Always Feeling Behind as a BSP? Here's What Might Help.
Introduction
This is a topic that I feel incredibly passionate about.
I’m about to talk about self-care, but in the way that I employ it. Self-care immediately calls to mind things like bubble baths, taking the dog for a walk, or other activities in your outside life that you do to recharge after a potentially heavy and dreadful day at work. It makes your job tolerable because at least you can return yourself to baseline after the workday.
I personally think this is crucial, but is missing the underlying reason for the need for self-care in the first place. And I’m a Behaviour Support Practitioner so of course I want to tackle the root cause of the issue, it’s literally my job!
The Root Cause
In my experience, every time I’ve experienced a near miss with burnout, it was due to one of the following reasons:
I forgot something I needed to do
A due date crept up on me
I had a busy week scheduled and then someone needed additional support
I’d over-scheduled myself or my calendar so I couldn’t even realistically achieve my daily tasks
I kept saying yes to things even when I knew it would be a strain
I let my caseload build too high and it became overwhelming
I kept giving my time away while I fell further behind on my own tasks
I started working after hours just to finish something and feel like I was on top of things again
Phew, okay, I’m going to stop there - but you see something underlying there, right?
These moments are a signal that I wasn’t protecting my time, respecting my limits, and keeping myself organised.
How I Approach Self-Care in BSP Practice
Through my own experience as a BSP and through supporting numerous others going through burnout or close to it, I’ve built a number of recommendations that I’d like to share here. These aren't formal requirements for BSPs, and they're not intended to be a universal formula for avoiding burnout. They're the practical strategies I've developed through my own BSP practice and through supporting other practitioners.
These are all related to shifting the way you work and about having vulnerable and open conversations with people (awful, I know, but it will make your life easier in the long run). These are real things that I do in my practice which has kept me around for many more years than the average BSP.
In order of my suggested priority, these are:
Manage Your Calendar - It’s not useful to have a Calendar that doesn’t give you an accurate representation of what your day, week, or month are actually going to look like. And be realistic with how long each task is going to take you. If you know it takes you 30 minutes to write an email because you just keep re-reading it over and over (this is a personal struggle), then make sure you have 30 minutes blocked out. If you don’t, you’re going to get behind on your tasks straight away and it’s going to cause you to play catch up for the rest of the day.
Manage your Caseload - I would say a typical caseload for one of my team members is around 15-18 participants. You’ll have more or less than this depending on the funding amounts of your participants, but in general, more than 18 participants begins to make it hard to distinguish them and keep on the ball. It’s when you start mixing information together, forgetting or missing due dates or things you promised to deliver, or starting to feel that creeping sense of dread that you’re falling behind on tasks and about to disappoint people - your caseload is a likely culprit and needs an examination.
Reach Out for Support / Say “No!” Politely - There is no shame in saying to your Line Manager that you can’t take on any more participants right now, and in fact that you might need support to move some participants to colleague’s caseloads. I’ve helped my team many times like this; as soon as they tell me they need a break before a new participant or they’ve taken on too much, I start making plans for how we’re going to reduce their caseload. Your Line Manager may or may not be like that, but I’ve seen quite a few who will just continue adding more and more participants to caseloads because there’s a gap between appointments or they don’t necessarily work in the role themselves. This is where it becomes important to advocate for yourself, and I see this as an important way I can support my Supervisees through being the one to help them recognise that they’re becoming overcommitted and we need a plan.
Make Sure You’re Not Working in a Silo - Working as a BSP can be incredibly isolating at times. Even though we’re constantly talking to people, it’s all with yourself positioned as the professional. For me, this tends to take a lot of my energy so it usually tires me rather than revitalises me. In these moments, I love to come back to my team and see what they’ve been chatting about today, I might make a few comments to my team members, and if I really need to, I debrief about what’s just tired me out. I’m incredibly lucky in that I’ve been able to build a supportive team culture full of caring BSPs who look after each other, so me doing a little bit of whinging is immediately met with empathy and support. This is provides me with some validation, some encouragement, and often a bit of a laugh as we tend to be a bit silly to combat the heaviness of our work.
If you don’t have a team environment like that, just even 1 people you can candidly speak to about your work is okay. It can even be your Supervisor. I know I’m often the only point of connection for my Supervisees with the wider BSP community, and it’s important to have that connection with someone who understands the role and how difficult it can be sometimes.
Manage Your Due Dates - If you take on a whole lot of participants at the same time, you’re going to be in a whole world of pain in 1 month and then in 6 months as all their Positive Behaviour Support Plans (PBSPs) become due at the same time. Make sure you’re planning this out already before you agree to take them - e.g. who has priority, what are your Restrictive Practice compliance deadlines, how early you’re going to start your Comprehensive PBSPs, etc. Regularly check through, either yourself or in Supervision, your due dates for at least the next 6 months.
I typically check across the next year; I’ve had someone’s caseload look perfect for the first 6 months and then have realised that’s because all these Comprehensive PBSPs are bunched up right at the end of the year. What we did to manage this was to start early so these were all written in time without the BSP ending up in a blind panic trying to hit deadlines.
Prioritising Tasks - If you start to fall behind in your due dates, don’t panic, prioritise. This is where I ask my Supervisees to reach out to me as I’ve had some experience in failing to meet deadlines over the years and have become accustomed to what usually helps. I love to take stock of where everything is, all the due dates, which ones involve compliance or high risk, and making a plan from highest priority to least priority. That Restrictive Practice Interim PBSP the team is waiting on, probably a high priority. That cool resource you want to make about your participant’s week, still important, but maybe could wait a tad longer.
The other most important thing to do here is to be transparent with your participant and their stakeholders. I’ve mentioned in another article but no one likes being kept waiting with no idea what’s taking so long or why no one is reaching out to them. By reaching out honestly and openly, you let them know what’s happened, you apologise, and you give them a realistic timeframe. It must be a time frame you can meet or all that rapport will be going out the window if you disappoint them a second time.
Let It Go - So it turns out you weren’t able to finish all your tasks today. It sucks but, it happens. The important thing is not to beat yourself up over how you didn’t finish everything, but to spend a moment reflecting on why you didn’t achieve your goals for the day. Were they realistic? Did you get pulled in another direction? Did you spend a bit too long on the lunch outing with your colleagues gossiping about your love lives? No judgement, my team know that I enjoy that too.
Make sure to shift back your tasks at the end of the day so you’re not starting tomorrow already feeling behind, and make sure to address what the issue was when you do it this time. If you don’t want to take the time to reflect, it’s likely that tomorrow is just going to be yet another repeat as you haven’t identified the necessary changes to your expectations and your systems.
Start Your Interim PBSP As Soon As Possible - As soon as I have a completed referral form, a few allied health reports, behavioural data, interview information, or similar, you can believe I’m opening that template and getting it started. I’m a firm believer in chipping away regularly and then it’s done before you know it. This also helps with that paralysis you might get in wondering whether you have enough information to get started with the Interim PBSP. Four weeks is not a lot of time to prepare this kind of document. It’s quite a heavy burden we carry, to have only a few weeks to get to know someone well enough to start making suggestions which will change their daily life. So give yourself as much time as possible to think about it by starting it asap.
Start Your Functional Behaviour Assessment (FBA) Early - My rule of thumb is to start working on the FBA around three months before the Comprehensive PBSP is due. I know this is only 3 or so months since you started working with the participant, but all BSPs know how difficult it is to get behaviour data and assessment responses back quickly. If you’re doing them on paper, you’re lucky if you get them back at all! So count on having that first month solely to collect all the information you need, start engaging in consultation (especially around Restrictive Practice), book in those team or stakeholder meetings, etc etc. Then you’ll have around 3-4 weeks to focus on writing the analysis for your FBA, and then another 3-4 weeks to get the Comprehensive PBSP completed and sent off for feedback.
Finish Your Comprehensive PBSP Early - This is my chipping away strategy again. If you finish your FBA with 3-4 weeks to spare and keep doing a little bit of the Comprehensive PBSP regularly, you’ll have given your brain great opportunities to mull over how you want it to be, and it will also make the PBSP easier to write and be better for the time you had to reflect, process, and consider ideas. It’s also likely to mean that you finish it a little bit early, which means a big sense of relief for you! You can get it sent off, make any amendments from feedback received, and finalised before that looming due date ever has a chance to stress you out.
Conclusion
I absolutely know there are more suggestions I’ve used myself or with others, but I’m worried I’ll just keep writing on forever here and one of my key rules in writing is not to make things too long or excessive. This is especially the case for writing PBSPs where our audience are often not BSPs at all and need to interpret our confusing jargon and analysis.
I hope overall I’ve made my point that self-care starts with managing your work, respecting your limits, being candid with others, and other very tangible things you can do starting from tomorrow. Of course, don’t give up any of the things you do outside of work to relax and decompress, but please consider adding a few of the above into your practice.
I’ve managed to build my team up from 1 to 9 successful and wonderful BSPs over the past 4 years, and I honestly believe I’ve been able to keep so many people around because I’m equipping them with a self-care practice that specifically works for PBS.
In conclusion, I’d just like to say, this is a tough job so make sure you look after yourself. Your work will be better when you’re the one managing it, rather than just trying to survive.
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