Go Beyond Surviving to Thriving

Do you finish your work week feeling like everyone has taken a piece of you and the only piece
left wants to crash on the couch? Does ‘that’ appointment (you know the one) refuse to move
from front and center stage in your thoughts? How is it that even though every minute of the day
is spoken for, it is hard to feel a sense of accomplishment?

Demanding careers, especially those focused on helping others, can feel overwhelming with little
hope of change. This is even more true when you are at the beginning or significant change in
your professional journey. Hang in there! There is always hope and things you can do to move
beyond surviving to thriving. Three concepts I have seen repeatedly in dealing with compassion
fatigue, building resilience and strengthening one’s ethics include:

Be intentional. Being at your best is not going to happen by chance so you need to be intentional
about who you are, how you take care of yourself and interact with the world.

Increase self-regulation. We all live with different capacities for dealing with anxiety and
emotions. We all also have the potential to increase our capacity to work in the midst of anxiety
and emotions without absorbing them as much. In other words, we can increase our ability
determine how we are influenced by the challenging people and situations in our lives.

Grow community and support. Building a support system, within and outside of the work
environment, is vital to promoting healthy professionalism. A healthy support system promotes
the positive and provides safe people to share vulnerabilities with.

Taking on such proactive self-development work does take time, but can provide stability,
strength and direction especially when the demands feel like too much. Ready to move beyond
surviving to thriving? Take a breath and remember – you are worth the effort.