We keep everyone else going. Who keeps us going?
MACE Coffee Chat | Resilience and Wellbeing in the Workplace
There is a particular tiredness that comes with working in communication, marketing and advancement in higher education. We manage the crisis at 22:00. We write the statement nobody wants to write. We carry the excitement of an achievement and the weight of a setback, often in the same day. We are the steady voice for everyone else, and then we log off and do it again tomorrow.
On 13 August, MACE members put that pattern on the table with Dr Charl Davids, Director of the Centre for Student Counselling and Development at Stellenbosch University.
He began by taking the word resilience away from us. “Resilience is not that endless endurance,” he said. It is the capacity to adapt, to recover, and to stay connected to what matters. Endurance asks how much more you can take. Recovery asks what you are putting back.
He was equally clear on the difference between stress and burnout. Stress can be intense and short lived, and recovery restores your capacity. Burnout is what develops when chronic workplace stress goes unmanaged, and it shows up as exhaustion, a sense that your own competence has become harder to reach, and a growing distance from work you used to care about. He also named the early warning sign: irritability. Not irritation at something specific, but the kind where everything grates for no reason you can point to. That, he said, is the moment to speak to someone.
Then came the question aimed straight at us.
“What makes it different for us to send out a statement from the university at one o’clock and not at two o’clock? Whose urgency is it? We can reach situations without going into crisis. When everybody else can be in crisis, it does not mean I have to be.”
His point was that boundaries have to be designed before a crisis hits, not negotiated in the middle of one.
The conversation that followed was honest. René-Jean van der Berg named how our skills follow us home, into the school newsletter and the church fundraiser, so we never really switch off. Charl’s answer was direct. Most of the people he eventually sees diagnosed with depression and anxiety are there, he said, not because of a single trauma, but because they cannot say no. “If I blow air into a balloon all the time and I never stop, it will burst eventually. So what do we expect our bodies to do?” We keep saying yes, he suggested, because we are more afraid of what people will think of us than we are committed to looking after ourselves, and the message we send is that we will always be available, which is exactly what guarantees we will be asked again.
Catherine Cloete of CPUT described her institution’s email policy, which makes plain that staff are not obligated to answer after hours. “Saying no is liberating. That is freedom,” she said. “I started saying no about five or ten years ago. Nobody died.” Martin Viljoen of Stellenbosch University named the culture underneath it: “We keep each other busy the whole time.”
Charl closed with a question rather than a checklist. What will you stop carrying alone?
This is what our Coffee Chats are for. Excellence is not only about the campaign that wins the award. It is also about whether the professionals behind it are still standing, still creative and still able to care by the end of the year. Wellbeing cannot be an extra activity. It has to become part of how the work is organised.
If any of this has landed close to home, speak to your own institution’s employee wellness or counselling service. Every university has one, and it is there to be used.
Our thanks to Dr Charl Davids for his time and his generosity, and to every member who joined and spoke honestly.
The next MACE Coffee Chat takes place on 29 September. Details follow shortly.
Come with your questions, or simply come and listen. Both are welcome.