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SoWhoCaresAnyWay E50 Not All Balls Are Equal · SoWhoCaresAnyway

• 0:04
  Welcome to So Who Cares Anyway?, a fortnightly podcast exploring stories that shape care, community, and the systems we live in.
• 0:12
  I'm Ruth Germaine, and in each episode I'm joined by my guests, people from behind clinical doors to the North York Moors, whose experiences open a window into how we care for one another.
• 0:24
  Together, we explore care through creativity, connection, and the strengths we already hold.
• 0:30
  Because care isn't small.
• Care isn't soft.
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  Care shapes the world.
• 0:36
  So who cares anyway? It's time to talk about it.
• 0:41
  Hello, and welcome back to So Who Cares Anyway? Um, for those of you that listen regularly, you might have noticed that I took a bit of a break over the summer, which I'll go into in a moment.
• 0:49
  But this is actually episode 50, so a bit of a milestone, and, um, it's another one of my solo episodes reflecting really on some of the things that I've learned while I took that break.
• What I have to say is, although I said I took a break, I didn't actually, um, announce it.
• I just knew one morning I needed to stop, and I didn't actually stop doing everything, so there's quite a lot of things I did carry on doing.
• But the podcast was just one of the those things where I decided to pull back, and it was something about I was hearing so much and learning so much that I thought, "I just need to stop and, and clarify."
• Um, and I was also doing so much as well, so I had a bit of a pause.
• There was nothing major going on.
• 1:33
  There was no crisis.
• Um, it was just a decision, and I suppose I felt like I was juggling so many balls in my life, trying to keep them all up in the air.
• But, um, what I realized is that not all balls are w- equal.
• 1:48
  So work is a rubber ball.
• 1:50
  Drop it, and it bounces.
• 1:52
  Well, it bounces high, and I have to admit anybody who can...
• who knows me will know that you do not want to play a game of...
• that includes, involves a ball or a, um, Frisbee or anything else with me because I will not catch it, and I will not throw it back to you.
• But you might get to know everybody else who's standing nearby as, as things land on them, and it began to feel a little bit like my work was like that, and I just wasn't quite bouncing that ball in the right place.
• And the other thing is, when I read this shortly after I, um, decided to take a break, is that many balls are actually made of grass- glass, and if you drop those ones, they don't recover in the same way.
• So that's our family, our friendships, our relationships, and our own health and wellbeing.
• So those ones need tendering, if you like.
• So I felt like over the last few weeks, although I was keeping that ball bouncing for a few things, with the other balls, I was picking them up and tending them and thinking, "Right, what do I need to do here?" As I say, no crisis, just that thing of thinking family sh- and friends are just really important.
• And, um, yeah, thank you to all those people out there.
• I spent some lovely weeks being with people.
• So here's some of the bits I've been doing.
• I've been working on a prescribing paper, so this is about clinicians able to prescribe in practice.
• Um, and it comes from s- work I was doing when I was still working in the NHS.
• 3:19
  So actually it's been years in the progress, and it's been in the back of my head, so I thought, "I need to sort that one out."
• And I also done some work around the Do WITH work I finished it.
• 3:30
  It felt a bit difficult.
• 3:32
  And once I'd finished that piece of work, I actually put that piece of work to one side.
• 3:36
  It's published, it's out there, and I'll probably do more about it, including a podcast about it at a later date And then I kept going with my knowledge mobilization work.
• 3:47
  So this is work about how do we support our workforce, so that's staff in health and social care, to really meet the needs of people with learning disabilities and autistic people.
• 3:57
  And many of my solo podcasts have been reflections on discussions and workshops that I've done in those times.
• Um, that was really important to me, and it was work that needed to be done.
• 4:06
  It wasn't something I could just stop.
• 4:10
  But it gave me more time to focus on it.
• And I've also been doing some more reading.
• 4:14
  So I started with a couple of just novels, and then I went on to think, "Hmm, I need to do something that would just stretch my mind and help me think about what it is I really need to do."
• Now, one of my adult children, um, some time ago gave me a book called The One Thing.
• 4:30
  I read the first three pages, thought, "Oh, okay, I should focus on one thing," and then promptly didn't focus on one thing.
• 4:37
  I focused on all those things, a couple of which I've already mentioned and everything else, um, and thought I was focusing on one thing.
• 4:43
  But the book's by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, and I realized that what I was doing was I was getting up and just doing things.
• That game of ball, like I say, where I was throwing the ball and the Frisbee, and they're all going in the wrong place.
• 5:00
  But actually I wasn't stopping and thinking and planning in a structured way.
• So I suppose we might ask why that really matters.
• Well, it actually asked one question in there, which I found really focusing, so I thought I'd just share with it...
• this with you.
• Because I don't think it matters whether people, whether I apply this to my work or to my home life or my own health or wellbeing.
• It's a question that can be asked across any area of our lives really.
• But what they ask or what they say to ask yourself is, what's the one thing I can do? Which is the bit that pushes you to think about potential, that by doing it, so doing being a call to action, everything else becomes either easier or unnecessary.
• So really that's about payoff.
• By doing one thing, actually everything else gets easier, or I don't even need to do it.
• So maybe I was picking up and juggling too many balls, I thought to myself.
• So let's ask that question to my...
• for myself.
• So the first question, and if I take the very first part of it, what is my one thing? So my one thing for sometime, some time is about being supporting people in health and social care who are doing absolutely amazing work, but they're often confined by the system, the hospitals, the organizations, the, um, whoever it is that they're employed by or work by, and thinking about what, what actually can happen.
• So my one thing is about supporting people in health and social care to really consider How do they meet the needs of the people that they care for? Now, we talk about person-centered care, and I've spoken about it on these podcasts before, but actually it's so hard because each of those members of staff, whether they work in a hospital or a community trust or in a, in a voluntary organization such as a hospital, they need to look after themselves and they need to look after families.
• 7:05
  They're juggling all their balls themselves.
• And then they get people that they need to see, and actually they're not always able to meet those needs.
• 7:13
  I know myself when I, when I've worked in, in those clinical facing roles, that I couldn't always do the things I thought I needed to do.
• So that's my one thing, that bigger picture, supporting people to really achieve that meeting needs, that do with approach.
• So that's the bigger question.
• 7:33
  And then taking it a little bit broader, bringing it down to that daily level, well, then that was easier because then I could go with my each morning and say, "What is the one thing that I can do today?" Such that by doing it, everything else will become easier or unnecessary.
• And that gave me my focus.
• Finish my prescribing paper, get that done.
• Think about where I need to send that, who else I need to ask, and who else those things are.
• But focus on that for today.
• Finish the do with work that I was doing and that piece of work, and get that published.
• Put it up.
• It's out there, it's done.
• I might draw on it later, but for now it's completed And the knowledge mobilization work that I've been doing, so this, as I just mentioned, is about supporting people to meet the needs of people with learning disabilities and autistic people.
• So what came out of that after a number of workshops and lots of different things that I was doing was a community of practice, and for those of you who don't know what a community of practice is, it's a group of people who come together regularly to learn with and from each other rather than sitting in a training room or going off on a course or a study day just to be told things.
• So this helps people really understand their learning, contextualize it, or make it real in practice, if you like.
• So they can actually think, "Well, what can I do differently?" So that's what I've done.
• It brought people together to listen and talk and learn from people, and it was led by experts by experience.
• So I thought when I first started that had this idea, "Well, maybe I'll get about 15 people coming together.
• That'd be great.
• I'll do some online.
• 9:15
  I might do one face-to-face as well.
• It's always harder face-to-face to actually get it going, get people there, but I'll do that."
• And then I found somebody who was really interested in it, so the momentum grew, and that person helped me to grow that momentum.
• And instead of 15 people, by the first community of practice, we had about 70 plus people signed up, and I h- now we have, after the pilot, 140 people or more than 140 people.
• Not everyone attends every time.
• The numbers last time were around 65.
• There are...
• 9:46
  been there 40s times before.
• 9:49
  But actually, all those people belong to that community of practice and will join at some point.
• But it was snowballing, and I'm, I'm coming to the end of this piece of work, and I thought, "Well, this is gonna snowball."
• 10:01
  But the trouble is I don't want it to get to the bottom and just crash and sort of break into smithereens.
• I know things evolve and become something different.
• But this is where the focusing question really helped me because I thought this community of practice, its purpose is about people with lived experience, so people living with learning disabilities or autistic people, maybe their friends and carers, people close to them, talking and working and listening to people who are staff to talk about what happened to them and why, and helping them to learn from their previous experiences and their stories.
• Those people with lived experience deliver it and run it, and suddenly I realized, well, they were the core.
• They were the core of that snowball, and I needed to make sure that they feel supported and recognized because they're the ones that will carry it on after my fellowship ends.
• So I suppose purpose come, has to come from what actually is important to you, and it talks about this in the book as well.
• 11:06
  It's not about numbers.
• 11:07
  It's not about saying, "I've got 140 people here."
• 11:12
  You know, great to be able to say that.
• It's not about money, um, which obviously is important.
• You know, you have to think about these things, but it's not about making money.
• 11:20
  Purpose comes from what's important to, to us as individuals, and the way that we get people o- on board is by sharing that purpose and helping other people to understand it.
• So of course, everybody who's come along to that community of practice understands this is about learning from people, people that really know, people that this is happening to in real life.
• And when, so when that purpose comes from the heart, people buy into it.
• That's what really makes it work.
• So, so as you leave today, I just invite you to go away and think about what is my core purpose? What is it that comes from my heart? And that might be about work, family, friends, or something else.
• But focus on one of those that seems important to you today, and think about it because that'll be the bit that other people understand, and that'll be the bit that makes it work.
• 12:20
  So after a short break, I feel like I've answered some of those questions for myself, but I'm gonna keep on asking them.
• So take care, and until next time.
• I hope today's conversation gave you something to think about.
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• Or to support my work, head over to my Linktree, which you can find in the show notes.
• But for now, stay caring, stay connected, stay curious.
• Thanks for listening.