The well-being of the workers and activities for youth workers

How to support wellbeing in youth work: Youth Worker

In youth work it is possible to control your work quite a lot compared to for example teachers in schools. They have a lot of targets and inspections dictated by education authorities. Youth workers do their work quite often in a freer space. It means that youth workers meet young people in their ‘free time environment’. It is also connected to informal education.

To support wellbeing as a youth worker, it’s best to focus your efforts on areas such as:

Workload efficiency

Autonomy

Opportunities for professional learning

Addressing professional isolation

Rewarding achievement at work

How you address these is down to you, and it depends on various factors in your place of work.

How to support the wellbeing in youth work: Youth Work Manager

The following 2-stage process should provide the youth work managers with a strong framework to start addressing the wellbeing of youth workers:

Nurture Resilience

Start by creating an environment where staff feel able to seek help from one another. You can do this by encouraging them to form groups or pair up with a buddy. This can help create a mutual support network where staff can influence outcomes positively and work towards solutions as a team.

Address Stress

Once you’ve identified sources of stress in your staff, there are many ways to address them. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

  • Work-life balance – make sure the day isn’t only dominated by work and ensure your staff have time off for eating and can fence off set times in the day for their families. This way, the burden of the workload can be broken up and make it more achievable.
  • Tackle the environment – make sure you have a good environment for your teams to work in. Simple things like essential repairs, tidying and de-cluttering are easy and affordable changes to make to do and can enhance the workplace to help reduce stress.
  • Relation to perfectionism – nobody’s perfect, but the desire to be can be overwhelming. So make sure you encourage your staff to be the best they can be, but don’t put unrealistic demands on them – these can offer spill over into their personal lives too and are a major contributor to stress and anxiety.
  • Focus on happiness – rewarding achievements, sharing success and encouraging your staff to spend time in reflection whether it’s prayer, meditation or contemplation; these have all been shown to improve happiness. So look to encourage these practices and consider running classes for your staff to help promote them.

Source:

EAGLES: Empowering and Activating the young Generation through the Learning of Employability Skills. http://www.eaglesyouth.eu/index.php/en/

This activity could be useful for youth worker, to assure that also they take sometimes rest.

Taking a daily vacation exercise aims to help people, who lack time, to actively savour and appreciate the experiences in their lives. Research has shown that, rather than their intensity, the frequency of positive emotions and feelings is a stronger predictor of our overall level of happiness and life satisfaction. In other words, it is more effective to increase the number of positive experiences, than it is to intensify them (Diener, Sandvik, & Pavot, 1991).

Taking a daily vacation exercise is based on Bryant and Veroff’s (2007) model of savouring in life. According to them, people have capacities to savour, and capacities to attend to, appreciate and enhance the positive experiences they have in life. The processes that underlie those capacities are called savouring. They identify many savouring strategies that people can use to generate or intensify positive experiences. More specifically, they point out twelve savouring strategies, among which are sharing with others, active memory building, self-congratulation, behavioural expression and counting blessings.

Taking a daily vacation exercise aims to take time out from every day-ordinary activity. This exercise builds a strategy to reinforce the savouring moments in everyday life. Everyday routine engulfs a lot of stress from work, housework, raising children and family responsibilities, and people tend to spend all their energy coping with these demanding routine tasks. The result is that they tend to get tired and try to find ways to escape this reality like collapsing in front of the TV. Undoubtedly, this life pace contains slight savouring experiences. The daily vacation exercise assist people to take some time off to let life pass more slowly and have specific moments of carelessness and freedom of burdens and stress. What does daily vacation mean? A mini vacation could be a weekend getaway, a day off from work, time away from having to cook, going for a walk with a friend, going to the cinema or to the gym.

Taking a Daily Vacation

Methodology

Methodology Taking a daily vacation exercise aims to help people, who lack time, to actively savour and appreciate the experiences in their lives. Research has shown that, rather than their intensity, the frequency of positive emotions and feelings is a stronger predictor of our overall level of happiness and life satisfaction. In other words, it is more effective to increase the number of positive experiences, than it is to intensify them (Diener, Sandvik, & Pavot, 1991). Taking a daily vacation exercise is based on Bryant and Veroff’s (2007) model of savouring in life. According to them, people have capacities to savour; capacities to attend to, appreciate and enhance the positive experiences they have in life. The processes that underlie those capacities are called savouring. They identify many savouring strategies that people can use to generate or intensify positive experiences. More specifically, they point out twelve savouring strategies, among which are sharing with others, active memory building, self-congratulation, behavioural expression and counting blessings. Taking a daily vacation exercise aim to time out from every day-ordinary activity. This exercise builds a strategy to reinforce the savouring moments in everyday life. Everyday routine engulfs a lot of stress from work to housework and children raising or family responsibilities and people tend to spend all their energy to cope with those demanding routine tasks. The result is that they tend to get tired and try to find ways to escape this reality like collapsing in front of the TV. Undoubtedly, this life pace contains slight savouring experiences. The daily vacation exercise assist people to take some time off to let life pass more slowly and have specific moments of carelessness and freedom of burdens and stress. What does daily vacation mean? A mini vacation could be a weekend getaway, a day off from work, time away from having to cook, going for a walk with a friend, going to the cinema or to the gym.

 

Instructions

  • Make groups of two. You will discuss with each other which activities or moments do you enjoy in your everyday life.
  • Now, you will make a week schedule of the daily vacation you will have. You are going to choose a different vacation for every day. For example, going for a walk with a friend, having a hot bath, watching the sunrise while eating chocolate, sitting quietly in a garden, reading a book, treating yourself to a cup of coffee, going out to eat or visiting a museum. The only limit is your imagination. Just choose things you enjoy doing and they last at least 20 minutes.
  • Now, take your pencils, crayon and stickers and depict your week schedule into the paper.
  • Present your schedule to the others and discuss about the activities you have chosen. What do you feel doing them? Why is it important to have those “vacations” in your daily life?

Further instructions in order the participants to implement their week vacation schedule and continue creating a schedule in their daily routine:

  • Before you start doing the first activity in the schedule, remember, your daily vacation is a time to relax. So, set aside your worries and fears for a while. Remind yourself not to be judgmental, but rather to see things as if for the first or last time, and to focus on what is happening and what you are feeling as it unfolds in the present.
  • During the daily vacation, try to be present and experience what is happening. Notice the sensations. How are you feeling? What positive emotions are you experiencing? Actively build a memory of the feeling and the stimuli associated with it, close your eyes, swish the feeling around in your mind, and outwardly express the positive feeling in some way.
  • After your week vacation remember to plan ahead for the next week.
  • Every day, before you go to bed, take at least five minutes to remember the positive emotions that you savoured during the day.
  • On the weekend, take 10 to 15 minutes to look at all the positive emotions of the past 7 days. Try to reexperience the positive feelings you felt during each daily vacation.
  • Compare the way you have felt over the past week and the way you feel right now to the way you usually feel during a typical week.

 

Objectives

  • The purpose of the daily vacation exercise is to give people direct experience with proactive savouring, to give them the opportunity to bring savouring into their lives on a regular basis.
  • After engaging in this exercise, some people may want to make daily vacations part of their everyday routine.
  • Having plenty savouring moments connects with people happiness and life satisfaction.
  • Engaging in these savouring experiences increase experiencing of positive emotions that undo the negative effects of negative emotions and build psychological resources and resilience.

 

Materials needed

A4 papers, markers or crayons, pens or pencils, stickers

 

Preparation

None

 

Duration

45 minutes Individually: 20 minutes daily

 

Group Size

Work in pairs and present to the whole group or individually as a homework in a daily basis

 

Evaluation /Reflection
and Duration

After the exercise, participants should devote some time to think how they feel about the exercise, what they would think they would gain if they do it outside the training. Discussion: 10 minutes

 

Notes for Trainers

  • How did you feel?
  • Did you learn something new about yourself? If so, what?
  • Would you repeat the exercise on a daily basis?
  • What benefits can you identify?

 

Variation

Instead of weekly schedule participants could decide in the end of the day which will be their next day vacation.

 

Additional Learning/ Reading material

https://positivepsychlopedia.com/year-of-happy/how-to-savor/

https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/positive-psychology-exercises/

Bryant, F. B., & Veroff, J. (2007). Savouring: A new model of positive experience. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfth1bJKMmA

Professional Quality of Life Scale

The ProQOL is the most commonly used measure of the negative and positive effects of helping others who experience suffering and trauma. The ProQOL has sub-scales for compassion satisfaction, burnout and compassion fatigue.

http://www.proqol.org/ProQol_Test.html

Babette Rotschild: Help for the helper.

 

Managing stress in the field

This publication is a practical manual. The different types of stress experienced by delegates are described along with the associated symptoms. It highlights the importance of identifying and knowing personal, team and organizational resources. English, French, Spanish.

http://www.ifrc.org/Global/Publications/Health/managing-stress-en.pdf