The work of supporting others can seem never ending. There’s always more we could do, someone else we could support or more injustices to fight. Our own needs, pain or challenges can seem trivial in comparison.

But it’s OK to slow down. It’s OK to pause. It’s OK to stop. The work may feel endless but our resources aren’t. Top athletes don’t just prioritise training, they prioritise recovery.

Whether you need an hour, a day, a week or five years, taking time to replenish your energy is vital. And the lovely thing about this work is that you are never alone. Just as more people move into crisis or suffering, more people enter on the side of support.

This is a team effort and sometimes we need to surrender the baton. And when we do, we role model sustainability so the people we hand it to also know it’s OK to surrender the baton for an hour, a day, a week or five years.

And maybe when they need to stop, they pass the baton to our own refreshed, willing and ready hand.

For many of us, taking on a role to support others feels more like a calling than a job. There’s a deep sense of meaning, a connection to the work. And finding your vocation can come with a profound sense of belonging and recognition. “Yes! This is what I want to do!”

All the more confronting then, if we get into this work and find that it’s not exactly like what we imagined.

Perhaps we imagined working with people who wanted what we had to offer in thoughtful conversations and a sense of achievement. Then we find ourselves working with people who aren’t even sure they want to be there at all.

Perhaps we imagined more chaos and friction, but also that it works out OK in the end. And then it doesn’t.

Or we turned up to work with people and find ourselves spending more time entering data. Or turned up for conversations and end up filling in a lot of forms.

It’s like our personal relationships. The romantic rollercoaster of falling in love gets all the attention from Hollywood but like any love story, that’s just the beginning.

What about when the honeymoon fades? The next thirty years of trying to work out how to live together and navigate life’s challenges is the real story.

It’s the same thing when we find our vocation. Deciding to enter a field of work or completing qualifications may get the glory. But the challenge of turning up and working out how to be genuinely helpful in the messiness of human lives is where the learning happens.

There may be unexpected twists and turns, heartbreak and new starts. You will discover things about yourself you didn’t anticipate, good, bad and everything between. Your path may take you far from your initial dream. And like any relationship you may decide to walk away entirely at some point. Maybe return. Maybe not.

This work is a quiet, slow, evolving process that takes time and effort like any relationship. It’s not sexy, it’s might not make good tv, but it’s the stuff of growth and fulfilment.

What comes to mind if I ask what do you hope will happen when you turn up to support someone?

We might think about specific outcomes, problems being resolved, help in some practical form. Or the person feeling hope or relief about their situation. That might then lead us down a path of what we can do to help that to happen – skills, techniques, resources. And a measure of how successful we were might include whether the desired outcome occurred.

What happens if we change that question slightly and ask what do you hope a person will experience when you turn up to support them?

It’s likely there was some overlap in the responses to the two versions. But perhaps now we reflect more on how we hope they would feel being with us. Or what they might notice about the experience. We might wonder more about their perception of us from their half of the encounter.

These three questions are useful anchors to ask and return to across our development as helping professionals and carers:

What do you want a person to experience when you turn up to support them?

What do you do that helps that to happen?

How will you know if what you are doing is working?

Supporting others requires us to be thoughtful, emotionally available and open to intuition. While some roles allow or even require touch, it’s not usually the main vehicle of change and in some roles it’s explicitly forbidden. Instead, much of the work occurs through connection, concepts, conversation. As richly valued as these are, they also have an insubstantial quality that doesn’t have clear beginnings, middles or ends.

We know we need to be holistic, and often talk of head, heart and body as our anchors. But what if we adjusted that a little and reframed this as head, heart and hands?

A friend of mine earned her PhD but after a couple of years of working in her field, she gave it up to paint houses. Aside from the relief of leaving behind the frustrations of academia, she talked about the simple satisfaction of her new job. She moved, she solved problems and, at the end of the day, she could stand back and see the walls she had painted.

There is something grounding about helping others through action, particularly when it is repetitive and rhythmic and finishes with a sense of completion. Even better when it’s done in company with a feeling of shared effort, and where talking is optional.

So if we’re in a talking-based role, we might need to get creative to find a bit more balance between our head, heart and hands. Lay bricks. Chop carrots. Stuff envelopes. Pack boxes. Shovel gravel. Knit booties. Scrub walls. Where can we find opportunities to also use our hands and take action?