Compassionate Living Psychology

Work is an important part of our lives. On top of offering us financial incentives, work and career could be a source of self-esteem and positive input to our mental well-being. However, work environment that are incompatible with our personal lives or even contradictory to the values important for us could fuel a sense of emotional exhaustion or even cynicism. This would, understandably, be detrimental for our mental health. We could feel burnt out, tortured, fatigue, withdrawn, depressed, disengaged, irritable or even resentful when we see ourselves stuck in an insecure, unrecognized, unrewarding, or unfulfilling job.

Interestingly, a common theme I observed among my clients’ sharing is that workplace relationships and unreasonable treatment from manager, rather than work duties per se, were the most challenging and stress provoking aspects of work for them. Speaking from my personal experience, I have myself walked through an emotionally taxing period in my previous workplace as well. Sharing my clients’ feelings, it was not about work itself, but office culture and supervisors’ management style that made it difficult for colleagues to cope.

Indeed, I could still recall how I had to segregated my work mentality into two spheres to keep myself focused and engaged. I actively switched between a clinical work mode when I see my clients – the part of work that I treasured and enjoyed – and an administrative mode in my encounters with workplace management – the part of work which I dreaded because the management was filled with a team who habitually minimize colleagues’ achievement and disregard all feedback received.

Reflecting on that period of my career, the workplace turnover rate was high and staff morale was low, but it was the “thank you” and smiles I received from my clients that kept me going. I believe my clients’ and my own experience echo the idea that compassion plays a core role in effective workplace management.

1. Enhanced psychological capacity is regarded as employees’ characteristics that could enhance work performance and job satisfaction. It refers to the sense of efficacy that one can identify and achieve work-related goals and stay resilient and optimistic in the event of stress and setback.
2. However, it is important to remember that the benefits of psychological capacity hinged on the level of compassion employees experience at work: Beliefs that one’s efforts and achievement would be ignored or devalued at work would dampen motivation and enthusiasm so that even people with high psychological capacity would fail to show the expected level of proactiveness at work.
3. This could be understood as a protective mechanism where employees choose not to invest psychological resources into a workplace/company/organization even though they are capable of doing so because they expect their contribution would be rejected or undermined.
4. Compassion in the workplace means a genuine sense of being cared and valued. It’s driven by trust as well as motivation of acknowledging strengths and facilitating employees to develop and flourish, rather than regarding subordinates with doubtful and skeptical attitude while making belittling comments and constantly demanding improved output from staff.
5. The lack of compassion drives distrust and discontent that could lower proactiveness and increase employee turnover, impacting workplace morale and eventually harming the company productivity as well as imposing higher cost spent on recruitment and training new staff.

Being in a managerial position is not easy. In fact, when I used to supervise clinical psychology trainees, I often remind myself that apart from holding the trainees responsible for their work quality (and mistakes they made), I also have a duty to identify their strengths, offer feedback and facilitate their self-understanding so they can develop and flourish as a competent and independent clinical psychologist. As a supervisor, bringing the best out of people is as essential as evaluating workers’ performance.

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