More than anything, this is what helped me grow.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes and hope you can learn from them.

This article breaks down how reflective practice systems changed the game for me in suicide prevention and crisis support. Self awareness, skillset growth, competence and confidence all greatly improved. It covers my experience, then how to write a pen and paper system of your own.

I’ve trained hundreds of people and very few actually get through training to make the impact they want to make.

I hope this helps you become one of those people.

I started suicide prevention as an empath with no boundaries.

You know how you’d always find someone crying at a house party?

I was the person next to them. They’d be crying, I’d be listening.

Boundaries were a very, very unfamiliar concept to me growing up. My parents didn’t have any idea of boundaries and I grew into the family with ease, morphing myself to fit the roles of caregiver, counselor and confidant all at once.

I was that same person when I started on service at my local suicide prevention hotline.

Maybe you can imagine how that went.

I’d get in trouble one week for being someone’s bff, then get in trouble next week for being a total robot.

Now I offer nuanced, sophisticated support and easily capture what I want to improve.

But the journey has been long!

And arduous. lol.

I’ve made a hundred mistakes and learned from many of them. My mindset and skillset have evolved constantly as the role of crisis supporter opened me up to parts of myself that I never knew I’d ever want to work on.

The interesting thing about working at Lifeline is how incredibly revealing it is. It opened me up to myself, as I tried to learn how to listen to others, I found I needed to listen to myself.

This kind of thing gets spoken about a lot, to the point it feels like a cliche almost, but the experience is profound. I hope you get to experience this too.

To realise the depth of numbness and avoidance that I’d been living with my entire life, even after overcoming so many personal struggles, addiction, suicidal ideation, that avoidance of going deeper into my experience of life… shallowness is all around us.

I never noticed it in myself because it’s standard.

You don’t think much about the boat you’re in if everyone else is in the same boat.

The personal growth I went through at Lifeline completely changed the way I relate to people. My friends, family and loved ones all receive a way higher quality version of Said now after being on this journey for years. That’s what I want for you and the people in your life!

I still make mistakes (regularly!) but what’s changed is my mindset of looking into the mistake to find the lesson.

I owe it all to developing systems of reflective practice, first using loose scraps of paper in the office, now I do it with a free online program called Notion.

But… Why use a system to organise reflective practice?

Firstly, reflective practice on its own is a powerful option for developing skills.

It’s a way of slowing down long enough to turn your experience into wisdom. Without the process of distilling, separating and then integrating meaning from the experiences you have on service, you can miss a lot of the valuable lessons along the way.

Making a system around reflective practice means you add a few layers of benefits over the top.

The simplest version I can think of would be like a journal, except at the front of the journal you keep a table to categorise and organise the book.

Now you have a place to store key bits of info. First you have dates, this gives you context and history. Next you have the entries themselves, which offer the bulk of valuable info to process and make meaning from. Lastly with a tally you now have a summary you can observe very quickly.

Take for example the challenge of asking yourself ‘what’s my average call length?’ or even ‘what are the themes that come up during challenging conversations?’

You could answer these questions by reading slowly through your journal, taking notes as you do, or you could flip to the front where you have a tally of ‘topics during longer calls’ and if you’ve been keeping that up to date, you have a tonne of info to immediately use.

You can focus on whatever info is meaningful to you.

If you’d like to see a full explanation of how I’d set up a reflective journal for suicide prevention or frontline mental health work, stay tuned. I’ll show you in a video later on.

Systems are adaptable, here’s how mine changed over the years.

At first I only ever captured the date and the call length.

I quickly realised I wanted more information to observe any themes or help make sense of what I needed to work on next.

So eventually I added a way of tracking my subjective feeling about how the call went, this was a simple five star rating.

Next was added a basic overview of the things I did well, or the things I did not so well, stuff like ‘worked within the framework’ ‘active listening’ ‘passive listening’ ‘made suggestions’ etc.

Of course ideally I would have just had the entire recording to listen to and play back in order to learn from it, alas that wasn’t an option so I had to make do with what I had!

Here’s how I’d set out a simple reflective practice journal using pen and paper.

To keep things as simple as possible, this is how you could keep a systematised account for your own growth, including a bunch of ideas and functional aspects to make it really easy to learn from in the future.

The journal would break down into parts.

Part one: bird’s eye view.

At the very front this part offers you a broad picture.

Summaries of the entire shift would live here in a simple table. Details such as date, hours on shift and vibe check would go here.

If you want to get super fancy you can keep a blank space to put symbols or colours in, like a ‘legend’ so that you can easily tell at a glance what info is contained.

Part two: details view.

Starting from the fifth page and onward this part offers you a very close picture.

By writing the number of the page up on the top corner, you can put the page number in bird’s eye section, making it easier to navigate and reflect later on.

Each time you have a shift, write out your notes into the journal section and this way you can easily reflect on the kinds of challenges that come up regularly, or any good solutions you come across.

This all reads weird over text, so watch this 20 minute video to see it in action.

Suggestions for what to track during shift as a Crisis Supporter.

This journey has been a long and bumpy one for me.

I want to make it easier for you. I want to prepare you for many of those bumps, give you a helmet, a couple tools, to make the whole thing much more simple and straightforward to improve your skills and keep moving along the cycle of mastery, no matter where you’re at.

Here’s a basic outline of all the things I’d suggest tracking during a CS shift, along with an argument for why.

1. Length of convo

Pretty obvious. The longer the convo, the less people you help. The shorter the convo, the less chance it was helpful. We want to strike a balance.

Tracking makes it much easier to stand back and actually observe the fact without ego or whatever getting in the way (happens to all of us!).

2. Subjective ranking

This one is nebulous. By giving convos a subjective ‘vibe check’ you build up a body of subtle evidence. If you think every convo is a high vibe, I guarantee you’re not paying close enough attention and some part of you is resistant to facing reality.

Your subjective ranking will expose either a) that you’re too hard on yourself or b) that you’re not hard enough. Having this information is a positive either way.

3. Compassion satisfaction

Everyone rants about compassion fatigue, it’s exhausting. No wonder organisations are struggling to keep staff, we’re all obsessed with how tired we are! Compassion Satisfaction is the flip side.

It’s the warm feeling you get after giving someone a thoughtful gift and watching their face light up as they read the letter / unwrap the present. That warmth is absolutely a good thing. It’s why we’re here. It’s the standard to aim for and makes our work meaningful and rewarding. So cultivate it!

4. Areas of did well

This info is best captured in a simple form. Short and sweet! Even something like ‘open questions’ and ‘didn’t suggest’ or ‘listened deeply’ are all handy to see and look back on in the future.

5. Areas of do better

Same as above! What do you want to improve? No need to beat yourself up or use judgemental language, just keep it straight to the point so that future you can see how far you’ve come. ‘Listen more deeply’ and ‘don’t suggest’ for example.

6. Whatever you reckon

Seriously, what do you think would be handy to track and look back upon? This changes over time! It’s not static because you’re not static. Nobody grows in a linear fashion, we improve in one area and slide back in another. We become more open to feedback but our self image might have to take a hit first. We increase the level of compassion or empathy but we may find we decreased our boundaries to do so!

The whole point of systems like this is that they change week to week, month to month, what’s important is that they do get the chance to change and grow, meaning you stick with the reflective process and adapt it to suit your needs – rather than quit and never open the journal (or Notion page) again.

The reason I’m writing… To help you improve.

Now, as I mentioned elsewhere, it is absolutely my agenda to make this as easy for you as possible.

I had to fight blindfolded in the dark to develop my skillset, the support my organisation gave me was amazing don’t get me wrong, but if I had been offered 100x that level of support I would definitely have taken it without question.

That’s how low my confidence and skillset was! Both took so much work to level up.

So anyway, now that I’m way further along the path I want to make it easier for you. To that end I have an email list where I share super valuable things about listening each week, sign up and I will love you forever!

I’m not here for your money but I absolutely appreciate your attention!

Though I may write a book or make courses or something down the line.

The more people who want to come along on this journey, the more these powerful messages will take on a life of their own and spread out to make the world a more supportive place for people like my mum.

If you do want to learn to use Notion, lucky you, I’m planning to make a primer for Crisis Supporters! If you feel like you’re ready to dive in and give it a go, shoot me a message or email and I’ll help you get started.

Over time this system helped me overcome so many crappy practices.

Offering solutions, making suggestions, giving advice, all the classic mistakes – I’ve made them a heap.

Don’t get me wrong, I still make plenty of mistakes these days. I hopped on service recently over the holiday period and was blown away by how verbose my work has become. Too much writing! So many words and so little said lmao.

However, the skills I have built, the challenges I have overcome, were massively due to the tracking and reflection I’m showing you now.

The hard part is actually noticing what on earth we even need to overcome!

It was difficult to know what to work on.

But keeping recordings of different reflections and subjective vibes made it much easier.

You know how hindsight offers clarity? That’s what would happen when I looked back over my notes of previous shifts. More and more clarity would show up as I allowed my mind to process the previous notes.

Things I didn’t even notice as I wrote them down would kinda pop up and grab my attention as stuff to work on.

For example a note like ‘Not sure how to contain someone if they ramble’ with a bit more experience actually became more meaningful.

The next time I read it I saw the subtext beneath the note ‘I’m not confident bringing directing someone’s attention to the here and now, especially when trauma is flaring’.

In other words, the reflections we capture become more valuable over time.

Reflective practice was helpful, but I wanted an overview of how far I’d come.

By capturing these lessons in a simple to digest way (and putting a summary system in place) it made it very easy for me to bring this stuff to my supervisors.

I never showed up unprepared to a group supervision or a conversation with a call coach because it was so easy to bring those challenges and difficulties.

Therefore it was easier to snowball and create momentum! In my experience a lot of people miss out on the wonder of learning this skillset because they simply don’t see fast enough growth.

Not because they’re not growing, but because they’re not tracking!

Recording progress was easy with a tracking system.

I have no doubt that there are lessons every single time you hop on service when you first start out.

These lessons come fast and furious if you can open your mind to them (not an easy feat to be honest, more on self awareness coming).

By making sure you track something, you’re making sure you look for it.

The data was helpful, but the growth mindset was the real prize.

But I do want to put a caveat in place, tracking can become a problem without the right parameters.

Keys for a healthy tracking mindset.

Here are some simple boundaries to help you make the most of your tracking efforts.

1. We’re attached to progress, not perfection.

If we’re constantly judging or criticising ourselves, we will not last very long. We have to make growth fun!

The best way I do this for myself is by focusing on the process of growing my skillset. I can’t control the outcome of how an interaction goes. I have no power to influence somebody except for how I apply the skills I have.

Accepting that my skills are not perfect and never will be is step number one, a couple things help me keep this front of mind.

a) Perfection is the lowest standard.

b) Practice makes progress.

2. We observe without judgement.

I like to think of my own personal Mr. Rogers helping me to learn.

How would the kindest hearted, most compassionate person treat my mistakes? That’s the target I’m aiming for when I look at my own practice.

This is a skill! Allow yourself to start out bad at it and improve as you go.

3. We stay flexible and agile, changing the system as needed.

Tracking systems have to change and adapt to need.

Just because we’re used to doing it one way doesn’t mean we have it all figured out, over time the system actually should change. This is a good thing!

4. We share what we learn!

This is the biggest key I can give.

If I could go back and talk to Said from 2017 who was just getting started I would 100% advise him to take it upon himself to share his lessons as soon and as often as he can.

When we share with others it opens the lessons up to scrutiny. It means other people can offer us feedback on their value. It shows us more angles to view our own perspective (and therefore cover our blind spots).

In order to think well, you have to expose your thinking to sunlight. Write your thoughts, tell people your discoveries, invite people to check your thoughts!

Your Invitation

Join me on this journey! I will one day absolutely create a community of practice to unite people working in suicide prevention.

Imagine that, an international community of people sharing and refining their best practice.

If this idea lights you up as much as it does me, say so! Leave a comment.

TL;DR

If you’re interested in keeping a pen and paper journal to improve your practice, this video shows how I recommend you set it out.

Remember, it’s just suggestions by some guy on the internet, go your own way!

If you want to use a free software online to do all this called Notion, sign up for emails and I’ll let you know when the template is ready to go.

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This post is written specifically for crisis support and mental health work, if you’d like to read more, click here.

I would really appreciate every stray thought and piece of feedback you have so please do reach out via socials if you’d like to chat.