Ep 14 Professional Persona

Brendan, an experienced social worker, discusses the importance of professional persona and authenticity in social work. He reflects on the need to be relatable and connect with clients while maintaining professionalism. He also shares his own journey of finding his authentic self within his professional persona. Brendan highlights the importance of having mentors who support and encourage authenticity. He emphasizes the need for social workers to regularly evaluate and re-evaluate their professional persona to ensure it aligns with their true selves. He acknowledges the challenges of conforming to organizational expectations while staying true to oneself. Brendan believes that social workers should practice what they preach and prioritize their own well-being and authenticity. He encourages social workers to take action and make positive changes in both their personal and professional lives. Kia Ora and welcome to Bellbirds Social Work Squad, the podcast for everything social worky. And I have a wonderful special guest with me today. His name is Brendan and he is an extensively experienced social worker and so it's a real privilege to be able to talk to him today. So welcome, Brendan. Well, it's a lovely way to be described, thanks, Rachel. Well, it's completely true as well. Am I allowed to play with the fidget toys during the day? You can play with whatever you like. Can't make too much noise. Yeah, exactly. All right. When I start scowling at you, it means put the toy down. Okay. I'll give it a go. Yeah. It's a lovely introduction and a good introduction to the topic I wanted to talk about today. Perfect. What a great segway. So carry on. Well, as I was walking in, because we're thinking about what we're going to talk about, I did think about professional persona and that projection we make of what it is to be a professional. We often fall into that when there's a problem, but actually, like lots of things, it's worth thinking about when there's not a problem. How do I want to be perceived? And I'm doing that now. I'm thinking about what I'm talking about, but I'm thinking about how I'm talking about it. Is this going to be interesting? Yeah. Because I care about that. I care about what the audience or the other person is going to think about and get from me. That's professional persona for me. And it leads on to a second part of that, which will, maybe we have these two things. Professional persona and what I call the professional veneer. How strong is your ethical backbone? What is your limit? I've always thought, and I still think this, we all have a limit before we crack. We fall away from that professional veneer. And I've always thought that part of the role of a social worker, and any other profession, I think social workers are more introspective. They think about this kind of stuff. How am I perceived? And is that perception accurate? And is it helpful to my client? Because I think if we are too professional, is that the thing? You know what I mean? When you meet professionals and you think, you're keeping me at arm's length, and that's okay in this role, but in social work, we need to let people in, right? So how do you maintain a professional persona, yet connect with people? I mean, that's everything from... I mean, I remember when I first was a social worker in this country, 21, 22 years old. I mean, if you think I've got an English accent now, you should have heard me 25 years ago, going out into communities, young, female, white, very English, pretty middle class, very conscious about what I was wearing, or how I was... All of that is a first impression. That's got nothing even to do with my personality, necessarily. But in terms of how I'm perceived as a professional, are you going to let me in your house? One. Are you going to feel like I'm relatable? Do I understand you? Am I someone that you want to talk to, that you want to share your vulnerability with, that you want to invite into your life? That's part of that professionalism, too. But I was thinking about just the persona and the veneer, and I wonder, does the veneer crack or does it fall away if actually the persona becomes so much more of a projection away from who we actually are? Of course. Does that then stretch the ability for that veneer to be stable, or actually is it something that... Do you know what I mean? Does that impact its ability to be stable? Yeah. And how much of you gets to come into your work. And that is totally dependent on where you work and the mentors you look up to. And I remember as a new social worker, I became a social worker at 25, that's over 25 years ago. So I think about, I knew nothing, right? So who was I modified by and who did I look up to? And I remember my first placement and the people I was working with, an RTLB, a counsellor who very much lived in the world of, be you first. Fantastic. What a wonderful place to be. And then when I started working within a government department, you get moulded into protection, protect yourself and protect your work more than I was when I was in the community. And that moulds you as well. It's not quite a forced thing, but you certainly are moulded by the culture of an organisation in positive ways and negative ways. So I think more recently, last few years in particular, I've stopped caring what people necessarily think about me as a person. So that takes years and it takes mentors who continue to say to you, be authentic, be yourself. And if you can do that in your workplace, you're halfway there because the families we work with need that authenticity in order to build relationship, in order for us to bring about shared change, right? So if we are going out to do our work and we are not, or our professional persona is such that it's vastly different to our personal lives, I think people see through that pretty regularly. Absolutely. And that was really fundamental to my learning. It was less about my accent or my clothes or whatever. And actually, I think what people connect with is that I'm here to be genuinely interested in your life, genuinely of service, to have values and principles. In the way that I work, an authentic person that is here for you, that then breaks down some of those kind of things. It was my worry that was projecting out more than it was a reality of what people were seeing. Yeah. So were your mentors in a position to support you with that? And you can answer that. I want to get one more thought out of my head and that's around, if you live two lives, you have a professional life and a personal life, and this comes up for social workers all the time. This is the challenge for social workers out there listening, is if your professional persona isn't a place where you can share your personality, then at some point you're going to have a problem. At some point there's going to be a clash. And it might not be the obvious ones, running into clients at the same bar or parties that you go to or those sorts of things that happen with social work. It could be as simple as, I'm not being authentic to who I am and that's coming into my professional world because there's a clash of culture between my personal values and my professional values. So is your professional persona as close to your personality as you can possibly get, and are you in an organisation that supports you to do that? Yeah. Have you had mentors that supported you to do that? No. Right. No, I mean my first job as a social worker was in a government agency, the same government agency that you used to work in, and I was more just instructed, you know, don't wear clothes like that, don't wear too much jewellery, don't wear make-up, you know, kind of like rather than who's Rachel, so no, I didn't have any kind of support. I had to find my way in that. When I'm thinking about the persona and our personality, but where I've got into trouble recently is I guess where my professional persona becomes my identity, and then who am I if I'm not that job or that profession? And that's almost where it became an overstep for me, that without the job or the title or the overstep, and for people who've heard other podcasts where I've talked about this, you know, I've got a little bit lost with who's Rachel outside of Rachel the social worker. So it's kind of finding how to be authentically me inside the professional persona without the professional persona being the only version of me that there is. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely, and if we're not re-evaluating that regularly then, because that's some of the conceptual stuff within social work, that is, we don't often get to that point, right? Unless someone's pointing out a fault, how often do we sit down and go, OK, so am I being true to myself or am I being authentic? No one's really asking those questions, right? So we only do it in crisis. So why not do it during the good times and go, OK, so am I dressing the way I want to dress? Am I wearing the makeup I want to wear? Is my hair color the color I want it to be? Things that are quite difficult in some organizations because if there's not overt challenge, there's covert challenge or there is a responsibility, and yet social work is all about diversity. It's all about being authentic and true to yourself. When you get into a work environment, it's like, yeah, be free, but don't do that. Yeah, but also conform. But also conform, and we don't do that here. We don't, you know, if you get the sideways, I call it the eyebrow of doubt. You know, one eyebrow goes up, right? And that's instantly that moment of, have I done something wrong? Because all I'm doing is trying to be authentic to me, and we talk about it. We do that with clients all the time. Do we do it for ourselves? That's a challenge. That's a challenging question. We don't think about it much as social workers. For ourselves, we should because I think anything we practice with our client base, surely we want to practice on ourselves as well. I had good mentors. My first placement as a social worker, as I said, an RTLB counsellor, both of them said, you be you first. That's how you want to be. So those early experiences as a social worker for me encouraged me to want to do the job, because if you're not getting something out of it, you know, and we get that a lot, right? We have, in our work for now, we have people come to us with issues and say, well, this is, I've got these things going on. Very seldom is it the work base, in that the work with clients, it's about their workplace. And I'm sure you do what I do, and it's like, okay, I've heard that, now what are you going to do about it? And I'm here to support you to do something about it, but social work has to be action based. We are assessed, understand, plan, and then do something about it. It's that do something about it that's important. There's agency to it. There's agency to it. If we don't take what we've learned and then make some, sometimes some pretty difficult decisions, then is it social work? And you could go, we could sit here for hours, but maybe we write this down for another topic. You go back to why did I get into social work? What is it about social work that drew me in, in the first place? And that can be a weird conversation, right? Because people have taken some funny roads to social work. I think it's, I still think it's easier to come to social work later in life. I really do. It's difficult to recommend it to a 20 year old. Not trying to put people off, but it gets easier as you get older, I think, because you do have life experience and you can take some of the disappointments a little bit less to heart. You, I think, and myself, definitely, kind of learned the hard way, kids. I was in there at 24, 25, didn't know anything and learned the hard way, made mistakes and became good at being reflective and introspective and trying to work out, as you're going along, trying to work out, am I doing the right thing? I still do that now. I still do that after 20 years in the work. I still question most of what I do so that I'd have that reflective feedback loop for myself because my clients deserve that. They deserve that I am constantly re-looking at, am I approaching this work in the right way and from the right headspace? What's my professional persona? Am I somebody who I would want to go and talk to? And I think we should always do that. I hope I do that until the end of my career because I think people who stop doing that are not working to the best of their abilities. But I graduated as a social worker in 2000, so that's 24 years ago now. So yeah, 23, don't do the math and work out how old I am. Yeah, I think it is really young and even though, obviously, at the time, you kind of feel like you're mature and old and all the rest of it, things were quite simple in my mind. Things were kind of right or wrong. It was quite kind of binary. It was quite kind of like, this was this way or it was that way. And then you get into complexity and particularly having my own children or having my own kind of things in my life, you realize that actually social work is hard. So I mean, it has been a huge kind of journey. I think you do tend to find social workers come into it later in life and that's probably a good reason for that because I think a little bit of world experience is good. And I think about the three-legged stool, which talks about your academic learning, your life experience, and then your work experience and the balance of those. And if actually you don't have much to draw on from a life experience point of view, then you're not necessarily as balanced on the foundation of your social work. It's a profession that I think is really important to have that reflection, to constantly be assessing, yep, thinking about what is it that I'm bringing to this? Am I doing, are they getting the best from me? What am I bringing to this? I mean, I was doing some research earlier and even thinking about all the stuff like confirmation bias and stuff that we impact, how we do assessments, who we are, what we're bringing in, that kind of, that persona that sits there, my professional persona, but it is me, it's not separate to, but it's acknowledging there's the me in it and I think you've got to be transparent, authentic, and open-minded to all of that. Yeah, there's another aspect to that which I think differentiates some professionals from others and you will have met them in your own life when you've gone and seen professionals and I've got professionals in my world that I rely on because they're good at their job, I trust them, and they get on with it. We've all got that. The concept of continuous learning, I don't remember the first time I heard that, continuous learning. Probably when I was in social work school many years ago, no, you've got to have continuous learning. I don't think I've understood that in my 20s, like, yeah, of course, cool, no worries. As you mature, continuous learning becomes a little bit more difficult because it's more of an active process. I think you're a sponge when you're in your 20s and you're starting out in a new job and it's all exciting. How do you maintain it through a career? Because continuous learning for me now is the fact that I can give you examples of things I've learned this week about how to do the job and that's after being in the job for well over 20 years. The moment I lose that, the moment I lose that little bit of spark about, yes, I want to understand that, now, I'm going to a seminar next week on autism. Now, how many times have I been to seminars on autism or learned about autism and understood autism? So why go? Continuous learning. There will be something that comes out of that next week that I will learn from and it will come into my practice and it will improve my professional persona. It might only be a moment. Some of our training, we've all gone to trainings where you come away thinking, man, that was a long day. Now, what did I get out of it? What did I actually get out of it? That's an active thing. That's an active thing of your professional persona. You go into it with the attitude you're going to get something out of it, you will, and you'll come out of it and learn something. I think the other thing that happens with being in the business a fair amount of time, the learning happens. It's not as active. I think when you're younger, you've got to study stuff. It gets easier because you're adding little bits to a lot of knowledge rather than adding a lot of knowledge to the little bits. I think the other thing that happens with being in the business a fair amount of time, the learning happens. It's not as active. I think when you're younger, you've got to study stuff. It gets easier because you're adding little bits to a lot of knowledge rather than adding a lot of knowledge to the little bits. I think the other thing that happens with being in the business a fair amount of time, the learning happens. It's not as active. I think when you're younger, you've got to study stuff. It gets easier because you're adding little bits to a lot of knowledge rather than adding a lot of knowledge to the little bits. I think you scaffold information onto what you already know, but if you've picked up something new in the last week, you've got it. That means you are open to the idea that I need to maintain. That means you are open to the idea that I need to maintain. That means you are open to the idea that I need to maintain. That means you are open to the idea that I need to maintain. That means you are open to the idea that I need to maintain. not only is that the right thing to do, we are required to. The board requires us to maintain our skill base. Again, it comes into your professional persona around, am I actively engaging with that training or is this just a day away from work? That's the honest question, right? Am I ticking a box? But that's it. And I think for me, that is the thing. It's the open-mindedness to the opportunity for learning. So it's not just even in a training room or on a seminar or webinar or whatever, but actually the openness to going, huh, I hadn't thought about it like that. Or actually, yeah, because I'd always seen it like this, but that adds another layer, that adds another dimension. And being able to explore and allow ourselves to use the word scaffold, and I like that because, yeah, I don't think there's a lot at the moment that revolutionizes my thinking because I've been around the block a wee while, so there's probably some solid foundation there. But I'm constantly growing. It's like a snowball, I guess, or the snowman. You're still adding, adding, adding, as opposed to 20 years ago when it was like, whoa, there's a whole new thing that I'd never heard of before. This is more, I guess, more particular or more specific. It's iterative. It's iterative. You've got those iterations of learning. I remember in my social work training, I had one moment of like, whoa, it blew my mind, and it was around critical thinking, right? So when we talk about critical thinking, you've got to challenge everything, right? Nothing is set in stone. Everything is culturally determined by your upbringing and your history and your ancestors and where they came from and what they did. So we understand that, but I had a moment that just completely blew my mind as a young social worker, and we were talking in class, and the question was, is there anything we can all agree on? And I stupidly put my hand up and said, well, the sun rises in the east. And a lecturer jumped on me and said, what's the east? And I sat down and went, oh, everything is determined by what's gone in the past. So we have decided that that's the east. In other cultures, they haven't decided that. That's something else and another concept. And you don't have to go too far to realise that everything is determined by what we've decided it's going to be. We've agreed that that's... A social construct. A social construct, absolutely. The idea within social work that we should be critiquing everything. Everything should be looked at, and you should always be thinking, yeah, but why? Or how is that helpful? Or what am I doing? So, again, that's going to come down to the culture of where you work. And is that separating you out from your professional persona and who you want to be? Who do you want to be as a social worker? How do I want to be perceived? Because you've got control over that. What you may not have so much control over is the environment that you get to do that in. And that can be a struggle. You see social workers struggling within organisations. You hear that all the time. Oh, if it wasn't for this, or it wasn't for that, and we can't do this, and we can't do that. My answer to that is always, what can you do? And are those bounds perceptual? Or is there a way for you to do what you want to do within the structure that you're currently in? Because as a social worker, you get to challenge that. You get to really think about what is it that I want to achieve? How do I do it here? And if I'm not going to be able to do it here, then what am I going to do about it? Exactly. And I think it is. How important is it? How negotiable? Or how much can you adjust it? One of my favourite things is if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. So sometimes we get fixated on something meaning something in particular. We get fixated that I don't like this thing because this thing means that it's not working, or I can't do this, or this is a toxic environment, or whatever. Or you have conversations with people and they're saying, well, this person behaved in a certain way and I didn't like that behaviour, and I don't like it, and it's a bad relationship or whatever. Actually, if you step back and you reassess what you've made that behaviour mean, if you maybe looked at it with compassion or looked at it with less investment in terms of does it actually even matter how they behave? Does it actually really impact you that much? The whole situation can change and we can go about our business quite differently, but I think people get caught in certain meanings which are just constructs. This is all just a social construct in terms of what's an organisation, how we work, what human relationships are, all of it. And you need to unravel some of that as to can you change that? How invested do you have to be in that? If it is a deal breaker in that sense, then what are the options that you need to take in order to be able to do something about that? If it's fundamentally against your values, if it's fundamentally against your wellbeing or whatever, then maybe you need to be in a different situation or whatever. But there's a lot that actually we can change simply by changing the way we look at it. Yeah, we can. I agree. But. And. However. However. I agree with that. The fundamental you've got to have is time. Yeah. And preferably someone to bounce those ideas off. So if you have those two things, you've got some space, right? You've got some space to think about it. It's never quite that easy. I think there are a lot of strong conditions that keep people socially just tied to organisations or tied to a certain way of working. We tend to use supervision to try and work through that. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's going back to what are my personal values? Again, we do it with clients. Are my needs being met? What are they? If they're not being met, how do I understand that? And then what am I going to do about it? We do it with our work all the time. And we have to be willing to do that with ourselves. But it's never that easy. I think the privilege I've had is having the space or the basic time. Time and space. Not the right words. There's another word there. I can't find it. But having developed the network of people around me who not necessarily think the way I think, but they are good people. They are people who want to do good stuff and be a good person and try and make a difference in the world. That's it. They don't have to be super qualified or particularly skilled in one area or another. They just have to be willing, help me to understand what are my deficits? What do I need to work on and strengthen what I'm good at? And if you've got that in your life, then your professional persona will grow to a point where you can start doing that for somebody else. And at that moment, you know that you are making a real difference to the industry and you're making a difference for people. That's not based on experience or time. That's based on your willingness to share your knowledge. So some of the mentors I've had last year in particular, it's 15 years my junior and I'm learning stuff. Okay. That's a moment where you think, wow, what's that about? It kind of flips on its head, the natural order. Good. I'm okay with that. I'm okay with somebody much younger and less experienced teaching me something. So what is that about my professional persona that allows me to learn from anybody? And where does it come from and how do I share that with other people? Well, here we are. We're doing a podcast about it. Well, exactly. And I was just sitting there thinking, you know, I mean, it's just human connection, isn't it? Ultimately. Ultimately. And I guess- You've got to be willing. You've got to be willing to do that. Exactly. And that's the thing. It's having that openness and within that, sometimes there's a bit of vulnerability. Sometimes there's a little bit of exposure, I guess. But yeah, it's just being able to say, I want to connect with you. I'm going to share what I think. You share what you think. I'm open to learning from you. You're open to learning from me. It doesn't mean either of us are right, because what is right anyway? But we're exploring. And actually, our values are such, our heart is in the right place. The values are strong. We want to be of service. We want to do good things in the world. It can't be far wrong. I once taught a 12-year-old child how to make a cup of tea. So I had a couple of options there. A 12-year-old should know how to make a cup of tea, right? What's the developmental gap that leads to a child of that age not knowing how to make tea? You can look into that and understand that and say, well, there were no tea drinkers in the house, but that's kind of a fundamental step. I'd expect the average 12-year-old to make tea. So you can look at that and think, okay, I've got two options. I can chastise and go, oh, you should know that. You're old enough to know better. Or you can teach, and I chose to teach. Do that with yourself. Just because you've picked up something very late in the game that perhaps you should have learned earlier, don't chastise yourself for it. Just accept it. Just accept that you've learned something about yourself that you wish you'd learned 10 years earlier. You didn't. Cool. Move on. Your perception is, yep, okay, I can be upset by that. Or I can just get on with it and go, well, I'm now going to be different. I'm now choosing to act differently, and I'm happy about that. So I think those things come through to our lives fairly regularly. The only difference between learning and not learning is being open to it. Again, with social work, we get the privilege at times of going into things deeper and deeper and deeper. It's part of our makeup. Yeah, that's great. It's still going to have an outcome. You still have to do something with what you've learned so that you behave differently. Exactly the same process that you'd go through with your client. You'd go, okay, so that didn't go so well. Let's give it another go. That didn't go so well. Let's give it another go. That ultimate willingness to reset and evolve as opposed to chastise and be unhappy and then maybe do it under duress. There's some stuff there about human nature, right? Exactly, and there's stuff in there around pride and blah, blah, blah. But it reminds me of your lightning talk you did at conference where you talked about mistakes and saying that actually, well, I mean, I should let you say it really, the thing about... No, you interpret it. It's good. Okay. My interpretive dance was that actually we waste a whole lot of energy telling people off for making a mistake when they already know they made a mistake. Yeah. Where's the value in that energy that we put into going, you've done that wrong, when they're already sitting there going, I know I've done it wrong. You knew you made a mistake. Okay, well, now let's move on because you're not likely to make that mistake again. Yeah. And I think that's the thing. I mean, certainly in the roles I've had to be able to support social workers, particularly new graduate social workers who are doing things potentially for the first time, doing home visits, going out and doing assessments, it's like you're going to get it wrong. Yeah. We've all had experiences of walking out of a home going, that didn't go as well as I hoped. Yeah. Right? That's the reality. Yeah. Don't berate yourself for a mistake or for a, you know, something that kind of you learn from. Yeah. Because actually, if you always were perfect, you're not actually really learning. Like, it's those moments that are the teaching moments where you say, okay, then what could you have done differently? Yeah. What might you do next time? You know, like it's… Experiment. Exactly. Experiment. Why? Yeah, I sometimes get a little bit frustrated or used to. I don't anymore because I'm older and more experienced, and I don't care as much about the external feedback. I'll learn from it, but it's not going to hurt me. You know what I mean? I think it's much more difficult when you're coming into social work than any profession at the beginning. And some professions are harsh, right? Some professions are really, really difficult. So there's some subtleties around that mistake stuff that I was talking about at the conference. And I looked across the room, and there's perhaps, there's a hundred people in the room, right? And I'm thinking at least 90 of them are looking at me going, yeah, of course, that makes sense. You know, duh. I think there's probably three people in the room who had that moment of going, oh, I do that. I tell people to do the thing they know what. They already know what to do, but I will tell them what they didn't do, even though I know that they know what to do. And I'm hoping that at least three people in the room had a moment and thought, I'm going to stop doing that. I don't need to explain to them what they got wrong. They understand it. Now, the reason I had that moment of understanding that I'm trying to share, without preaching, I think it's personal. I think you've got to have that willingness to actually shut the mouth, get the brain engaged, and maybe not, there's something we get out of that, you know, that makes us feel good. Because I knew how to do it, and now I'm telling you how to do it. We get to be right. We get to be right, and there's something good about that. So I'll tell you what, when you stop doing it and you see the other person not have a negative reaction, they have a positive reaction to your reaction, it's self-fulfilling. It's got its own momentum because you've made someone feel good about making a mistake. Now, that's the power that you have as a social worker, as a mum, as a human being, to make other people feel good even when they've got something wrong. That's powerful. The engagement there and the development of a stronger relationship happens straight away because you're not, you know, within social work, you're not a threat. In fact, actually, you are someone who is helping develop another person's understanding of the world. But take it out of that and just as a dad, I'm actually building up my children's confidence because I'm not telling them how to, you know, tell them off for the tenth time because they've left their dishes on the bench, you know. They know what to do. They haven't done it. Me explaining to them what to do isn't actually helping. No. Yeah. So, yeah. My thing is breaking things. This is my little overshare but, you know, as a kid, if I broke something, you know, dropped a plate on the floor, I would get screamed at for breaking something. Right. And it used to terrify me, like, to break something. Like, I felt like I wanted the earth to swallow me up, like I was a terrible person breaking something. And so, as an adult, you know, if anyone in my house breaks something, I mean, it's already broken. Like, they already feel bad about it. It's like, okay, well, it's broken. You dropped a plate. Yeah. That's how I react in my house because, you know, oversharing again, I remember that moment when I was a child, I smashed a downpipe. I was pushing a trolley down a hill on our driveway. It went off course and smashed the downpipe. So when I was challenged by my dad, he said, hey, he said, what happened to the downpipe? I lied. He said, oh, I don't know. My brother ratted me out. And my dad came to me and I thought, here we go, this is going to be bad. And dad said something to me that I don't use with my own kids but, boy, it stuck. He said, I'm disappointed because you lied. Yeah, the lie is worse than the… Oh, wow. The sadness that came over me for that moment. So, yeah, again, I haven't taken that into my own parenting. It's kind of an almost guilt-tripping stuff. Yeah, exactly. The emotional. The emotional stuff. But I remember it to this day. I was possibly eight years old. So with my own kids, when they break things, it's like, yeah, okay, cool, let's clean it up. And another thing I've offered and coming out of that around parenting, we've taught our kids to say sorry a lot, right? We like it. We like hearing sorry from kids. So lots of kids learn pretty quickly to use that word a lot. And I've started with my own kids. Again, it comes back to how you were parented. You'd say sorry and one of my parents would say to me, no, you're not, but you will be, you know, that kind of attitude, right? So with my own kids, when they make mistakes now, I've given them permission to not have to say sorry. Yeah, because it's not their fault. You should be sorry for things that you've done that you know you shouldn't have done. But accidents are accidents. Accidents are accidents. You don't need to be sorry for things that weren't in your control. Making that little differentiation, it frees your children up and possibly frees your staff up and possibly frees your clients up to make mistakes and be honest and upfront about it. Yeah, well, that's right. And in some ways, we should encourage mistakes. Sure, but do we do that? So again, as part of your professional persona, permission to make mistakes in your own work. Yeah, because if you're not making mistakes in your own work, I'd like to meet you because you're magic. Yeah. You're a very special, rare person who never makes mistakes. So, you know, being facetious, but because those people don't exist. But if your professional persona is such that I never make mistakes, yeah, it might be time to rethink that. Maybe you need to talk to someone as far as if you're not making mistakes. You know, one of the primary mechanisms for human learning is making mistakes. Well, that's right. We learn from our mistakes. We don't learn from our successes so much, right? Like you. Yeah. So if you say I don't ever make mistakes or if you're living to perfection, then actually either you're in such a small little bubble that you only ever do the same thing over and over and over again. That's not a good thing. Yeah. Or you're in denial. Yeah. I had an experience a couple of months ago, maybe three months ago, where I got something completely right the first time and it was like, hole, that's a fluke. Normally I muck it up. I have to get it wrong, get it wrong, get it wrong, and then I get it right. Again, professional persona in your professional work, are you a person who can accept mistakes from yourself? I guarantee you accept it from your client base. Guarantee it. Whatever the mistake is, you will head into that relationship with, hey, we can fix this. This is a chance for us to learn and fix. And you build relationships. We do it for ourselves. Or for our colleagues. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Are we tolerant of each other or do we go, oh, they didn't do that right. They didn't do this. And there's possibly another conversation there around the professional veneer because there is a conversation to be had around do you live the values that you express to others. And I'm not saying they have to be 100% aligned, but they should be pretty close. You see and hear things that you struggle with as a social worker. And I would struggle if my drug and alcohol counsellor was down at the pub every Friday night getting slaughtered. Honestly, I would struggle with that. But for some people, their professional persona is such that I can be a drug and alcohol counsellor nine till five. After five, that's up to me. I'm my own person. I can do what I want. Can you do what you want or do you have to maintain a level of commitment in your own life to look after yourself and living some of the values that you want to see in other people? And that's the ethics question again. Yes. And like I think we said at the beginning that the separation or the distance between your professional persona and the veneer, the further they are away from each other, the higher likelihood they're going to crack essentially, probably, because it becomes unsustainable to try and live a professional persona because at some point there isn't an authenticity behind it because actually the values you're purporting inside this persona are not the values that you're living in your daily life and that veneer cracks because ethically it's not the same. You're kind of like becoming two people. That's a risk. The other side for me was when they all become a bit too entangled and then you get a bit lost in that as well. It's a challenge though because should any work have any control over your personal life? The short answer in social work, teaching, nursing, policing, is yes. Yes. I'm pretty sure there's something in the social work registration around bringing your profession into dispute. Yes. So I can give another example around that because I think we can talk about those helping professions, but let's move out. Let's move out to plumbing, gas fitting, electricians, drain layers, engineers. Those professions, you don't want any of those people cutting corners. I have a close mate who's an electrician. He came and did work on my house and we made a mistake. We put in the wrong size wiring for a fan. So two options, leave it and hope for the best. My house, it's my house. And I said, leave it. It's my problem. And he was like, no, my name's on this. He said, I won't sleep well knowing that we've put in the wrong wiring. So we're smashing holes in the wall to replace it. Because I agree straight away. Because his professional persona, he's maintaining his profession and he's saying, yeah, you know what? The chances of that being a problem are one in a million. You're the homeowner. You don't care about it. You'll take the pump. But as a professional, he is taking responsibility for his work. So it's not just about helping professions. When you find professionals who are making their values present, you hang on to them. Because it isn't universal. It's not universal in social work. It's not universal in plumbing. It's not universal in medicine. It's not universal anywhere. So when you come across professionals who walk the talk, you've got to stick with them. And in our privileged position of sitting here talking about it, how did they develop that? How do they maintain it? And how do I teach it to others? Because that's what we're about, right? We want to share that knowledge and our experience of getting it wrong with others and maybe make your social work career a little easier to navigate. We want to help and inspire. We can't protect you from falling into the traps. But when you do fall in, you might remember the one thing in this podcast that has stuck with you. And we can't decide what that's going to be for you. But if that helps you at some point in the future, let us know. Feedback's great. Exactly. And I think that's probably a good place to sort of summarise, but that is a lot about what Bellbird is about. The sharing of knowledge, the creating connections, the inspiring people in terms of maybe a different way of thinking or a new thought or a different outlook or perspective, that one bit that they can take and move forward into the next step of their career. And it's a journey, right? So we hope to kind of support people on that journey wherever they are, whatever they're doing. Yeah. And the social work community is a relatively small one. So you need to take lessons or understanding or learnings from wherever they'll come from. So absorb it from wherever it feels comfortable and be open to continuous learning in that you should be in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, continuously willing to be open to new ideas. Because that's the only way we're going to be able to progress and be able to share knowledge with others. It sounds very preachy. Sorry. No, no. It's absolutely right. And I think- Therefore ends the lesson for the day. Exactly. And so carry on learning into your 70s. I'm like, oh, I'll be well retired by then. But thank you so much, Brendan, for your time. I appreciate it. We can sit and chat for hours and hours now. So no doubt you will be on plenty more podcasts to come. Yeah, looking forward to it. But thank you very much for your time today. And to everybody that's listening, I hope you enjoyed it. As Brendan said, we love feedback. We'd love to have your thoughts, your comments. And if there's anything in particular you'd like to hear Brendan talk about, let us know. But thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Rachel.