If you are in the helping professions, you need support. Hopefully you have good managers and supervision. Ideally these roles are built into the work. Sometimes you need to find them for yourselves. When you get the right fit, external supervision is a worthwhile investment in your skills, professional self-care and career.

There is also value in less formal mentoring. Not your manager. Not your supervisor. People who can give you a refreshingly honest and grounded take on the work from one step back.

It’s hard to find your way when the support offered is mostly aligned with performance targets or organisational objectives. Or with a narrowly defined professional identity that doesn’t seek to question itself. You also need support that makes room for you – who you are, your values, your strengths and how you could make your way within in the bigger picture.

There’s a role for aunties and uncles. Someone who can talk authentically about the reality of the work, it’s limitations and messiness, as well as the opportunities. Someone who can talk straight with you, not via the funding models.

Maybe there’s a dash of healthy cynicism and almost always a generous dose of pragmatism. There’s a willingness to say “I don’t know” and mean it when they say “I believe in you”. Someone who will always bring you back to the fundamental purpose of the work and the people you are trying to support.

When we think of therapy, it’s hard not to imagine a therapist’s office. Armchairs, set on an angle to each other, box of tissues on a coffee table between. Maybe a sofa. Very likely a calming print on the wall, possibly of an impressionist painting or forest scene.

If you work in the public sector, you may need to swap out the cosier features for more utilitarian ones. The armchairs might be washable vinyl, or have less fabric and more plastic. The print might be more generic, sun faded or replaced by public health posters tacked to the wall.

Either way, the idea of the counselling room is embedded in our minds – a safe space for vulnerable conversations.

And yet… Youth workers often find young people are more likely to open up when they are being driven somewhere, eco therapists work on trauma in nature. Some people feel actively anxious in closed spaces, others are just more comfortable in motion. And sometimes profound connection can emerge in the space created by a shared, practical activity.

The counselling room is there for good reason, offering containment, confidentiality and predictability to many clients. It’s valuable to have spaces that are just for the purpose of therapeutic work, where a door can be closed when the conversation ends. A dedicated space also allows therapists and organisations to develop consistent procedures to offer services and respond to risk.

But it’s always worth asking if this our only option. We don’t want to mistake convenience with necessity, convention with quality. There may be times when we need to think outside of the box, with its armchairs, coffee table and print on the wall.

When we learn our craft we learn a lot about what to do – what to say, when to say it and, sometimes, how to say it. In terms of what not to do, we get the big ones – don’t cause harm, don’t breach trust, don’t violate the code of ethics.

There is less focus on how not to take action in the moment. How to become more comfortable with silence. How to hold back useful information at a not so useful time. How to refrain from giving opinions or advice when the other person’s ideas need to be brought forth. How to just sit, hold the space and allow what is happening right now to be felt and experienced.

Far from passive or indifferent, non action is a state of active awareness. An intentional redirection of energy from doing to being. Anyone who knows me will know this one is dear to my heart because I’m really not very good at it. I’ve had to work for it. I’m still working on it. I’ve got a mind like a box of bees and there’s always something I’m wanting to say.

Just as we build a repertoire of useful questions or strategies, we can build our capacity to hold our urges. Like strengthening a muscle at the gym, there is no wrong place to be when we start and each repetition helps.

We can ground ourselves with why it matters so much – holding space invites something to meaningful to emerge, rather than try to make something less substantial happen. We can build stamina – five seconds may become thirty, one minute may become five. And we can give our full attention to what the other person is saying and try to understand more deeply what has already been said.

And we can be gentle with ourselves when, once again, we lose our focus. The autopilot kicked in. The urge offer thoughts got too strong. Or we just reacted and joined a conversation as our less filtered selves. Perhaps we are able to reset in the moment. Sometimes we need to give ourselves space to refresh and return another time.

It’s tempting to think things will get easier when… we know more, the funding models are improved, more resources are made available, we’ve done that workshop, we get more staff, the roadworks are finished, the IT system is upgraded or we go to a four day week. And possibly it will. We can always try to improve what we have.

We can also waste a lot of energy resisting reality. Complaining about the limitations. Reserving our best for when the conditions are the best. But those things haven’t happened yet, and we’re here, right now, with things just the way they are.

The messiness isn’t just the reality of the work. It is reality. Life is messy. Relationships are messy. Change is wildly, unpredictably messy. When we fight reality we risk sending a subtle message that the people we support need unrealistically ideal circumstances in order to thrive.

We may worry about saying the wrong thing but their lives are full of people who say unhelpful or out of sync things. It’s more important to be on alert for when we inevitably miss the mark and repair any friction than to think we will can avoid such moments.

We may not have all the resources we would like, but we can model being adaptable, tolerating discomfort, and making do, and be alert for the ways that they also demonstrate their own resiliency.

If we offer the perfect therapeutic relationship, we haven’t helped the person to prepare for dealing with anyone else. If we offer perfect solutions, we’ve done nothing to help them discover their own wisdom. And if we offer seamless, generously funded services we might just have helped everything else to seem a little bit more disappointing.

So yes, absolutely, let’s keep improving ourselves, our skills, our systems. There is a gift in offering another human a thoughtful and carefully delivered service. But let’s also, equally, embrace the messiness of the reality we are in now.