In learning suicide prevention there’s a tonne of obstacles and challenges.

It’s hard, scary work and you’re here remove some of those obstacles and equip yourself with tools, skills and mindset to lower the barrier for others too. Long term this kind of work – preventing suicide – changes people, changes families, changes communities and changes the world.

It’s work that forces us to examine from top to bottom what are the important problems in society and how do we overcome them?

So to that end, this article make it a lot easier for you to upskill in digital crisis support. It’s part of a broader big hairy and scary goal of helping 1,000,000 people grow high quality listening and suicide prevention skills (imagine that!).

Whether you’re on text or chat, in Australia or another country, or even if you work in mental health in another front facing role. This will help you develop a simple, powerful technique that will compound over time turning you into a highly skilled communicator.

You’re about to learn exactly how I wrote my own sentence stems for inviting more information and asking about suicide without making it weird.

So, let’s begin, click the menu to skip to the ‘instructions’. 👇🏽

Starting with some context.

Moving from the Phones to Digital was a big shock.

On the phone I had to learn the skill of speaking without editing.

The more I edited my words in suicide prevention, the more awkward the calls got. You know how you can tell when someone isn’t being real? They’re wearing a fakeness? Well it destroys connection immediately.

In this line of work, connection is everything – forgive me the overused cliché but in this case it really is – the difference between life and death.

I thought I’d find digital crisis support easy…

I grew up typing. I used to joke when people asked me where I’m from, I’d say ‘I grew up online’. I figured how different could this be, right? MSN Messenger, GaiaOnline, Runescape, all these places I spent countless hours typing on before I even had hair on my chest.

Yet even with years on the phone and having grown up online, I was totally unprepared.

Sitting down behind a screen is SO different to speaking through a phone. Not even to get into the technical and technological differences, the vibe is just completely different.

There’s no non-verbal cues; a sigh, a huff, a murmur, whimper, cry, quickened breath, there’s so many layers of communication I took for granted, all of which were stripped away via text.

I couldn’t rely on my hmmms and mhmms and the millions of variations of both. I had to develop whole new patterns without these sounds, a whole new system of visual textual expression with the subtlety or sophistication I’d always relied on without knowing it.

But that wasn’t even the biggest challenge.

The toughest part was the exact opposite of learning to not edit my thoughts as they came out. I now had to unlearn the habit of flowing and allowing the language to just come straight out without pause or hesitation.

I had to learn to truly edit, to really, properly edit my words because otherwise, if I sent the wrong message that spun the convo into the wrong direction, it might be another ten – fifteen minutes to get it back toward a helpful direction!

When someone’s on the edge, time is precious.

Direction matters.

The transition was tough because crisis support is a terrible place to learn.

Countless evidence suggests the reason we play and imagine as children is you learn best through play.

Fight or flight, cortisol, tension, pressure, all of these are terrible teachers. Lessons we learn in this state typically get hardcoded into our brain in the form of trauma (little t or big T). Playing a game is a much better way to learn. That’s why babies love being delighted so much! That’s why a litter of kittens will nip and yowl and chase each other. Because they’re learning.

Now let’s apply that to learning crisis support.

You’ve got someone on the other end of the line, phone or computer, who’s telling you they’re going to end their life.

Not exactly a playful, fun environment.

The stakes are… as high as they can get. To get around this, organisations do all that they can to lower that tension and increase ease. For example they have rituals around the tea room, or they have support around the office, or support even during shift in quite a few different forms.

Despite that, the pressure is on.

As frontliners it’s up to us to lower that pressure as best as we can for ourselves.

When I’m in the hotseat, it’s my nervous system I need to watch out for first. Managing my own fight or flight response, observing my patterns of thought and breathing, recognising if I’m getting panicked or worried, all of this plays a huge role while on service.

• Side note = I’ll probably cover this in a long essay in the future so hit up my email list and I’ll let you know when it comes out.

So! We decrease learning pressure by lowering the stakes to match our skill level.

Let me illustrate with a story about bombing on stage before I bring it home to land the whole point.

Before a big show, you practice… Or your show will suck.

In a past life I studied jazz.

Piano.

Yeah, I’m full of surprises.

Well I have this memory of being frozen on stage, breathing tense, jabbing and stabbing at the piano keys like my life was on the line. I swear I could feel the audience collectively cringe.

All this because I hadn’t practiced the piece of music.

Zero skill, maximum challenge!

And yet somehow that’s how we show up in crisis support. No real sense of practice.

We show up thinking ‘Well, I’ve done the training, right? Now I’m here’ and the reason I know is because I did this.

I didn’t know any better!

I filled out reflective practice forms, I showed people my notes, I went to group supervisions, but the only real practice I did was under pressure when someone needed me.

It sounds ludicrous the way I’ve laid it out, but this is standard. Imagine if jazz schools said ‘Don’t worry about playing your instrument until you’re on stage. You don’t need to practice, you just need to study the best you can.’

Of course if you’re organised, friendly, have the time and energy and whatever else it’ll take you can also meet other people and role play conversations but… wait, no you can’t. You have no idea what people are genuinely like in crisis, that’s why it’s so difficult in the first place. You can’t role play for others because you wouldn’t even know how to..

To clarify the problem of learning suicide prevention…

1. There’s no way to really ‘practice’ delivering service
2. You only learn while there’s a human cost to mistakes
3. It’s hard to have fun on service for at least the first year of confidence building!
   • Side note = yes, crisis support can be fun once you learn to be both authentic and professional

So what’s the solution?

Design and update your own sentence stems.

This is the single best way I’ve found to improve my skills reliably over time (and move along to the right) because it solves all three problems.

I first saw this solution months before I actually took action and wish I’d done it sooner.

How many people might I have offered better support to?

Such is life, we can only take the lesson when we’re ready.

I hope you’re ready.

In the office at Lifeline Brisbane some of us would share notes. We’d have a look at each others best work, comment, compare and contrast. It was a simple, informal, powerful way of sharpening our perception.

“I didn’t know you could say that!”

“You can be that direct?” “Au contraire, to break stigmas… You must be that direct.”

Loads of things.

Over time I combined my scrap paper pile of notes I’d scribbled during shift, all the little wee bits of gold I discovered by chance, or from others and put it into one document.

By having a home for sentence stems, I got to ‘practice’ the work!

In between calls or between shifts, it cost me almost nothing to simply open the document and fiddle with a sentence or two.

I’d have fresh eyes based on how a call just went, or based on whatever theory I’d been studying at the time. It became very easy to make little adjustments and continuously improve.

There’s tonnes less pressure when editing a list of sentences!

Without an audience to inflict my struggles upon, practicing an instrument is way easier.

In this case my instrument is the non-judgement toolkit of words, phrases and responses that help people relieve their distress and lower the fight, flight, freeze or fawn response.

I could move through a sentence very slowly, improving a tiny section over the span of five or ten minutes, without the pressure of having someone on the other end.

So long as the doc was opened regularly, it made the work easier and easier.

It became part of my pre-shift ritual. Armed with coffee or tea, a fresh set of empty pages to fill with scribbles and a Sentence Stem Workshop document on the PC, I felt ready to help.

But writing isn’t always easy, anyone who writes knows the pressure of a blank page, so…

Write with ease by using a proven structure and making it fun!

By preparing your page before you start, you break down the barriers to writing out sentence stems and give yourself a much less painful pathway to mastering high quality support skills.

On top of that, by making it zany and fun you also create a WAY more engaging reason to get inside the document in the first place.

That’s plenty of context, let’s dive in!

Instructions for building your own Sentence Stem Workshop.

1. Prep your page for maximum ease.

First write out these headings and subheadings in an empty google or word doc, then we’ll dive into the steps, skillset and mindset behind using this tool to massively boost the quality of support you provide over time.

• Side note = I grew this document very slowly, spending only 5 – 10 minutes at a time. For ease of reading, I’ve written it all out step by step, but do remember there were often days or weeks where nothing happened (the map is much smoother than the territory).

Sentence Stem Workshop

My title is Sentence Stem Workshop because that’s simple and straight forward, make it whatever you like.

‘Sentence Stem’ is the entire point, having pre-prepared messages similar to how musicians have chord progressions, licks and even solos they’re familiar with to throw into a song or jam session.

‘Workshop’ shows the way of thinking attached, it’s an instant way to bypass perfectionism by keeping this front of mind: ‘we’re here to experiment and work on things’.

Next subheading.

Top 5 Reminders

Next subheading.

Struggles Becoming Strengths

Finally down underneath that we’ll put the last subheading.

Sentence Stems

So your whole page is now ready to go!

Here’s a Google Doc version you can clone and make your own (or copy paste into word etc).

2. Write out a reminder or two.

The first subheading is like an inbox to leave messages to your future self.

What big lesson created a breakthrough and made it easier to actually do the thing? Here’s a few I keep at the front of my mind at all times.

1. Better consistency than intensity – life is a marathon, not a sprint.
2. Improvement is cyclic not linear.
3. Hitting the target doesn’t come from aiming, it comes from missing. So fire!
4. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
5. I am loveable, worthy and enough – no matter what the doubts say.

3. Write out some struggles.

What are the things you’ve had a hard time with on service?

Allow yourself to not get into too much detail. Keeping each dot point small and simple will make it easier for future you to understand, remember and build upon.

For example, I remember finishing a call that went terribly wrong and I had an enormous debrief with my internal support staff at the time. They helped me fully unpack how I reacted to my own tension when the person I was talking to said some inappropriate things. It was a big debrief and an even bigger reflection after!

Basically I put down a wall as soon as they mentioned something inappropriate. I came back with a standard ‘that wouldn’t be appropriate for me to answer, this is Lifeline, a listening service, yadda yadda yadda’. I sensed that I could have definitely handled it better which led me to have the debrief and reflect upon it so deeply – it left me feeling like I’d failed them somehow.

Putting all that time and effort into reflection was extremely valuable, it showed me where I wanted to improve my practice and how I could build more authenticity. However, for a sentence stem workshop, the only struggle I’d need to capture is one line.

• I don’t know how to respond when people hit on me or make advances!

Some other common struggles people have right off the bat:

• I don’t want to put the idea of suicide into their head, but I know I should ask if they’ve had thoughts of it.
• I don’t know how to connect or hear about someone’s feelings if they don’t want to open up.
• I don’t know how to end a call if it’s been going for ages!

Any struggles you’ve had at all, they’re all valuable to work on.

4. Workshop your struggles.

Now you’ve got them written out it’s time to workshop them.

‘But I thought we were here to workshop sentence stems!’

That’s what we are doing! Just like we prepared the page in order to make it easier to fill in the blanks, we’re now preparing the struggles in order to make it easier to solve them.

Firstly, we want to change sentence stems into Prompt Questions, not statements.

‘I don’t know how to reject it when people hit on me or make advances!’ = ‘How do I reject it when people hit on me or make advances?’

Now it’s no longer a struggle, it’s a question that prompts you for an answer.

We can do better. Let’s improve it.

‘How do I reject it when people hit on me or make inappropriate advances?’

Now it’s a bit better.

• Side note = this next sentence is easy to miss so pay attention, this is literally the entire point.

This clear, straightforward prompting question actually positions my mind in a problem solving framework. I’m looking for the solution now, not focusing on the frustration or confusion, but rather focusing on the way through it.

By workshopping my struggle, I’m turning it into a strength.

5. Prep your sentence stems for maximum fun.

Start by making a few silly ones first.

So let’s do it! Take one of your struggle questions and create a subheading all of it’s own.

• How do I reject it when people hit on me or make inappropriate advances?

This becomes it’s own subheading and we put dot point sentence stems beneath it.

How do I reject it when people hit on me or make inappropriate advances?

• That’s inappropriate and if you keep it up… I’ll tell your mum!
• You, naughty naughty you teasing me.
• I really shouldn’t be saying this but… if you don’t quit it I’m gonna get your line blocked.

Ok, please don’t ever say anything remotely like the above while on service lol.

But do write them out in your workshop! It helps to break things up a little and the point is to loosen you up so you can have a laugh and think creatively.

Next, let’s put some absolutely terrible answers in to continue to open us up, the worse the better.

• Excuse me, this is a listening service. If you continue to express human needs in this inappropriate way I’ll be forced to terminate our interaction without prejudice.
• Not only is that an inappropriate use of our service but if you continue to put yourself out there like this I’ll have to hang up on you.

It helps to have these terrible sentence stems here as a way to clarify ‘what is good service?’ by thinking about ‘what is bad service?’

The answer I actually used on the day went something like this.

• It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to answer that as this is a crisis counselling and suicide prevention service and it’s against our policy.

So what’s the main problem here? It’s so cold and sterile. This sterility and coldness became a lot more clear when thinking about those crappy answers above. They’re literally the worst ones I could think of and why is that? They completely lack any compassion and humanity.

The person didn’t say anything rude or awful to me, they just asked me an innocent question from a very vulnerable place, wondering whether I’d take the bait and open that line of dialogue.

My answer was a reaction to how I felt, due to previous experience being hit on and feeling very uncomfortable about it during my time as a bouncer.

So now let’s take that answer and ‘workshop it’.

6. Workshop your sentence stems.

‘Finally!’

I know, I’m so good at injecting random stories and segues I should start a recipe website.

Let’s do this, how can we improve the following?

• It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to answer that as this is a crisis counselling and suicide prevention service and it’s against our policy.

Let’s drop the policy bit. Because that’s not about them, it’s about me. It doesn’t matter to them what policy I have or don’t have, it only matters to me.

• It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to answer that as this is a crisis counselling and suicide prevention service.

Bit better, but let’s improve it again, we can again make this about them, not us.

• It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to answer that as I’m here to listen to and support you, so let’s keep the convo about you.

Alright! Now we’re cooking. I’ve gently deflected the question away from myself, but it still feels a bit iffy.

That’s ok, because doing all of this workshopping has illustrated in more detail exactly what problem we’re trying to solve, which brings us back to an earlier stage of this process.

7. Iterate.

Now we can improve the struggle because we’ve got more clarity and vision of the problem!

You can see how this process isn’t linear, it’s cyclic. Meaning an upgrade to the sentence stem causes upgrades to the struggle, causing upgrades to the reminders, causing upgrades to the sentence stems… etc.

We’re building an iterative system of growth to help simplify the complex task of mastering non-judgement and suicide prevention. It might seem like a lot of effort, but that’s because most people would rather pay way more tomorrow for a cure, than a tiny bit today for prevention.

Let’s improve the struggle knowing what we know now.

How do I reject it when people hit on me or make inappropriate advances?

• How do I compassionately reject it when people hit on me or make inappropriate advances?
• How do I compassionately respond when people hit on me or make inappropriate advances?
• How do I compassionately respond when I feel uncomfortable from someone’s comment or question?

This is the viiiiibe.

Let’s quickly recap the improvements here.

I started out wanting to reject the person whose crime was loneliness.

I hid behind policy and procedure to protect myself from the discomfort of not knowing how to handle getting hit on.

I found a way better way to answer the person so that they’re not receiving a slap in the face, I’m maintaining the appropriate positioning according to my role and the conversation is now either moving toward being on track, or we have a clear doorway to talk about boundaries.

Now we have a question that gives me ownership over my part in all of this – the feelings that come up in me. That’s the real thing I’m fighting here, the person seeking my help isn’t my opponent, they’re my ally. My own judgements, discomfort and other baggage, that stuff is my real opponent.

Can you see how this growth is cyclic? It’s the same thing on a tiny scale, improving one single response to one single question, as it is on a macro scale, improving a whole skillset or mindset.

8. Iterate more.

You thought I was done.

Hah!

Life is a marathon, not a sprint – let’s keep going.

Here’s the question I asked earlier, and the best answer I came up with:

How do I reject it when people hit on me or make inappropriate advances?

• It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to answer that as I’m here to listen to and support you, so let’s keep the convo about you.

By improving the question, we also improve the answer, watch and see what I mean.

How do I compassionately respond when I feel uncomfortable from someone’s comment or question?

• I’m here to listen to and support you, so it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to answer. I’m curious to hear more…
• I’m here to listen to and support you, so it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to answer. I’m curious to hear more… What makes you ask?
• I’m here to listen to and support you, so it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to say. I’m curious to hear more… What makes you ask?
• I’m here to listen to and support you, so it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to say. But I am curious to hear more… What makes you ask?
• I’m here to listen to and support you, so it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to say. But I am curious to hear more about that longing you hinted at. It sounds like some loneliness there…

Breakthrough.

The sun has come out.

Hallelujah.

What do you think of how it’s improved so far? Takes plenty of effort, but so does mastering anything. The real gains are found when you’re willing to go further than others.

Instructions TL;DR

Prepare your page to make sentence stems easier to produce, by using some preset headings and sub headings.

Then fill out things you’ve found difficult.

Next, workshop them into questions for example ‘I don’t know how to…’ becomes ‘How do I…’

Now pick one question, write out dot point sentences beneath starting with the absolute worst examples you can possibly imagine. Give yourself permission to be silly here.

Next, write some better sentence stems and reflect upon what makes them better. Go back and improve the prompt question.

• Side note = this is a bigger version of an old post I published a couple years ago, you can view the original here.

Now, over to you!

I hope this guide helps you support others.

As I said, it’s a bumpy road getting into suicide prevention and crisis support, but it’s absolutely a road worth traveling.

I’ve got friends and family who’ve attempted to kill themselves and I stepped right up to the edge myself.

As scary as it might seem to support people in such a place, it’s really quite simple.

1. Identify the skills needed.
2. Clarify the gaps between here and there.
3. Create a plan.
4. Follow through.
5. Step 1.

Sometimes this isn’t what we expect. Maybe the skills we need are subtle, quiet or even downright hidden. Boundaries, self awareness, perfectionism, and so many more psychological quirks can turn into obstacles to providing good support.

Obstacles to be overcome!

By arming and equipping you with the best insights and lessons I’ve had the privilege of uncovering over the years, I hope you feel a little more bold stepping into the darkness to support someone who needs it.

Whether that’s a friend, family member, client or colleague, I believe this kind of work will change the world – and if you give energy and intention to grow courage, it will change your world.

If you give this a go and create sentence stems of your own, I’d absolutely love to hear about it! Leave a comment below or drop me a message.

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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.