 Hi, this is Pookey and Mork again. Mork's been hanging out with me quite a bit at the moment I think because it's really nice and warm in my shed and it's really cold outside. Anyhow, today's topic is for those of you who are working with young people and you often end up being the person who is providing support or who young people turn to and confide in. That might be because it's part of your role, it might be because you just happen to be one of those people to whom young people kind of gravitate and who they trust. It's a really privileged position to be in but it can be really stressful too. So I wanted to share sort of five ideas to help you help yourself and keep yourself kind of well because it can be really really stressful when you're kind of looking after a lot of other people's worries, when you're kind of holding them. In a environment where you were acting as a kind of professional therapist or counsellor you would get sort of supervision but that often doesn't happen in the kind of environments that I work with people in so kind of schools or youth settings. So five ideas. Number one and this is really important, never be the sole source of support for a young person. You might be the person they've gravitated towards, they might be really really keen that you're the one who offers them kind of frequent support, it might be within your role because you're their tutor for example but you shouldn't be the only person who can help them. That's both for you and for the young person. So it's for you because you need to know that hey you've got someone else you can talk to about this, if ever you're not quite sure what to do next or if there are issues around confidentiality or the child's safety or that kind of thing to heads are always better than one there and it helps you to kind of spread the emotional burden but it's also beneficial to the young person because if for some reason you're not in school one day or away on a course or you're ill then it means they've got someone else they can talk to too and it really massively takes the pressure off you if you're not the only person who's involved in that support. Also realistically long term you're not able to do that all the time you can't be there at the weekends in the holidays and that kind of thing so yeah don't be the only source of support in that young person's life really important and loads of us fall into that trap really easily. Number two is to make sure that you have got somewhere that you can offload so the young person's offloading to you where are you offloading to so you can do that in a lot of different ways it might be that you have a partner at home who you can talk to it might be that there's another member of staff that you can do some sort of kind of supervision or kind of offloading to confidentially it might be that you choose to write or journal or paint or sing but you need to have some way of actually just letting go of these thoughts these feelings the difficulties that go with working with young people because however much we love it and for many of us it really is a vocation it can take a toll and we need to be able to kind of find a way to let go of that and really sort of offload it. Number three is kind of an extension on number two really and that is to have specific periods of time when you're not going to be thinking about your role in relation to the young people in your care so actually have kind of almost like working hours or more specifically non-working hours so you might say for example I am not going to think at all about the young people in my care no matter how important they are to me and how important I am to them between the hours of I don't know 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. that's just for me that time and I'm not going to think about them and that can take some practice but it's really important to be able to completely switch off and give ourselves a bit of a break and again at the weekends and the holidays we need we can't necessarily do anything to support in those times and we need to give ourselves permission to stop thinking stop worrying about those young people things you know will carry on in their lives and we'll pick back up with them when we next see them but we need to give ourselves permission to stop worrying about them otherwise it really begins to take its toll on us. The next one is you need not to feel like you have to rescue and fix everything so often your role with a young person is that of listener that of non-judgmental adult in their life that of person who cares about them that of someone who will support and walk alongside them whilst they get the support that they need you can't personally usually fix stuff and yeah there might be practical things you can do to help them in their day-to-day life to make things a bit easier to manage but you on your own are unable to take their problem and make it all better much as you wish you might like to be able to do that you're very unlikely to do that so forgive yourself for that be open and honest with yourself about that and be open and honest with the young person that role of someone who walks alongside who supports who listens who never judges is really important and it's just as important as being the st. Bernard and fixing stuff okay and then finally and this is kind of a theme throughout really but number five is the importance of self-care now if we don't look after ourselves we're not going to be in a good position to look after young people the saying goes you know you can't pour from an empty cup so just making sure we've got those basics of self-care in place making sure we're getting enough sleep that we're eating healthily that we are getting outside and getting active just that we're really taking care of our most basic kind of physical and mental health needs so that we are in the best possible position to look after a young person and if at any point it becomes too much and we feel that the emotional burden is too big too difficult or we've got other things going on in our life that stop us from being able to support young people in the way that we might like to that's okay and it's really important to recognize that and to be honest with the young people and with our colleagues so that other provision can be made it's okay not to always be the one to help sometimes we need a break sometimes we need to reset sometimes our own mental health and well-being must come fast and that means that in the long term we can continue to do the great work that we want to with young people i hope this helps i hope that you do take a moment to really think about these things because in my experience those of you who do this kind of job you're really dedicated to it and i can't thank you enough for the work that you do it's so important but you must must look after yourself too good luck thanks for all you do um i hope you found this helpful please take a moment to like or comment below with any ideas that you have on this topic your experiences things that you find help you to keep yourself well so you can look after young people um and also please take a moment to subscribe i'm trying to do a video every day at the moment so if you subscribe and hit the bell notification then you will find out as and when i really really snooze stuff which i hope you'll find will help you in your role let me know what you'd like to see more of let me know what you'd like to see less of and uh yeah and we'll keep going thanks so much for watching and huge thanks to those of you who take a moment to comment and share bye