0:00:01 – Announcer

You are listening to the National University Podcast.

0:00:09 – Kimberly King

Hello, I’m Kimberly King. Welcome to the National University Podcast, where we offer an holistic approach to student support, well-being and success – the Whole Human education. We put passion into practice by offering accessible, achievable higher education to lifelong learners.

Today we are discussing self-care for therapists and, in a recent article in the Library of Medicine, mental health practitioners work in a culture of one-way caring, in which they’re required to demonstrate empathy, compassion and patience without the expectation of receiving such care in return from their clients. But to be effective in providing mental health services, practitioners must develop a professional alliance or working relationship with clients that maintains appropriate boundaries and levels of emotional and psychological involvement. This is a very interesting and relevant conversation coming up on today’s show.

On today’s podcast, we’re discussing self-care for counselors and therapists, and joining us is Dr. Susan Williams. Dr. Williams is a licensed psychologist with over 30 years of clinical experience. She’s received her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Rhode Island and has taught full time in the Master’s in Counseling Psychology program at National University since 2005. Prior to her employment at National, she directed the Counseling Center at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, from 1998 to 2005, where she taught as an adjunct faculty in the Master’s in College Student Affairs program. She also served as the Counseling Center Director at the University of Scranton in Scranton, Pennsylvania, from 1990 to 1998, where she held an appointment as assistant professor of psychology and taught undergraduate psychology and women’s studies classes. She completed her two-year clinical internship at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where she served as a clinical fellow in psychology at Harvard Medical School.

Her clinical and research interests include therapist self-care, positive aging strategies, effective strategies for teaching, cultural competence in psychotherapy, social justice issues in counseling, self-transformation following loss and utilizing mindfulness-based approaches for stress reduction. Wow, impressive. We welcome you to the podcast, Doctor. How are you?

0:02:46 – Doctor Susan Willliams

I’m great.

0:02:47 – Kimberly King

Why don’t you fill our audience in a little bit on your mission and your work before we get to today’s episode topic?

0:02:53 – Doctor Susan Williams

Well, I basically am a person who lives to be in service to others, and when I was very young in my own family, I sort of was the elected therapist of the group. I was always the one everybody came to and I had from early on a desire to become a psychologist. And when I first started in the field, I wanted to teach and have a private practice because I really love the teaching process. And now I’m developing new trainees for the profession and that is very, very satisfying to me. At National we have a really diverse population and so we are training therapists from all different walks of life, and they are so excited to give back to their own communities, and broadening our base of who is in the profession is critically important. So right now my mission is to help them thrive and graduate and give back to their communities. And I loved doing therapy as well, but I’m a full-time professor, you know, for the past 20 years.

0:04:08 – Kimberly King

Well, you can see your passion, you can hear it, and so that’s great. I love that you’re passionate about this. Today we’re talking about self-care for counselors and the therapists. So, doctor, this is probably something that people don’t even really think about when you are hearing other people’s traumas, and I think it’s important and it’s very relevant. Self-care is so important for therapists to embrace. But how did you get interested in this topic? You mentioned something about your family.

0:04:36 – Doctor Susan Williams

Yeah well, how I got interested in the topic of self-care for therapists was when you’re in the field as long as I’ve been in the field, you do hear a lot of very traumatic stories, and vicarious traumatization is a situation that you can experience. And you don’t want to take home all of your clients’ problems. And in order for us to do a good job, we first have to be taking care of ourselves, so we have the energy to constantly give to our clients. And so when I found myself, you know, going over time in sessions, not having breaks between sessions, just going, going, going and then coming home and feeling pretty depleted and then maybe, in response, stress eating, which isn’t a healthy coping mechanism, you know, those kinds of things made me think I really need to look at my own self-care more seriously.

And therapists tend to be wanting to take care of others and they don’t necessarily put themselves on that priority list of taking care of themselves. And sometimes we feel like, well, it would be selfish to, you know, have a spa day or take time out for myself, or, you know, do some yoga or meditate. But actually it’s not. It’s something, it’s an ethical imperative for us to do self-care so that we are ready and able to care for those who are coming to us, who are really hurting, and they need our expertise and they need us to be at 100% functioning level.

0:06:12 – Kimberly King

Yeah, it is something, and I feel like that also in church, you know, when you go talk to a pastor about that, or in law enforcement as well, like there is, we just don’t think about who the receivers are on that end. So I think this is a really good time to talk about this. What are some of the challenges of the profession of counseling?

0:06:37 – Doctor Susan Williams

Well, there’s quite a few, even though I think the rewards outweigh the challenges. But through surveys, we know that respondents that experienced major distress in the last three years 75% admitted to doing that. These are therapists, 75% saying they’ve experienced major distress. And in an APA survey we had about 40 to 60% of the practitioners saying they had some disruption in performing their duties as a therapist due to feelings of anxiety, depression and burnout. So you know these are some of the challenges that we face.

Some studies have even supported the idea that psychologists may have a higher risk for suicidal ideation and behavior than compared to the typical population and the general population. And so you know it’s very, very important that we not ignore any of these signs and symptoms of our own distress. And some other challenges that we have- when you think about the job, it’s a physically isolating job. You know you’re sitting alone at a desk all day, so there’s no real exercise time. But because it’s, you know, the work is confidential. We can’t go home and talk about our day to our family or our friends, and so we have kind of an isolated work situation during the day and not much time for contact with the outside world and then constantly giving to others, always being there for others and being in a relationship where there’s only one way sharing. So you’re giving, giving, giving and hearing really difficult stories. That can create some need to have emotional distance from the work and that emotional distance can actually spill over into your private life, where you feel emotions depleted when you come home and you’re not necessarily as there for your family as you would want to be.

Some patient behaviors are extremely stressful and challenging, like when a patient is suicidal, or when they’re very aggressive. Are they really resistant in treatment and are they accusatory towards you? They want to sue you. They say you’re incompetent. They aren’t motivated for treatment. You know, they bring in treatment prematurely. All of these things are real stressors that therapists have to cope with. Also in terms of our working conditions. If we’re doing managed care, that usually comes with time pressures. You know limited session limits, excessive paperwork, high caseloads. You know, politics in the organization that are difficult. Those things come up and we have to struggle with that as well. Lots of therapists don’t accept insurance anymore. They just do cash only because they don’t want to deal with that stress.

And then in terms of therapeutic relationships, we can get stress there too from clients who really don’t express any gratitude for the work or for our feelings of counter transfers for the client that are going unnoticed and not dealt with, which needs to be done in personal therapy, not in the therapy hour with client and then just raising, you know, having problems with tolerating the ambiguity of therapy. You know there are no clear cut answers, and so you have to live with the fact that you of therapy, you know there are no clear-cut answers, and so you have to live with the fact that you think your patient is improving, but you know you don’t have some clear-cut guidelines showing you that.

Also, we mentioned the vicarious traumatization, but you know we really have to watch out for not taking their trauma and internalizing it to ourselves. And then we also create our own stress by being overly perfectionistic, having self-doubt, having excessive needs for approval, feeling that we could be failing the clients and living an unhealthy lifestyle, those are all different challenges that we face. And we can overcome all of them. You know, they are overcomable if that’s a word, which it’s not, but they are real challenges and we need to make sure that we are aware when we’re dealing with those, and that we are finding a place to resolve it outside of therapy.

0:11:03 – Kimberly King

I think if it’s not a word, we should make it a word: overcomeable. Everything, yeah, we can overcome. So what are the rewards within the psychotherapy practice?

0:11:17 – Doctor Susan Williams

Oh, there are so many rewards. I mean to me there’s nothing better than knowing that you have really helped someone else in their life. You’ve made a difference in their life. You’ve seen them go from being very depressed and unmotivated to someone who’s cheerful and assertive and getting a job promotion or, you know, getting married or doing whatever they want in their life. I mean, to help someone through that journey, to walk beside them through that journey, is the most rewarding thing I can think of. I just love being of service and of help to clients and seeing someone get well, feeling much better, is just excellent.

And in surveys, therapists have said that being a therapist has made them feel like they are a better person, that they are a wiser person, and it does increase your self-awareness. You can’t be a therapist and be totally unaware of yourself. So it pushes you to really think about all aspects of your life and making sure you’re keeping those core from your therapeutic relationships. It helps you develop psychologically and it gives you an increased tolerance for ambiguity, since there’s a lot of ambiguity in therapy sessions. We learn to live with that. I think also we learn to have a better capacity to enjoy life and our minds get broadened through the process of therapy, so our value systems can change and grow and develop in very positive ways. So those are some of the things that I think are real benefits to the profession.

0:13:00 – Kimberly King

I like that, again, your passion comes through. If you weren’t so passionate, you might not have been sticking around for all these years doing this and making a difference. How can therapists maintain appropriate boundaries and balance in their professional lives?

0:13:15 – Doctor Susan Williams

Yeah, that’s critically important. In fact, in the research literature, one of the most important methods of therapist self-care is to maintain clear boundaries. So, first of all, setting some guidelines for yourself, saying no by setting policies up front, so you can have policies about your work hours, whether or not you’re going to be available after hours and, if so, how, what your cancellation policies are, your email policies, your payment guidelines, types of cases you don’t treat and whether or not you will take managed care or insurance.

Setting all those boundaries up front helps you avoid a lot of stress. And then you want to screen your clients really well. And you are doing that to, certainly, refer anyone that is out of your scope of competence, but also screening for clients that you know you don’t wish to be working with. Sometimes, I mean sometimes you have clients that you find you’re fine with working with, but you don’t want six or eight of them on the caseload. It’s okay to have a few with a specific diagnosis, but you don’t want to be dealing with that diagnosis all the time. It’s too much for you emotionally. So that’s something.

And then you really need to maintain your boundaries between your work life and your personal life. So don’t bring your work home with you. Now, if you do telehealth, you’re doing it at home, okay. So then, what you have to do is like close your laptop. And when you close your laptop, that’s closing your work time, and you’re now going into your family mode and you’re keeping your home time reserved for yourself and your family and your friends. And so your clients need to have clear guidelines of when they can contact you outside of session, and you want to stick to those guidelines. That’s, you know, that’s very helpful. Another way you can achieve more balance is to delegate any responsibilities that you can to lighten your workload. So if somebody else can do the paperwork for you, that’s great, and a lot of services will do that. They will manage your paperwork and you just see the clients. Yay, that’s a big plus.

And also, and this is where I fell down- scheduling breaks during the day to take a moment for yourself. The therapy hour is usually 45 to 50 minutes, and that’s so that you could have 15 to 10 minutes to go to the bathroom, get something to drink or eat, make a phone call, etc. And you need to do that. Unfortunately for me, I kind of work on a 60 minute hour. That’s just how long I like to be with somebody, but if the clients are scheduled on the hour, that doesn’t work. So for me a 60 minute hour, then my next client should be scheduled at 15 after. But they weren’t, so I was literally closing up one, going out to the waiting room, getting the next one and coming back. This is a bad situation, and I do not advise that. So making sure you have that break time, that’s really, really important.

Also, you want to limit the number of working hours that you have to a reasonable amount. Some people say they see 40 clients a week. That is just too many stories to hear. That is too many stories to take care of, and I would hope that people wouldn’t put financial gain over emotional balance, you know, because that’s just too big of a caseload. So you have to figure out what actually works for you.

I know a lot of therapists in private practice only practice maybe three or four days a week and they have that other day to do paperwork or just to have more time off. But they don’t do five days a week, you know, eight to five, because that would be way too many clients. You also have to keep your boundaries with your colleagues and your supervisees, so not taking on too much from colleagues that ask for favors, keeping limits with your supervisees about when they can have supervision, and that kind of thing. And then the other thing is, we always want to remember that clients are not there to meet our needs, ever. The treatment relationships aren’t reciprocal and we have to make sure our personal needs are being met through your private life, either through therapy or just through your friendships with people or your family or your spiritual life or whatever. But we have to get our needs met outside of our therapy with clients.

0:18:07 – Kimberly King

Yeah, and some of this you just kind of answered, and that is really how do we those self-care strategies that you can utilize to prevent burnout and promote resilience? And I do like that you’ve mentioned spirituality, just putting boundaries around it.

0:18:24 – Doctor Susan Williams

Yeah, yeah, and that’s really important. And there’s a lot of ways that we can prevent burnout, but if we were to talk about it as a whole, beating burnout could be summarized in one word and it would be: balance. So, again, we want to make sure we maintain balance in our lives. But let me just talk about so many different strategies to prevent the burnout, and that’s nice there’s so many, because everyone’s an individual and they have different needs and different desires, and so some things are going to work for them and some absolutely aren’t.

So I would say, at the top, getting personal therapy when you need it and therapists do need therapy. Just because we’re therapists, that doesn’t mean we don’t have issues and problems and when we recognize that our stress level is getting too high, we need to hightail it to therapy ourselves. Maintaining a sense of humor is really critically important, and if you can do that, you’d be surprised how many stressful situations you can get through, doing things in moderation, like I said, keeping that balance. But then there’s these regular things that we should all do, which is getting adequate rest. We need seven to eight hours of sleep at night. That means, you know, stopping your devices at least an hour before you go to bed and give yourself time for seven to eight hours. We should all be exercising regularly. That’s really good for your brain, it’s really good for your physical health, and we need to eat healthfully. And if we’re not, try to do small modifications to add more healthy food into your eating plan and depleting some of the unhealthy food as you go along. Just very minimal. It can be a very minimal change over time.

We need to take time to socialize with family and friends, make sure we’ve got people time and connect with those that nurture us, because we need energy to come back to us and we can’t get that from the clients, but we can get it from those we love. Also, we need alone time, I mean, and that depends, you know, if you’re an introvert you need more alone time than if you’re an extrovert, but the alone time is really important. Getting massages. I have a friend who has a masseur who comes to his house once a week and gives him a massage, which is such a nice luxury as I’ve never had that. But I think that’s a great idea and really working on the body, because we can internalize the stress in our body, you know, especially around the shoulders, sitting all day, you know, get really tight in the neck and shoulders.

And then another thing would be having realistic expectations for yourself or your clients. Sometimes novice therapists expect that clients are going to progress really fast and they feel like failures if they don’t see change right away and they don’t understand that change takes time and we have to be patient and we have to look at the small gains that clients make, the baby steps, and promote those and be grateful for those. We should be open to supervision and consultation with colleagues so you know if you’re having difficult cases, it’s very important, even when you’re licensed, to consult with others about their opinion, what they might suggest that you do, so you don’t have blinders on and just miss spots in the therapy that could be improved. You can diversify your work life. You know you could do less therapy hours and do some teaching or some research or presenting at conferences.

Making sure you take vacations, you know we all need to just get away and have fun and we can have new experiences like taking up a you know musical instrument or gardening or doing something new that just will rejuvenate you and, like I said before, learning to say no to unreasonable requests. And then you know, well, if you’re working at an institution and it’s too stressful, maybe going into private practice is a way to prevent burnout. But you know, you can also think about changing jobs. It’s really okay to take a break from doing therapy and it’s also okay to leave the profession if you’ve had enough, if you feel like you’ve given all that you can give. You’ve heard all the stories that you could hear. You know, if you feel that way, you should make note of that and think okay, maybe it’s time for me to do something different. And that’s perfectly fine and no one should feel guilty about that, because it is a job that requires an immense amount of psychic energy to do well.

0:23:13 – Kimberly King

Yeah, that’s all great, and you know I like that you say to take a break or switch gears. I mean, it is never too late, so there’s always options, I guess.

0:23:26 – Doctor Susan Williams

Yeah, there is. I mean, and we shouldn’t have any shame in that I mean, in the average life we change careers or can change jobs about six times over our lifespan, and so you know, to think that you’ve got to always be a therapist once you’ve become one isn’t necessary. You know, and I actually put videos in my class about that I have people who were therapists and left the profession talk about that and talk about why they made the change. And I do that because I want people to understand that it’s okay to make a change if you get to the point where you know this is just as much as you can do and you have to move. You know you need to move on for your own well-being.

0:24:11 – Kimberly King

Right, right. How can therapists create a positive work environment? I know you said a lot of this happens from home, or you know, just when we’re isolated.

0:24:21 – Doctor Susan Williams

Yeah, well, first of all, you can assess your workspace for comfort and appeal. So if you do have an office and when I was, you know, counseling center doctor I had beautiful offices, but you know I had beautiful decor, I had beautiful artwork, I had plants, I mean people would come into my office and feel like it was a soothing, safe place. So you want to make it feel comfortable and relaxing, both for you and your client. You want to have fresh snacks, healthy snacks, and water available to you so you stay hydrated during the day. You want to make sure that you are protecting your safety in the workplace. So if you’re in an institution, do they have a button, an emergency button you can press if a client’s getting violent, or you know, what are the procedures to get help if you should need that?

We mentioned before, the 10-minute breaks. You’ve got to do that in between clients. And you could support efforts at work promoting self-care activities. We Pausing Center, we employed a chair massage therapist to come in and people could book 20-minute chair massages during the day and that was so much fun and it was so relaxing and it was amazing how much better people felt afterwards. Of course, then they wanted it all the time and we couldn’t afford it, but that’s a really fun thing to do to help your work environment. You want to delegate and simplify business aspects of your practice so you can spend more time doing the things that you enjoy, and that would be another thing that we could do.

0:26:02 – Kimberly King

That’s nice. I like that. What about going through- How can therapists renew themselves through personal creativity and growth?

0:26:12 – Doctor Susan Williams

Well, they can do a lot of different things. In the therapy itself, we can use metaphors or develop new treatment methods and then really experience moments of insight and discovery with the client right in the moment. That all enhances your creativity. Outside of the therapy, we can engage in new projects, so like redecorating, remodeling your home or your workspace or, you know, engaging in new activities like I mentioned. You know, maybe you want to take voice lessons, maybe you want to take dance lessons, you know, something that’s just completely different but would give you a sense of joy and fun.

And you can diversify your psychotherapy practice and your professional activities. So maybe take on different specialties, learn about a new specialty and then start treating those folks and you can rearrange your schedule and that would help you with not getting bored, you know. So maybe you’re going to add teaching or writing or supervision and not just seeing clients specifically all the time. And then it’s really important that we stay lifelong learners and we have to do 36 continuing education credits every two years to maintain our license. So that’s learning in the field. And it’s also important to learn in areas outside of the field so that you can talk about something other than psychology when you’re at that cocktail party and then again, seeking personal therapy is really important for increased self-awareness and growth and enrichment. So those are some things we can do to keep the creativity growing.

0:27:51 – Kimberly King

Yeah, I like that. I think that’s so true and I feel like when you tap into your artistic, creative side, that, yeah, probably very healing.

0:28:01 – Doctor Susan Williams

It is and it just gives you a different aspect of yourself, you know.

0:28:06 – Kimberly King

Right, right. So how do therapist self-care needs change across the lifespan?

0:28:12 – Doctor Susan Williams

Well, you know, we grow and develop and change across our lifespan as we age, and so in early adulthood that’s typically a time for proving oneself, you know, both in your career, and it’s also time to find a mate, and if you’re so desirous, to have children. And younger adults do tend to want to sort of prove themselves to their parents, their partners, their bosses and their mentors. So they have more acute performance anxiety, and they also have more porous emotional boundaries, so during that time, they’ve got to deal with those emotions, do things to keep their anxiety at bay and learn to create those boundaries that more experienced practitioners would already have and keep that balance going between their personal life, which might be getting married and having kids, and their work life.

Now, in middle age, you know therapists in the middle age range, they’ve already had sufficient time to develop skills that are helpful for managing themselves physically or psychologically and socially, and their accumulated life experience gives them a heightened awareness of what time brings, shifts in what we deem as meaningful and what we define as success. So in midlife, we actually end up getting to have greater satisfaction in the experience of just being, being and doing and achieving.

But the downside is the signs of aging may start to bring some anxiety. You know midlife crises, so we have to be aware of that and maybe that’s a time to go into personal therapy. If you find yourself wanting a sports car and wanting to divorce your spouse or something like that, you know it might be time to think about okay, where is this coming from? And looking at midlife issues and how they impact your thinking. So, and the other thing that happens in midlife is you may have more responsibilities and commitments, so you might be caring for your aging parents as well as your children, being in that sandwich generation, and so, again, trying to figure out how to balance all that time, trying to and making sure you carve out some time for yourself despite that so that you can stay rejuvenated.

And this is also the time when most of us confront the death of our parents when we are in middle age, and so, in that sense, we’re looking at grief and loss issues. And how do we manage that? Making sure that we take care of ourselves as we go through a grieving period. You know, it’s a real misnomer to think that grief only lasts like a year or so. Grief is lifelong. It doesn’t mean you have to be dysfunctional in your life, but you know when you lose someone, you’ve lost them for the rest of your life, and so, understanding the challenges of grief and riding the waves that may come, you know where, all of a sudden, you’re triggered and you feel really sad and you want to cry and crying is fine. And go ahead and do that. Let the feelings out, don’t shame yourself for having feelings. And then we can, you know, move forward and think about all of the positive memories of our loved one that we have and think about ways to honor them and cherish them. That can give you joy in the here and now.

Again, in midlife too, you might have some health concerns emerge, some chronic ailments may start in midlife. So there’s this situation where you need to focus on your physical needs and make sure you’re taking care of yourself medically, and the awareness of our mortality starts to hit us in midlife. And the upside of that is, it can allow us to live our life more fully. When we realize, you know, we’re not 18 anymore and indestructible as we thought we were. We realize, you know we’re not 18 anymore and indestructible as we thought we were, and then, in later adulthood, we refocus and readapt our energy into new roles and often in later adulthood, we’re looking at giving back to the younger generation, but our financial security and our health status are really important issues that come up in later adulthood.

The nice thing is, with age comes wisdom, and so older therapists tend to report fewer hazards of the profession. They work fewer hours and they use their time more efficiently when they are less prone to burnout, and that’s because we’ve been there, we’ve done that, we’ve got this, and that’s a real positive aspect of aging. I think people don’t think about the positive aspects of aging enough. It’s not all a negative situation. We have more acceptance towards others, which can lead to improved relationships with others. We’re just typically more mellow, you know, and we are more open-minded and we can embrace people in situations that maybe we didn’t when we were younger and less experienced.

Now, of course, there are anxieties in this time. One of them is potential for cognitive decline, and so doing brain-based exercises, eating a brain-healthy diet, making sure you get your exercise- those are all really important for elders to keep themselves active and their brain functioning really well. The other thing that happens during this old age is we lose people, and so we are dealing with grief and loss at a higher rate of time than any other time in our aging, higher rate of time than any other time in our aging, and so that’s something that we have to deal with, and going to therapy if it’s problematic is a good idea. This is also the time when we have to plan for retirement and a successful transition for ourselves and our clients. So therapists who have a robust sense of self, they feel good personally and socially, above and beyond their work, they’re the ones who are going to navigate retirement the best.

But it’s always good to plan for retirement, to not just say, well, I’m going to retire and sit in my rocking chair. It’s like, no, that’s not a plan. You know they really need to think about what do they want to do in retirement, what’s going to give them meaning and purpose? And maybe it will be volunteering, you know, for something, for a cause that they feel really meaningful about. Or maybe it’ll be spending more time with grandchildren, if they can, you know, really impacting the much younger generation. But having some sort of plan as to how they’re going to navigate retirement other than just sitting in a rocking chair watching TV all day, that’s a recipe for cognitive decline.

0:35:07 – Kimberly King

Yeah, and I like all the things that you’re looking ahead about. You know, losing parents, possibly cognitive decline and just like looking ahead and sometimes just having that plan. What makes all the difference? Just knowing that we’re not going to be here forever.

0:35:23 – Doctor Susan Williams

So no, we’re not, and by the time you get to older age, that’s really clear because you see people dying that are your peers, you know, and you’re the next in line in your family, like maybe you’re the last one in your family.

And my ex-husband, he just lost his sister. Both of his parents are gone, and so he said I truly am an orphan. You know, you’ll always have me, even though I’m his ex. We’re very close friends and he’s got three wonderful daughters that we share. And so, yeah, it’s hard to realize, I’m it. I’m the next in line. Yeah, that’s a very hard realization. So make use of your time and do meaningful things while you’re here so you don’t have any regrets on your deathbed.

0:36:16 – Kimberly King

Amen, I love that. I love that. Finally, the last question is that again I’ve been talking about these, but what steps can therapists take to create that positive action plan for improved self-care which, again, I think a lot of it is looking ahead and not letting it come as a shock when the time comes? Right?

0:36:36 – Doctor Susan Williams

Right, right. Well, we have a little self-care action plan that’s got four points to it. The first one is to sit down and assess the stress level of your work currently, okay. And so, questions you would ask yourself is how much control do you have at work, what are the specific demands of your job and what type of support do you have at work, and write out answers to those questions. And then the second point is to look at the ratio of other care to personal care that you have currently. Would you say your life is a 50-50 balance, or are you giving 90% to your work and 10% to your personal life, or 70-30, or vice versa? Where do you assess yourself in that balance? And the idea being, the ideal balance is 50-50.

And then the third point would be to assess your level of professional self-care. So what activities do you engage in now to support your professional self-care? And then, what areas are in need of improvement? If you look at your professional life, where do you need more self-care in those areas? And then the fourth and last point was to list one specific goal to improve your functioning for each of those areas. So one specific goal to improve your work stress, and then one specific goal to improve your ratio of other care to personal self-care and finally, one specific goal to improve your professional self-care. Then you get those goals down and then you work on them and then you check back in with yourself in about a month and see how the hell am I doing on my progress to these goals? And if I haven’t done diddly squat, then ask yourself, why haven’t I done diddly squat? What is the cause of my resistance? And you know, be your own therapist and figure it out so that you can achieve some goals to give yourself better self-care in the long run.

0:38:50 – Kimberly King

I love that. Excellent, wow, so good. I feel like I just went through my own counseling session with you. So thank you. Thank you for sharing your professional knowledge and if you want more information, you can visit National University’s website at nu.edu. And thank you so very much for your time, doctor. We appreciate it.

0:39:09 – Doctor Susan Williams

Oh, it was a pleasure. I really appreciate being on the podcast.

0:39:16 – Kimberly King

You’ve been listening to the National University Podcast. For updates on future or past guests, visit us at nu.edu. You can also follow us on social media. Thanks for listening.