Community Service Worker

How Self-Awareness Benefits Your Career After Community Service Worker College

July 19, 2019

Self-awareness is the ability to understand yourself as separate from other people and your environment. It involves being conscious of your own motivations, thoughts, feelings, and personality traits. With self-awareness, you can assess how your own attitudes and beliefs might influence your work.

You may connect too much or too little to the lives of people you work with, imposing your own experiences onto theirs and judging them through your own lens. Ego boundaries are what keep us from blending our individual selves with others, and it’s important to have these boundaries in a helping profession. Read on to learn some ways that self-awareness can help you after community service worker training.

Conscious Use of Self After Community Service Worker School

Conscious use of self means applying your knowledge, skills, personality, and other traits to your work with intention. This increases your control and use of personal resources, as well as reducing counterproductive reactions.

Increasing your ability to self-reflect and identify your strengths will enable you to use these advantages to benefit the people you help. For example, sharing your own experience with a client might be counterproductive in some cases, while in other situations it might support them by providing common ground. You can present the best version of yourself with everything you’ve learned at community service worker college, combined with your natural personality traits and other skills. When you know what you can offer, you can leverage your strengths to benefit people.

Identify Your Own Stressors to Better Cope with Your Job

Self-awareness helps you notice when you are being triggered by a personal stressor. Instead of accumulating tension, you can use self-awareness to notice what is causing certain feelings and responses in you, and mitigate them to maintain a calmer and more controlled demeanour. This will also help you cope with unexpected events and challenges in your work, as it is a way of caring for yourself and managing your emotions.

Mitigating your own stressors lets you be fully present and contribute to the lives of others at work

Self-awareness offers you control, and providing the best, most professional service and support in your career requires you to have control over yourself and your responses.  Awareness of your body state can be a major factor in controlling stress. For instance, if your jaw is clenched because of a stressor, letting go of your jaw tension might lead to a more balanced, focused emotional state.

Community Service Worker College Leads to Jobs with Important Boundaries

In addition to ego boundaries, which keep us from identifying too easily with the experiences and lives of others,  graduates of community service worker school need to be mindful of emotional and physical boundaries with the people they assist and work with. This is to benefit both you and your clients or community members. With awareness of personal motivations, you can assess why you are doing or saying things and whether your motivation is personal for helping someone.

Being aware of your own beliefs, memories, tendencies and thoughts will help you monitor your reactions to the people you work with. You’ll be able to maintain healthy boundaries and keep your relationship professional. You can be a caring, accepting support person for someone without fully immersing yourself in their life, being disturbed by their thoughts or feelings, or feeling fully responsible for them. In this way you’ll be a strong, steady support and provide services that can change people’s lives for the better.

Boundaries let you connect to and care for people without taking on full responsibility for their lives

Are you interested in what a community service worker course has to offer?

Contact Medix College for more information.

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