How to Sustain Compassion at Work
If your job is to support women entrepreneurs, you do important work. You provide information, advice, support, and sometimes, you’re the only ally in a challenging journey. You accompany women who have invested to create something personal and professional that will represent their livelihood and passion all at once.
Along with the knowledge of marketing, business plans, crowdfunding, financing, patenting, and all the sector-specific knowledge and other skills, one very important tool that you use every day is your ability to be compassionate. As you support coachees and entrepreneurs in the development of products and services, you are also offering encouragement, feedback, empathy, and compassion. As a professional in this sector, your ability to feel compassion for your agency’s clients will solidify relationships and trust.
Compassion Satisfaction and Compassion Fatigue: Everyone Experiences Both
Compassion Satisfaction is that great, fulfilling feeling you get when you can see that you’ve made a positive difference. You feel good, you know what to do, how to do it, and it’s working. This enhances your sense of effectiveness and your motivation for your work.
Compassion Fatigue, however, can leave feeling you depleted and unmotivated. Reactions are different from one person to another, but in essence, it reduces our capacity to feel compassion for our clients and may make it more difficult to be authentically present for them. This may interfere with your ability to effectively support coachees and entrepreneurs in their processes.
Personal, Environmental, and Systemic Factors That Impact Compassion at Work
Personal Factors
Coaches and advisors are people first. You have your own set of strengths and characteristics that can make things more challenging. Factors like your own available support systems, recent events in your personal life, how you typically manage boundaries, and your work style can all affect your vulnerability to compassion fatigue.
Environmental Factors
The work environment has an impact on compassion fatigue. In a context where the funding can be sporadic, the workload heavy, the resources few, and the stakes high, it’s important to be self-aware and vigilant about the impact on yourself and on the team.
Systemic Factors
Supporting others authentically means that we care about how things work out for them. We have some skin in the game. In tough times, like during a pandemic, coaches and advisors are weathering the storm in a multitude of ways. This can sometimes mean that the ability to feel and extend compassion is running low. As we watch women entrepreneurs lay off between 40–80 percent of their staff, run out of funds, and sometimes have to put their business on hold to find other ways of generating income, it can be tough to remain positive and compassionate. These are real strains on individuals and on communities.
Strategies to Manage Compassion Fatigue
1. Finding Solutions—Change the Things That Can Be Changed
When you identify a situation that is draining you and your ability to compassionately support your coachees and entrepreneurs, it’s important to determine how much control you have over it. If you find that you have some control over a situation, try to find a positive solution to eradicate or mitigate the factors that may be contributing to compassion fatigue. It could be about modifying schedules: If you are at your best in the morning, move some of your challenging conversations to that time. Can long hours be changed? How can some tasks be shared or delegated? Can weekly debrief meetings be created to share common challenges and support?
2. Manage Your Expectations
As people who work to support others toward success and through their challenges, we can lose track of what is actually under our control and become too invested. Sometimes, in wanting to support coachees and entrepreneurs, we may forget to stand back and trust the participant to find their way through. We may even take on more responsibility for their success than we can actually control. This is a key factor in compassion fatigue. Constantly coming up against your own unrealistic expectations is the short route to disappointment and fatigue.
3. Remember Why You Chose This Work
Why did you want to support women entrepreneurs? What was it about this work that fired you up? What connected with your beliefs and your values? When difficulties at work bring you down, it can be hard to remember that it’s meaningful and important. While it’s a good idea to find ways to remember why this work matters to you personally, external reminders are also useful. Keep a thoughtful email from a participant, a positive evaluation, a picture of an entrepreneur who you supported who has a flourishing business nearby. Invite your coachees to send you emails about small victories.
4. Use Your Network for Support
The experience of compassion fatigue can leave you feeling inadequate and alone. The truth is that most people who work at providing support to others experience this in different forms. Sharing your challenges with others will provide some relief, some solutions, and may be helpful to others who are probably also feeling the same way. This network can be your personal network, colleagues, a community of practice, or even a Facebook group.
5. Healthy Habits and Compassion Fatigue
Healthy habits have protective effects on compassion fatigue. Yes, it’s that advice again about getting enough sleep, eating right, and exercising that everyone keeps telling us! Keeping these practices up may have some protective effects on the general fatigue that can take over when we put ourselves last. Take a break, eat your lunch, call a friend, and set up things outside of work that you look forward to, and then leave yourself enough energy to be able to actually do them. Try the Self-Care Plan suggested in the link below.