I've been working with support workers for so many years and now why don't I just go do some research on that, do it on the topic that I was interested at the time was called vicarious trauma.

Speaker 1 (04:38.412)
As part of it, you have to do a literature review. And so you have to go look back and see what literature there is about it. And it's quite funny. I looked up support workers and there is next to nothing. Look up for social workers, nurses, OTs, thousands of research articles like formal peer reviewed and quite esteemed academic journals. Support workers, nothing. You know, it was quite funny. There's a couple of dissertations on it. Other people had obviously done support work and done the similar thing that I had done.

but hadn't actually, there was no proper research articles around it. And so I kind of got the idea, why don't I do something for that? But because there was nothing, I had to dial back my expectations as there was no foundation to go off. So in research, kind of got to start from scratch if there's nothing there. So what I ended up doing was like an exploratory one, kind of just to kind of provide a little bit of a foundation brick for future research to come.

Take us back to vicarious trauma. Like, what is that?

Vicarious trauma, I actually learnt about it by watching, I it was a YouTube video, some psychologist. was like, okay. It kind of piqued it in my interest in seeing what it was. So I looked into a bit more and it's basically like a health worker that's been working in the field a long time with people who have been through real trauma and are starting to negatively impact their outlook on life. So they used to be optimistic, but now they're very pessimistic about things. It kind of happens over a long period of time.

And what's the difference between vicarious trauma and like

Speaker 1 (06:07.32)
So there's quite a few things that it does get mistaken for. So there's secondary traumatic stress, there's compassion fatigue, there's burnout, there's also brownout. Everyone seems to use...

Brown out? Brown out. Okay, you're gonna have to explain that one for me. Okay.

So everyone knows burnout. Someone's been overworking themselves too much. And you think of, I used to imagine a steak that's just been cooked, it's all black, charred, it's inedible. They kind of need to take it away, replace it and bring something new. So someone needs to stop working for a little while, a couple of weeks, take a real serious intentional wellbeing check and kind of look after themselves to get back to a good place. Brownout is someone who's getting close to that point. So it's almost like the early warning signs of burnout is what I would say. But they're still working and still functioning well.

burnout, kind of can't work and function. So it's like that point before.

And so what's the difference between vicarious trauma and like secondary traumatic stress?

Speaker 1 (06:58.51)
Secondary traumatic stress is in relation to one like tangata whai or client or person you're engaging with or providing therapy to. Where they've got, when you're helping them navigate a traumatic situation, but that is impacting you and kind of you're feeling that stress secondhand. So it's only one to one. One person's impacting you. Vicarious trauma is multiple people over a long period of time has reduced and kind of made your outlook on life pretty grim.

Yeah, I can relate to that. After 25 years working in the disability and mental health fields, yeah. So your topic that you were looking at specifically, what was it about? Was it about vicarious trauma for support workers?

So I wanted to do that, but there's certain topics that you go into, there needs to be a whole lot of extra preparation and care put into it. So when I mentioned trauma or vicarious trauma, there's a whole lot of ethics things that go on. There's a whole lot of extra supports and stuff that needs to be put in place. So I'm a first year research student. So it's too big of a meal to take on the kind of thing. So I worked with my supervisor and we kind of dialed it back.

I said the Ethics

Speaker 1 (08:08.11)
and kind of just exploring it rather than kind of going in specifically to the different nuts and bolts of vicarious trauma, because obviously we're doing it, could actually only re-traumatize people as we're going intentionally into it, and then you need a good backup plan for that stuff and a good training. I was like, is too much to do for the short amount of time that I had. And being a first year research student as well.

Yeah. So what did you end up doing?

So we kind of came up with this research title that said, exploring the impacts that the stories of service users have on the psychological wellbeing of mental health support workers. It's an absolute mouthful, but you have to say kind of everything in it. the kind of someone who reads that can understand fully what you're talking about. And we did have to use the term service users because it's halfway between academic language and recovery language. And it makes it a bit more recognizable to people who aren't in the health sector.

Yeah, that usually happens.

Speaker 2 (08:59.468)
Yeah, I mean, you for those of us who work in the health sector, it's kind of like stuff that makes your eye twitch. Service users, it's old language,

Even my supervisor was like, I know this isn't the correct term. We wouldn't call them clients, couldn't call them patients. Service users are least a little bit closer to recovery language.

who use our services. Yeah. But that's cool. We'll move past the language issue. So what led you to pick that topic?

So in my first six months as a community support worker, as what I, in retrospect, know as my first permanent full-time job, I'd worked many jobs before that, but I'd worked in seasons. So I'd worked in warehousing and worked in building, worked in hospitality, but it was like extreme bursts for short time, like two or three months. So I didn't realize the toll that long-term work takes and then exacerbated by working in a mental health field where you're working with

quite intense things. After six months of working on the role, my boss pulled me aside and said, hey, have you taken a break yet? Or kind of checking in with me. I'm like, no, I haven't. She'd check through my notes and said, you've been making a couple of mistakes on things. And had recognized that there was showing early warning signs of brown iron burning out there. really great that she was looking out. Said, think you need to take two or three weeks off. Yeah. Because I was just going hard. I was used to sprinting and not running like a marathon, is the way to put it. So she made me take two weeks off.

Speaker 1 (10:19.438)
And that kind of made me, I'm shocked because I didn't recognize my warning signs of burnout or brown out what's going on. And so that was a point that I kind of learned I need to make sure I've got this, got wellbeing plans in place and checking in on things. And another specific incident happened is two months into the job, I got punched in the face by a time at a fire order that I sport. then I was like, we recognize early warning signs were going on with the person. There was some other stuff going on. I still came back to the work, which kind of surprised people. Okay, he wants to stay around, still wants to be here.

We kind of sort of a good plan for that person. Everything's all good. But different experience that I had done, gone through, and then talking to my colleagues as well, kind of, and over the years, okay. And just being a bit observant to those who been around for a long time. And our team at the time was pretty high intensity. You had to kind of operate at a high, like revving really high in the car all the time to kind of manage different things we were doing, because there was a lot of emergency housing we were dealing with. And it was interesting seeing people who had come into the team.

who would owe you the last two months or two years. It's weird to kind of put that contrast because you could sprint for that long, but then you'd, if you weren't looking after yourself or couldn't handle it, you'd be out in two months. So we had a couple of people come to the team who couldn't and have that capability to handle the high level of stress and to kind of handle things that was going on. And I had a couple of experiences like that over that time. And this kind of points me out, this is pretty interesting in studying psychology and learning a bit about counseling and stuff and just the different people that we support and learning about it.

I focus shifted from helping people to helping the workforce, which was quite cool. As I used to say, how can I help the helpers?

Because if you're helping the support workers, then you are in effect helping tangata whai ora because if they've got support workers who are doing well in their mahi and feeling supported, then it's going to be a better service for tangata whai ora.

Speaker 1 (12:06.478)
Yes, 100%. And it was one of the interesting things learning the difference between older people have been around for a while and the new grads like me who'd come in wanting to change the world, help everything going out and then thinking they were doing great work by going over and above and beyond, but then falling over in six months time, which is what happened to me. My boss is like, okay, this is what you need to change in your practice. You kind of can't pour from an empty cup. And so that kind of got me into that change into that mindset of how things were going on.

It reminds me of during COVID and the initial couple of months I was working as part of the initial COVID response and just that high level of adrenaline running consistently for a good couple of months. I totally burned out. You can't sustain that level of adrenaline for that long without doing some things to look after your own wellbeing.

Yeah, it was pretty intense. remember actually going to, there was a mobile worker at the time. Man, Auckland's traffic was beautiful during that time though. you just be driving all around, all the motorways are clear anytime, any day. That was one of the benefits. But then I'm also going into like all the different supermarkets wearing masks and stuff, shopping for people who were vulnerable who at the time, that was pretty interesting. Going to learn all the different supermarkets and the stuff that was going on. It a of fun.

to from the

Speaker 2 (13:21.102)
Yeah, yeah. Are you able to tell us a little bit about the organisation that you work for, Jono? Pathways?

Yes. So our full name is Pathways Health Limited. We're a part of a big organization called Wise Group. And the aim of Wise Group is just to kind of help people to live better lives. And they do it through many means, kind of a big focus on mental health. So I think we're one of the biggest ones in the country, or like the top three or top five or something like that. We've got teams up and down the country, down in Christchurch or all way up to Auckland. I've been working with the company basically for eight years now.

So it's pretty good company to work for.

That's great. And what kind of role do support workers play in the organisation?

the biggest role. So we have this thing called a PPO, which kind of talks about the mission statement, the values and stuff. And one of the things on there is that our staff, or our kaimahi, sorry, are our greatest asset. So a lot of time and energy and effort and money gets poured into the workforce, the support workers, as they make up the majority, 95 % or something rather, of this workforce. They're the ones who do all the work. And we could say that if I was away for two weeks, my team would still function.

Speaker 1 (14:34.702)
But if half my team were away for two weeks, things are going to be really rough. We're going to be scrambling around trying to cover support for things. So that's to me is the measure of where the most importance is. If you take me away, they're fine. Take them away, we're screwed.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And that's the same for the entire mental health and addiction sector, right? Support workers make up the largest percentage of the workforce.

Yes, and that was the interesting thing during my research. I'm like, nurses are a third, support workers are a third. And for support workers who are a third of the workforce, for the whole of the country, to have zero academic research for them, I was like, why is there nothing for them? It's not like they're little niche thing. They're a third of the workforce, which is why I could kind of get this really easily over the literature on the thing. I basically said, there's no research for them. They make up a third of the workforce. There needs to be research for them. And they're like,

Yeah, Yeah, and we want to encourage more people to take up the topic of support work in the academic research because like you said, it's a really under-researched topic and they make up the bulk of our workforce. So more investment needed. Hey, let's talk more about what you found out during your research. What were some of the findings?

So as part of my research, I did exploratory analysis essentially, where I did qualitative, which means it was more words than numbers. So instead setting out surveys, I did interviews. I kind of did semi-informal, so I had like a run sheet of questions, but then if we went off topic, we kind of went off topic and kind of things, kind of eventually getting to the point.

Speaker 2 (16:08.94)
I'm a researcher too and I just love capturing people's stories. think that's where the value is. All the power comes from people's stories.

It totally is. And I interviewed about 10 people and kind of just collated them all in and what I did was I did Brown and Clark's reflexive thematic analysis.

But I'm doing a shout out to them because I can't remember, I'm brown, she's a kiwi, so it's kind of obvious here, kiwi kind of out there, and the top is a bit brown. And so you of code everything and you kind of create these different themes and you go and look through all the transcripts and everything else. I created four themes out of it all. Three themes relate to the work and the last theme is kind of like Pathways Spirit or their wider work coming through.

So the three themes that kind of go through in relating to the work sorry is knowing your limits, watching your boundaries and when work comes home with you. The last one is called seeing the best. In the conversations with them, there was an optimism, there was no angst towards any of the people that they supported. There was just this natural kind of thing, always looking back, okay, they may have been unwell when they did this, but that's...

that displays why they do behave to that certain point. There was never this negativity about the work that they were doing. Someone had been in the field for 10, 20 years, someone had been there for six months. That was pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (17:32.632)
So what kind of questions were you asking them?

It's asking a prompt about have you experienced this in your work before? What do you do to kind of maybe manage that when it comes on board and just gauging the different responses that I got from them.

And so your findings again were...

So four themes. So my first theme was knowing your limits. And from that is kind of support because we're talking about knowing a bit of your professional limits and your personal limits too.

Is it also things like your boundaries?

Speaker 1 (18:00.78)
Yes, that's all that's what the watching of boundaries kind of comes into for the next thing.

Sorry, I jumped ahead.

Yeah, yeah. the sub theme for the first one is called call for help when you need it. What that is, is it's kind of referencing you don't work in silo, you work as part of a team. Yeah. So particularly as mobile support workers, you need to kind of be able to get in contact with your colleagues if you need kind of need help with different topics or different situations. If you're doing emergency housing and you don't quite know or don't have a solution to this, ask your team and they can provide a solution to it and kind of get two people to be able to one to look forward to things.

The second sub-thing was the benefits and dangers of lived experience.

Okay, yep, explain.

Speaker 1 (18:40.63)
So I was interviewing someone who had experience with sexual violence. They had been through it personally. But what happens is all referrals related to that were coming to them. So they were the specialists, specialists in that field. And so that person was essentially reliving that thing by supporting only that type of person. And so it was taking a toll on them. They wanted to use their insight and their skills, but it ended up really triggering them.

ended up working out a care plan with their manager that only, I think it was like 30 % of the caseload was going to be related to it. The other 70 % was going to be related to other things. So they could still use their skills, kind of share their story, but it wasn't going to be taking a significant toll because it took extra work and extra empathy to support in that realm. So it's like, you can do, you have extra insight into the area, but then if you're always in it, it takes that extra toll. So it's those little things we need to look out for as support workers and how we work in that field.

And I think that that's something that our peer support workforce that are we particularly pertinent to. I mean, it's not just our peer support workers, know, they are using their lived experience in their mahi. But a lot of community support workers also have lived experience. They just might not be in lived experience roles. So yeah, just being really cognisant of the effects that the topics that we're working on can have on our say if we've got...

Definitely. And so that ties well into this next one, which is called maintaining a wellbeing action plan. So that sounds like it's optional, but the Sporeworkers described it as compulsory. That you won't survive in this role unless you actually have a wellbeing action plan.

Is that something that most support workers will have?

Speaker 1 (20:22.922)
No. Some people are really good helping others, but not helping themselves. Yeah. Keep on pouring out, but not actively looking after themselves.

Yeah, and to organisations across our country, you know, regularly ask support workers to have an action plan for themselves.

I do. I know I've since doing this and stuff, I'm actively checking in on my team, making sure they've got it and looking after themselves. And that's how you get support because working for a long time. Yeah. Because they're refilling and it's not just not doing certain things. You have to be very proactive. Got to look after all spectrums of your health, your spiritual, your mental, your physical, the kind of going into the GP checks. basically to fight up a fire. If you follow all of that actively all the time, then you can do really well in this role. It was just interesting. wasn't like, I don't know, if those people who don't have it,

can do well for six months because they're slightly drawing from the bank, but then eventually they're to run out of money and start going into debt. And then the loan sharks come in and kind of ask for the money back. like, okay, I'm out of the role.

Yeah, totally. So that would be a great thing if we could have organisations across the country instituting things like that for their support workers.

Speaker 1 (21:23.424)
Yeah. And I think the managers probably know that those who have it have a good wellbeing action plan and doing well. And those who don't, who don't know how to look after themselves kind of have their higher turnover in that sense.

And how often do you check in with your kaimahi around their action plan?

probably every month and what's going on. kind of do it and they're the ones who have been around a long time. I know I can trust in that sense, but I've always had conversations with them every time I see them, checking if there's little subtleties and changes in behavior and stuff, what's going on, do we need to do this, and always putting them at top priority rather than the other people.

Yeah, cool. Okay. And what were the other findings that you

So one of things here was watching your boundaries. That's an interesting difference I noticed between support workers and registered health professionals, social workers, nurses, OTs and whatnot. I think in their university training, they have formal training around boundaries, but I don't know if they have it in for support workers.

Speaker 2 (22:15.854)
It's probably part of their level four, but it might not be a huge focus.

Yeah, so one of the sub themes was the danger of getting too emotionally involved. So the boundaries aren't just don't call me and wait nine to five, but there's other levels of it too. So when you start caring for someone too much, you go over the top and you kind of keep going things and then you're answering calls after shifts, it's finished and all that stuff. You're kind of blurring that boundary between a support worker and a friend and a close associate. And the idea is you kind of need to stick to what a support worker is.

That's something again that I think might even be trickier in the peer support space. Yes. Because you're coming at the relationship with Tangata Whaiora as a peer. So it's even closer to that friendship kind of role, but you still need those professional boundaries. Otherwise you will burn out and you will also have ethical issues that you have to deal with.

Yeah. So that's what I like linking to the next one is knowing what you can and cannot do as a support worker. You can't go out there and be Jesus to save everyone. That's literally one of the quotes from one of my other people I interviewed. Can't be Jesus, you're just a support worker. Okay. You've got this time, you've got this energy, you go out and do the best you can with that time, but you're not available 24-7, you're not doing everything else there. And some of them shared about, they've kind of showed they're like those who they helped a bit too much.

And some of the people that didn't make as good progress as the ones they may have helped a little less as a way to put it.

Speaker 2 (23:45.996)
Is it almost like they are disabling them?

Yeah, it's like they're a dependency rather than independency. we say, want to do ourselves out of a job. So, this is really interesting during this point talking to them about it.

is not what we

Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (23:59.182)
I mean, acknowledging the fact that people are going to, know, mental health and addiction is fluctuating health condition, right? So there's going to be times where people need support and times when people don't need support or need support less. You're never going to not be needed entirely. But yeah, you want to be building up people's own reservoirs and own skills so that they aren't so dependent on you.

And I guess the last sub-theme for that is experience influences your boundaries, which kind of highlights that everyone, slightly on the experience burnout, all kind of those things, had to learn from it, change their practice, and then are now practicing good boundaries. Now, that kind of maybe goes back to say, sometimes you don't learn it through study, you only learn it on the workforce. You're going through, conversations with people, working with them and stuff, and then if I were to try and push the boundaries, some will kind of have good ones in place and know what to do. So you really have to learn it.

Over time. And almost like you're only then over time.

Yeah, and you know, speaking from experience again, once you've burned out once, you are really keen to not have that happen again. So, you you learn what are your signs that the wheels are starting to fall off. That's something that I really love about the experience of the lived experience workforce is that we, you know, can bring our whole selves to work and there's no shame and stigma about having experienced mental distress. And we've got to role model that for everybody because we all...

can experience mental distress. And if it's in the workplace, we need to be able to speak up about it so that we can put things in place to stop ourselves from burning out.

Speaker 1 (25:35.982)
Yep. So kind of hearing you talk about peers, I think I was unintentionally really lucky that one of my old managers that I had for a number of years was a really, I don't know this, like a really strong peer. She was out and proud about it, very vocal. So I learnt how to work with peers and how to kind of, I thought it was just normal in how we kind of engage with them. Then I realised that I was actually very rare to have a peer team coach.

Yeah, When I was working as a director of lived experience, I found that our lived experience team were actually a little bit more advanced in terms of being able to have those boundaries in the workplace and say what we needed than even some of the clinicians that I was working with. You know? We've got skills that we can share with other people in our sector.

So there's two other things that kind of come on board. One was that kind of shared about was when work comes home with you. The first point was not enough hours in the day. People find that they don't have enough time to get the work done that they want to get work done. Because we have administrative requirements as a support worker. I was annoyed at it as a manager. I now know why we have to do it. The data, the paperwork, the consent forms and everything else. So.

Are you talking about the data?

Speaker 1 (26:53.87)
Now I know there's like legal legislation requirements about why we do X, Y, Z, why I've explained certain points at different times, why we do these different checks. I didn't know about that time as a support worker, because as a support worker, all you're thinking about is how do I help this person and I want to spend more time with them. So in terms of like hours and forbidden figures, I want to spend more of my hours during the day on the road rather than in the office doing paperwork. But now I've kind of been able to work at it a bit more.

And I guess one thing they shared about was you'll never know how you feel after work. And that's something I think I've realized is sometimes you'll be having your plan your day. You'll have a plan to have to take three appointments, take people out for a in the park. And then suddenly that's the day they're going to share and open up about all of their history. And you suddenly, might suddenly do this massive emotional dump on you that you were just not prepared and planned for. have a hard conversation.

Okay, that was intense. I'll try and look after myself. And it happens again for the next two or three appointments. And you just talk through some horrific stuff throughout the day. You're like, gosh. And you end up the day just completely flat as a pancake, utterly exhausted from it all. And so it kind of speaks to how the fact we can't plan for that quite often. So that's where it goes back to having that wellbeing action plan. You need to have these things actively going to make sure you're topping up and got stuff in place to do when this stuff kind of happens. And one of the

what I call early warning signs of burnout was when this person was saying that things have invaded my sleep and my cooking time. When they were making dinner, their mom could make dinner, the kids in the background, and they were actively thinking about worrying about someone that they had worked with during the day, like, hold on, I think I need to reframe this, is my caseload too high? Is things going on, going on too much? Or when they're at sleep and they started dreaming about work, they're like, okay, no, that's too far. That's a lot, okay, no.

when stuff hurts me. Just ruminate for hours and hours and hours. But it's really hard to turn that stuff off. How do you do that?

Speaker 1 (28:51.32)
That's the hard thing. Sometimes you kind of can't plan for it, but that's when it's talking to your manager. And in this case, she said she took off, I think she was failing it on her day, so she took off the next two days because it was too much. person may need, but someone else could step in. And it's just about taking time off using the leave you've got to actively look after yourself instead of overworking like it might be in the corporate world and health world. You've got to take care of yourself in that sense.

Yeah, Speaking about talking to your manager, a lot of support workers, that's kind of the main way that they can offload what's going on for them in terms of their caseload. Did you do anything in your research about reflective practice and the importance of that?

No, so because my thing was just focusing on exploring and assuring what support workers felt, there was no solution to it. It was like a foundation brick before we started building the wall. that would be the next topic for it. It was like, is what support workers think about, and this is their feelings. So the next topic would, okay, this is what they feel. How do they navigate those feelings?

Yeah, great. And I know for some of the episodes that we're to do in this series that we're going to be looking at some of those things. you know, as possible answers like reflective practice to possible burnout. Those findings are amazing. And it's great to hear that you've been, you know, taking them and putting them in place for your koimahi. Yeah. Any other words of wisdom or advice?

I've got a lot of learnings as a manager that I took after experiencing it, that I now actively look out for my team. This might be a sound like a subtle thing. Probably the one thing I want people to take away would be to take their lunch breaks. It sounds so simple, but I know so many support workers who see a person in need and so cut off their lunch breaks regularly to support people. I learned that I enforce it, like when I was a support worker, to put it into perspective about

Speaker 1 (30:40.078)
how much of a ruthless person there was on it. I was housing someone in emergency housing. I showed up with no home in I was going through the process, trying different boarding houses. And I think we had kind of found a spot that we were moving to in the afternoon. But I'm like, okay, I never realized I'm kind of running out a bit of energy. Okay, it's 12.30, drove to the mall. And then I, okay, I'm gonna go eat something to eat, then we'll catch up again in an hour. So they kind of looked after themselves for half an hour.

kill some time in the mall than I after I was done kind of fill myself up again. Okay, cool. Pick them up and then go back onto it. Yeah. It's a pretty dire situation. Someone doesn't have a house secured. Yeah. But I know that if I didn't do that, I would have started petering out as the day went on. And so I, as a manager and stuff, I've had to have conversations with my team. You need to take your lunch breaks. I'll eat it the other day. No, it doesn't matter. Even if you're not eating, you still need to take that time out to refill your tank. Yeah. And it's not like you do your notes during that time. You put everything away. Focus on yourself for that half an hour.

You've still got your other breaks as well. But that half an hour lunch break is really important. And if you regularly put that into practice, your work days will be a lot better. Otherwise, you're just going to recover in the weekend and sleep away and stuff. Or you're going to come home to your family and you're going to be tired and grumpy and hungry and angry at them because you haven't eaten and stuff. like you take your break during the day so that when work finishes, you're more present for your whanau in the evening.

Because support workers are just go, go, go all the time.

All the time. And obviously different things can be unplanned, emergencies can happen in different situations, you've to respond. But when it's over, you take a break.

Speaker 2 (32:14.434)
And there's never gonna be like a perfect time to say, hey, now is the time I'm gonna take a break. You just gotta make it happen, right?

Yep, so at certain times you've to work with it, but at the best of your ability, schedule in your breaks, be a bit ruthless with it, and you'll be a much better support worker for it at the of the day.

That's an awesome bit of advice Jono, thanks. Yeah, just take your lunch back. Thanks for coming in today Jono, it's been really great to talk to you.

Just take your lunch break.

Speaker 1 (32:39.746)
Thanks for having me Alexia.

Speaker 2 (32:45.89)
Well that's a wrap. I'm Alexi Black. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Difference, a podcast for support workers in mental health and addiction in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Be sure to listen to the other episodes in the series and check out the resources and links for more information. Just want to take a wee moment to let our listeners know about the brand new section that we've created on the Te Pou website. It's dedicated just to mental health and addiction support workers.

We've been busy the last few months pulling together a whole bunch of learning opportunities and resources and putting them all in one place, making them super easy for support workers to find. So whether you're wanting to access some professional development or just learn from the experiences of other support workers, make sure you go and check out the new space on the depot website. I hope you find it helpful. Mā te wā. See you next time.