We are really pleased to be working with Chroma on a series of events aimed at professional deputies and their teams around the subject of resilience.
What does it mean?

Why is it important?

Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioural flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands. Our professional roles are often about supporting our clients to build resilience, but do we keep ourselves healthy in order to do in multiple cases?

Psychological resilience is the ability to cope mentally or emotionally with a crisis or to return to pre-crisis status quickly

Why do we need to develop resilience in our professional lives and workplaces? We work in the field of trauma and evidence shows toll on mental health and wellbeing.

LawCare, the mental wellbeing charity for the legal community published their “Life in the Law” report looking at data it gathered form 2020/21

There are many positives that the report highlights, for example workplace autonomy averaged relatively high across all participants, with those reporting higher autonomy also reporting lower burnout rates.

But certain groups, for example legal employees with a disability or those from ethnic minorities showed significantly lower autonomy scores and higher burnout rates.

Across all participants, psychological safety averaged at a mid point, but with significant negative variation for certain groups again

Worryingly almost three quarters or 69% of participants reported experiencing mental ill-health in the previous 12 months, with one of the main impacts being the impact on family relationships. 

Looking more closely into the detail of people’s data, anxiety, low mood and the strain on family relationships was experienced very often and sometimes all the time by participants.

The additional factor that Chroma and the PDF have been discussing is the impact of working from home; where there is no separation between the office table and the kitchen table. Even more unseen is the impact of loneliness due to working from home, despite the flexibility it can offer.
 
Chroma and the PDF are proud to launch the Resilience Curriculum, which is an online series of 6 1hr sessions provided to all PDF members as part of their membership, running every month.

Rachel Swanick, Chroma’s training lead, will be running the curriculum which is focused on giving deputies – and others involved in deputyship affairs guidance – support and practical tips and techniques across three main areas:
 
Resilience – how to we respond healthily to crisis and become aware of the impact of secondary trauma in our thoughts, feelings and bodies. What strategies and tools can we build to develop our resilience?

Supervision (of their teams) – keeping an eye out for impact of trauma and appropriately offering support in management supervision.

Managing work-related trauma – how we talk and think about our field of work as being impactful, what spaces and procedures we have, how we can communicate effectively about trauma and our needs as individuals, teams and professionals.
 
We will be sending out full joining information in the near future – look out for it soon, but in the meantime, PDF Members can find out more here

The first session is on 20th October, 12-1pm, via Zoom, so if you are not already a PDF Member, sign up here today.

We’re really excited about this PDF/Chroma partnership, and hope that it will really make a positive difference to the wellbeing of those involved in deputyship.