What I Got Wrong & Help Please
Kia ora e hoa! Lots more below but briefly I have openings and would love your advice for a talk I'm drafting. xx Kerry
Dear Helpers,
It is common for us to feel grief and sadness when we work with the best of intentions then see so little impact. I used to tell mentees our reactions made sense because we were reckoning with the limits of our control. It is hard to accept how little we may actually impact. But I think I got this wrong.
I just finished reading Sharon Salzburg’s "Faith" for the third time (quoted at length below). It’s a doozy of a book, dizzying in insight and depth. I learn more each time I revisit it. After this pass, I kept coming back to one key point:
What if we know very little of the impact we make on the world, and our discomfort is not with lack of control but with the lack of knowing. Sharon says, "We don’t know the ultimate unfolding of any story; certainly not enough to decide that what we do has no effect."
Somehow this feels lighter...softer to me. I just don't know. I can sit with no knowing, I can keep nudging the world toward kindness and love, accepting I will not see the final fruits of this labor.
This leads to my humble request from you:
Help Please
I'm giving a talk in 2 weeks on coming back after burnout. The talk has 4 parts:
Part 1: defining burnout, moral injury, and what causes them
Part 2: how to treat these forms of suffering, with case examples
**Part 3: concrete skills for helpers
Part 4: developing a regenerative plan to move forward
But I'm struggling with the best frame for part 3. People will just be back from lunch and already endured a lot of talking and learning. Please hit reply and tell me which of these topics you'd be most interested in:
A. The Job Orientation I Wish We All Got
B. Core Skills Needed For Burnout Prevention and Recovery
C. a group exercise examining a list of 10 "Dialectics of Helping"
Thank you / Ngā mihi nui in advance for your vote. Wishing you warmth and peace and safety in this challenging time. Warmly, Kerry
Longer Quote from Sharon Salzburg
"The reality that everything is connected doesn’t imply that the events in life are predetermined, or “meant to be,” as though we need to feel ground down by the inexorable conditions of life. Rather it evokes a picture of our lives as seen from a perspective in which we and others and the varied events of our lives, whether desired or untoward, are contingent, related, in concert.
This interdependence is both good news and bad news. The bad news is exemplified in environmental devastation...The good news is that, according to the same law of interconnectedness, what we do individually and collectively does make a difference. The essence of chaos theory is something called “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” This means that a very small perturbation or change in a system can have a profound effect; that tiny, local actions can have widespread, far-off, complex consequences.
There is a far bigger picture to life than what we are facing in any particular moment. To see beyond the one small part in front of us and not think that’s all there is, we have to look past our ready conclusions. When we see only the suffering before us and our own actions in response to it, it is no wonder we might conclude that what we do seems inadequate.
We may think the final result of something we’ve done is visible on page four of the story, or page seven. But as we turn page after page, we step outside our own limited perspective and realize that there is more to come.
Both the suffering and our efforts to address it are woven into an immense but hidden flow of interaction, a dynamic process of action and consequence that doesn’t stop with us and our particular role. We don’t know the ultimate unfolding of any story; certainly not enough to decide that what we do has no effect.
Salzberg, Sharon. Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience (pp. 127-131). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Updates
- Openings
- For people living in North America, I have a few openings for professional mentoring...aka behavior coaching or therapist supervision or help with burnout and setting boundaries. Email me if you're interested and please spread the word.
- For people in New Zealand, I have therapy openings for people in the helping professions or people who experienced a trauma in the last five years.
- North American Readers START HERE: A Practical Guide For the Overwhelmed, is now available as an e-book on Amazon and Bookshop and will be available in paperback on October 20th! Pre-order now from your favorite bookshop.
Let's Hang Out!
More details on all events at this link.
- NELSON Book Event: 13 March 2026 Book signing and talk at Page & Blackmore Booksellers
- Day Long Training: 14 March 2026 - "Start Here and Keep Going: Developing regenerative work and life practices after burnout" - all welcome!
- PETONE Book Event: 19 March 2026, joint author talk with Ben Sedley
- Online Training: 15 Sept 2026 "ACT For Burnout" - register here.