When I started volunteering in suicide prevention, growth hurt.

So badly.

Now? My work improves with ease.

I used to ask: why is it so difficult to just… get better?

Some calls would go super well and I’d feel like I did a great job. Only to connect the dots later and realise I’d projected my weird childhood crap on the other person (sorry!).

Other calls would be rough as guts where I’d feel useless. Only to find out from my supervisor they heard loads of signs the conversation was immensely helpful for the other person; signs I missed completely.

Was I an idiot?

Was I not cut out for suicide prevention?

Was there something wrong with me?

A few years and thousands of service hours later, I’ve come a very long way in providing support and have trained many people to do the same. Am I perfect? Hell no. Is my work at mastery level? Nope, but it’s a lot closer than when I started.

I now find authentic ways to express things while staying confidently grounded in professionalism.

I’ve grown a lot, and I owe it all massively to the system I’m about to show you.

This article is a ‘tell all’ that highlights a bunch of hidden gems I picked up through trial and painful error.

By the end you’ll have a practical breakdown of the system that helped me grow and overcome countless hurdles, how exactly it works and what exactly it requires to work it.

I’ve learned a lot on the journey, not just about WHAT to do, but also HOW to do it so your reflective practice can avoid some really common pitfalls that rob the people in your future from receiving the best support you can offer.

As with everything, this is all in service of the mission: 1,000,000 people with way better listening skills.

With your help, you and I can make this world a more inviting place for people who need someone just like you to welcome them back into the fold.

Let’s get started.

This Is A Vehicle

Just like how your car is a system with lots of subsystems and parts to it, I’m about to show you a powerful system.

It’s my gift to you because of the incredible work and dedication you’ve already shown to be at a point where reading this article even makes any sense to you.

I know the journey! That’s why I know you don’t actually need to understand the details of how it works in order to appreciate the value it can offer in helping you become a more skilled supporter.

Just like you don’t need to know how your car works to drive it, you just need a general idea like ‘this is how you go forward / backward / left / right’ and ‘look out the windows or in these mirrors’ etc.

It obviously takes more, but you get the idea.

What I’m about to reveal is similar, you don’t need to know how the data flows or connects in order to see why I’m so excited to reveal it to you.

But before I show you how this thing drives, I need you to understand its purpose.

What’s the reason for this ‘vehicle’, exactly?

Systems Help You Move

Just like a car, a reflective practice system can get you from here to there.

It turned the task of learning crisis support from a painful and confusing experience to one where the lessons compound into clear, crisp insights and reflections.

We all start out wanting to play it safe, terrified to say the wrong thing, and yet where does that get us? An awful sinking gut feeling as we get hung up on or disconnected time and again. A feeling that seems to whisper ‘Is this really it? Am I just not cut out for this?’

Playing it safe often hurts more than it helps, but we’ve all gotta start somewhere.

The purpose of a system like this is to help you identify your plateau so you can soar beyond it.

Armed with fresh insight and observations, you’ll be scaling obstacles and barriers to improving your work like a cat with a mouse in its eyesight.

This system can help you identify your own personal signs of burnout, catch clues that you may be ‘going too fast’ and need to hit the brake a little or at least lay off the accelerator.

It can raise your confidence to actually see clearly step by step the progress you’re making toward milestones in skills development, even measuring cutting edge science backed leads like Compassion Satisfaction – the feeling of glowing warmth you get after a special kind of shift.

How?

By systematising your reflections, you expose yourself to patterns.

Kind of like seeing ‘trends’ when you look at data, or when you analyse your favourite books or films.

In this case, a reflective practice system (RPS) can help you uncover the mysteries hidden in your own internal world by capturing observations and surfacing insights.

Here’s a quick summary of how exactly a tool like this can help you develop excellence in crisis support.

Remember, it’s all in service of getting you moving.

Yes, the link is at the bottom of this article.

How To Drive Your RPS

To get moving and improve your skills, there’s two simple things you’ll do.

1. Collect observations.
2. Reflect on observations.

Collecting observations is like filling your RPS with rocket fuel.

Reflecting upon what you observe is like putting your foot to the floor to actually get going and improve your skills.

When you notice something and capture it, you can stand back and see patterns you otherwise wouldn’t see. You become a detective, observing, for example… which shifts at which times seem to go better or how long conversations tend to go if you use those microskills, versus if you forget these microskills.

Patterns emerge over time to reveal to you what’s happening in your work and if you’re gentle and patient enough, even allows you to peek into your own inner workings.

If you use a traffic light system regularly, you can see how often things are ‘red light’ versus ‘green light’ to give a strong sense of what sort of triggers need dire attention, which types of conversations require the support of an in shift support versus more deeper work like with a therapist or clinical supervisor.

Yes, this tool can help reveal and identify areas where a little bit of deep work might massively improve your emotional life – that’s what happened to me!

If you rank each shift out of five stars for a simple vibe check, you can notice trends over time of how you feel about crisis support work by seeing the before and after and how that tends to evolve.

This subjective information usually slips right past, but with your own RPS you can capture it and keep it tidy so it’s even easy to read in the future.

The last thing anyone wants is to spend energy gathering info that’s so ugly and confusing they never look back!

That’s why the system actually breaks down into very simple, bite sized areas for you.

System Parts

There are two main places to look, when you drive the RPS.

1. Shift dashboard, to compare one shift to the last.
2. Chat dashboard, to compare one conversation to the last.

Both receive input and help you find patterns (ie. collecting observations and reflecting upon them).

	Input In	Observations Out
Shift Dashboard	✅	✅
Chat Dashboard	✅	✅

But despite the effort that went into designing dashboards that are simple to read and easy to use, this STILL might feel too complex.

That’s 100% ok!

Vehicles Aren’t For Everyone

But movement is.

Having a whole system for reflection might not be right for you.

Maybe it’s not the right time, or perhaps looking at rows and columns gives you the heebie jeebies, that’s totally ok! If you’d rather keep it simple on paper, this article outlines how to do it with a notebook. Change it up! Do what works for you.

Self awareness and self observation are how we move forward in life, it’s absolutely my unequivocal stance these are simply skills you can work on. This system is what worked for me and I’ve made it as a gift to anyone else who wants it.

I’m just some guy on the internet who trusts you know what’s best for you.

Test Drive

To see what it’s like, let’s see how you’d do a shift once your RPS is fully in place and operational.

Keep in mind it did take me years of growing my reflective practice and self observation to get to this point. In other words, this is a test drive from someone with practice; we’re going on the highway, not learning in the carpark.

It’s much easier if you see it in action.

Strap in – we’re going somewhere!

Start Of Shift

First, you show up half an hour early.

Giving an extra half an hour means you start without stress. You may have heard others use rituals like singing bowls, or wear a special beanie. You start up with your favourite warm drink and begin logging in…

Watch this to see how setup goes using your RPS.

I will warn you, I had a severe cold during this test drive so my vibe is… well, severe.

Done.

You’ve set yourself up for success by touching base with your reflections, perhaps your body and energy, reviewing your recent shifts and setting a target to focus on today.

Let’s do this!

During Shift

You flick over to ‘ready’ and accept a new interaction.

Watch the next video to continue the tour.

The shift continues like so, moments of stillness and reflection between offering support and connection.

After Shift

And that brings us to the end of your test drive.

As I said, I really hope you can forgive my vibe; I was trying desperately not to cough. Hopefully the headache isn’t contagious through the computer, not like it’s a computer virus.

So that’s it.

You’ve seen it now.

You’ve seen the thing being driven around, hopefully the seat was warm and snug.

That was all about the tool, now let’s get into the mindset behind driving something like this so we stay safe out there.

Reflections On… Reflecting

Oh, the things I’d say to younger me…

Hopefully the test drive above illustrates all you need to see how this ‘vehicle’ can help you ‘get somewhere’.

Just like driving a car, using a reflective practice system can be dangerous too.

The thing is, reflecting upon your work will generate movement in your skillset.

You’ll connect new skills to old ones, you’ll create new realisations and understandings of different aspects of your work and what it means, you’ll perceive patterns into who you are and why you make certain choices and say certain things.

This process can be ugly and sometimes ‘movement’ might actually be in the wrong direction!

If your observations hide your own bias from you, it can be easy for you to fall prey to common biases.

What’s the problem? You may stray too far!

For these reasons and more, keep in mind the following to maximise your chances of successful navigation.

Verify And Validate Your Findings

Find people who are trustworthy, compassionate, respectful and self aware and ask for their input.

I know, I said we’d get into a mindset and I start with a blunt direction.

Just trust me!

Whether that’s your supervisors at the organisation you’re volunteering or working with, whether it’s your colleagues during group supervision where you have a clinical supervisor trained to help keep you from trauma dumping, whether it’s someone closer who you know can listen well while you unpack things – like a therapist or really trustworthy friend.

When you pull your car out onto the road, you’re benefiting from a huge system of subsystems that have built up over hundreds of years of brain power and effort.

Did you know highways and overpasses actually tilt around corners based on principles of physics so your car’s weight and momentum help push into the ground to keep it there? A few degrees difference and that can cause accidents as momentum will lift one side off the ground.

Civil engineers do a whole unit on this, calling it ‘superelevation’.

That’s how much thought has gone into creating safety for you while driving! Not even to mention seatbelts, airbags, traffic laws, vehicle construction standards, even licensing… All in the name of keeping you safe (enough) while on the road.

In the world of reflective practice, is there even a road you’re driving on?

We don’t have tens of trillions of dollars worth of accumulated human knowledge to help design traffic systems to move really quickly while staying relatively safe.

In other words, you and I are exploring a new frontier.

We’re designing the roads with our own hands and feet and reflections as we go.

This includes beating down the dirt for people behind us, or trying to build a system to help others to do it better than we did.

We need this infrastructure! We need highways of mindset and culture that we can actively work on as a big group of people, but it’s gotta start somewhere so thank you for coming with me on this journey.

I deeply, deeply appreciate your participation and support as we explore these distant lands together; not to conquer, but to listen. Not to destroy, but to understand.

Yet no matter your intentions, it’s not enough.

To do all you can to cover for the gaps in your own bias (and believe me, the gaps in my blindspots are big enough to swallow entire Bermuda Triangles), please pay extra special attention.

All this to stress the importance of what comes right after this very sentence.

Verifying and validating your reflections is a tender process and trustworthiness is absolutely critical in who you do choose to share with. I cannot stress this enough, you must feel respected by the people you open up to, if you don’t, please slow down and do some long hard thinking about what that means.

For Brene Brown’s primer on trust, easily the best thing I’ve ever found on the topic, check out this podcast episode.

It Worked Because I Worked It

Do you know what the best diet in the world is?

Out of all the zillions of options, the verdict is clear as crystal, though experts might still disagree (if they’ve got something to sell you!).

The best diet is the one you stick to.

If you decide you’d rather make your system a simple debrief with your husband because he knows how to hold space, he’s trauma informed and has some counselling practice / training and you can respect confidentiality, great!

Do what works for you – go your own way.

My system worked for me because it grew slowly over a long period of time, I didn’t try to solve a hundred problems overnight. I just tried to solve one, one at a time. After months and years, it looks like what you see above.

If you want to learn how to step gently into a system like the one I’m offering as a gift from my heart to yours, read on.

Progressive Consistency, Not Perfection

Growth is non-linear, meaning it’s a very squiggly journey up and down, one step forward two steps back, etc.

But growth happens in a linear medium; time. You only march forward through it.

Whatever you happen to do, make consistency your aim. Consistency of service, consistency of reflection, consistency of growth.

Many people want to do this work with their full heart, not just going through the motions. So do you otherwise you wouldn’t be here reading all this nerdy stuff, you don’t want to offer mediocre levels of support. You want more than to simply ‘show competency’ because this is about making a difference. No one in pain ever felt seen and heard and said ‘thank you so much for your competency’.

To grow a deep level of skill in anything, we have to recognise that skills grow slowly over time, bound by the speed of our reflections.

But consistency grows over time too. Very few people start with and maintain a consistent commitment.

People tend to have to grow toward that consistency progressively, step by step.

Revisit Old Thoughts

Read your old journal entries!

Read your old reflections.

What did you used to struggle with that is no longer an issue?

What do you find harder now?

You can only move forward through time, but you need to return to old stages in order to uncover new lessons.

Measure Gains Not Gaps

My inner voice used to be so critical that learning anything new was extremely painful.

I dropped out of jazz studies because I couldn’t handle it – and I love jazz!

Thanks to mentorship from incredible people (a story for another day) I’ve learned a couple things.

Measuring the gap between where I am and where I want to be leads me to feel like crap. There’s always something else to do, write, say, achieve, etc. The distance between me and the horizon will remain there, no matter how fast I run.

It’s a treadmill.

Of suffering.

I learned to measure the gain by comparing where I am now with where I was in the past.

Looking at where I was last year.

Looking at where I was last month.

By measuring the gain of how far I’ve come, I feel empowered and ready to dive head first into my life. I feel confident, capable, even bold.

I want to try stuff, I want to step into the world and expose myself to risks. I want to see where life takes me and find opportunities, make friends and support the world to become more resilient and anti-fragile.

If you’re keen to read more on this, check out The Gap And The Gain by Dan Sullivan (that’s a link to my review on Goodreads, add me if you’re on it!).

Measuring your growth this way will help you develop a deeply encouraged and empowered perspective.

Don’t Just Take My Word For It

There’s lots to say about mindset when it comes to reflective practice, I’ll keep it surface level but please know this isn’t specific advice.

It wouldn’t be responsible for me to sell you this stuff as a solution or snake oil that will take away your struggles. It’s really not. It’s my personal opinions based on my personal experiences.

Please don’t fall into the trap of reading-but-not-questioning this article because I have taken the time to write it.

Run it past someone you trust, what do they think about the words above? Share this article with them and tear it apart (if you do, send me the shreds!).

Run these ideas through at least one brain cell, preferably two.

I jest, but for real please question what you’re reading here.

Interrogate these words.

Does it feel right? Does it sit right for you?

I’m learning too, I expect in 12 months from now I will probably look back at this and find even better ways of doing things. I say this from experience because it’s happened multiple times since I started blogging.

The text is static, it’s written onto this page and frozen in time, capturing my thinking as of today and the few weeks it took to write this. But the experience is not static. It’s shifting.

This is what served me, I hope you change it to make it yours so it serves you too.

I hope it helps you uncover, refine, polish and shine your own authentic light.

The world doesn’t need other versions of Said – I’ve got that covered.

We need more of you.

This system is called the Reflective Practice System For Crisis Support Excellence.

Why? Because that’s what it is.

My agenda is not hidden, it’s absolutely bold, told and sold in plain sight.

I want to give you such a delightfully incredible system, complete with video tutorials, articles and other tools that you feel absolutely compelled to pay it forward and pass it on to others.

I want to arm and equip you with a torch of hope that shines so brightly you cannot help but light up the pathway for others just like you, people who deep down know they are destined for more in life, for giving more bravely, for living with mor courage, that you inspire them to shine just as bright and even brighter.

That’s why it’s free.

If you want to help, pay what it’s worth to you or simply pay it forward by giving it your absolute all.

Forge yourself into a more authentic, heartfelt supporter and make the world a little bit more warm.

Heard Enough? Get Your Copy Now

Get your very own Reflective Practice System for Crisis Support Excellence.