Self-Care As a Leader and Advocate
INTRODUCTION
Leadership is an active role: lead is a verb. But the leaders who tries to do it all is headed for burnout, and in a powerful hurry.
Bill Owens
In this unit, you will be guided to synthesize your work throughout the course to develop a sustainable plan for how you will engage in leadership within the counseling profession. The unit readings examine success strategies to engage in self-care as a leader and advocate. You will identify your plan for finding a leadership mentor, identifying leadership opportunities that speak to your passion, and addressing leadership competencies. You will focus on strategies to become a transformational leader while promoting wellness, preventing leadership compassion fatigue and burnout, and engaging in productive leadership behaviors.
Reference
BrainyQuote. (n.d.). Bill Owens quotes. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/bill_owens_167736
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PANEL DISCUSSION:
Josh Stanley
Dr. Kascsak and Dr. Lange, you both mentioned something that seems just really salient here, and that’s the ability to push things along and lead through, sustain through, and tolerate sustained discomfort. I’m wondering what advice you would give to those who may find that more intolerable than tolerable.
Amber Lange
I guess one thing that comes to mind is that it takes practice. Over time, I’ve gotten better. I mean, granted, a decade, but it takes practice. It’s hard even still with a lot of practice to take a risk to step forward, to have to stand by the decisions that I make and the choices that I put forward. I still am not always comfortable doing it. So, even though it takes practice to get better at it, I don’t know if you get to a place I wonder if you get to a place where you will be able to not have this rush inside you, this, “Oh gosh, what’s going to happen next?”
I think that one of the things that I had to mostly become comfortable with and tell myself is that, am I willing to live with these choices? Am I willing to stand by this leadership decision? Am I willing to be able to do that? If I can say yes, I can only do the best job that I can do at any given time. I think that this is a great moment to be able to start to talk about mentorship because someone above me, a mentor for me is able to say, “Indeed, you’re doing the best you can,” and/or they say, “Indeed, you’re doing the best you can but” So, I think that one of the things that I would recommend if you’re not comfortable would be practice, number one, and to find a mentor, someone who is more comfortable than you, someone who has had to do these kinds of choices, decisions, management, leadership for a period of time beyond your own, and then to be open to their feedback.
Theresa Kascsak
I like that. I like that idea of mentoring because I think we talked a lot about supervision. So, as I’m sitting here, reflecting about our CES learners, that’s what they’re learning to be. So, many of you are counselors, and so you’ve kind of gone through that developmental process. I think that Dr. Wayman and Dr. de la Paz, they work so much with our master’s-level learners and also with many of you all faculty with many of you when you’re working with our master’s learners during your internship. You begin to see that kind of that lack of distress tolerance that maybe our own learners have at that level or that you once experienced.
As you grew with time, as you grew with practice, as you sat in the chair longer, a lot of that went away. You learn that you could endure those things. I think that that’s no different than the developmental phase that we go through also as leaders, as managers, as advocates, that sometimes, something is uncomfortable, but that does not mean that we can’t do it. So, what we often need are those people before us, those mentors, those supervisors that can normalize those experiences for us. They can provide us encouragement during those times. It’s also this acceptance that it’s that developmental piece that none of us just picked up a guitar and could play it beautifully. We had to practice, and that’s what this is like too.
So, I think that there’s a little bit of, as we’re practicing to be good leaders, we make mistakes, and that’s okay. That’s part of the learning process. When you were learning how to be counselors, you made a mistake. You asked a question instead of reflecting a feeling, and nothing really bad happened. It’s so different than this. It’s about just doing the next thing, but it’s also about having that courage to do the next thing. You’re not alone in any of this. I think that that’s the piece too, is that we are a community.
So, I think so many of us are trying to build in this online environment a social community also. So, reaching out to your peers, reaching out to your instructors, reaching out to those folks in your professional associations and building those connections so that you do have mentors, and you have people sort of like I think sometimes, I looked for people who had something that I wanted, and I tried to sit next to them at a table because they had a gravitas, or they had a calmness, or they just had a style of leadership that I really respected, and that’s what I looked for.
Michelle De La Paz
When Dr. Lange and Dr. Kascsak were speaking about leadership and being able to be uncomfortable in providing that feedback in order to create transformation, not only with individuals but within a community of maybe the university or some other association, I’d also like to add that in doing so, being well-rounded and holistic about looking at the big picture and when you have individuals, knowing that those individuals can provide you with that feedback on how to make things transformed. I do see Capella doing that. I see Dr. Kascsak doing that, is looking at in group process, the group decides how it goes within a facilitator that creates that change. So, that, I think, seems to bode well. I do like the addition of that discomfort that you feel within that whole process as a leader or an individual that wants to create change, listening to that and maybe looking at how to make it work from that perspective.
Dale Wayman
Along with what Dr. de la Paz was saying, I also kind of look at it as a parallel process too. Where’s that anxiety coming from? Is that coming from within me, or is it being bumped up to me, or is it coming from the client to the students? So, I’m trying to figure out where does that go. So, if I maintain my composure and my leadership, that parallel process is also going to work the other direction and help to calm that anxiety down for them. So, for me, it’s not me becoming comfortable, but it’s me using myself as a barometer of the discomfort and being able to use that barometer to help the people that I’m leading to become more comfortable with the distress, I guess, maybe is the way I would want to put that.
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Self-Care As a Leader and Advocate
Read the articles and above panel discussion and complete the assigned readings. For this discussion of 750-800 words, address the following:
- Identify a plan for finding a leadership mentor.
- Describe how you plan to incorporate leadership activities while completing your doctoral studies.
- Describe how you plan to engage in boundary setting and manage conflict as part of your leadership activities.
