I don’t know too many people in the helping professions who think what they do is ‘enough’. Need is high, resources are limited and there’s always more people queuing to get in the door. Add escalating social and economic pressures and it can feel impossible to meet demand.

The work itself is often complex and there aren’t a lot of clear wins to offset the immersion in human suffering. There’s also a growing expectation that everyone should be alert to, assess and monitor a growing list of risk factors that may vary widely from the presenting concern.

People who choose to support others often have a deeply held feeling of responsibility, a strong sense of integrity and fair chance of perfectionism. It’s a fine line between a feeling of not doing enough and not being enough. There’s likely to be pressure and expectations coming from other areas of life as well. It’s a recipe for exhaustion, burnout and good people leaving their fields.

And sometimes this is all compounded by messaging from senior managers, ministers, media or the public, amplifying the internal pressure to be angels, mind readers and miracle workers where one mistake is one too many.

Being surrounded by other helping professionals can offer a sense of community. But it can also reinforce unrealistic benchmarks. When everyone else’s work is challenging it can be hard to appreciate the impact of the work because when we look around it’s just normal. Much of the work is also done alone with the client, not shared.

It’s a lot. And can do harm if we don’t have active counter measures in place. We need to make space to disentangle our desire to do a good job from internalising impossible expectations. We need room to continually reset, be human, have some days be better than others, have missteps, awkwardness, and more to learn.

And to do that, we need each other. We can help each other catch the internalised pressure because it’s not always easy to see it from the inside. We can collectively celebrate the wins, no matter how small.

When we create cultures where mistakes and setbacks are approached with grace and curiosity, we can share the load rather than make one person’s burden heavier. It’s not about adding a new task on top of the rest, it’s about softening the edges of what’s already there with a little shared kindness.

When we build a fire in a wood burner or campsite, we start small. A spark, a little kindling, maybe some gentle breaths to give it oxygen. We pay close attention to help the delicate flame to become fire. Sometimes the conditions aren’t ideal and we need to take extra care. Maybe the kindling isn’t quite dry or we only have a little bit, or perhaps there’s a strong breeze or threat of rain.

As the fire takes hold, we don’t need to pay quite so much attention from moment to moment. Instead we tune into the slower rhythm of what size wood to add and when. We take care that it’s not so soon that it smothers the fire, and not so late there’s not enough fuel left for the next piece to catch alight.

Building motivation is very similar. It often starts small and fragile. The kindling might just be a thought, a wondering, a faint vision of something better. The process is tentative, curious, where we’re ready to step back if it’s too much.

We can help to draw out the oxygen that fuels motivation – core values, deep desires, unspoken dreams. We want to watch for what strengthens and diminishes the fire and be ready to help add fuel if it’s needed. But when it becomes fully internalised and integrated, motivation burns with a momentum of its own and we don’t need to do so much. If anything.

And yet how often do we start by trying to set whole logs on fire? We fund programs that treat motivation more like an electric heater that can be switched on and off, and when it doesn’t work we wonder whether the worker or the client is broken.

And perhaps, it’s because we mistake motivation for the fire itself. Motivation is the heat, the energy, that helps to drive the change. The flame is not the motivation. The flame is hope. Something precious that already flickers within the other person and requires careful, tender attention.

We have plenty of words for groups of animals. A gaggle of geese, a murder of crows, a herd, a flock, a school. And we have plenty more words for groups of humans. A profession. A system. A sample, a cohort, a target population.

Regardless of the role we’re in, which side of the therapeutic fence we sit on, what we get paid or the things that keep us awake at night, we’re all just humans trying to get by as best we can by doing the best we know how.

I know, no revelations here. And yet… how often does this simple fact get lost in the busyness of the work of people supporting people? That the fundamental creatures sitting in the room together, regardless of the qualifications, title or outfit, are the same.

We share the same basic electrochemical processes, the same basic layout of the cardio vascular system, the same inevitability of aging, grief and death. We share the same basic survival needs and our reliance on water, food and air. We even share many of the same core insecurities and fears and hopes. Especially the fear about being different from other people. It’s one of the greatest things we have in common.

Yet we’re trained to focus on a far smaller set of differences, which makes it easier to think in terms of ‘us and them’ rather than ‘us and we’. Many of our strategies to make the work seem more manageable involves compartmentalising and breaking complexities down into smaller pieces. Including our connection.

Coming back to our shared humanity opens up more potential to connect and make the most of this opportunity together. Maybe we’re cycling through different human experiences to each other right now, but we’re all in the same soup of human existence.

And no matter what we’re going through, we all want a little kindness and care, to be seen and understood, to be treated as an equal, to matter. We can start there, and return again and again each time we get pulled away.

We have all benefited from someone holding us to account. Perhaps it was feedback on how our behaviour was unhelpful or hurtful. Maybe they highlighted how we were falling short of our own standards. Or pushed us out of our comfort zone into attempting something we doubted we could do. While it might not have been pleasant at the time, it was valuable and offered something we would have struggled to identify or initiate alone.

Equally we have all been challenged badly. Maybe the wording was insensitive, overly personal or designed to wound. Or was so vague we weren’t clear what exactly was being said. Maybe it came in an environment of inconsistency or lack of safety, leaving us unsure where we stand or how to proceed. If it led to a positive outcome, it was pretty much left to chance.

If we want to get better at giving potentially difficult feedback well, we can start by seeking opportunities to practice receiving it. We notice what makes us constrict or withdraw, and what opens us up to new possibilities. While we want to be mindful that we will have personal preferences, there’s no teacher quite like experience.

Consistently receiving feedback with grace also demonstrates that our priority is growth rather than criticism. We need to be a trusted observer if we want our observations to be trusted. And where possible, we want to bypass the need for feedback altogether and support people to form their own realisations first. Equally, we also don’t want to wait so long that the person needlessly flounders or burns more bridges.

If we still think we have something helpful to offer, we can seek permission to share our perspective. And when we do, it’s more likely to be considered when we are thoughtful, honour the positives and find common ground. We want to be specific but not so detailed it’s overwhelming. Curiosity about the other person’s perspective can turn feedback into an offering. And genuine respect for the other person can transform it into a gift.

Humour in supportive conversations is a tricky thing. We don’t want to over do it and risk coming across as trivialising, condescending, sarcastic or just plain missing the mark. Humour is far from universal, and unaligned humour can disrupt engagement and amplify difference. And while self-protection is healthy, humour can be used to avoid and deflect rather than sit with and connect.

But we also don’t want to under do it, and risk burdening already difficult conversations with an unrelenting weight of seriousness. When we avoid humour, we may inadvertently avoid a fundamental part of the other person or communicate a lack of faith in their resilience. And we risk reinforcing that the problem is bad. Really bad. So bad, there is no possibility of lightness or joy to coexist even in the smallest doses. That’s a hard environment to grow in.

Humour can make the unbearable bearable. If we can find humour in a dire situation, it can’t be one hundred percent bad. If we can find a moment of levity, it’s easier to find a moment to catch our breath. Appreciating absurdity can soften our tendency to take it all so personally. And a genuine shared smile or laugh does genuinely good things on a physiological level.

Humour is like any other interpersonal tool. The more we pay attention to it, question it and watch like mad to see how it lands, the more we can use it in a considered way. We can safeguard it with warmth and kindness, and be guided by the kind of humour offered to us while making sure we’re still being authentic to our own.

We can also be ready to back off and apologise when we miss the mark and even find gentle humour in our own fallibility and faux pas. Done well, it’s not just nice – humour offers a way of relating to life’s challenges that leaves a door open to curiosity, acceptance and hope.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s no coincidence that the wisest teachers I’ve had the privilege to learn from have embodied a deep capacity for humour, wry observation and delight.