It's been a year since I led my first training as a self-employed person. My website was being built (painstakingly, with great frustration and much coffee, by me, definitely not a website designer), I was meeting with potential clients, and also my accountant, my attorney, and sussing out which bank would be best for my business account. Thankfully I am married to a former data analyst, and god made Quickbooks intuitive enough for even a theatre-kid-turned-social-worker to understand. 

It became clear so quickly that while you go out on your own to do the work you're great at, you actually spend about 80% of your time doing things you've never done before. Administrative tasks, marketing, selling. It's a wild ride. 

Many people have asked me over the last year about self-employment, and I try to answer honestly. There is a whole lot of self-employed, self-empowerment, "girl boss" culture right now out there, and it does look super attractive. How many times have you seen a beautiful photo of a beach, someone's front porch, a trendy coffeehouse, and the caption #myoffice ? If you follow me, you've seen it a couple times at least. And, yes, it is true that I have put some serious work time in on my front porch with my dog at my feet. But this is also not the full picture. I've written a little before about the realities of the last year, and I wanted to write a few posts to address specific questions people interested in working for themselves have brought to me. Here is today's topic.

How do you swing it financially?
A self-employed colleague, Julie Kratz, told me that it took about a year for her to start getting consistent clients, and that she had been told the same by other consultants. That has been true for me too. And in that first year before you're making real money, you're also spending a lot to start your business. Because I wasn't opening a brick and mortar store, buying light fixtures or inventory, or even renting office space, I didn't think about how much money I would still be spending. But, oh did I. Office supplies. Technology--I had a laptop, but needed a projector, adapters because every room seems to have a different plug situation, a printer and then money at copy shops when that printer inevitably died. Membership dues and continuing education hours for the licenses I hold as a social worker, therapist, and yoga teacher. Malpractice insurance for both therapy and yoga. Meals with potential clients, and meals when I am traveling for work. Attending networking events. An accountant, an attorney, photographer for a professional headshot. Registering as an LLC with the state, and registering my website URL, the associated email address, and the software I use to design my logos, fliers, business cards, and social media posts. Sure, you can write all this off on your taxes. But writing something off doesn't mean it is free! The huge cost that stopped me from leaving my job even earlier than I did? Paying for health insurance without employer help. The next time you get your pay stub, really look at how much money your employer puts toward your health care. Get on the ACA Marketplace and do find out what health insurance will cost you before you leave your job. The price will shock you.

It takes a certain amount of planning and saving, and privilege, to be able to spend more to make less, and to not know for certain when that math will flip in your favor. A few things that helped me feel more secure taking this risk? 
-First and foremost, again, economic privilege. Plenty of people start successful businesses without it, but it sure does make it easier.
-I have a few skills that I knew could yield immediate income like teaching yoga and providing therapy. Of course, gaining these skills also cost a lot of money and time. But I had already made that investment when I set out on my own, so I had them at my disposal.
-I had a previous career in the tech start-up world and I knew it was not a forever thing while I was there. Luckily I had the foresight and ability (privilege again! See?)  to save a lot of my income at that time, knowing that I would likely want it later when the time came to do something weird. Here we are!
-I do have a partner who shares my household expenses, and we are both very comfy living on the cheap.

You need to get really honest. You do need to be brutally honest with yourself about how much money you need, what you can sacrifice and for how long, what you have saved, and how you will handle emergencies. An example? Earlier this year I had the unanticipated experience of traveling to Northern Ireland and presenting a workshop in Belfast. Because I have family in Ireland and I had the flexibility with my time in a way traditional employment never allowed, I decided to backpack Ireland and Northern Ireland the entire month leading up to the work engagement. I budgeted for a year to make that happen, including renting out a room in our home and trading rent for dog-sitting during the two and a half weeks of the Ireland trip where my partner joined me. Brilliant! All planned out! The night before I left, while I was busy congratulating myself on the execution of this plan, our furnace died, it was in the 30s where we live, and we had to find $2500 within hours, on my way to the airport. 

You will be tested. I felt that at many points I was being tested on how much I really wanted this. And you can call this "manifesting" or "prayer" or, like me, the practical outcome when we focus our time and energy fully and intentionally.  Whatever you call it, as soon as I said "I am 100% in for this thing I am doing," it started to work in a new way. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I am a year in, and this happened very recently. 

Limit your "free" work. You will get so many exciting connections to potential work, only to be told that they intend to compensate you with "exposure." Unlike booking a Southwest flight, I can't choose to pay my bills with either "Dollars" or "Points." AT&T has only accepted my dollars up to this point in our relationship, with no regard to my vast exposure points, and so dollars are what I need to earn. Look, there is something to be said for getting your name and what you have to offer in front of the right people. But my experience has been that if they know they can get it for free, they value it less, and assume you will give it away again. When I have worked for free, it has not generated the paid work that "exposure" was supposed to get me. But doing work for pay has generated a lot more paid work. I don't know what alchemy this is, but it is true. Charge what you're worth, give some discounts to non-profits and others with limited budgets, but don't put yourself out of business before you even get going. 

The grass is always greener. I have had several people say, "Well yeah if I had a partner that helped pay the bills I could do this too." Or: "Well sure, if I didn't have kids, I could work for myself as well!" Don't guess at the resources of others, pals. You are rarely correct. Yes, having a working partner does help--and, his job isn't high paying, stable, and doesn't cover our health care. Doing this was asking a lot of him too, and it required a commitment to communication and vulnerability that we have not had to muster before. We do not have children to care for, that is true--and we chose that, so we could pursue other things,namely work that is meaningful to us, if not secure. Also most of the people I know who own their own businesses have children. I don't know how they do it, but they do. Oh, also? Know other people doing this. They will talk you down when you need it, they usually also have weird daytime availability to do it, and they will rejoice with you in your wins in such a heartfelt way, because they understand it in a way others won't. Find you a village, and love them hard. That isn't financial advice, but it is so important. 

Most of us who work with victims of trauma are very aware of the behavioral cues that may come with their experiences. There is no shortage of training on the topic. Sexual assault victim advocates want law enforcement to know that the shock of the attack may look like hyperarousal...or, hypoarousal. We educate the legal system on how memory may be impacted after a traumatic event. And as the discussion of childhood trauma moves to the mainstream--like, Oprah did a special about it kind of mainstream--teachers are receiving trauma-informed care trainings to recognize trauma in their students. We share memes that say "The kids who need the most love will ask for it in the most unloving ways," and we try and help educators understand that the behaviors that feel like indifference or disrespect may indeed be cries for help, and that when schools punish this behavior, we may very well be punishing a kid for having abusive parents. A history of sex abuse. The death of a loved one. 

Behavior is communication.

Why then, do we understand this for our clients, urging their teachers to consider alternatives to suspension, creating endless PowerPoints for police officers, only to see the same signs of trauma in our colleagues.--and dismiss it right away as bad behavior?

In my trauma-informed self-care training, we delve into the overlap of trauma survivors taking on roles in trauma work. To give back and to make meaning of our experiences, we may seek to work on the very issue around which we have experienced trauma. My theory in this workshop is that we have a lot of people working with trauma survivors who are not only subject to vicarious trauma via the client, but who are also being consistently re-triggered in their own trauma history. And if enough folks at the same organization have that experience, you can guess that the work culture may not be the healthiest one in the office park. Things may begin to break down.

Think back to the last time you were in a job that you really, really didn't want to do anymore. How did you behave? Some of the common things I am told when working with clients around employee morale include:
-coming to work late, or leaving early, or both
-taking long lunches, or disappearing to run "errands," but everyone is suspicious of where the employee really is
-makes any excuse to be out of the office, generally
-someone who used to be diligent in their work now misses deadlines, makes excuses
-an employee who was usually very friendly and team-focused withdraws, and maybe even shows hostility toward colleagues

If we work in social services, and we have a client who begins to exhibit behavior like this, what do we do? Do we come out swinging? Do we write them up? If we're practicing in a trauma-informed way, we sure don't. We have a conversation. We ask probing questions. We go into that conversation assuming that these are likely symptoms of the bigger picture and that the client requires more support, not less. So why is it different with our colleagues? If we would ask a client, "What's been the barrier to you missing your sessions with me? Is there something making you uncomfortable about our time together?" why can't we start with "I've noticed a change in your work performance and behavior. Is there a reason you don't seem to want to be in the office? Is there something or someone here making you feel unsafe or uncomfortable?"

Productivity is important. Employers invest salary and benefits compensation into a person, and the demands of the job don't allow for many folks to dip out during the week. But the more I have sat with my own history of trauma, how it has been poked in my time as a social worker, and working in an incredibly toxic environment that I've worked hard to understand and grow from, I have come to this: we cannot call ourselves trauma-informed, if we only attend to the trauma of our clients. We cannot call ourselves trauma-informed if we create office cultures where gossip and bad boundaries are the norm. We cannot call ourselves trauma-informed if there is an unaddressed history of turnover, hostile relationships with former or current employees or community partners, and a practice of meeting these facts with defensiveness rather than honesty. We do not let our clients ignore their most problematic behaviors and relationships, and we should not let ourselves do it either. 

Did anything in this post sound familiar? Mary-Margaret would love to work with you to investigate your workplace culture, either via her trauma-informed self-care training and/or her consulting and team-building services. Shoot her an email here!

It is a staple of every conference in the non-profit world: the survivor of the very issue we are all there to discuss, shares their story. The conference center salad is served: pale romaine leaves, the one sort of red cherry tomato, the two gravy boats of dressing. And out comes the Inspiring Person. 

Inspiring Person shares their story, and those of us in the audience who work as service providers are inspired to keep going. The speaker is the culmination of all of our hopes for our clients. And they may also be a mirror for ourselves. Because if you've ever worked on a social issue, you know that many of your colleagues have direct experience with the issue at hand. And that can be an overwhelmingly powerful thing--or a dangerous phenomenon that will impact that survivor, their colleagues, and your ability as an organization to deliver effective and ethical programming. 

Social media has taken sharing our stories to a new level. What used to be reserved for our friends and family, our therapist, our congregation, has an audience. And it's not just a memoir book deal, or selling the film rights-- our life's greatest challenges and triumphs are now easily posted by any of us on our blog, as an Instagram caption, or regular Facebook updates. Brene Brown's work on vulnerability has inspired many people to share their stories. And sharing can be empowering. But Saint Brene did not give us carte blanche here; it is not always healing and empowering when we share. She reminds us that we have to decide who has earned the right to hear our story. And that we should not be sharing we have not yet processed for ourselves. 

In my most requested training, Trauma-Informed Radical Self-Care for Service Providers, I share the highlights of my resume--and then how those highlights align with some of the most profoundly personal pieces of my life. I share that it didn't occur to me when I took a job in HIV prevention that I was perhaps working to right the wrongs against my close family friend who had died of the disease. Or that serving refugees was in some way serving my immigrant grandmother who boarded a ship to give me the kind of life she never could have imagined for me. Or that my work around Adverse Childhood Experiences helped me answer life-long questions about my reactions to losing my parents at a young age and a childhood with a chronic health condition. I was drawn to work in the domestic violence field and it took me training others on domestic violence to name that it had happened to me years before. 

And in all of these instances, I am far from alone. I have always worked alongside colleagues who came to the work via their own personal experiences with the topic at hand. Non-profit break rooms, blogs, and interviews are full of "I wanted to give back after I had received help" and "I wanted to use my experience to help others" and "I think this happened to me for a reason, and helping others is it." These are some of the most dedicated employees I have ever worked alongside. 

But I have also seen them burnout at alarming speeds. 

When we are confronted daily with our own trauma, especially trauma we may not have fully addressed and integrated yet, we can have the same trauma responses that we are trained to see in our clients. We can easily project onto that client, rather than empathize. What if the client isn't doing it the way you did it? We can become frustrated and self-righteous. What if the client has more resources than we did to resolve the problem? We can become defensive and withholding. We know these are not pathways to healing, but if we are not engaged in our own healing, we cannot walk with others on their journey in ways that are effectual, and I will argue, even ethical. If we are asking our clients to show up for themselves, to put in the hard work of self-exploration and healing, we must be engaged in that too. 

It's likely clear to anyone following my work now that I honed in on a particular obsession in my endeavors, and I don't intend on letting it go. I wrote months ago about toxic work environments in organizations that are expressly working against a toxic society. I developed a training around creating a trauma-informed workplace, and a training around trauma-informed self-care. It came back to me over and over that we cannot create social change when we as change agents are not willing to change; and we cannot be willing to change if we do not identify what needs to change; and we cannot do that hard work of identification if we are not taking care of ourselves. So, the trainings merged and now I offer Trauma-Informed Radical Self-Care for Service Providers. The name is hulking and clunky, I know. But so is the topic. I'm working on it. 

In April when the weather begins to change, we see more sign-ups for run/walks, bike rides, and marches for social change issues. Here in Indiana, the Indiana Coalition to End Sexual Assault dyes our downtown canal teal. Pinwheels cover the lawns of youth-serving organizations. It's Sexual Assault Awareness Month and National Child Abuse Prevention Month. 

Even if your organization does not directly address either of these issues, if your organization is staffed by, well, any person at all, chances are unfortunately rather high that someone at your organization is directly impacted by one or both of these topics. And April may be a hard month, or an empowering month, or both (or neither!), for them on their healing journey. Life is complicated.

The Instagram account @Therapyforwomen shared this recently and I adore it. We can't know what we don't know. We can't fix what we don't know needs attention. As social media continues to transform our sense of self in ways both good and bad, more survivors are claiming their stories and sharing them with others. Maybe you are connected with a colleague on social media and see them share a #metoo post. Maybe they re-tweet a National Child Abuse Prevention Month statistic and disclose their own abuse. Many of us have had that moment with someone else where we think, "Oh no. I didn't know they had experienced {fill in the social issue here}. I hope I've never said anything to offend them. How do I treat them now?" 

As a lover of The Office, my mind goes immediately to Season 3, Episode 1 when Michael and Dwight find out Oscar is gay. 

Michael Scott: There could be others. I need to know. I don't want to offend anybody else.
Dwight Schrute: You could assume everyone is, and not say anything offensive.
Michael Scott: [rolls eyes] Yeah. I'm sure everyone would appreciate me treating them like they were gay!

And all joking aside, I think this may actually sum up how to begin infusing our workplaces with trauma-informed care principles. I know. Stay with me. 

We don't need to assume anyone's sexual orientation (or level of trauma, or ethnicity, or ability, or anything else) to behave with respect. It doesn't mean we won't sometimes say the wrong thing, but it means that we are aware of how our words and actions may impact other people, who we cannot possibly know everything about. Now, not behaving like Michael Scott at your own workplace is a pretty low bar, so let's raise is a bit: how can we become aware of possible triggers in our work to our colleagues?

Use these awareness raises months to do just that: raise your awareness! Read the posts you see. Familiarize yourself with the statistics. That alone will begin to shift your perception. For example, when you learn that one in three women and one in six men in the USA experience some form of contact sexual violence in their lifetime, you may be more sensitive to the fact that people around you may struggling if a big sexual assault or rape case is in the news. And, you can begin to think critically about how the work of your organization may be affected by those you've hired to deliver the programming.

Ask yourself:
-does my team display signs of burn-out? 
-are team member over-identifying with clients? Displaying symptoms similar to those they are caring for, or obsessing over certain clients while others suffer?
-Do you have employees who got into this work because they have direct experience with the issue at hand? 

The last point is the topic of the next blog post, so stay tuned. In the meantime, how can you channel more empathy at work? Do you have a role model for that to emulate, who seems to be the opposite of Michael Scott? Begin by journaling what you admire about that person's style, how they make you feel, and analyze their leadership style. Try to incorporate one thing a day that you think they may do, if they were in your situation.

​We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same. -Anne Frank

When I was fifteen, I traveled to Amsterdam with a school group. I had been anticipating our visit to the Anne Frank House museum since I learned about the trip, having read her diary as a child and becoming somewhat obsessed with her story ever since. The thought of standing where she had stood, calling to mind scenes from her entries and imagining them unfolding, right there in front of me, was almost too great to conceptualize before it happened.

The museum begins on the ground floor of 263 Prinsengracht, where the offices of the company owned by Anne's father functioned. Today they are filled with artifacts: typewriters, letters, photos of the Frank family and those who joined them in the Annex. Suddenly, you turn a corner and before you is the bookcase that obscured the door to their hiding place. It stopped me in my tracks, seeing this passage I had read about so many years ago, immortalized in movies and plays and history books. There it was, just in front of me. I could touch it. I did touch it. And then I walk through it, feeling as if I was walking on sacred ground, and also ground I had tread before, though I never had, because it had been in my imagination so long. I identified a lot with Anne. Both young avid readers and writers, dreamers who often left others around us frustrated as our imaginations and hopes for the future swelled, pushing out the present. The profound, urgent feelings of first love. Carrying on as a relatively normal teenage girl in the midst of great challenge and uncertainty. While my challenges were nothing like hers, the juxtaposition of her very humanness and teenager-ness against great pain reminded me that I could do the same.

I thought of Anne this last month when I traveled to Belfast, Northern Ireland to present at a conference and visit youth-serving programs as part of The Journey fellowship. Our tour of the peace walls, monuments displaying gruesome photos of the dead after a bombing, and watching school children—in real time, in March of 2019, 20 years after the Good Friday agreement was signed—keep to their sides of the walls, and attend segregated schools. Our protestant tour guide who told us he has metal over his windows and multiple locks on his front door and sleeps with a gun after 4 assassination attempts against him; and our Catholic guide on the other side of the wall, who was in prison for 12 years and pointed to the wall mural memorializing the ten prisoners who died in the 1981 hunger strike and saying, “These are my friends.” Visiting R-CITY, a program serving youth on both sides of the walls, trying to bridge the gap through camps and self-development workshops and a coffeehouse, even as the barbed wire stands. Listening to Alternatives, a restorative justice program in the most economically depressed neighborhood along the wall, who also began suicide prevention work because it is such a problem there. In all of this, I thought of Anne. I thought of her when I saw the images of dead young people on the sides of buildings, and when I walked past gaggles of kids as they walked home from school. I thought of her in the youth centers we visited, meeting adults who had been given the chance to heal and process and change when they were kids.

Our delegation from the United States was made up of youth workers, and each time I travel with the fellowship, I am reminded of the power of our youth. Their vitality and high emotions and lack of filter is powerful—and can be harnessed for good or bad. The adults around them—us, their parents, teachers, social workers, neighbors—guide the direction of those gifts.

It was not a stretch, you may imagine, for a group of American social service folks to stand next to a wall dividing a city and think of our own nation's call to build a wall between us and our Mexican neighbors. To hear stories of Northern Irish children caught in the middle of the affairs of adults and think of innocent children in cages in our own country. To hear the fears surrounding Brexit and what it may do to the two decades of relative peace between the Catholics and Protestants, and remember the visceral feelings surrounding the 2016 US elections. And in both we hear the generalized caricatures of the masses, us and them, good and bad, and we bias our children and change their fate based on it all. We build walls, physical and metaphorical, for them to grow up in the shadow of, and navigate around for the rest of their lives. As a youth worker, I grieve the work we are leaving for them. But as a youth worker who has seen the power of youth, I also hold on to the hope that they will also be the people to eventually tear those walls down.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren't any other people living in the world. -Anne Frank

When I started working for myself, I hit the social media ground hard. I had a schedule around it that I did not break. And, it yielded some great interest quickly. I was booking speaking engagements sooner than I anticipated, and more of them than I had accounted for in my business plan. I was getting requests for trainings I did not yet have listed on my site, and I was contracted to make them for clients specifically. I was teaching a lot of yoga, at random one-off community events, subbing for teacher friends as needed, and secured two regular teaching jobs, one at a university and one at my home studio. It felt good, and I shared that highlight reel via seek&summon's social media channels. But during the autumn of 2018, I realized a few things about my work process, and how it made me feel, and how it impacted my health, and I'm here to share it in my first blog post back in a while.

Much digital ink has been spilled across the Internet about the impact social media is having on our social connections, our mental health, and our perception of the world at large. I won't attempt to recreate that dialogue here, but suffice to say, if you ever find yourself scrolling listlessly through Instagram and believing everyone else has it figured out besides you, everyone else is doing the same scroll. Even those people who project their unbelievable having-it-all-togetherness. You are seeing the greatest hits version. And while I know this to be true, I found myself as I was trying to prove myself and make connections, doing the same thing.

The Highlight Reel
I got to travel a lot this year. I even wrote it into a couple consulting contracts that part of the work would be done remotely while I was away. I negotiated a training contract from my father-in-law's childhood bedroom, grateful for the ability to work while also visiting with my partner's 94 year old grandmother. I took one of the best dang calls I've ever taken from an Airbnb in New Jersey, the night before an epic reconnection with my father's side of the family. I finished building a training module in the evening hours after sampling coffee all day in Seattle (and to be fair, I had a lot of sleepless hours to fill after drinking caffeine for ten hours straight. No regrets, coffee in the city known for coffee ruled). Many days, I worked in short bursts then went to run an errand or start dinner, and a big part of my self-care became trying new recipes. I was able to create the exact work I wanted to create, without a boss or a grant funding my salary dictating it. I found myself in the best shape of my life, having the time to devote to my yoga practice like never before. I engaged with important changemakers to address issues I experienced for years in my non-profit career.


As improvisational actors say:
"Yes, and..." Yes, all of those highlight reel moments are real. And, this has been an incredibly challenging endeavor. Yes, I traveled a lot, and most of that travel I did was booked when I still had a full-time, salaried job so it was already paid for, and not by what I was making the first few months out on my own. Because I wasn't making anything, when you factor in the costs of starting a business. Yes, I worked all over, and the ability to work from anywhere also means you end up working everywhere and most of the time, turning vacation into work and feeling guilty about it, because the trip is costing money that you are not technically making yet. Yes, I had extreme flexibility, and the ability to dictate my schedule most days was almost overwhelmingly challenging for someone with major depressive disorder, and I had to put a lot of practices in place, and even enlist friends, to help ensure I stuck to a schedule at all. Yes, I cooked and ate a lot, and the delicious and beautiful recipes I tried and posted to my Instagram were also made because we cut our restaurant and bar budget to almost nothing. Yes, I had almost unfettered creative license, and a lot of my work never saw the light of day because you have to have products to offer, but you cannot guarantee that people will pay you for them. Yes, I feel better physically, and the physical shape I am in came because my chronic back injury returned with gusto, and I put a lot of physical therapy sessions on my credit card because while I pay the most I ever have for health insurance, it is the worst coverage I've ever had too. Yes, I got to speak freely about the problematic patterns in non-profit work, and I lost friends over my insistent to speak the truth about the ethics in my field, and I was disappointed by people calling themselves advocates while also willing to look the other way.

So, what's next?
As my partner will tell you, much to his dismay, I have never liked fantasy stories. He's hunkered down with Harry Potter and I'm re-reading Angela's Ashes. I like reality, in all of it's mess and muck. In fact, to look at my bookshelf, the messier the better. I have made seek&summon scarce on social media these last few months because I became aware that it was not telling the full story of self-employment, or at least my lived experience of it. When I thought about making a post, I would ask myself “Will this post actually garner you more work, or are you doing it to prove to someone, even if that someone is yourself, that you are succeeding?” It became clear that the time I was spending sharing online was not necessarily yielding more work, even if it was yielding likes. And, worse, I realized it may be yielding the false narrative that so bothers me. And because one of my flagship trainings and consultation topics is self-care, I stopped taking speaking and training engagements for a couple of months to focus on healing my injury. Without paid sick leave, I had to refigure my financial life again, but I am glad now that I put my (lack of) money where my mouth is.

I spent the time and energy that had gone to managing my online presence and doing the actual work further honing my skills, taking more coffee meetings with people who may hire me or help me learn, and investing in continuing education. Most importantly, I have taken the space to really sit with what I want this work to be, when it isn't reinforced by likes and follows. I've filled pages and conversations with friends and colleagues about the difference between “social work” and social change, and “human services” and being of service to humans. I've worked on my branding, my mission statement, and values to align closer with this work, and continue to refine as time moves forward.

2019 has some big things in store for me, Mary-Margaret, separate from and alongside seek&summon. I intend to return to blogging, at least, and look forward to sharing with you via this medium as it serves the work, and I look forward to cultivating even more awareness in myself to that end. 

This past Tuesday I was happy to be invited to speak at The Marion County Conference on Re-Entry, an event of the Marion County Re-Entry Coalition. Our topic was "Is Your Helping Hurting? Trauma-Sensitive Service Provision." It has been my observation that as we talk more and more about trauma-informed care, we may not be doing the critical work on evaluating what intentions and spirit we bring to that work. So, we started, seemingly, simply. I asked the attendees to just quickly jot down their agency's mission statement. Predictably to me, and surprisingly to my attendees, many of them could not recall their agency's mission statement. Nervous laughter filled the room. “Even just some of the buzzwords or key concepts,” I said. “It doesn't need to be word-for-word.” Still, nervous faces peered down at tables, tapped pens, guzzled water. Two people event left. I'm not joking. 

This was planned on my part--well, not scaring two people out of the session entirely! But I know most people can't rattle off the mission statement of their organization. And yet, organizations pay consultants like me for many hours of our time to help craft them. There are surveys, focus groups, and lunch ordered in. Why spend all of that time, energy, and money to create something you never revisit? Is your team upholding the mission if they can't even tell you what it is? Maybe they are, indirectly. But what would the work look like if your mission statement was a living, breathing thing?

Mantra
In addition to my non-profit work, I am a yoga and meditation teacher. During many yoga and meditation practices, participants recite, aloud or silently, a phrase or word to help ground them and re-orient them. Some I have offered classes in the past week are “I am safe,” “I am enough,”  and “I am capable.” And I gave this example to my conference attendees. What if our mission statement worked like a mantra? A centering call, a grounding reminder, and a call to action. A guidepost when the work gets tough and we need to remember just what the heck it is we're doing here. A way to prioritize our work. And, maybe in the best case scenario, an inspiration.

Walking the Talk
When I talk mission statements with folks, I challenge those in the room who are leaders in their organizations to model the mission for the teams they lead. Can their management decisions even fall in line with the mission, creating a healthier and more affirming workplace? Leaders have the opportunity to show their teams that the mission does not just matter in client-facing work, but amongst colleagues as well. As I've written about before, there are too many examples of hypocrisy in our field, and many reasons for it. Your agency's mission statement can be a good place to start when checking in about the environment of your team.

Your brand
We hear all the time these days about our “personal brand,” managing our social media and image online, especially how it relates to our work. Whether or not we have an Instagram following, we can think of our professional life as having it's own brand, and it's own mission statement. If the mission of your current agency doesn't speak to the work you do there, or it feels dead, or others at that agency do not seem to do their work in it's spirit, can you find a personal mission statement through which to serve? Through which to approach not only your clients but you neighbor, the barista, and the parking garage attendant? When I started my training and consulting practice, I chose three words that spoke to what work I wanted to do, and how I wanted to do it. Those words stay with me, guiding me when I debate whether or not to take a contract, apply for a conference, or develop a new curriculum. If it doesn't fit into my word list, it's a no. It keeps me focused, honest, and from straying from my intention.

The work we are called to do each day can be heavy. For some of us in the non-profit sector, our work is to sit with a person on the worst day of their life--and we do it each and every working day. It is easy to stray, letting our minds and hearts wander for self-protection from that vicarious trauma. But then we remember that word or phrase, that dim light in the back of our mind that grows brighter as we summon it forth. It is our "why." Our reason for coming back each day, for getting up this morning, for showing up to this work. It is our mission. 

Could your organization use some training or consultation on this topic? Email Mary-Margaret, or check out the ways she is working with organizations to build more informed and more sustainable service providers!

This week in some of my yoga classes we are focusing on brahmacharya (bra-ma-char-ee-uh). The word itself, in Sanskrit, breaks down to

Brahma= ultimate reality and charya= to move.

So the practice of brahmacharya moves us closer to the ultimate reality. The highest truth. And it also has to do with sexuality. Fun!

In Hindu practice, brahmacharya is the first life stage (or ashrama in Sanskrit) and spans birth to 25 years of age. It is the time one is a student, devoted to their studies, both formal and the general education of how to be a person in the world. After that time in life, it refers to celibacy for monks and other unmarried folks, and practicing sexual fidelity in marriage. It is a form of self-restraint and, when practiced, can open up space in our lives for deeper understanding and self-work. The practice of yoga, really, is to gain control of the thoughts and to cultivate a life lived with intention. Brahmacharya is a piece of that work. Author and yogi Deborah Adele also explains this principle to mean restraint in pleasurable activities. Her example involves food. What happens when we eat our favorite food? We savor it, enjoy it, and feel satisfied. But what if we have a second helping, and a third? What was once pleasurable becomes too much, making us feel unfulfilled. If we turn to food, or sex, or any other pleasure too often, it can morph from self-care to self-sabotage. 

As I worked on my lesson plans for the week concerning this topic (and preparing for an early 2019 lecture in the Indianapolis yoga community on the same topic), I started where I usually do. Strengths. Empowering language. So one of the first sentences I jotted down to offer my classes was “Sexuality is powerful. That's why most religious traditions and societies have so many rules about it. It speaks to a great energy. But we can decide how to use that energy.”

I stopped writing as I imagined my students before me. Most yoga classes are full of women, with a few men here and there. Statistically, 1 in 6 of the women in my class will have had a sexual encounter in which they had no choice. For men, it's lower but still present and unacceptable—1 in 33. For our transgender students, the rate is as high as 47%. I realized that even though I've spent a bulk of my career in sexual violence prevention and education, and even though I myself am a survivor, my initial language erased that experience. An experience that can already make us feel alone and erased. 
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I think I began with this language because in an ideal world, what I originally wrote would be the case. It's the world I'm working so hard toward, after all, as a sexual health and healthy relationship educator. For some people, it is already the case. They have always been able to choose when to use their sexual energy, and with whom, and how. In the world I am working toward, our sexuality would be a place of safety, expression, and growth--rather than doubt, fear, and unease. And I find yet again an intersection of my seemingly separate spheres of work. Yoga calls us to work toward bringing together our mind, body, and spirit (however the practitioner defines that). We do this by noticing our bodies in space and time. Through intentional movement, we observe the ways our bodies respond, what they want, and how the external impacts our internal experiences. Through focusing on movement and breath, we calm the constant chatter of the mind, opening us up to new revelations and insights. We many work through a mental block and literally also feel a physical space open within us, a release of muscle tension, and relaxation of the fascia.

What if our sexualities were like that? What if the ways we moved in our erotic life mirrored the yoga practice, were also done in pursuit of wholeness, integrity of self, and peace? What if our sexual experiences were mindful, bringing us to presence in our bodies, in our minds, and in our spirits? When we engage in sexual experiences we have chosen to engage in, can we begin to see them as healing and integrative? I often say that no one comes into their sexuality without some hang-ups. How could we? We all grow up in a culture of over-sexualized media content, but a startling lack of sexual health education in our homes and schools. We begin from a young age to compare our bodies to computer-enhanced models. If sex is discussed with our youth, it is often only to point out the danger in it ("good touch/bad touch"). How can we expect to thrive when the foundation is one of shame, fear, and misinformation?

Yet like the lotus flower in yogic philosophy, beauty can grow from mud and muck. 
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As our nation watches testimony from a Supreme Court nominee accused of sexual violence, and the testimony of one of his accuser's, we see the power that sexuality holds. Regardless of our feelings on this example playing out in front of us, we can agree that at the root of sex can be joy and pain, pleasure and fear, indifference or intention. I join you all in the work of eliminating this violence, and bringing us all closer to a sexuality that is chosen, peace-making, and integrated. We do this work through training and learning best practices together in a classroom, or via the work on our mats, dialing in to our inner teacher so that we may show up in the world less afraid and more whole. 

Have you ever met someone who you could not wait to stop talking to, only to find out they were a social worker, or in the helping professions in some way? Have you worked in or with a non-profit and observed behavior that could be classified as snarky at best and downright bullying or harassing at worse? What about a victim advocate who engages in victim blaming? A sex educator who shames certain sexual practices?

If these sound weirdly specific it's because they are all real. I've seen them myself, and each time I walk away feeling confused and incredulous. Years ago as a brand new social worker, I entered the profession pumped full of pride and faith in the discipline I had chosen—and chosen to spend quite a bit of money and time to enter, mind you, so I really wanted to love this! I had held a string of corporate roles before coming to graduate school. Perhaps it was knowing the benefits and pay I was leaving behind that made me think everyone in my new field would show up with best intentions. If you want to treat people poorly or just show up to collect a paycheck, I thought, go do it somewhere where you'll get paid double while do it.

In short: why would someone who works for considerably less money, and fewer benefits, and in much less shiny office buildings, do so if they do not love it and are fully committed to it as their life's work and calling?

Trauma When I facilitate any training on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) with social service providers, many in the room share that they have a high ACE score. They may even verbalize that it is why they chose their work. They want to “give back.” And my anecdotal and scholarly research supports this. I have worked in HIV/AIDS, refugee resettlement, and domestic violence/sexual assault services. A close family friend died of HIV, my father was raised in an immigrant family, and I have experienced abuse in a relationship. Sigmund Freud believed in recapitulation of trauma as an attempt to resolve it; meaning that the reason many of us find ourselves in the same situation over and over again is that we are trying to master it. While there is no evidence that mastery every occurs, no matter how long we torture ourselves, we do it. I could not save my friend from HIV, but I hope my education on safe sex saves someone else.

Unless we have done a whole lot of self-work to address our own trauma, we will never be fully present for the trauma of another. In fact, we will likely practice unethically with our clients facing similar life circumstances, and not even see it coming. We may judge a client harshly because we see them making the same mistakes we did. Maybe we judge them because, in our eyes, at least WE didn't do it that way, at least WE were smart enough to only go back three times and not a fourth, and so we feel righteous and judgmental. I hope I don't have to tell you that this is not a healing situation. For anyone.

Stress of the job Even if we have no prior experience with our field of work, it is taxing to face crisis every single day. This burnout may cause us to behave unkindly to clients and coworkers, family and friends, alienating those who could help us center and refocus our energy. Self-care practices are important for everyone, but they become absolutely critical when the work we do has us facing the darkest depths of the human experience.

Inflated ego of do-gooders It is easy to feel important as a social worker. Sure, we may make less money than our finance friends—a friend of mine once told me they were disappointed by the size of their annual bonus that year and the sum was the same as my entire salary--but the cultural capital is enormous. Most every time I have told people that I am a social worker by training, I am praised for it. I am thanked. A cocktail party introduction turns into a conversation around how I should make more money than I do, that they can't imagine the work I do, and there are often “awwws” and sighs involved. It's all very dramatic! And you know what? If I arrive at that party after working a 60 hour week, and I keep imagining the vibration of my emergency phone that isn't even on me tonight, that drama feels good. It makes me feel justified and important. There is an oft-shared Muhammad Ali quote: Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth. If it feels as if you're paying for a penthouse condo but you're living in a shady studio, it is incredibly easy to resent those who you assume aren't paying their share. This self-righteousness may be good to get us through a busy spell at work, but it can also begin to make us feel indignant and intolerant of anyone outside of the social service field. What our business card says does not define us, though. Our actions do. And if our title leads us to defensive, egomaniacal, or unkind behavior, it negates our do-gooder status.

We are all just people Perhaps most disappointing of all to a young social worker was this notion: we are all just human beings trying to figure this thing out. While the education and career experiences of many social workers can turn them into some of the most empathetic people on the planet, just as many are people you wouldn't want to spend time with, even if they paid you for it. And I maintain plenty of friendships with folks in the for-profit world who are humble, loving, genuine people. It is hard being a person.

The more research I've done around the impact of primary and vicarious trauma, the more grace I've been able to cultivate for those who have experienced it and how that influences the ways in which they interact with others. But if we are choosing to show up in the world as helpers and keepers of safe spaces and publicly claim that as our work, we cannot actively contribute to toxic work environments, hostile work environments, or breed ill will in our personal life. It is our responsibility to confront ourselves and do the work to adjust how we meet the world and those who make it up. This isn't easy work, as the scores of self-help books and seminars, therapists and yoga studios, places of worship and rehab, all attest to. It is the essential human task. And if we do agree with Ali that there is rent to be paid for our time here, let us begin by renovating ourselves.