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New articles will be added every few weeks so check back soon.
Empathy: The Rock of Positive Behaviour Support
Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, is a fundamental social skill that plays a key role in building relationships, fostering compassion, and promoting prosocial behaviour. In prioritising increased quality of life for a person displaying behaviours that challenge (over behaviour modification), Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) has a need for staff empathy at its core. Empathy has long been regarded as an innate trait, but recent research suggests that empathy is not only something we are born with, but something we can both learn and lose, influenced by various internal and external factors.
The Door
I sometimes look around me and think of things that we take for granted and how significant they are for how we live. The clock for example has fashioned the daily rhythms, functions and processes of billions of people around the planet. Within capitalism it has been used to measure time we spend at the service of (usually) someone else. It generally instils a reflex around behaviours including when we go to sleep, wake-up, eat, work, learn, socialise etc. The invention and development of the door is something else that is also truly fascinating and significant for us. Yes, that’s right, the door. But especially the development of the lock on a door.
The Value of Values
Oi! You!
The way we speak to people, and the language we use, have always been aspects of communication that risk causing offence or a feeling of personal injury. There have been many social developments in recent times that have arguably accelerated this risk; the use of personal pronouns springs to mind as a powerful example. Even potential misunderstanding around colloquialisms and local modes of expression require care – as I’ve found to my cost over the years as a Glaswegian who moved to rural Cornwall 30 years ago. Where relationships are based on unequal power, there needs to be some degree of personal reflection and awareness to ensure that people with more power take care not to exhibit language, attitudes and values that create resentment, fear, anxiety or exclusion. It’s not about wokeness; it’s about respect and professionalism.
Well, What Do You Know?
Someone once asked me: What do you know for sure? It’s quite a profound question, especially in such unpredictable times. But there are things we do know. I know how to tie my shoelaces, for example. I also understand how to do it and how it works. Everything we know and understand has been learned somehow. Some of the learning we have acquired may have been learned independently of someone else, by experiment or by chance (self-discovery). Most of what we know and understand has however been taught to us in some way. It’s interesting to consider that when we have been taught, or have taught other people, new things there has been an approach, or method, and a process involved in doing this.