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Year 1 Spring Semester: Resilience in Practice
What I have learned about the stressors and challenges that OTs face in practice:
From the coursework we have learned this spring semester and through interviews with practicing clinicians, I have learned that OTs experience a variety of different challenges and stressors in the field. Reflective of the PEO model, there are three different categories in which these challenges fall in that are related to internal factors, environmental/external system factors, and OT-specific professional identity factors. As a cohort we identified many of the challenges embedded within these factors being described while interviewing currently practicing OTs. Some of the most prominent included:
OT refusal
This challenge is representative of some of the OT-specific professional identity factors such as a lack of understanding, lack of respect, and/or under-recognizing the value of the OT profession by clients and other professionals. This can be really discouraging when the practitioner is emotionally prepared and enthusiastic going into a session.
Maintaining healthy boundaries between work and personal life
Related to internal factors, this challenge was prevalent amongst practitioners and showed itself in many different ways. Practicers sometimes felt they had a difficult time releasing all the stressful or emotionally heavy moments that accumulated throughout the day.
Unsupportive external systemsÂ
A lack of support from a supervisor or from the company system as a whole can be really difficult and stressful for an OT and can quickly lead to burnout.
Amongst these listed challenges, something that would be particularly difficult for me should I encounter this in practice is maintaining healthy boundaries between work and personal life. I hold mindful awareness of the fact that I am a deeply empathetic individual and that bottling up or holding onto feelings after listening to difficult experiences can be detrimental to my own health and wellbeing. To combat this, I am working on becoming even more aware of when I am holding these feelings in and giving myself more opportunities to cope/heal.
Resilience Strategies:
Throughout the semester we utilized an activity book by Jessica S. Gifford called The Resiliency Skills Training Workbook: 10-minute exercise to improve your health and happiness. Within this activity book was a menu of activities are intended to be used as resilience strategies. We had the opportunity to try these activities and reflect on how those strategies helped us be resilient throughout the semester. The strategy that resonated with me the most was practicing positive self talk by finding that positive voice within myself. I have recently been cultivating a higher awareness around how cruel and negative I can be towards myself at times. Seeing how much this impacted my self-esteem and therefore my occupational performance growing up, this is a skill that I am passionate about improving moving forward in my life. Through some of the activities we did in class and by practicing positive self talk as a shorter term goal (1 week at a time), I have noticed an increase in my ability to interrupt and replace negative thoughts with positive ones more consistently. Developing this skill will not only be beneficial to me in my personal life, but also through my professional life as a student and future practitioner. I now see the importance of understanding, accepting, and being at peace with making mistakes as this is where growth happens. This strategy of positive self-talk connects back to self-compassion, which is something we all need to show ourselves and will lead us to be resilient!
Take-aways from this semester:
As I discussed above, the resilience correlate of self-compassion really resonated with me this semester. I have experienced so many lif changes throughout the last few years and taking the time to talk about self-compassion and share experiences with my cohort related to this topic was really meaningful for me. These experiences allowed me to stop and fully move through deep rooted feelings related to not having self-compassion for myself in the past. This process was beautiful in that it allowed me to the opportunity to grow as an individual and develop relationships with others in my program who can relate to my experiences and support me when I am going through a hard time. There is one activity in particular that we did in class that I will always remember and carry with me moving forward. It involved writing a letter to yourself offering yourself support, kindness, and compassion through the perspective of someone in your life who currently does these things. This was eye-opening and powerful experience for me and is something I continue to use to this day to remind myself to be more self-compassionate. Doing so has definitely had a positive impact on my overall health and well-being and is something I will be using as a future practitioner.
Image Symbolizing Resilience
Image Symbolizing Resilience
In this image is a beautiful sunflower, standing tall in the summer sunshine. I took this image myself on a beautiful afternoon in July a few years back. The sunflower is one of my absolute favorite flowers because of its big and bright inflorescence. To me, it represents hope and excitement. What speaks to me in this image is the way in which the sunflower is positioned, its leaves and flower backlit by the sun while it is facing the shadows. The shadow cast on the sunflower feels representative of the challenges or stressors we may face in life. However, the sunflower looks to be almost beaming with light as the sun shines behind it. This to me represents resilience and success through adversity. All of the external and internal factors such as bugs, wind and rain, disease, lack of nutrients, sun exposure, etc will always be there. However, it is how we balance these things that contributes to our resilience and growth.
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