Glenn DeGuzman:
Hello and welcome to student affairs. Now, my name is Glenn DeGuzman. I use he him pronouns, and I’m coming to you from Livermore, California, the ancestral homelands of the Ohlone people. And this is my first recording of 2021. And I’m really excited about today’s episode today. We’re going to be really shining light on the increasing stress and anxiety that many student affairs professionals are experiencing and really looking at ideas to support wellbeing. I’ve been hearing from our audiences and colleagues, but how they’d like to hear more on burnout and wellness strategies as we just continue to respond to the myriad of issues that we’ve just experienced in 2020, whether it’s anti-blackness, COVID, the election civil unrest, it just goes on and on and on, and it’s continuing into 2021. And to help shed that light, I’m excited to be joined by a panel that administrators, researchers, and influencers, really, just to talk story on this topic more/ What is the research telling us and what we can as a profession, do better at to better understand, and really identify generative solutions to support ourselves our colleagues. And even for me, personally, lessons that I oftentimes take home to my family and friends. Student affairs now is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. Our mission is to have our conversation that a contribution to the field and restorative to our student affairs profession. We release new episodes every week on Wednesday. You can find us@studentaffairsnow.com where we’re also growing our list of archive episodes, and that’s where it sits. So check it out. We’re also on Twitter and Instagram, and I want to definitely thank our sponsors. Stylus publishing is proud to be one of the sponsors of student service. Now podcast, you can browse their student affairs, diversity professional development titles@styluspub.com. And for limited time use the promo code S a now for 30% off all books plus free shipping. You can also find stylists on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter @Styluspub. I’d like to start by having the panels introduce themselves. So let’s go ahead and have them share a little about their work scholarship and, if relevant their doctoral pursuits and in general, that’s really tied to today’s topics. So let’s go ahead and start with the person I’ve known the longest Dr. Jason Lynch, Jason. Okay.

Jason Lynch:
Oh, well, thanks, Glenn. I’m super excited to be here. Hi friends out in student affairs world. I’m Dr. Jason Lynch. If you interact with me, just call me Jason. That’s fine. I am an assistant of higher education at Appalachian state university in Boone, North Carolina, but I actually live right outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. I’ve been a practitioner in the field for about 10 years before I just switched over to the faculty and I’ve worked in a number of different areas, but where I knew Glenn from was my days at Berkeley and residence life. Yeah. Go Bears. And so now I like I said, I’m an Assistant Professor or a lot of my research and scholarship and teaching really centers on issues of traumatic stress. But I look at it from the angle of how traumatic stress impacts educators, whether that’s K through 12 or higher education. And I have a particular focus on, on the impact of traumatic stress on student affairs professionals. And so I’m super excited to get a chance to kind of talk about my own experiences and explore the experiences of my awesome friends and colleagues that are on the panel today. So again, thank you. Thanks for joining us, Jason. Let’s go to Jamarco.

Jamarco Clark:
Hello everyone. My name is JaMarco Clark. I use he, him pronouns. I serve as the Director of Leadership and Engagement at the University of Iowa. I am also a second year doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin LaCrosse, in the Student Affairs Administration and Leadership Program. Just about a month, I’ve got a big thing coming up. I will be defending my dissertation proposal and I’m working on a study titled, “Weight on My Shoulders: Secondary Trauma and its Effects on Black Men Student Affairs Professionals.” So my goal with that is to number one and most importantly, build on the work that Dr. Lynch has done with looking at secondary trauma of student affairs professionals, but really look at the black man as we do the work. And I was very intentional and using the phrase “weight on my shoulders,” but I really want to look at and give black man that platform to talk about how they’re affected or impacted when they’re working with others, just looking at how their mental health and their personal professional well-beings are impacted by doing that work. So thank you.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Definitely looking forward to hearing some of your research. Let’s go to Leah.

New Speaker:
Hi, thanks Glenn for having me. I’m born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. I currently serve at the University of Dayton as a Community Coordinator. I’ve worked in housing since I was an 18 year old first year RA, which was amazing, but also probably shouldn’t have done that as a first year student, but learn to live. I am a full-time doctoral student at the University of Dayton in the Educational Leadership Program, and I hope to study secondary traumatic stress, specifically the possibility of recovery programming as a method to combat burnout.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Amazing. And then let’s go to Molly.

Molly Mistretta:
Hi Glenn. Thanks for having me. My name’s Molly Mistretta. I am Assistant Professor and the Department Chair for the department of counseling and development at Slippery Rock University, which is in Western Pennsylvania about an hour North of Pittsburgh. I teach courses both in Student Affairs and in Clinical Mental Health Counseling. My career path started and in my interest in the issues of burnout and compassion fatigue actually started from my own personal experiences, working in student affairs and particularly Residence Life, which I, for many of you who work in that area, know, that’s a high burnout area. And I became really interested once I became a faculty member and really focusing on issues of mental health, looking back and seeing how my own experiences with burnout and compassion, fatigue really impacted my experience in, in student affairs and sort of wondered about why this aspect of our work lives was really never discussed in the workplace and with supervisors. So this is a sort of a passion of mine. And recently I had the opportunity to co-write a book with out Alison Dubois and the books called overcoming burnout and compassion fatigue, and it focuses on the roles of administrators in education, and that was published by Routledge this past year.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Outstanding Molly. Let’s just stay with you and talk about this book that you co-authored, and it really is about self-care for educators. And I’m really interested in this topic of “compassion fatigue” and burnout. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more on what does it mean and how does it apply to student affairs practitioners?

Molly Mistretta:
Sure. So let me start with burnout because you sort of have to take this as burnout as the foundation for developing compassion fatigue later on. So burnout in its most essential form is basically too much work and not enough resources, whether those resources are time finance personnel it’s, it’s basically over being overworked and that produces both a physical response a mental response and even an emotional response. And so there’s a couple things that I think we as student affairs professionals sort of come to the field with that predisposes us to burn out. One, we have a tendency to make our life really a lot about our work for some of us that’s really hard because we live where we work, but we also see this as, as a passion, as a calling, as a true vocation for us. And so we, we tend to struggle with creating boundaries between our personal selves and our professional selves, and that predisposes us to burn out. Also, we tend to have a high expectations of our own performance where people who don’t like to make mistakes, who feel like we need to do right by our students and our coworkers all the time. And that adds additional pressure. We also feel like we’re never allowed to make mistakes. We want to feel like that. The people we work with are satisfied by the jobs that we do and, and that amount of pressure that we put on ourselves increases the likelihood that we can develop burnout. So oftentimes because we are being asked to do more with less, more and more in this profession the pressures have really been compounded on us as professionals in the field. And so when we, when I talk to people in the field, basically what they described to me is a chronic sense of stress all the time. And what happens is when you’re chronically stressed you’re less able to be resilient in the face of adversities that you experienced in the workplace. And so when you encounter, and in the case of compassion fatigue, the prime ingredient is trauma. When you have been exposed to other people’s trauma through students’ stories that they tell you about things of their own past, that’s called secondary traumatic stress. And when you add burnout with secondary traumatic stress, that’s when you start to experience, what’s called compassion fatigue, and where burnout tends to be more of a mental and physical exhaustion. A short-term way to think about is compassion fatigue is that emotional exhaustion. And that is where you have been so overwhelmed by dealing with other people’s trauma. And aren’t able to process that in a healthy way. That’s when you begin to experience all sorts of symptoms, they can be physical, they’re mostly emotional, but that’s where you see it beginning to impact your work abilities. Maybe you’re experiencing chronic absenteeism because you’re sick more often, or you’re just, aren’t able to emotionally function at work at the levels you used to. And that would be described as compassion, fatigue.

Glenn DeGuzman:
That’s really relevant. I mean, as a person in residential life, I’m experiencing other people’s exhaustion, and it’s translating Leah you’re in a similar boat. You are a Community Coordinator. How do you see compassion, fatigue and burnout play, play out in your work?

Leah Ward:
Yeah, absolutely. So I mentioned that I’ve served living in since I was 18 years old, which has been a long time. I’m in my last semester of my last living position, we have a four year cap in this role. So I know Dr. Lynch and I’ve talked a little bit about getting out of housing is going to be different, but to Molly’s point, especially with my role as the community coordinator, I work with upper division students and they live in a neighborhood. So they live in houses and apartments, and they are expected to live as adults, which it can be challenging for college aged students. So for me, I see a lot of the compassion fatigue, that emotional response, when it comes to serving on call for students that often don’t want to reach out for help, but need help, or their friends call on their behalf or their friends see something on Instagram or social media that gives them questionable with some concern. But then I think the burnout comes from the response to student behavior. So working where I live and especially being in housing, we hear conduct cases. So it’s the repeated conversations with my students about decision-making that they are fully aware is not appropriate for our standards are theirs. And it’s just the constant conversations can, can lead to a little burnout when it comes to the repeated expectations I’m telling students, cause they’re learning. We have a safety net for a reason, but it does sometimes get to a point where I can feel that physical exhaustion, especially working from home with the office chair that probably wasn’t the best choice to buy from Office Depot. Love it, it’s doing its job, but I think it starts to wear and tear for sure on me in that role.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Leah, can I ask a follow-up question? You know, you’re working with upper division students. Do you see do you see a big difference working with upper division versus working with let’s say newer students?

Leah Ward:
Oh, absolutely. Upper division students, the ones I work with, they know the expectations, they are fully aware of what the email says and they choose to often ignore it or kind of say, “Oh, I wasn’t really sure that applied to me.” I think when I’ve worked with first year students, they are extremely aware of that. They read the email four times, but to the Dow, their mom has told them to read it. Upper division students like to test the waters because they maybe have already seen someone in conduct or they’ve already kind of seen what it could look like if they do find themselves being held accountable for their behavior. So they are, I think a little bit quicker to say, I’ll try it out and see what happens. Which can be frustrating. But I also know that they are aware of that too. So it makes for a hearty conversation. It just makes for some frequent hearty conversation.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Thank you. Let’s turn to Jason. Jason, I know that we’ve talked about this before actually, as we’ve worked in the past, and I’m curious to know and have you speak on this concept of emotional stress and labor and really its intersection with student affairs professionals. Can you speak more to that?

Jason Lynch:
Yeah. So I wanna give a shout out to Dr. Kerry Klima, California State University, Long Beach, and I just published a chapter and Dr. Margaret Sallee’s book around creating sustainable careers in student affairs. And our chapter is about emotional labor and wellbeing and student affairs. And I think it goes really hand in hand with what but if Leah and Dr. Mistretta were talking about and in sort of their work I think that the kind of clear the air about like emotional labor or the, the, the high and low of what you’re talking about. There is sort of this mismatch of kind of what’s going on internally and like your ability to kind of check your face or check your physical, physical manifestations of that to be able to please or respond to those around you. What’s deemed appropriate by whoever is around you, right? Whether that’s a supervisor or your organization or your peers or the student or whoever. The term emotional labor was actually going back in the eighties by Arlie Hochschild. She published a book called, “The Managed Heart” on, and then her research is really about understanding the gender perspective of emotional labor and how in different professional environments there’s different expectations or different differentiated expectations for women and how they were engaging in emotional labor in different ways than were expected by men. And since then, the there’s definitely been that continuation of the gendered approach, but they’ve also talked about the racialized approach to emotional labor as well, and, and, and other sort of identity groups and that way, but for the way we kind of talked about it within the context of our chapter. The book was through this idea of burnout, compassion, fatigue, and traumatic stress, right? The student affairs professionals might experience. So we think about what Leah was just saying about you’re on call. You’re doing, you have some of these maybe less than fun student conduct hearings, but then perhaps you were having to bounce right back from that. You might be doing that one hour and the next hour you have to go into a department meeting where you’re expected to be all happy chappy and lovey-dovey, and do your warm, fuzzy up and downs on, and that’s emotional labor. Like I’ll say, I think the, not to, not to date our conversation right now, but we’re recording this on the day that the riots happened at the Capitol when it’s evening. Like I really enjoyed being with my colleagues here, but I’m engaging in emotional labor right now. Right? Like I’m angry and frustrated and scared and all these other things, but I’m putting on my game face to share this year, this year of myself. And and I work with with these other folks. And so I think that the kind of sum up the, and connecting this back to some of the other work around traumatic stress, like emotional labor has been shown to correlate with higher levels of things like secondary trauma, burnout. And even that types of emotional labor have been shown to differentiate in different ways for correlating differential ways to those concepts. So for instance, on the, you have this idea of surface level acting, which is a type of emotional labor where what you feel on the inside is completely different than what you are displaying on the outside. And then there’s this idea of deep acting where it’s like, you’re, you’re conjuring up like warm, fuzzy thoughts, so you can display a warm fuzzy face. And then you have sort of this idea of like real acting right of flight, leaving out authentically in your, in your expressions and how you’re behaving is as to what you’re feeling inside. And so the, the further you get away from that authentic self the more likely you are to experience burnout or some of those negative ramifications.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Thank you, Jason. You know, I, and that’s, I’m glad you raised that because, you know, obviously we are filming this and recording this on on, on what has been a very interesting day. And this is the end of the day. And putting on that game face has been definitely something that I’ve been doing all day and it is taxing. It is it is impactful particularly for many folks who may also be coming from different lived experiences and personal experiences. And so Jamarco, I want to build off of that a little bit and, and really talking about this emotional stress and labor, really this, this this game face often times that we put on. And really I’d like to hear more about maybe your research, the experiences of black male student affairs professionals and what type of emotional stress and labor challenges or secondary trauma or game face put on as, as student affairs professionals.

Jamarco Clark:
Absolutely. And I appreciate that that both you and dark colors, she used the word game face. You used the phrase “game face” because from my perspective and my experiences as a black man and working in the field, it’s always having that game face on. So it’s like, it’s, it’s always on. And, and that’s, that’s really, it comes from the tenants of men in general, not supposed to show emotion not supposed to, you know, show how you’re really feeling. And you couple that with working in student affairs, and again, as a black man working in student affairs, I think a lot of times like using today as an example, you know, there’s, there’s some people out there that are very pleased with, with the, the developments of things are happened. Whereas, you know, there’s, there’s some who aren’t in. And I think when you, when you’re dealing with that and working in the photo student affairs, you’re going to have some students who are pleased with it. And some who aren’t. So what student affairs teaches us is that as student affairs professionals, we’re supposed to keep it, you know, middle of the road keep our game fates on it and be able to be supportive of both sides or be accepting and hearing of, of both sides. So again, as a black man working in student affairs, the game face is always on for a lot of different reasons of, and the work that I do I just like you know, Leah and Molly, my introduction into what all this was, came from experiences in residence life. So my interest in the topic comes from a student death experience. So that, and that really made me take a step back and look, look at, you know, what does mental health really mean to me? And w what is my, what is my mental health mean to me? And prior to that never really had a lot of conversation about it, but that experience made me really focus on it and understanding of the traumas that were associated with that, or working in, working in residence life and responding that one’s called situations where you’ve got a student who they’ve had something really horrible happen at home, or they had something really horrible happened on campus. And just again, being a black man who a lot of folks look at you to be strong, you have to be strong in those moments, even though it’s really easy up on the inside or up to the core you just gotta be able to withstand and persist and be able to show, show that. And I think that’s also evident and true for, for a lot of my peers who are also black men working in student affairs. It’s just that, that foundational and, and that internal developments that we have growing up of, of not showing any emotion and, and being, you know, always being on and sharing the facts with freshmen as a whole do that. And they were always on. And, and I’ll talk about, you know, the urgency that, comes with that and understanding what that really means. I think the last thing that I would add when looking at the secondary trauma and looking at the emotional stress, I looking at everything that’s happening in our world, it’s so cyclical. So at, at a certain point, you’ve got to make sure you’re being protective of your mental wellbeing and, and deciding how much will I let this impact me because it’s going to continue to happen, you know? And so you’ve gotta be, make sure you’re taking care of yourself and, and, and being intentional and what you choose to indulge in. And I acknowledge that not everyone has an opportunity or as the right or privilege to be able to do so, but when, when you can have extra that exercise that I think it’s really important.

Glenn DeGuzman:
No, that that’s wonderful insight. I think about a lot of what you said. I feel like it also trans transferrable to other under our marginalized populations or generation professionals, or just folks who are really like, oftentimes putting on that game face of, you know, we may be experiencing some level of imposter syndrome and how does that play out in how we carry ourselves and where I might put on this game face, but deep down inside it’s, it’s eating me up. Right. So really great insight. And let’s stay, let’s stay on this a little bit, but maybe expand it to let, just reflecting on 2020. I mean, obviously so much has happened this past year, and it continues to trick onto 2021. Jason, I’m going to start with you to kick us off and maybe a little bit on the research that you’ve done, you recently conducted and completed a COVID 19 and trauma traumatic stress survey. Can you tell us more about the study? What did you find, or what did you discover?

Jason Lynch:
Yeah. And so back in the it was like August, September took sort of a national sample of different educators. The survey is really geared towards K through 12 and higher education educators, whether they were faculty, teachers, or administrators, staff, student affairs professionals for the purposes of our conversation, I’ll kind of focus on what I found with student affairs professionals, but out of, we had almost 2000 people take the survey and in 400 of those were student affairs professionals. And so I was looking at different what we call trauma responses, right? So there’s, there’s different behaviors that individually might not might not be considered a trauma response. Right. But taken together, you can kind of tell whether or not somebody might be having a response to a traumatic situation, right there, things like lack of sleep strong feelings, like anger, feel, fear, guilt hyper-vigilance this need to be perfect or grandiose sort of expectations of themselves and peers and things like that, right. and so in looking at the survey, like had people self report about these different sort of trauma responses and about the overall mental health, and what was interesting is the 80%, particularly within the, or talking to the student affairs professionals, 80% of student affairs professionals reported that their response to COVID-19 had negatively impacted their, their mental health. So out of this for nearly 400 responses 80% of those said that, and then whenever you’re looking at sort of the different trauma responses, right? Some of the top ones were fear, deal, anger lack of sleep exhaustion hyper-vigilance kind of this idea of is like kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop or this constant feeling that something bad is going to happen. Right. But what I found that was interesting and comparing some of these results, and this was actually true, whether you look at K through 12 or faculty, or sort of student affairs professionals, is that sort of the higher up you go in an organization, the there’s sort of this detachment. So like the, the people that are frontline, student affairs professionals, faculty members, teachers student services staff in K through 12, right. They are having a significantly more rates or magnitude of, trauma response behaviors and senior administrators as sort of the further wrapping go with this bubble. The less they’re experiencing that. And I would definitely attribute that to the fact that you’re, you’re, you’re doing, you’re working a lot with students. There’s a lot more pressure. It feels like in some of those situations, but one other thing, and I’ll, I’ll be quiet cause I know I’m talking a lot at this point, but when you’re looking at different predictors of what these trauma responses look like during the COVID-19 crisis, one of the things, the number one predictor was a student affairs professional sense of psychological safety of their workplace. So the less psychological safety, they felt the the greater, the rate of trauma response that they were reporting. But what was interesting on top of that is I’m measured on this construct of supervisor emotional maturity. And we can talk about that at some point, but that was directly related to their sense of psychological safety. So if you think about this in sort of a structured way your supervisor’s response or modeling or whatever creates the sense of psychological safety for you, which in turn gives you space to to either kind of take care of yourself to not the kind of, you’re kind of taking their lead or their, their behaviors are impacting how you’re, you’re, you’re sort of able to function. So yeah, so that’s, that’s a few of the feed, the things that I’ve found, I’m still kind of digging into the data.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Yeah. That’s wonderful. Keep digging because it makes me want to ask some follow-up questions. So what I’m hearing from you, Jason, is that newer staff are looking, you know, newer separate looking to their supervisors and, and, and trying to get a sense of how they are leading. And, and are they really understanding the psychological safety concerns that they may be having and, and that can help or hinder people’s ability to address or work through some of the emotional trauma, their experiences, is that what I’m hearing?

Jason Lynch:
Yeah, well, it’s not just the professional for the sample, it was kind of everybody. So whoever had a supervisor or whether it was their department chair, or they labeled as a supervisor or whatnot, however, what you bring up about young professionals is interesting and close in a separate survey on that I conducted a few years ago of student affairs professionals that are one of the top predictors of secondary traumatic stress was being was your sort of years of service or being a new professional, you are a lot more likely to experience secondary traumatic stress in your job. And so I think the common theme that is emerging between sort of the quantitative and qualitative information that I’m collecting is that there seems to be the sort of generational gap and understanding of what the student affairs role encompasses. And so you have sort of the old guard, people that have been in the field for forever that are like, Oh, like back in my day, like this is like, I had to deal with this roommate conflict. And it wasn’t that hard. And whereas the new professionals now, like we literally have people jumping out of buildings and that is like, how are we supposed to cope with that? Where, and so you have this sort of generational divide of like, suck it up and keep going. And the new people were like, well, we’re dealing with worse things than you and have less resources. And then now there’s this compounded issue of less empathy as well, because like, there’s the, the older folks are like, well, like what are you going to do? You know?

Glenn DeGuzman:
Wow, thank you, Jason. Let’s, let’s start looking for solutions here. So Leah, you know, I know that you’ve done research on secondary traumatic stress recovery practices, really to limit the experiences of burnout. Can you share with our audience, some recovery practices that you advise for student affairs professionals, especially in, you know, we’ve been talking a lot about residential communities. How do we do that? How do, how do leaders guide their staff to take care of themselves and their wellbeing?

Leah Ward:
Absolutely. So I really got interested in the recovery practices after I took one of my independent studies. I created a recovery journal for my colleagues that serve on call. It was meant to be just a document that you can journal your experience. So what songs do you listen to when you’re on call? What did, what does your body respond? How does your body respond to the duty phone ring? Which for most of us is pure fear and panic. I actually created one for our students staff this year that were new to working in housing residence life at the University of Dayton, especially cause we’re managing COVID. So I think for me, there’s a few things that I’ve thought about, especially now that we’re working from home more often. I’m able to in my campus housing separate my workspace from my home space. I think that’s really important if I was in person still with our students, that would be able to do that with my office on campus. I think that’s really helpful to have a separate space for that to kind of give a break of where you put your energy and where you hold that stress. I think it’s, it’s important to take time to recharge. I’ve always been conditioned from my graduate experience to say, if you have sick days, those are mental health days as well. So take a day, step away. A lot of institutions are doing more with less, so you can feel easily overworked and your plate might be, you know, a little bit more full than it usually is. So taking a day to recharge, turn your work phone off, turn off your emails. I think it’s equally important to mentor those graduate students and undergraduate students, if you are a full-time professional. I know for a lot of the graduate students I work with, they’re not looking to be higher ed professionals long term. So for a lot of them, it’s just, I think, helpful to check in and say, how are you managing? A lot of them are taking a position in housing for the benefit of living for free. But that comes with a lot of added work that does not separate the work from where you live. So I think just checking in with them and I’ve been really excited this year so far to talk to my undergraduate students staff, a lot them have been managing COVID from a high stress and high anxiety, anxiety place, which I think makes sense, they’re feeling a little responsible for their student’s behavior. So for me, I think when it comes to that taking care of themselves piece, I try to talk to them about your students are gonna make decisions for themselves outside of what you have either shared with them, or are you, what’s your expectation of them is but even just saying, like take a step back too, because it’s might not be what you want to do, long-term either. So how do you manage that anxiety and your own personal safety around this virus? And still do the work. And sometimes that just means having transparent one-on-one conversations with them and say, tell me how you’re feeling. And we can work through this together or coaching people out of the position. If it feels like maybe this is too much to manage because at the end of the day, they’re in school to be students and not to be students, staff, something that’s really important too, for the undergraduate and graduate students to have that conversation.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Wow. That’s wonderful. You know, I’m hearing the list that you just went through and I’m thinking my goodness, I could relate to so many and had, had do several on the lighter side. And I don’t, I guess it’s not literally lighter side, but just even the, the the duty phone idea. Right. So I know that I’ve changed the sound of my personal phone, just because that Ding just it’s, it just, it’s so impactful for me in how I just react and small things. So let’s keep going. I’d like to keep hearing more Molly. I know that you have a huge passion for working with new practitioners in a variety of educational settings. What advice would you give knowing that the potential for burnout is there. And, and I think as a follow-up to that, you know, I think I’d like what Leah said about like mentoring our next generation of and future student affairs professionals differently. Do we need to prepare our student affairs professionals differently after what, after 2020?

Molly Mistretta:
Absolutely. you know, 2020 has really been a year of crises, right? And, and that’s, that’s what people are responding to. It’s, it’s not just about the pandemic. It’s about all sorts of upheaval in our communities and our workplaces in our homes, you know, in terms of maybe financial or health-related issues. And so I think people are really dealing, I mean, can, can legitimately call this a traumatic year to live through. And so, you know, I think we’re, we’re all dealing with some level of trauma based on this, what I’m calling the year of crisis. I love Leah’s list and on observations because I think they’re so important. Oftentimes we tend to talk about burnout as if there’s only one part of the equation in terms of preventing it and, and, and lay a lot of responsibility with the individual, right? So someone’s burnout, then we say, well, they just weren’t taking care of themselves. Or if they’re experiencing compassion, fatigue, they’re just not as resilient. Right. And that’s that’s wrong because there is an, there is just, there’s an individual piece. There’s also an organizational responsibility here. And, and that’s where I I’ve, I tend to be hammering the most lately in terms of, of my responses to them. I think that we cannot, as a profession, continue to lay the responsibly responsibility for this solely at the feet of individuals. And that we, as a profession need to promote healthy workplace environments. And we need to push that our organizations be more responsive and more supportive for an individual struggling with these types of issues. And so I think that means some very basic things. We need to ensure that everyone in our profession has adequate salary and time off. We have all worked in environments where, you know, the, the going the going phrase is, well, you know, this is student affairs, you’re supposed to work 50 plus hours a week, or, you know, in the month of August, what is the day off even on Sunday’s right. And so we, we need to look closely at our culture and, and look at how we, I think perpetuate a lot of this as well. I think as institutions in organizations, we can’t keep expecting, particularly as Jason pointed out our youngest and most vulnerable professionals to absorb the trauma that they do working on the front lines with students and provide no institutional mental health support for that. I think we can’t count on every institution in, in the United States or even outside the United States to ensure that there’s an adequate mental health provision to their health plan. So they can go seek the support that they need. If they’ve experienced working with a student who has had high levels of trauma in their life. I think beyond that, we also need to make sure that as you were talking about the mentorship of new professionals, one of the things that you see in the literature time and time again, is the reason people leave the field. And about some, you know, some research says as high as 50 to 60% of professionals within their first five years leave the field. And they point to the lack of good supervision. And I think as we’ve been asked to do more with less resources, what has fallen by the wayside is good supervision. We’re expecting new professionals to jump into frontline roles with little in the way of orientation, little of the way of onboarding and expect them to figure it out on their own and sort of absorb all these emotional impacts on their own. And I think we need to figure out a way to do some trauma informed supervision to ensure that new staff are getting good supervision and that those supervisors are implementing things in the workplace like self-care plans, helping staff establish meaningful and realistic boundaries between their personal and professional lives. And, and also making sure that the institutions that we’re working in are providing meaningful and emotional supports. And that’s a tough one because that’s going to be a huge cultural change, not just for the profession, but also for the institutions we work in.

Glenn DeGuzman:
That’s outstanding insight. And speaking of good supervision, let’s turn to ]Jamarco. Jamarco in your professional role as a Director of Leadership and Engagement, how do you feel, what do you feel our profession would do better to support professionals and find that, that balance?

Jamarco Clark:
I think, I think Molly just hit it all on the hand. I think it’s going to be a, it’s a cultural shift and really I’m going to add, I’m going to say this, but we’ve got to disrupt what we’ve known, and especially in this environment that we’re in. But the other thing that Molly said that really resonates with me is that trauma informed piece that trauma informed leadership. And we’ve talked about trauma on this call and we’ve really got to come to grips with that and really understand what that means. I think that could vary institution to institution. Earlier I talked about that urgency and student affairs, we, a lot of things that, that we come across are urgent for us, or at least we, we make them urgent. So really understanding what’s urgent and what’s not urgent understanding our emphasis on urgency because what happens is when those new professionals come into the field, they’re always seeing this urgency. That’s go, go, go. Especially in August. You know, they, they come in July, July is kind of smooth. You get the training in August, it’s go, go, go. Everything is urgent. So, so me personally, I I think something that, I’m really horrible at I practice, but I don’t always preach it, but I love being on the go. I love working, you know, those 50 hours a week, but it’s because that was, that was instilled in me right away. And it’s something that I’ve kinda based myself on. But I really work with, with my the folks who work, work on my team to make sure that they’re taking care of themselves. It’s okay to take time away. It’s okay to step away from the job. You know, if, if it, if it gets to be too much throughout the course of the day. And I think specifically through the time of COVID and working from home, it’s really important that, that our profession and that our folks who work in the field understand that we’re at home working and we’re not working at home. I think there’s a very distinct difference there. And especially through this pandemic in who knows how long it’ll be, hopefully, you know, hopefully we get some sense of normalcy assuming that I have the, the, the luxury and great, I’m really happy that I’m able to be in my office right now, but I know not everyone has that. So going back to what we had talked about, being able to find ways to create opportunities to separate from, from, you know, if you’re working at your kitchen table all day, you’re not really providing yourself those opportunities. So being able to do that and, and, and the profession and the leaders in profession need to be able to communicate that effectively and clearly to our professionals in the field. And, and then I think it also, it’s really important that our professionals have the, the understanding that they can also create that for themselves. I think that’s really important. And because, you know, it’s going to go back to the, one of the things I said earlier again, is being protective of your mental wellbeing. That’s very important. And, and I think, I think those are the things that, that we can do to be able to find that balance, but also promote that balance for our professionals in the field.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Wow. Thank you. Thank you for taking us home. So let’s wrap this up this podcast, and this is sort of like the question that we always ask our panelists at the very end. This podcast is called student affairs now, and during this conversation this wonderful conversation. What has bubbled to the top of your mind that has you pondering questioning maybe something you’re excited about or something that’s still troubling you now? And I have to choose who goes first, Jason tag, you’re it!

Jason Lynch:
I had a feeling that that was going to, that was going to happen. Thanks Glenn. So I think that, I think I have a couple of things that like come to the top of mind, like one is we talk about the different lenses that we’ve been looking at this idea of stress and burnout and trauma through with each, each of our work. But I think that one of the ways that I really like to, or one of the ways that I try to like argue for this for the profession in general is through a sense of ethics, right? So you look at social work as a, as a profession, you look at counseling as a profession, and you look at nursing as a profession, they all have statements of ethics about mental, mental health, and wellness for yourself and how that is a, an ethical imperative on, and while the NASPA ACPA competency document kind of toys around with that under their purse, by the professional ethics competency, they toy around it a little bit. It’s never directly stated. And when you think about it, like if you were suffering from burnout, compassion, fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, whether you’re a new professional all the way up through to a senior level professional, you’re not making decisions in a, on an irrational ways sometimes, right? Because if you’re kind of one of the classic trauma responses, this is idea of black and white dualistic thinking. So if you’re not able to embrace complexity and be creative in your decision making process, you’re harming everybody around you in the organization, whether it’s the students, whether it’s the people you’re supervising your peers as there really is an ethical imperative. And so I think the last thing that kind of bubbled up for me is that I’ll often feel like that we have a lot of these conversations and ever since I was a new professional way back in the day, these conversations had been happening, but I don’t think anything is going to change until like our national organizations and people that are leaders in the field are really going to step up and start talking about this. And I think that in the form of grant money in the form of recognizing these things through workshops or institutes I think that this, like, we’re going to keep having these conversations until like Jamarco has said, there’s some of the major disruption in the field. And it’s, I think that’s, that’s sort of, what’s on my mind. Thank you, Jason. I heard Jamarco, so let’s go to Jamarco.

Jamarco Clark:
I think, yeah, tag, I’m it. I think for me, it’s really that idea of like, I, I hope to have a long career in student affairs and I’m a person who I went to college and I wanted to be an early childhood educator. So I wanted to be a pre-K teacher. And I learned of student affairs because of my people who did the work that I do when I was in college. And I think it’s really important that, that we’re, we’re taking care of our field. I think we need to take care of, and that’s going to come from what Dr. Lewis just shared, you know people have got to speak out and talk about what it means to, to save. I don’t want to say save the profession, but to really give the profession the, the respect and the or the professionals and the respect, the respect, and the just the, the things that we’ve earned, you know, from all the hard work our work is about the students. And, and, and that’s always going to be the forefront. That’s always going to be very important. However, I think it’s also important that we’re, we’re taking care of the folks who are doing the work and, and that needs to happen at a lot of different levels. And, and circling that back before I have someone else be, be tagged that trauma informed leadership and coupling that with some trauma informed care, I think that could be very vital and take them step forward. Thank you

Glenn DeGuzman:
Very well said. Jamarco, I’m going to stay in a trouble. You get to choose who goes next.

Jamarco Clark:
I get to choose next? I’m going to go with Molly.

Molly Mistretta:
Oh, thanks, Jamarco. I will advocate as we’ve been talking, something occurred to me. So my colleagues and I have been playing this game over the course of the pandemic and the game is sort of what will stay after all of this is over. And one of the things that we vote for is, you know, we do a lot of things, particularly in the field of student affairs, just because that’s the way they’ve always been done. And if there’s a silver lining of the year 2020, I hope it’s that we have disrupted ourselves enough to really ask ourselves the hard questions of what needs to stay, but what, what can fall away? What is no longer essential? What did this year show us that wasn’t essential? And maybe what we learned this year is we don’t need to, we don’t need half the meetings, the populate, our calendars, you know, maybe we don’t need half of the programs we run, just because we’ve always run them. So I’m hopeful that maybe this is the time for us as a profession to really reckon with some of this, because we realized we cannot continue the way we have.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Wow. That’s a wonderful game. And that’s like a, that’s a podcast topic right there. What will stay? Leah, you get the last word.

Leah Ward:
Wow. Well, I think I’ll have to quote Molly here. I think since a “year of crisis” says, come and gone and now we’re entering another one. It seems like. I think that for me, I feel hopeful that now that we have a shared experience, we’ve all lived through COVID-19. I think that gives us the ability to talk about trauma a little bit differently. When I first met Dr. Lynch, I talked to him after a student death, and I was like, I don’t feel like I should have trauma. My friends that responded should, and he corrected me that, you know, it, it compiles and it’s there it’s, it might not be me responding, but it’s me talking to the students who are impacted. And I think for me now that we’ve all experienced a pandemic, we now have that in to talk about trauma with all of our colleagues, that thing before it became our individual narratives where ours for our for the sharing. But now we can say we’ve all lived through it. We’ve all felt the panic. We’ve all seen target with empty shelves of no toilet paper. We’ve all seen folks trying to get tested. We’ve seen what that looks like. So how do we use that to say, how will we talk about trauma for everyone knowing that we all at least have this experience in common? So I’m feeling hopeful

Glenn DeGuzman:
Well said, we’ve run out of time. I want to thank this panel for your time today in this episode of student fairs now. So Dr. Jason Lynch at Appalachian State University, Leah Ward at University of Dayton, Jamarco Clark University, of Iowa, and Dr. Molly, Mistretta at Slippery Rock University. If you’re interested in contacting any of our panelists, please go to our website and get to their social media account. While you’re there, please subscribe to SS Now newsletter. You can visit our website@studentaffairsnow.com definitely check out our growing archives. Please subscribe to the podcast, invite others to subscribe, share on social, leave a five star review. You can find us on social or retweet share and like reach out to me as well. If you’d like to hear more on topic, this episode was because we heard from our audience. So again, my name is Dr. Glenn DeGuzman. Thanks again to today’s guests and to everyone who is watching and listening. See you next time.