The work of helping professions is often intense and complex. And many of the variables are out of our control like funding models, service capacity and the roller coaster of people’s life events.

Anything we can tweak or adjust within our work to feel more effective is worth attending to. We can be pragmatic about what we can and can’t achieve in a given moment.

It’s also helpful to have a counterbalance – an immersive world we are connected to outside of our work where we can refresh our energy.

Family and friends can offer a degree of this, but it also comes from feeling connected to a community of people with a shared interest. Art, craft, sport, nature, food, language, model trains, 1950s Vespas. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you really care about it, others really care about it and it has a healthy and large degree of separation from your daily work.

Likely this other world has its own frustrations and conflicts. But the fact that it exists – and that we exist within it – can help keep our perspective open and hold the challenges of our helping roles more gently.

Having another world of knowledge and skills to draw from also enhances our creative problem solving as we transfer learnings back into our work in often surprising and satisfying ways.

Like maintaining balance on a moving train, we can shift our weight between each foot to steady ourselves and ease the pressure of staying in one place too long.

When I was a kid we spent a lot of time driving through beautiful native forest and our mum was well known for exclaiming “Look at the trees!”. It was less of an instruction and more of an involuntary gasp of wonder. And we did look. And the trees were wonderful. They still are.

Yet when people come to our clinics and services, often in their toughest or darkest times, what do we ask them to look at? Sterile clinic rooms? A faded Monet print or disconcertingly cheerful health information? Maybe a window, maybe not.

We know spending time in nature can be therapeutic. Forest bathing is a real and beautiful thing. Going the next step to conduct deep therapy in nature is a growing field.

We can rarely control the location we support people in. Either there is an amazing big tree out the window or there isn’t. But we can stop and reflect on the space we offer. What hard edges could be softened? What soothing colours, textures and images could we gently introduce? What links to nature might help ground the space and the people we invite into it?

Many of us are personally and painfully familiar with the imposter syndrome – the pervasive sinking feeling that you really don’t know what you’re doing and any minute someone might find out.

It’s associated with self-consciousness, self-doubt, second guessing and a hefty dose of comparison where you always come out feeling second best. It’s not helpful to anyone, least of all the people we support.

We joke that we need to “fake it til you make it!” We are encouraged to be kinder on ourselves, take an inventory of our strengths and capabilities, see growth as a process and seek support on the way. The aim is to build our confidence and find firmer ground.

But what if we’ve got it the wrong way? Maybe it’s the brittle veneer of conviction that is the real imposter. We might well be chasing a false confidence that reassures us but isn’t necessarily accurate or warranted.

We are taught what to know in our training. Far less attention, if any, is given to what we don’t know, let alone how to have a healthy relationship with the reality that our professional knowledge is limited, flawed and constantly evolving.

What we are taught to believe is true now might be dismissed, ridiculed or condemned in the future. We know some of it will, even if we don’t know which bits, because we currently dismiss, ridicule or condemn what was taught in the past.

When we can hold our acquired learning more lightly, we can enter a more equal partnership with the people we support. Less certainty creates more room for curiosity. Conviction gives way to more collaboration. So perhaps making friends with uncertainty is the goal, not the problem to be eliminated.

When we really get into our profession, we run the risk of tunnel vision. Therapists want to talk, surgeons want to cut and physiotherapists want to show you exercises you intend to do but probably won’t.

We put a lot of time and effort into learning our craft and carving out our niche where we feel we have something valuable to offer. We then get together with others from our profession and advocate for more money, resources and recognition to do the special thing we do. And good things have come from that.

It’s just as important to take a step back. Sometimes a really big step back. The randomised control trials of one field might say this particular treatment could be helpful. But so would a fair wage, job security or affordable housing.

And then take it even broader. What can we learn from historians? From philosophers, farmers, engineers, artists? From other cultures, sub cultures, First Nations cultures?

What patterns are leading to the symptoms we treat? What systemic pressures underlie the underlying conditions? We can value our specific contribution and talk about the importance of other perspectives as well. We don’t have to choose.

Just as it is unhelpful to think our mental health is unrelated to our physical health, it is just as short-sighted to treat individual wellbeing as unrelated to social, economic or environmental wellbeing. We’re not stepping out of our lane to talk about this, we’re inviting people in the other lanes into a conversation.