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Put your hand up if you like conflict and confronting others. No, you don’t?
Well you’re in good company. One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced both personally and professionally in my life is being able to advocate for myself.
Now, there are a whole host of reasons for why that is and that doesn’t matter really, because the fact is that regardless of why, a lot of us really struggle to advocate for ourselves.
So, what do we mean by advocate? Firstly, we’re not talking about you advocating for your patients, that’s a whole other topic.
We’re talking about you advocating for yourself. Essentially self-advocacy is speaking up for yourself, and as I’ve said already, for a whole host of reasons many of us find this hard to do.
I’d like you to take a moment and ask yourself, why is it so hard to advocate for myself?
Oddly, you might be very good at advocating for others, yet not for yourself. So I want you to literally stop reading here, close your eyes for a minute or two, and ask yourself, “Why is it so hard to advocate for myself?”
[calming music plays in the background]
I suspect that for many of you two of the main reasons that you struggle with self-advocacy are:
You might even consider self-advocacy to be a selfish thing to do. But let me assure you, it’s not. In fact, it’s incredibly important for your own mental and emotional health for you to learn how to self-advocate.
Based on my own experience, I have three simple suggestions for you.
Let me give you a personal example. Self-advocacy has been a long journey of personal discovery for me.
I grew up barely above the poverty line and attended extremely rough, underprivileged schools.
No one in my family had ever gone to university or worked in any job other than blue collar and I had this constant nagging feeling of, “I’m not good enough,” because working class people like me don’t tend to move from that socioeconomic demographic very often.
However, I still remember one of the first times I ever advocated for myself.
I was in a supermarket at the deli counter and I ordered twelve chicken wings. I watched as the person serving me counted out only eleven chicken wings and then bag them up and weigh them. Without a word I simply accepted the package from them and walked away.
Here's the problem though, I was really angry because I had asked for twelve chicken wings, not eleven.
I wasn’t so much angry with the person who served me, rather I was angry at myself for not asking them to correct the error.
After debating with myself for a good ten minutes, I finally decided to go back and ask for the correct number of wings. I sheepishly did so and, much to my surprise, the wonderful person behind the counter was so apologetic for the mistake and gladly added in an extra chicken wing without re-weighing it and charging me more money.
To self-advocate, you don’t need to roar, sometimes you just need to meow and slowly allow your confidence to build. If you meow on a regular basis, you’ll also avoid roaring when you reach breaking point and then saying something you might regret.
If you struggle to self-advocate then you might fall into the trap of, as mentioned above, reaching breaking point.
You might find yourself not only roaring, but blurting out something confrontational that not only might you regret, but it might put the other person on the back foot and now they’re reactive. Sound familiar?
Try this: if someone says something that you don’t agree with, try being inquisitive.
Maybe you can say, “Oh, that’s an interesting way to look at this situation, can you tell me a little bit more about why you think that?”
A respectful conversation will almost always yield a better result than an argument.
If you never meow and you jump straight to roaring, you might regret it.
Have you heard of imposter syndrome? Whilst it is not a formal diagnosis in and of itself (and it has been ascribed more specifically to certain professions and high-achievers), generally speaking a lot of people feel inferior, even if they are extremely good at what they do.
Let me say this: you are not an imposter. As a new grad you have something very important to bring into the workplace, and that’s a fresh set of eyes.
You very likely will see things quite differently to someone like me who’s been in this role for close to three decades.
Of course, there’s an art to how to bring new ideas to the table without upsetting more senior and experienced nurses, but please don’t think you have nothing to offer and that you’re inferior.
You are incredibly valuable. You have much to offer, and you are worthy of respect and being listened to.
I hope your grad year is one of the most rewarding, interesting, inspiring and challenging years of your career and I look forward to seeing all the new grads I get to work with flourishing and finding their feet in this wonderful vocation.
Who wrote this Guide?
Geoffrey is a Senior Mental Health Clinician working on the Emergency Mental Health Team in the Emergency Department at Royal Melbourne Hospital. Geoffrey begun his nursing career as an Emergency Nurse working in a large trauma hospital in Sydney, eventually moving into Emergency Mental Health. After five years he moved to outback New South Wales where he was able to hone his skills in a very different environment compared to working in the city.
A highlight of Geoffrey’s career was moving to Melbourne and spending six years working on the road with Victorian Police on a team called Police and Clinician Emergency Response (PACER). This involved attending mental health emergencies with police and assessing people in the community rather than in an Emergency Department.
Geoffrey is particularly fascinated by the impact that exercise, nutrition, community, meaning and purpose, and practices like yoga have on a person’s mental health and living a simple life of reflection, contentment, and wonderment.
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