Hey y'all and welcome to going through the motions, a reset framework for BCBA supervisor burnout. Before we get into it, just a few quick things. I'm Christy Wilson, a BCBA supervisor and the creator of the Ascend RBT Assessment System.
I have supervised across multiple settings, clinics, schools, homes, teleaalth. Now, I have been working with incredible RBTs and I've had moments where I recognized and realized that the wheels had completely came off and I didn't catch it soon enough. For years, most of my attention has as a supervisor has gone towards just this one question.
Is my staff getting what they need from me? It's absolutely the right question to ask about our staff. But somehow somewhere along the way, I realized that I stopped asking another second question that's also very important.
Am I actually okay? And is this way that I'm supervising sustainable for me, not just for my staff? Now, it's that second question that this course is built around.
So, by the end of this course, you're going to be able to identify at least three research supported predictors of burnout among BCBA supervisors and be able to explain how each of them affect supervisory practices. You're going to be able to tell the difference between experiential avoidance and values-based action in specific supervisory responsibilities like feedback, delivery, BST, and observations. you're going to be able to apply at least one actbased psychological flexibility skill to a real current supervision challenge that you're experiencing.
And we're going to draft an individualized values aligned commitment for sustaining supervisory quality even under those real job demands that we all experience. I want to not skip out on this one thing though. This course covers on like burnout.
Honestly, it's going to share some of my own experience with it. And if at any point this brings up something heavier than burnout for you, real distress or something that feels bigger than just a rough season, please, please, please reach out to a mental health professional or a crisis resource rather than just trying to work through it alone with something like this video. This course is continuing education for you.
It's not therapy. And I want to be upfront with that absolutely from the start about that distinction. Okay.
Now, let's get into it. This is an asynchronous self self-paced course built around a five-step framework called reset. We've got recognize, examine, separate, engage, and take action.
There are going to be reflection moments and short practice exercises woven throughout this training. And y'all, I mean it when I say pause, pause and do them at that time. They're not filler space.
It's not just for funsies. We are going to have fun. But these are where the real work is actually going to happen for you.
It's going to be the difference of listening to this training and putting it into action into the work that you're doing. You're going to have a workbook that follows along with this training. This is a place to actually do the writing and the reflection work instead of just thinking about it and moving on from there.
So, I want you to go grab that right now before we even start so that it's right there when the first pause point comes up. At the end of this training, you're going to take that quick quiz and submit the form for your CEU in order to receive your certificate. Okay, now the good stuff.
I am a BCBA supervisor and I want to share with you a small weird moment that actually tipped me off to a pattern in my own behavior. I recognized that I would wrap up a supervision meeting smiling warm. Bye.
Talk to you soon. And the second I clicked out of the call, the smile just vanished. gone, flat.
Straight into documentation, straight into the next meeting. Same performance again. Smile on, click out, smile off, repeat.
At some point, it hit me. I had basically become a very tired actress with a niche audience of one RBT at a time. Now, that's worth naming.
Not because it's not nothing. There's an actual term for it. It's called surface acting.
Performing an emotion with feeling something totally different underneath it. It's one of the clearest markers of depersonalization, which is one of the three core pieces of burnout that go back all the way to Mazbook's original research, and it still holds up today. So, if you've ever caught yourself doing the professional happy face thing on and off like a costume you just can't wait to get out of, hear this clearly.
That's not you being fake necessarily. It could be burnout doing exactly what burnout does. And usually there might be a quieter tell.
For me, it was the calendar. I'd open up the app to build next week's schedule, look at it like it personally owed me money, and quickly close that tab. I'll deal with it later.
And later became a whole personality trait for a while. Small, unglamorous, nothing anyone on the outside would see, which is exactly the point. This is what burnout can look like before it's a crisis.
Not burned out necessarily, just flat. So, if something like this has been creeping in for you, I want you to hear two things. Before we go any further, you're not imagining it.
And you're definitely not the only one. Before we go further, I want you to think about the two tails that I just shared about on the previous slide and see if you can relate to either. Which of those two tells sounds more like you?
the smile that drops the second the call ends or something else entirely different like maybe your own version of going flat or maybe it's something else. I want you to take that split second to just notice it. No need to write anything down yet.
Just notice it because here's what research actually says. Burnout in our field isn't rare. It's basically the house style.
We're talking largecale surveys of ABA professionals putting burnout rates at se 70% or higher, y'all. 70% or higher. Early career BCBAS, unfortunately, this is an even higher number.
And this isn't some like some people are struggling type problem. This is a fieldwide pattern. And somehow we still whisper about it like it's a personal failing instead of, you know, the norm.
So, there's this one study that I keep coming back to, soyak and Jay in 2023. They looked at behavior analysts specifically and found that psychological flexibility and the quality of the supervisor's support were two of the biggest predictors of who burns out and who doesn't. So, we're going to come back to psychological flexibility a lot.
It's the thread that kind of runs through this whole course. But right now, I want you to sit with this for just a second. The people studying our field are basically confirming what our body already told us potentially months ago.
Here's what I want to push a little bit past where most burnout content stops. It's easy to talk about burnout like it's purely a job thing. Too many cases, too much paperwork, tough behaviors, and yeah, all that is real.
Like, don't get me wrong, that's part of it. But honestly, when I reflect, my worst burnout seasons haven't been the ones when I've had the highest or the hardest case loads. They've been the seasons where work stopped being its own contained thing and just became one more demand piled onto a life that was already full.
Spring for me when sports overlap like a badlyun group project. The school year's winding down and there's suddenly no line left anywhere between work stuff and life stuff. It's just stuff.
That's not a case problem. That's a whole life resource problem. And I think a lot of us carry it without ever really actually naming it.
And we just blame the job for something that the job is only partly responsible for. So quick question. Do you have a season like that?
Not necessarily spring. Maybe it's something absolutely different. But I want you to take that moment to just name it to yourself.
even just silently. And here's the part that matters the most. Honestly, the reason you're earning a supervision CEU here and not just a wellness CU, this flatness, this depletion, it doesn't just stay locked in how we feel.
It leaks out. It shows up in how we actually supervise. We'll get into exactly how in the next segment, but before we go there, do one more thing for me.
30 seconds right now. Think of one moment in the last month where you were flat, not fully there. Nothing dramatic, just that quiet, going through the motions feeling.
What season of life was that moment sitting inside of? Now, you don't need to write anything down yet. Just let it surface.
Hold on to it. We're going to go back to this and we are going to use it and write stuff about it. Now, here's why this first step actually matters.
Beyond just feeling seen for a second, you can't apply psychological flexibility to something you haven't named yet. Everything else in this course, the diffusion work, the values work, the action step at the end only works on something specific. Vague burnout stays stuck.
Named burnout, it becomes workable, y'all. And that's what we're here to do. So that moment that you just thought of, that's exactly where we're headed next, noticing it.
That's step one. Seeing where it actually shows up in your supervision. That's examine.
So back in recognize, we named it that flat depersonalized feelings burnout produces. Great. That's step one.
But here's the thing that nobody tells you. Burnout doesn't stay politely contained to how you feel on your drive home. It leaks, you guys.
And for us specifically, it leaks into the one place that it really shouldn't. The room where we're supposed to be building someone else's clinical competence. So, this segment next is where the evidence gets dense.
Okay, buckle up. Here's a reframe that I think actually matters for us more than it might for other professions. Burnout isn't just a feeling state.
It's a set of behaviors. And those behaviors are following the same laws every other behavior follows. Recent work conceptualizing job burnout through a behavior lens frames burnout related behaviors like withdrawing, avoiding, and disengaging as maintained largely through negative reinforcement.
So, I've caught myself living that exact pattern, the short-term relief of avoidance, quietly reinforcing the very thing burning me out. That's exactly why it's so hard to catch. It's not sabotage.
It's a schedule of reinforcement doing precisely what reinforcement does. Which means that the fix isn't willpower either. It's the same thing we'd tell our any supervised the contingencies, not just the intention.
So what does that actually look like day-to-day? Here are a few things that I've noticed in myself. Not the definitive list, just a few examples of the shape things tend to take.
Yours might look different, but see if any of this rings the bell. There's the cancellations. And look, some some of those cancellations are real legitimate boundary setting cancellations, but I started to notice that some of them were avoidance wearing a business casual outfit.
And you can usually tell the difference by the relief. If cancelling gives you way more relief than the actually actual scheduling conflict warrants, it's worth noticing, not judging. Then there's the multitasking your way through a meeting, answering an email here, half listening, nodding at the right moments like you're some kind of professional bobblehead.
Here's the lining, though, and it's backed by research on how staff actually receive feedback. how present you are while giving it that feedback. It changes whether the person even takes it as accurate.
So, it's not just that you're a worse listener in the moment. The whole interaction quietly goes downhill. And the other place where I've seen it leak is that feedback itself getting really generic.
Good job. Keep it up. Watch your pacing.
technically all words, not actually feedback. And here's the re reassuring part, though. Research on supervisor training has found that people only get good at delivering sharp, individualized feedback once they've actually been trained to do it.
It's not automatic just because you're competent yourself. So, the feedback goes generic under burnout. That's not some character flaw showing up.
It's a skill losing its scaffolding. and burnout knocks the scaffolding out from under you first. So, take your quick gut check.
Did any of these land close to home? Cancellations, multitasking, or feedback going generic? Or maybe y'all, it is something completely different, and that's okay.
It doesn't have to be dramatic, though. Just notice what you recognize the fastest when you think about it. Here's the part that raises the stakes just past this is hard on you.
None of it stays contained to you. Turner Fischer and Louiselli in 2016 they wrote in behavior analysis and practice. They point to a cluster of findings on this exact issue.
A weaker supervisory relationship predicts less willingness on the trainees part to disclose struggles, less follow-through on the supervisor's own recommendations, and directly higher burnout risk to the person being supervised. separately. Planu Donovie and Verus Ortega 2018, thank you for being patient with me as I practice these names, found supervision, quality, and support to be among the strongest predictors of burnout in a sample of early career behavior analysts.
So, when we put these together, the stakes get clear fast. When we are depleted, the depletion pushes us towards behaviors like cancelling, multitasking, and generic feedback. We're not just having an off week.
We may be setting up the exact conditions that produce burnout in the next person coming into the field. Ouch, that hurts, right? So, quick real example because it illustrates the parallel process pretty well.
I was coaching a BCBA fieldwork supervise who realized through her own reflections that unclear boundaries with a client, in this case it was how much a sibling or parent got folded into the sessions had been quietly feeding her own overwhelm. As I was coaching her through it, I recognized the same patterns in myself. Supervision, y'all, is a mirror more than we would like to admit it.
You may often catch your own patterns in someone else's case before you catch them in your own life. Now, has supervision ever been a mirror for you like that? Coaching someone through something and catching your own pattern in the middle of it?
I want you to sit for just a second. Y'all, this is one of my favorite parts of doing the work with others when it triggers me to take the time to self-reflect myself. Walk the walk.
Right. Here's where this gets transformational instead of just diagnostic because naming a pattern isn't the same as changing it. If cancellations are your thing, try tracking your own rate for a couple of weeks.
Not to punish yourself, just to see the real number instead of that felt sense of it. You already know how to do this. You do it with target behaviors constantly.
Now, turn the same lens on yourself for once instead of always pointing it at someone else's data. Now, if you're one of those multitaskers, treat undivided attention as a skill that you're rebuilding, not a personally trait that you have permanently lost to a group chat. Phone away, tabs closed, one window, small change, disproportionate payoff.
And even if you aren't to the point yet where you can do this the whole entire meeting, try it for small segments because you know when we get those building blocks, those stepping stones, we certainly can climb that whole mountain. And if feedback for you has gone generic and that really hit home with you. Don't try to white knuckle your way back to indivi individualized willpower alone.
Borrow a structure. Tools like the corrective feedback instrument revised exist because good feedback delivery is trainable, not something you're supposed to improvise from scratch every single time, especially not while you're running on fumes. Check out some of my other CUS.
Also, feedback is something that I have found a lot of interest in in my own practice and I've shared some of that through my other courses as well. Think about your own supervision sessions over the last few weeks. Just take a moment here with me, okay?
Where has depletion actually showed up for you and what you did or didn't do? Not how you felt, but the behavior itself. Maybe it was a canceled session.
Maybe feedback was really boring and generic, more so than normal. A conversation about consistency that you have been putting off. Just notice this, y'all.
No fixing it yet. Here's the good news. Noticing where it leaks isn't the same as being stuck with it.
Underneath most everyone of these behaviors is a story that we're telling ourselves. A rule about what a good supervisor is supposed to look like. That's actually making things worse.
That's what we are going to after this. That's what we're going to next. That is the separate part of the reset framework.
So, so far we've named it and we've tracked where it leaks into supervision. Now, we're going into the part of this course that actually starts to shift something. So, here's the idea.
Underneath almost every burned out behavior we just covered, there's a sentence running quietly in the background. A rule that we're following without ever really deciding to follow it. Mine sounds something like this.
A good supervisor should be excited and joyful about showing up for staff and clients every single day. Say it out loud and it's obviously ridiculous. Now, let's be real.
Nobody feels like that every day about anything. I love my job. I love my staff.
I love my clients, but to feel 100% of the time is inhuman. You can't feel like that 100% of the time about anything. Not your job, not your marriage, not about your favorite hobby.
But here's the catch. I didn't say that sentence out loud. I just believed it quietly in the background.
And believed quietly instead of said out loud, it's brutal. It turns an ordinary rough Tuesday into proof that you are failing at your job and there's a name for what's happening here and it's worth learning because it changes what you actually do about it. So in act we're looking at cognitive fusion.
This is an example of how cognitive fusion can look. Here's the simplest way that I can put it. It's when a thought stops feeling like a thought and starts feeling like a fact.
Like reality itself. I should be excited every day starts out as just one sentence that your brain generates on one particular day for some particular reason. But over time it stops feeling like a sentence.
It starts feeling like a rule you're being tested against. And every day you don't feel excited. It doesn't feel like huh normal human variation.
It feels like you failed the test. That's fusion. You and that thought have basically fused together.
So, you can't tell the difference anymore between I'm having a thought and this is simply true. Does a thought like that come to mind already when you think about it for you? Not the exact words, just a flicker of, "Oh, I have one of those, too.
" Hold on to it. We're going to use it soon. Okay.
I don't want this to land as just a nice mindfulness idea. So, here's some actual evidence for you. A study by Villardga and colleagues published in 2011 in the journal of substance abuse treatment looked at almost 700 addiction counselors and they measured a few things.
cognitive fusion, which we had just talked about, alongside with something that we call experiential avoidance, which is basically working really hard to avoid uncomfortable feelings, and values commitment, staying connected to what actually matters to you. Here's the findings that stood out. Those three things predicted burnout more strongly and more consistently than the usual suspects that researchers blame, like job control, salary, workload, or even how long someone has been doing the job.
So, I want you to listen to that again because it's a really big deal, you guys. How fused someone was to their own unworkable thoughts predicted their burnout better than how long they had been in the field or how much they were getting paid. That's not an interesting detail.
That's a pretty direct argument for why we're spending an entire segment on this and why we're taking a look at it. Here's the part that I think should land differently for you than it would for anybody else watching a generic burnout webinar because you've already own this concept. We simply call it a rule-governed behavior.
So, a quick refresher since it's been a while since the grad school. For some of us, rule-governed behavior is behavior controlled by a verbal rule instead of by direct contact with what's actually happening. It's incredibly useful.
Rules let us skip learning everything the hard, painful, and trial and error way. You don't need to touch a hot stove yourself if someone tells you that's hot. Don't touch it.
But rule-governed behavior has a well doumented downside too. It can make you less sensitive what's to what's actually happening right in front of you and it can keep a behavior running long after the rule has stopped matching reality that I should be excited every day is a rule like that. It probably wasn't fully true even from the start, but early on there were enough genuinely exciting moments that it felt true enough to stick.
Now, it just runs on autopilot regardless of what's actually happening that day. And it's causing you something real. Contact with the parts of the job that are still working, still meaningful, and still yours.
because they're buried under a rule insisting the whole thing is supposed to feel a certain way all the time. No exceptions. So, quick gut check here.
Is there a part of your job that's actually still working, still meaningful, that's getting buried under one of these rules? I want you to just notice it. We're not fixing anything yet.
So, what do you actually do with a thought like this once you've spotted it? Well, not argue with it. Arguing just proves the thought is important enough to argue with, which makes it stronger, not weaker.
In act, the move is something called diffusion. basically creating a little distance between you and that thought so that it goes back to being one sentence your mind produced instead of a verdict handed down about who you are. Here's one of the simplest ways to do it.
Take that thought and add four words in front of it. I'm having the thought that. So instead of I should be excited every day, try I'm having the thought that I should be excited every day.
I know it sounds almost too simple to matter. It's not, y'all. That tiny shift in language puts you back in the driver's seat.
You're watching the thought go by instead of being dragged along behind it. Let's actually try this instead of just hearing about it. I want you to pause here for a few minutes.
Seriously, push pause. Grab a pen or open a notes app. Whatever's easiest for you.
I want you to write down one should that you carry as a supervisor. Some rule that you hold about what a good supervisor is always supposed to do, feel, or handle. No exceptions.
Then rewrite it with I'm having the thought that right in front of it. Read both versions back to yourself. Sit with them for a second and notice if anything shifts even a little bit in how heavy that sentence feels.
Say three minutes. We'll be here when you get back. Don't skip this.
It's a powerful process. Now, for real, push pause and do it. Okay, I hope you actually took the time to do that exercise.
Now, we're going to move on to something else that none of us are alone in feeling. Here's another one I'd bet shows up for a lot of you because it's incredibly common in the field. I need to be available and responsive all the time, especially if it's about a client.
Apparent messages. An RBT has a question. Data comes in that needs a reaction.
All of it runs through the same fused rule. A good supervisor answers immediately, always. No exceptions, day or night.
Y'all, I'll be honest. I still catch this rule running for me. I haven't diffused it away entirely and I don't think anyone fully does.
But I did build one small practical thing around it. I use a separate phone number just for work. So when my phone goes into downtime at night, work messages simply don't come through.
The rule didn't disappear. But it stopped being the only thing making every decision for me. There we go.
Using a good old anesthetic modification to support a healthy habit. gotta love behavior principles. And maybe for you, it's not a different phone number.
Maybe it's how you use the apps and the notification symbols or notification delivery on your phone that has a different boundary um on the off time than it does on the on time. Be creative. Maybe think about something that you can do.
So, you practiced some cognitive diffusion and you looked at where you could practice some boundaries or maybe how that action step could help. Now, I want to look at another specific example of how you might build some of these tools into your day. I know that most of us aren't going to carve out 5 minutes to sit and journal just in the middle of the day, but the practice that actually matters the most happens in about 10 seconds right before you walk into a hard conversation.
Say that you've got a supervision meeting coming up where you know that you need to address a pattern of tardiness or give corrective feedback of some kind on a session that went sideways or on progress notes or something. Before you click into that call or you walk into that meeting, notice whatever should is already running in the background in your mind. Maybe it's I should have caught this sooner or a good supervisor wouldn't need to have this conversation.
Or maybe it's even I should feel confident about this. I shouldn't have to worry about things like this or how I'm going to have this conversation. I want you to silently add the phrase I'm having the thought that.
Say it to yourself once right before you go in. And that's it. You're not trying to talk yourself into feeling confident.
You're not trying to argue the thought in any way. You're just walking into the room as yourself instead of all the thoughts that are running in your head. Over time, this 10second version becomes the one that you actually use.
Maybe it fits into the schedule that's actually full, which let's be honest is the whole reason that most of us are watching this course in the first place. our schedules being super busy contributes to it and it just exacerbates that addictive vicious cycle of not stopping long enough to reflect and do things differently in a way that doesn't burn us out. So I want you to think is there a conversation on your calendar this week that could use 10 seconds of this practice before you watch it walk in.
I want you to notice what comes to mind and maybe visualize how you can use this tool before that situation. Practice, you know, visualize what is it going to look like when I get to that start button or when I get to that door and I hear these thoughts in my head. How am I going to practice?
I hear the thought that before whatever is running in your head as you identify it because it really does it really does matter and it really can help in the small moments of the day as you practice these skills. Now I want to be clear that this isn't just about your own peace of mind even though the ma that matters plenty on its own. When a fused should is quietly running your supervision decisions, you end up less responsive to what the actual RBT in front of you actually needs in that actual moment because you're busy satisfying the rule instead of paying attention to the person.
Diffusion isn't softness and it isn't self-care fluff. is what lets you actually see your supervise instead of the script in your head about what supervising that person is supposed to look like. Think about a recent moment where a should showed up for how you supervised.
Some rule about maybe what a good supervisor always does or feels or handles that shaped a decision without you fully noticing it at the time. Just notice it. We're going to build on it in the next segment.
Now, loosening a fuse thought, it creates space. But space on its own isn't our goal. What you do with it is.
If a should isn't running the show quite so hard anymore, the real question becomes, what do you actually want your supervisions to look like? So, that's our next step of the reset framework. Engage.
Last segment. We loosened up the grip of the fused should. Good.
But here's the thing about creating space. Space by itself doesn't point anywhere. You can diffuse from the thought all day long and still have no idea what you actually want instead.
So that's where we're headed now. Not what am I supposed to feel, but what actually matters to me here? Let's slow down on the word values for a second because it gets thrown around so much that sometimes it's lost its meaning.
In act values aren't goals and that distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A goal is something you finish. You check it off.
Yes. Get that RBT to 90% fidelity. Yes, that's a goal.
Values are different. They're a direction, not a destination. You don't ever fully arrive at being a supportive supervisor.
You just keep moving towards it decision by decision as long as you're doing the work. Here's why that distinction matters for burnout specifically. Goals can get completed, delayed, or taken away from you by circumstances outside of your control.
And when they are, it can feel like the whole thing was for nothing. Values can't be taken away nearly as easily. Even on your worst week, you can still take one small step in the direction of a value that's available to you even when a goal isn't.
So, here's another quick one. Let's check in. Can you already feel the difference between a goal that you're chasing and a value underneath it?
It doesn't need words yet. Just notice if something's stirring as you think about it. Here's something that I think you'll want to know exists because it's directly relevant to everything that we've been building in this course.
A study by Hess Garcia Gould and Katagnonist published in 2022 in the journal of contextual behavior science combined behavioral skills training that same BST that you already use every day with training specifically in sharing values in taking committed action delivered directly to BCBA supervisors. They used what's called a concurrent multiple baseline design, which as we know means each participant's own behavior was tracked closely over time so that researchers could see the change happen for each individual, not just as across an average across the group. Participants learned to name their own values, share them appropriately with a supervise, give and ask for feedback through that lens, and track and document their goals and actions going forward.
The results were strong. Every single participant reached mastery on the supervisory relationship skills being taught and their improvements somewhere between 53 and 85% above where they started were actually more robust than similar earlier studies had found. On top of the skills themselves, y'all, the researchers measured real outcomes before and after the training.
burnout risk, self-compassion, act knowledge, and what researchers call value living. Basically, how much someone's daily life actually lines up to what they say matters to them. Training reduced burnout risk and improved both self-compassion and value living in these BCBA supervisors in the study.
I want to be really clear about what that means. This isn't some hopeful theory. Someone actually built values training into BCBA supervision and measured real outcomes.
Burnout risk went down, y'all. It went down. That's the evidence this whole segment stands on.
Let me tell you why I actually became a supervisor in the first place because it's relevant here. It wasn't really about becoming a BCBA generally. I wanted that too.
But supervising specifically was its own decision. Throughout my career, I've sat in conversations with newer BCBAs that honestly appalled me. Attitudes towards clients that had nothing to do with compassionate care.
That mattered to me enough that I decided that I wanted to become a part of shaping those who come into the field. And how? That's why I created Elevate Your ABA Supervision Guys.
That's a value. Not a goal I ever fully complete. Just a direction that I keep choosing meeting after meeting, supervise after supervise.
All right, now it's your turn. This is the values exercise, and I want you to actually do it, not just listen to me talk about it. Pause here.
Grab your paper or your notes app. Write down three to five words that capture why you became a supervisor. not a BCBA generally, specifically a supervisor, not what you're supposed to say, what's actually true for you.
Even if it sounds small or unpolished or nothing like what you put on a LinkedIn post. Now, once you've got your words, look at them and ask one question. Is there a current supervision behavior, something that you do or avoid doing or rush through that drifted away from one of these?
You don't have to fix it right now. Just notice that gap. Naming the gap is where the is the whole point of this exercise now.
Set a timer for 5 minutes. Pause the video here and then come back. I mean it.
Do it. All right. I hope you actually did that.
Thank you for taking the time to work through that exercise. Please feel free to email me your thoughts or your experience. I mean it when I say that I would love to hear from and support you.
Now, here's something else worth naming honestly. It's not every case, every meeting, every day. That's okay.
That's true for everyone in every field, not just us. But there are still moments. For me, it's a specific kind of conversation.
the ones where the supervise and I get into real clinical conceptualization together working through a hard case and I watch something click for them. That's the moment that reminds me why I signed up for this. Not every meeting gets there, but when it does, it's not manufactured.
It's real and it's still available to me even in a burntout season. That's what values do that goals can't do. A goal you miss this month is just missed.
A value you touched even once this month is proof that the direction still means something to you. Now think of one recent moment, even a small one, where supervising still felt like what you signed up for. Hold on to it.
It's evidence. Not that everything's fine, but that the thing you're chasing is still real and still reachable. Now you've named the pattern.
You've seen where it leaks. You've loosened the grip of the should that's been running your show. And now you've got real words for what's actually matters to you as a supervisor.
That's four steps. There's one left and it's the one that turns all of this into something that actually changes your Tuesday. That's take action.
All of that work that you just did, naming it, seeing where it leaks, loosening the should, finding the words that actually matter, is genuinely valuable on its own. And I don't want this course to end as something that you simply watched. I want it to end as something that you did.
So, this last piece is about turning everything so far into one small specific action. The kind of action that's still there waiting for you on your ordinary Tuesday long after the video's over. All right, quick reason this matters.
Backed by research, a randomized control trial testing a workplace act program published by Predencian colleagues in 2022 found that a four session program reduced psychological distress and produced a real, if smaller, reduction of burnout among healthcare staff. Here's the detail that matters most for us. The improvement wasn't driven on insight alone.
It was mediated primarily by an increase in mindfulness skills and values-based behavior. Meaning the people who actually acted differently based on their values were the ones who got better, not the people who just understood the concepts. That's the whole argument for this takes action segment.
Understanding fusion doesn't reduce burnout. Doing something different, even something small, does in act. This step is called committed action.
And it's simpler than it sounds. It just means picking one small specific behavior that moves you toward a value you named and actually doing it on purpose. Even though the feeling of motivation might not show up first, you don't wait to feel ready.
The action usually comes before the feeling does, not after. Here's the part I want to underline for this audience specifically. You already know how to build a behavior plan, guys.
You do it constantly for other people. A committed action is just a target behavior for you this time. It needs the same things any target behavior needs.
something specific enough to observe, something small enough to actually happen, and ideally something with a Q attached so it doesn't rely on you simply remembering before the practice. Which value from engage is already pulling at you the most right now? It doesn't have to be the right one, just whichever one shows up first.
Think about it. Let's move on. Here's a small one of mine so that you can see kind of what this looks like in actual human scale, not aspirational scale.
I started using a transcription tool during supervision meetings specifically so that I could stop half documenting while half listening. That's it. Small, mechanical, unglamorous.
But it directly served a value, actually being present with the person in front of me. And it was specific enough that I could tell whether I had done it or not. Your turn.
Go back to the values words that you wrote down in the last segment and pick one. Then answer these three questions. What's one small behavior this week that would move you towards that value?
Not a personality overhaul, something you can actually get done by the end of the week. What's the cue? When exactly will you do this?
Tied to something that already happens like right before a specific meeting or right after you open your calendar Monday morning. And how will you know that you did it? Keep it observable.
Be more present isn't observable. Close my email tab during supervision meetings is write it down as one sentence. When Q I will specific behavior in service of value.
Now, push pause, take your 5 minutes, and do it. One more thing worth naming before we close. Since committed action doesn't have to be limited to changing what you do, sometimes it's about how you walk in the moment.
A hard supervision conversation, a rest observation, a day that's already gone sideways by 10:00 a. m. Your body is carrying that load, too, not just your thinking.
So there's real evidence behind simple brief regulation tools here. A 2023 metaanalysis of randomized control trials found that structured breath work practices reduced self-reported stress and improved mental health outcomes. And then there's a separate meta analysis that found that heart rate var variability bio feedback training reduced stress and anxiety across a range of studies.
Now, neither of these requires an app or retreat or 20 minutes that you don't have. Even a minute of slower, deliberate breathing before a hard conversation is enough to matter. And now, I'm not going to turn this into a wellness segment.
That's not what this course is for. But I didn't want to leave you with only cognitive tools when the evidence says that the body matters, too. I put a short evidence-based resource page in your workbook with the actual research behind each option just in case you want a tool to reach for before your next hard supervision moment.
All right, before we close, here's something to take you past today. We've got a short worksheet built from everything in this course, so none of it has to live only in your memory. This worksheet has four parts.
One, the diffusion prompt from Separate. I'm having the thought that with space to write your own recurring shoulds. Two, your values words from engage written where you'll actually see them again.
Three, your committed action sentence from just now. And four, one weekly check-in question, just one to come back to. Did I take the action I committed to?
And if not, what got in the way? Not to punish yourself, just to notice. the same way you'd track any other target behavior.
One more honest thing before we close, and you already know this from your own field better than I do. Information alone doesn't hold. You tell your RBTs this constantly.
One training session doesn't build a durable skill. Repetition does. The same principle applies to you right now with everything we just covered.
There's actual research behind this, you guys, not just a hunch. Work on maintaining trained behavior over time has found that what keeps a new skill from quietly fading isn't the original training. It's a self-monitoring and consistently returning to the material afterward.
That's exactly why your workbook has a check-in date built in. And that's exactly why I'm going to say this directly. Watching this once and closing the tab won't be enough.
Come back to the worksheet. Rerun, reset in your head in 5 minutes the next time you notice yourself going flat. This repetition is the actual mechanism, not an afterthought.
This isn't a program that you complete once and you're fixed forever. Burnout isn't a box that you check. It's something you'll likely move in and out of across a career in this field.
The statistics we opened with are real and they don't fully go away just because you finished a 2-hour course or a 1-hour course or a anyh hour course. But here's what's actually different now. You have a structure for what you do when it starts creeping back in.
Recognize it. Examine where it's leaking into your supervision. Separate from the should that's running the show.
Engage with what actually matters to you and take on one small action. You came into this course fried and maybe you still are some days. That's honest and it's not a failure.
But the version of you that loved this work is still in there. I know because mine still is too on the days the work gets to just be what it actually is. All right, one more last thing.
If something in this course landed for you, a moment, a line, a piece that stuck, I would genuinely love to hear about it. Email me. Tell me what showed up for you, what your committed action ended up being, whether the worksheet actually got used.
Y'all, I read my emails. And if you get to the other side of this course and find yourself wanting more than a one-time watch, more support putting into this practice, more of an ongoing thing, reach out about that, too. I'm building out coaching support for exactly this.
And this course is just the start of that conversation, not the end of it. And I do want to say also if you felt like this wasn't helpful or didn't hit the mark or you couldn't relate to it at all, I'd hear about that too. I'd really like that feedback.
And I do want to end with saying thank you for being here and for doing the actual work instead of just watching. Up next, you're going to find your short comprehensive check to close out your CU credit. See you later, guys.
