Here is the audio recording of the Virtual Book Launch held on April 16 2012 of The Compassion Fatigue Workbook. The full webinar, with slides and audio is available by clicking here.

Thank you to those who attended the live webcast! I was very touched by your emails and your feedback.

Please remember that the book draw, referred to in the audio file was only for the live event and is now closed. If you wish to purchase a copy of The Compassion Fatigue Workbook, you can go to our Store and follow the links.

Thanks! I hope to offer more webinars in the future.

Update: The winner of the book draw is Rhonda Leblanc from Nova Scotia. Thank you to everyone who participated.

Virtual Book Launch

of The Compassion Fatigue Workbook:

Creative Tools for Transforming Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Trauma

Live Broadcast:

Monday, April 16th, 2012 12:00noon-1:00pm EST

with author Françoise Mathieu, M.Ed., CCC.

Compassion Fatigue Specialist

Photo from Kingston book launch, February 2012

Since its publication in January 2012, we have held book launches for the Compassion Fatigue Workbook in Kingston, Toronto and will soon be coming to Ottawa. We are now thrilled to offer a virtual book launch that everyone can attend, no matter where you live!

Join us LIVE on April 16th and enter your name to win a free signed copy of the Compassion Fatigue Workbook!

Busy on that day? Listen to the webinar anytime after April 16th by clicking here. (Please note the contest to win a copy of the book is only valid during the live broadcast).

Where/When/How?

Where: From the comfort of your office or home

When: Monday April 16th, 2012 from 12noon to 1pm EST

How: There are three easy ways to listen to the book launch:

1) At your computer: (this is the best way to participate so you can see the slides while hearing the presenter)

http://InstantTeleseminar.com/?eventID=27125310

2) Using a telephone only:

Phone Number: (203) 347-3041

Pin Code: 562147#

3) You can also listen in via skype:

Follow this link for more information:

http://InstantTeleseminar.com/?eventID=27125310

Win a copy of the Compassion Fatigue Workbook!

 ***To win a free copy of the workbook, you need to send me an email (whp@cogeco.ca) within 2 hours of the end of the webcast, telling me the code word which I will reveal during the webinar. I will draw a name that evening and contact the winner right away. Contest will close at 3pm EST on April 16th, 2012. Only participants in the live call on April 16th are eligible.***

Hope you can join us!

Focusing on Organizational Health and Hands-on Wellness Strategies

Full Program now available!

Here is the amazing lineup for the June 12-13, 2012 Compassion Fatigue Conference which will be held in Kingston, Ontario. I am thrilled to be able to bring together such a talented and diverse group of presenters. Take a look below – your biggest challenge will be deciding which workshops to attend! Please don’t delay in signing up, though – last year, this was a sold out event. Click here for registration information.

Read more ›

Caversham invites you to join in celebrating the release of Françoise Mathieu’s newly published work THE COMPASSION FATIGUE WORKBOOK: Creative Tools for Transforming Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Traumatization. Routledge Psychosocial Stress Series. Click here to download invitation.

at Caversham Booksellers, 98 Harbord St

Reception 7:00 to 9:00 pm,

Thursday, March 1st, 2012

RSVP to Caversham Booksellers:

(416) 944-0962

1-800-361-6120 or

events@cavershambooksellers.com

website: www.cavershambooksellers.com

“Françoise Mathieu’s writing is wonderful: she speaks from the heart, practitioner to practitioner, about the stressors and strains of human service work, particularly those that come from prolonged regular work with traumatized patients and clients. This is a book you help write by yourself and about yourself. That’s why it is the workbook for trauma work.” -

Charles R. Figley, Tulane University, Louisiana, USA, and author of Treating Compassion Fatigue

Over ten years ago, Robin Cameron and I met over coffee and talked about the pressing need for more resources on compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. That conversation lasted for hours and at the end of that day, we had decided to do as much research as we could and design a compassion fatigue workshop that would speak to the needs of helpers around us. Walking the Walk, our one day compassion fatigue workshop, was the product of this meeting of the minds.

For the past decade, we have wanted to offer a coaching group for helpers but the time was never right (babies, a round the world trip, work, life got in the way). Well, now we are ready!

Robin and I are thrilled to be able to offer this unique experience: an eight week coaching group for 8 helping professionals in Kingston! This group starts on April 17th and will offer 5 in person sessions as well as email support and tons of additional resources for eight weeks.

Click here to read more

Those of you who have been to my live workshops have heard this story before:

One day, a few years ago, my son who was about ten years old at the time, came to me looking rather concerned. He said: “Mom, have you ever noticed that we are never in the present moment?” And I said: “What do you mean, sweetheart?” (well, in French but I am translating this conversation for you ) and he replied: “Well, I am either grinding the past, thinking of things that made me angry, or that were unfair, or things I missed doing or I am looking forward to or worrying about the future. I am never in the present. Mom, my life is passing me by!”

My son’s comments made me reflect on many things: the hectic pace of our lives, the rare times when we sit and simply enjoy the present moment and the fact that he’s a wonderfully wise old soul.

Let me ask you: How often are you in the present moment?

Many of you are familiar with mindfulness meditation and mindfulness stress reduction (MBSR). Developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn over thirty years ago, MBSR is a holistic mind-body approach that emphasises the importance of practicing daily sitting meditation where we simply sit, focus on our breathing and stay in the present moment. I wrote a full-length article about MBSR and its effectiveness in helping us manage compassion fatigue in 2009. Click here to read it. If you are not familiar with mindfulness, I encourage you to take a few minutes to view Kabat-Zinn’s Youtube videos on the topic. To find them, simply enter “Stress Reduction Kabat-Zinn” in the Youtube search engine. You will see videos entitled “Stress reduction one of 6″ and so on.

Sitting and doing nothing other than focusing on our breathing is incredibly difficult at first: many people talk about being distracted by thousands of fleeting thoughts, ambient noises and sometimes boredom. This is completely normal. Jon Kabat-Zinn encourages us to simply refocus on our breath, and gently redirect our minds to the task at hand, without beating ourselves up about the distractions. The goal of mindfulness is not to reach a state where our mind is empty, the goal is simply to be here, right now, in the present moment, and, as Kabat-Zinn says, if you need to bring your mind back a thousand times, then bring it back a thousand times.

In his video, Kabat-Zinn explains the tremendous health benefits of learning to connect with the present moment:

“When I am teaching meditation, we use a tennis ball and just remind people that they can drop into the breath virtually at any time. So it’s not just like when you are doing some kind of formal meditation practice – that’s the least interesting part of meditation: The real interesting part of meditation is that your whole life becomes a meditation – that you’re here for all of it, and you are able to be with it with a little less reaction, a little less judgemental and, in that way, these hidden dimensions and opportunities and options appear to us and we can navigate with much greater wisdom and with much greater self-compassion in our own lives and deal with the full catastrophe of the stress, the pain and the illness that is inevitably going to come up because we’re human and we have bodies and we’re mortal and we are subject to huge forces that we have no control over.”

The incredible power of mindfulness is that once you practice it regularly, it becomes a tool that you carry with you  into all aspects of your life: you can reduce the stressful experience of being stuck in a traffic jam, in a heated meeting or working with an angry client by dropping into the breath.

Jon Kabat-Zinn acknowledges that learning to practice mindfulness is indeed difficult: “You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it.” How about starting small and trying to sit without doing anything for the next few minutes? Simply take normal breaths, focusing on your in-breath and your out-breath and perhaps closing your eyes if that is easier. You can also visit this website for an easy introduction to being in the present moment: www.donothingfor2minutes.com

Here’s a link to Kabat-Zinn’s first stress reduction video: Stress Reduction 1 of 6

Update: (January 25, 2012)  How timely – I just came across two short instructional videos on various uses of mindfulness that may be of interest to you. They feature Dr Ron Siegel, author of “The Mindfulness Solution.” In one of them, Dr Siegel interviews a physician’s assistant who works in the Arctic. She describes how useful mindfulness has been for her both in her patient work and in keeping herself grounded and reducing her stress while doing challenging work. Another short video discusses times when mindfulness may be contraindicated and a final one discusses anxiety and mindfulness. These videos were produced by NICABM (The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioural Medicine). I subscribe to their newsletter and often find telecalls and webinars that I enjoy on their site. In order to view these, you need to sign up by sharing your email with NICABM but they guarantee that they will not share your email or spam you. Let me know what you think of the videos! Here is the link to register to view them. Just so you know, I have no affiliation with NICABM, nor do I profit financially from sharing these resources with you. Just thought you’d be interested, as I was.

Walking the Walk: Creative tools for transforming compassion fatigue with Françoise Mathieu, February 23, 2012 9:00-4:00. The Westin, downtown Halifax.

If you are a Halifax resident, please consider coming to this one day compassion fatigue workshop. This event is being sponsored by Connections Halifax.Early bird rate $120.00 (before Feb 14) and regular rate $150.00 To download a registration form, please click here. 

I didn’t give much thought to the fedex notice on my door on Monday. I was busy with the realities of returning to work after two blissful weeks in winter wonderland. Read more ›

This will be a brief post as I am packing things up to head up North for the holidays. Just wanted to share a few update and send some thanks out before going off to the big turkey/Cashew nut roast fest. I will be off on vacation until January 4, though if we finally get snow, I will extend my leave to January 9th.

There are many exciting things happening at Compassion Fatigue Solutions in the New Year: Our book launch in Kingston and Toronto, a Webinar series, and an amazing Conference in June. I will be heading to the East coast several times in the coming months (Halifax and St John’s, looking forward to meeting you!). I will also be presenting in Montreal and Toronto for the Hincks Dellcrest and offering Walking the Walk and the Compassion Fatigue Train the trainer  right here at home in Kingston in March. If you haven’t had a chance to experience our one day Walking the Walk workshop, please come and give yourself the gift of a day for you.

A Word of Thanks

If you have met me in person before, you will likely know that I am deeply passionate about my work. I have had the most amazing past ten years working in the field of compassion fatigue education and have met some wonderful people along the way.

Read more ›

Lawyers and Compassion Fatigue/Vicarious Trauma

The Wisconsin Lawyer recently published a study of public defenders and their CF/VT rates. Very interesting. Unfortunately, they are using VT and CF interchangeably which doesn’t help with future research wishing to tease out the difference between the two. But the good news is that they are using the definition of burnout accurately! Hopefully at some point we will get agreement on these terms. Click here to read the article. 

CF in Aids Workers

Here is a recent article on Compassion Fatigue in AIDS workers. They have a slightly different twist on CF and burnout and how they relate to each other. Click here to read.

Chronic stress in the workplace costing companies billions

The Globe and Mail published an article on December 8th on the Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Addiction and Mental Health which recently published its final report. To quote the Globe: “The roundtable’s final report, which is being released Thursday in Toronto, calls for a 10-year, $10 billion effort by companies and governments to find a cure for depression and improve workplace mental health in Canada, the United States and Britain.” The report provides some shocking statistics on the impact of mental illness on company bottom lines: “The roundtable puts the annual toll at $51 billion (U.S.) in Canada, or 4% of gross domestic product, and a staggering $1.1 trillion across North America and Europe. Four percent of GDP is roughly equal to the combined outpout of Canada’s mining and oil-and-gas industries.” The Globe continues: ”The report found that 18-25 per cent of Canada’s working population likely suffers from depression, or between three million and 4.2 million people.” Click here to view the Roundtable’s reports.

Peer Groups for Physicians

Also in the Globe and Mail, an interesting article about family physicians who have created support groups to reduce the impact of chronically stressful jobs: “As it is, surveys suggest that on-the-job stress and burnout are common among Canadian doctors. A 2001 study of rural family physicians found a self-reported burnout rate of 55 per cent; in a 2008 survey of urban family practitioners in southwestern Ontario, researchers found between 45 and 50 per cent had high scores for burnout symptoms – emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, with a low sense of personal accomplishment.” Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the online version of this article which was published on September 5, 2011 and was entitled “Doctors seek the Rx for burnout” by Sheryl Ubelacker. If you find it, please let me know and I will post a link to it.

Update: Ok I found it! It was originally published by the Canadian Press. Here is the link.

 A handout on Self Awareness and Self Care practices

Dr Lee Lipp is a San Francisco-based psychologist who specialises in working with individuals struggling with depression and anxiety, using mindfulness as one of her key tools. I came across a lovely handout which she wrote: It invites helpers to slow down and reconnect with our self-awareness when we are starting to feel overloaded. She very graciously gave me permission to share it with you here. Thank you so much Dr Lipp! Click here to visit Lee Lipp’s website and click here to view her handout.