Welcome to the first LEHSS blog post! We will be posting regular short blogs on topics relating evidence-based wellbeing support, based on ideas from our training.
Our first blog is about compassion, as this is the cornerstone of much of the training we deliver, especially relating to the wellbeing of school and college staff. We strongly believe that developing more compassionate ways to relate to each other, and to ourselves, is the best way to support and improve our wellbeing at work in difficult times. So, to get us started, what is compassion?
Compassion is defined as "a sensitivity to distress and suffering, and a commitment to addressing this.” Compassion is a key motive for humans, which we think has developed as an evolutionary advantage. We have a drive to care for, and be cared for by, others.
Compassion is different to simple kindness, as it often takes strength and bravery to have a commitment to addressing our own or other people’s distress. Imagine working as a firefighter without compassion – just recognising the distress of others is not enough, and it takes immense bravery to take action and rescue people from a burning building.
We believe that developing our compassion skills is a necessity for effective education and maintaining good wellbeing. By intentionally moving from noticing distress to taking action, we can regulate our nervous systems, reduce burnout, and create the safety required for children to learn.
Compassion has three ‘flows’: it flows from ourselves to other people (giving compassion), from other people to ourselves (receiving compassion), and from ourselves to ourselves (giving ourselves compassion). Research with people in ‘helping’ professions such as education and healthcare professionals has shown that we are often very good at giving compassion, which is why we are drawn to these roles in the first place.
But we are often less good at receiving compassion, and commonly quite poor at showing it to ourselves! By understanding how compassion flows, we can start to notice where these flows could be ‘blocked’ or flow less well, and try to do something different.
We will come back to a range of ways to do help the flow of compassion in future blog posts, but for now here are a some ideas for how can we develop and show compassion in everyday life.
