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Every day this week, we are sharing with you some highlights of the upcoming Compassion Fatigue Conference June 4-5th. Today, we feature a “mini business bootcamp” and Soul Stations.

Running a Business from the Heart and the Hip: Balancing the joys and predicaments of being your own boss with Robin Cameron, M.Ed., CCC.

An informal talk with a serial entrepreneur who believes that with a little bit of creativity you can be the best supervisor you’ve ever had and avoid becoming a tyrannical mess!  Bring your questions and real life examples, or show up with fears and reservations, heckle, take notes, come as you are to this fun and relaxed business bootcamp.

My clients face a deluge of unrelenting stress. We take the best of coaching and counselling and with a little humour thrown in, work to lessen the hard stuff and make room for more fun and inspiration

Robin Cameron is a therapeutic coach who works with helping professionals and students who desire more freedom and room to be creative in their work lives. She can be found at www.lifeinspired.ca

Join us on June 4th to hear Robin’s presentation along with several others such as:

Soul Stations (A little first aid for the soul) with Christa Dales Donnelly

After 30 years working in social services agencies, both in Developmental Services and Ontario Works, Christa Dales Donnelly has experienced Compassion Fatigue and all the fallout from it. Christa developed her business  “Compassion For You”  in order to provide awareness and support for agencies, professionals and families that are involved with the rewarding, heart wrenching, frustrating, life affirming and soul sucking endeavour of providing human services. At the conference, Christa will engage you in fun, interactive and thoughtful activities while affording you the opportunity to learn and share ideas that help us cope when our “give a damn” is busted.

and

Taking Control Back from Stress: Key strategies from a top level personal trainer with Renee Whitney

When your health becomes your last priority you can become drained, physically uncomfortable and stuck. Take care of your physical well being first and not only do you transform your body but you feel more ALIVE!!  Your relationships, work and life in general all become easier and more enjoyable. Most people know this & want this, but sometimes find it hard to stay on track when “life happens.” This is why I created FOCUS Personal Fitness Studio. I believe that everyone can benefit from proper guidance, support, and motivation. Our role at Focus is to provide these tools in a welcoming environment where individuals can discover their own personal reasons for wanting to live a healthier, happier life.

Stay tuned as we feature more great offerings from this year’s Compassion Fatigue Conference all week!

Don’t forget that there is still time to enter your name in the”Refer a Friend Contest”

Refer a Friend Contest: Ends May 16th 2013.

Refer a friend and enter your name in a draw to win a $200 refund off your registration! To enter this contest: 1) You must be a registered participant by May 10th, 2013 2) Your friend must enter your name in the “refer a friend contest” box on the registration page anytime before May 17th. We will draw a name on May 17th, 2013. Good luck!

 Click here for more information on the June 4-5th Conference

Every day this week, we are sharing with you some highlights of the upcoming Compassion Fatigue Conference June 4-5th. Today, it’s all about organizational health

What would you do if you were given carte blanche to design and implement a compassion fatigue initiative in your workplace? 

Read more ›

Refer a friend to the Compassion Fatigue Conference June 4-5, 2013 and your name will be entered in a draw to win a $200 refund off your registration!

Refer a Friend Contest: Ends May 16th 2013.

Contest rules: 1) To be eligible, you must be a registered participant by May 10th, 2013  2) Your friend must enter your name in the “refer a friend contest” box on the registration page and they must register anytime before May 17th. If you refer more than one friend, your name can be entered more than once!

We will draw one name on May 17th. Good luck! Click here for more information on the Compassion Fatigue Conference, June 4-5, 2013 in Kingston, On.

Today, I am delighted to bring you a feature interview with Dr Judith Davidson who is a Kingston-based clinical psychologist and the author of the newly released “Sink into Sleep: A Step-by-Step Workbook for Reversing Insomnia.”

Q: Judith, congratulations on your new book! Can you tell us a bit about your work as a Kingston-based psychologist?

Thank you!  Since 2007, I have been the psychologist with the Kingston Family Health Team.  This Team comprises several family physicians and other health professionals who serve 30,000 patients in the Kingston area. At the Health Team, I assess and treat primarily anxiety, depression and sleep problems. Most of what I do is group treatment programs, using cognitive behavioural therapy.

Q: Can you tell us about your new book? 

Certainly!  I am excited that it is out.  I wrote Sink into Sleep for people who have insomnia (trouble sleeping that lasts 1 month or more). This condition impairs people’s functioning, well being and mood. It can also lead to depression.

My background is in sleep research, and for several years I’ve known that the best treatment for insomnia is something called “CBT-I”. CBT-I is cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia. This treatment is NOT accessible to the people who need it. So I wrote the book to get the technique out there, to put the knowledge into action.

CBT-I is a set of interventions specifically for insomnia. In a nutshell, it involves first discovering what type of insomnia you have, then basing your bedtime and rise time on that — in order to get your sleep very solid. You then adjust your bedtime over 2-3 weeks until you have solid sleep that is sufficiently long. It also includes techniques for dealing with racing thoughts.

I tried to translate the techniques that we use in the clinic to the book so that people can do the program themselves.  It does involve logging your sleep and some simple calculations, but with some patience, it is a highly effective program. People start sleeping well and then know how to maintain their good sleep for the long term.

The book also contains chapters on men’s sleep, women’s sleep, sleep when you are anxious or depressed, sleep and medical conditions, and the pros and cons of sleep medication.

The book website is Sinkintosleep.com.  It has information and some special electronic forms to supplement the book.

I hope it helps lots of people!

Q: What would you suggest to someone who is reading this interview who has been struggling with insomnia and doesn’t know where to start? 

Pick up a copy of Sink into Sleep!

Q: Thank you Judith! I see that the book is now available at Chapters, Indigo and Amazon. So if you are struggling with insomnia or know someone who needs help with their sleep, take a look at this great new resource.

This White Coat Black Art show aired in September 2011, but I hadn’t had a chance to listen to it yet. Click here to listen to Dr Brian Goldman investigate the phenomenon of nurse bullying. There is a great interview with Kathleen Bartholomew, author of “Ending Nurse-to-Nurse Hostility: Why Nurses Eat their Young and Each Other.” It certainly fits with what I’ve heard from nurses across Canada. An alarming situation.

This will be a short post as it’s “family day” here in Ontario and it’s a day off for nearly everyone. I must say that although I love the fact that we now have a stat holiday in February, I find the name of it a bit unfortunate. I know many wonderful people who, for all sorts of reasons, live alone and do not have family – is it really necessary to rub it in their face that they are alone today “happy family day! oh, wait, you don’t have a family…” Could we not have called it something a bit more inclusive? I also think that the term “family” is very loaded for many people, not always a source of comfort and love. I believe that family is composed of whomever forms your inner circle of love and support. My Kingston “family” extends far beyond bloodlines and includes a delightful child who was adopted from Siberia whom I consider to be my niece, even though she isn’t, and her mother, who was present at both of my children’s birth, and who is like my sister, although she isn’t, and so on…

Read more ›

Many of you who have attended my workshops know that I am a big fan of the concept of 1% change. In fact, when it comes to implementing change, my motto is “Keep it Small, Realistic and Achievable.” Good for you if you ran a marathon last year, awesome if you lost 70 lbs and kept it off, or quit smoking and never looked back, but the truth is that for most of us, change is hard, and we fall down over and over again. New Year’s resolutions? They are usually long gone by Valentine’s day, right? The problem is often that we set ourselves up to fail – our goals are simply too big, and we lose steam early into the change process. A way to set yourself up for success is to establish what Sark calls “micromovements” tiny little steps in the right direction: want to improve your eating? Add one apple per week to your diet. Start small, and keep it small.

Now, clearly great minds think alike because my favourite blogger Leo has written about micromovements too. Check out his great post on making small changes and go floss that one tooth! Happy V day to all of you. xoxo Françoise

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Do you remember the last time you picked up a book that you could not put down until you had read every last word?

I just had that great pleasure with Laurie Barkin’s book The Comfort Garden: Tales from the Trauma Unit. This is a story of how a dedicated and highly experienced psychiatric nurse found her way into the depths of vicarious trauma and burnout and travelled her way back out again, having learned many important things along the way: Lessons about a dysfunctional health care system, the lack of support often experienced by patients and staff alike, about moral distress, repeated trauma exposure, about the price health care professionals pay when managed care has stripped away the structure that allowed them to do their work safely and ethically.

Sometimes I feel like that’s what we do at the hospital. We hold up the weight of the world. And, in doing so, we hear screams and witness the suffering that sometimes becomes our screams and our suffering, only we choke it back and continue bearing the weight without complaining and without acknowledging that we too need relief. L. Barkin “The Comfort Garden” (2011) Read more ›

Today, I am delighted to offer you an interview with Tanea Fortin, a Certified Child and Youth Counsellor and professor in the Child and Youth Worker program at St Lawrence College in Kingston, Ontario. Tanea has a wealth of experience working with children and youth, and is no newcomer to Compassion Fatigue education – she attended one of the very first workshops that Robin Cameron and I offered over a decade ago. Since then, Tanea has integrated concepts of self care into all of her teaching. I have had the pleasure of visiting Tanea’s class about once a year to meet her students and answer questions. When the Compassion Fatigue Workbook was published last year, Tanea decided to select it as one of her textbooks for the placement course.  I wanted Tanea to have the opportunity to share with other instructors what she has found useful. Tanea also generously offered to share two of her handouts with us. They are included as downloadable documents in the body of the text. Read more ›

I don’t know about you, but no matter how responsible I aim to be with money, I always have somewhat of a financial hangover after the Christmas holiday – I tend to go a little overboard in December, especially with stocking stuffers (you can spend a lot of money on very tiny things – just because they are small doesn’t mean they aren’t expensive!), food, wine, baked goods, chocolate – all these nice things that I want to contribute to the holiday experience for my loved ones. SO, I thought it was very timely to hear the wonderful Gail Vaz-Oxlade on a recent noon hour show. Gail, if you don’t know her (really, you don’t know her? How is that possible? She is everywhere! Ok, everywhere in Ontario) is a no b.s. financial expert who helps everyday folk to get out of debt. She has two very popular TV shows and several books. Her most recent book Money Rules offers 261 rules on money smarts. I have written about Gail in several prior posts such as here and here and here too.

Listen to Gail Vaz-Oxlade on CBC Radio One’s Ontario Today

Read my 3 post series: Money Matters

Money Matters – Resources to Get your Finances in Order

Money Matters Part Two: A blogful of Resources

Money Matters Part Three: Becoming an Entrepreneur

One of the things I have done in the recent years to help with the Christmas shock, is to open a separate savings account called “Xmas” in which I deposit a small amount each month. That way, I have a clear sense of what I am working with. My mistake was to create an account called “Xmas/Kids’ Summer Camps” which I now realise doesn’t work for our new reality and simply means that I don’t actually have a clear sense of how much money I am working with. But that’s an easy fix. With most big banks nowadays, you can open savings account in a matter of minutes online, providing you already have a main account with them. Scotiabank, certainly, is very user-friendly about this. I have 6 savings accounts in which I dole out a certain amount at the start of every single month. That way, I have a very clear visual of where the money is going and how fast it’s going. It’s sort of a virtual version of Gail’s Money Jars.

Now can you tell my 12 year old son to stop growing? Buying shoes every three months is throwing a very large wrench in this well laid-out plan.

Coming soon: A feature interview with a professor in a Child and Youth Worker program who will share with us how she incorporated the Compassion Fatigue Workbook in her practicum course.