ABC: Always Be Compassionate
A call-to-action for being people-centric in our work in academia
Note: This article was published in Vol. 3 of the Dragonfly Digital Diaries, published in March 2021 by Dragonfly Mental Health (the global consortium for academic mental health). You can read the original article here: Newsletter | Dragonfly Mental Health (note: links open in a new tab or window)
“Always sounds a bit extreme. Can that be most circumstances or under specific conditions instead?” If this is what you’re wondering after reading the title, then, (a) I empathize with what you feel, and (b) compassion always needs to be accompanied by boundaries.
Think of compassion as empathy combined with action and boundaries. Dr. Brené Brown defines empathy as one’s ability to feel with another person when they share an experience or what they’re feeling [1]. This is a skill that can be cultivated and I will encourage you to check out Dr. Brown’s work [2,3,4], to learn more about intentionally developing this skill.
Now, more than ever, empathy is a core requirement for all of us in academia -- students, postdocs, staff, faculty and administrators alike. I say this because we have all been talking for many many years about processes, policies and practices in academia not being people-centric, about how academic burnout is a real thing, about how people have to choose between their careers and being there for their families/relationships, and about how nothing seems to be changing. We all remember how people make us feel in a given situation. If someone hasn’t listened, truly listened or held space for what we may have felt in an experience, we remember. If nothing has come out of complaints or concerns we may have raised, we remember. If it feels like there is injustice all around, we remember. We remember these in our minds and bodies. We suppress it many times because we do not know who to turn to when we need help. We bring it with us to our families and all our relationships. This toxicity that we may have experienced lives with us until we collectively say no more, until we seek help to heal, until we become part of the system and work towards tangible change. And therefore, empathy is a required skill for all of us in academia.
This brings me to the action part of compassion. With a foundation of empathy and having an understanding of what some toxic experiences can do to people, we can work towards changing it. Change does not happen in a day. Tangible and sustainable change requires us to intentionally and objectively look at the cause, the behaviours that are not okay and examine the action steps that we can take to change it. There will be experiences that make us feel angry, unheard and like an imposter. Many experiences will make us feel vulnerable, and to this I will point to another one of Dr. Brown’s definitions - this time of vulnerability. She defines vulnerability as something that makes us experience “uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure”[2] and guess what, these are the same feelings we experience in moments when we feel weak and when we feel courageous. Vulnerability, in a way, is like the mid-point in the vulnerability-courage continuum. If we lean in to what we feel and work towards our goals, it makes us courageous and more resilient, but if we do not, then it makes us less resilient and can lead to this feeling becoming a weakness.
Understand and validate your feelings, the ones that make you feel happy and the ones that make you angry, because the feeling of anger helps you identify boundaries. Boundaries are simply an acknowledgement of what is okay and what is not for us, be it in our work or in our personal lives. Understand that boundaries can evolve and we really need to be friends with our feeling of anger and reflect on the situation and be aware to acknowledge the specific boundary. Working with a professional (e.g., a therapist) can definitely be helpful in this endeavour. Understand that our expectations and our boundaries can also evolve when we move between different roles in academia - for example, our expectations and boundaries may evolve when we are no longer students and we enter into faculty/administrative roles. People’s expectations of us change and so do our own expectations. We start to realize that the demands of our roles may not leave us any time to work towards change or what we thought would be a straightforward change may not be and for a valid reason. This is not wrong, it’s just an acknowledgement of the reality that things can change based on our evolving experiences. But the core aspect here is that knowing our boundaries is very important to practice empathy and to be compassionate.
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines compassion as “sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it”. Many experiences in academia leave people in distress. When we ourselves may be going through our own experiences or are feeling unheard, it may feel incredibly challenging to be compassionate towards someone else’s experiences. So, learn to be self-compassionate too [5]. And just being compassionate doesn’t mean that issues or challenges will disappear; no, they will not. This gives us the ability to be resilient and helps us work through our challenges with kindness.
So if you’re wondering how it is possible to always be compassionate, let me tell you -- identify your purpose. Begin by identifying values [6] that are important to you. Then think about a purpose, a vision [7] for your life, that you want to contribute towards through your work. Recognize that after you define your core purpose, this could evolve in the future, but every decision you make needs to be in the service of this purpose. This core purpose is where we can choose to be people-centric, to have compassion as one of our core values, because despite our experiences, our challenges, we are all responsible to leave academia a little better than we experienced it, so that one day -- hopefully not too far in the future -- we can see people in academia thriving, collaborating in healthy ways, setting healthy expectations of each other and honouring each others’ boundaries in our workplaces, and of course, always being compassionate. We are all people experiencing academia in our own ways. It reminds me of the saying that became popular during the pandemic -- “we are all in the same storm, but we are not all on the same boat.” Recognizing this aspect, let’s all work together to at least help control this storm so that our journeys on our own boats may be peaceful and healthy.
So, in closing, I will say again: always be compassionate.
Links and notes
[1] https://www.thersa.org/discover/videos/rsa-shorts/2013/12/Brene-Brown-on-Empathy and https://brenebrown.com/
[2] Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly. New York: Gotham Books.
[3] Brown, B. (2017). Braving the Wilderness. New York: Random House.
[4] Brown, B. (2018). Dare to Lead. New York: Random House.
[5] Dr. Kristin Neff defines self-compassion as a combination of self-kindness, mindfulness and a recognition of common humanity.
[6] A list of values is available on Dr. Brown’s website, which may serve as a starting point for you. You can find it here: https://daretolead.brenebrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Values.pdf
[7] If you would like to learn more about identifying your core purpose or vision, I recommend reading the book “The Infinite Game” by Simon Sinek (2019, Portfolio/Penguin).
