How can you maintain active listening skills while avoiding burnout in peer support?

It is important to learn to know ourselves and understand how we can navigate our own activities and preserve our own mental health before we can help and support others. It is extremely important, therefore, that we understand when you are emotionally ready to support because if not you will not be adding value to your peers. You have to be in the right place to be open and able to help.

We hear it all the time, “you can’t pour from an empty cup”. You also cannot effectively pour from a cup that is cracked, has a whole in it, or is otherwise leaking. Essentially, the best way to avoid burnout so can use active listening is to make sure you are making consistent time for yourself away from the work you do. This includes community and volunteer work as well. Those of us in service are there for many reasons, most of all, we just want to serve. However, if you are constantly stretched thin, no matter how skilled you are at active listening, you will find yourself unable to fully engage with anyone because you are not actually present. Make time for yourself to REST. If you are serving others, it’s a necessity.

We all know what we are capable of, how far we can help our peers. However when we want to pose ourselves as guidance, and point of contact that our teammates can reach for practical or moral support then we need to propose ourselves the following questions: 1. What can I do to improve my leadership skills? 2. Do I have all the technical knowledge that is needed to support my team? 3. What do I want to people to reach me for? 4. Do I feel that I am adding value to my team with the support I am giving? How can I improve? From the moment we understand how people are visualising us and how that aligns to what we expect to represent for them, will be the moment we can really improve and keep adding value.

As mentioned a while ago, we cannot help others if we cannot help ourselves, the golden rule when it comes to be a leader and support our peers is that we have to lead by example. We cannot preach something we do not apply, while we want to support our team we need to keep in mind our own mental health and wellness does not suffer in the process.

We don't have to invent the wheel, and just like your experiences can help other, you can also learn from other's experiences. It is a continuous, bidirectional learning process. Something I recommend to do to encourage this is to, every one or two months, hold a learning session where you take the team to share your most challenging project, for example and others can contribute with their own experiences.

Recognition is important, wether some people acknowledge it or not, or wether it's public or private. What you can do is to ensure you share positive and/or constructive feedback at all times, it is a practice that seems everyone is aware but not a lot of people apply it, I cannot stress enough how important to give and receive feedback. Feedback is what keeps the learning process going and so you need to ensure to take the time to provide it. It is also fundamental to receive feedback, it is your way of knowing if you are truly adding value to your team, what I suggest you do is that, every quarter, you send an anonymous survey to your team, let them share with you positive and constructive feedback as well, to you.