One of the challenges of most helping roles is that they involve performance. Not the fake kind, where we pretend to be something or someone we are not. It’s more in the sense that the work we do happens live.

When we say a sentence, that’s it, that’s the sentence we said. We can accept it, build on it or apologise for it, but we can’t unsay it. When we miss an opportunity to connect or deepen the work or draw out hope, we may have another chance later, but that moment will remain missed.

Like any performer on the stage, we’ll have better days, and not so good days, and a few spectacular moments that would make the highlights reel of our lives. And we get that, it’s human.

But it can be harder to accept that when today, in this moment, it was one of the not so good times with another real life human. There’s a desire to give peak performance every time, all the time, when that’s just not possible. And a wishful thinking that we could choose when the lulls occur. Please, not today. Not with this person. Not with this group. And yet there we are, saying dumb things and missing moments where we could have done better.

Like musicians and actors and athletes and anyone else who performs for a living, our safety net is our craft – the principles and skills we have practiced over and over, both with the people we support and away from them. When we have invested in our craft as our foundation, even our 70% performance is still solid, still meaningful, and can still make a genuine difference.

For so many of us in the helping professions and caring roles, it’s not just something we do, it’s an expression of who we are. We have chosen a path that’s aligned with our values, provides meaning and purpose, and gives back to us in many ways.

At the same time, these roles require a great deal of learning and unlearning, where we need to shift from our automatic human reactions to more considered responses. And like any muscle, we can overuse these learned responses to the point they get out of balance from other parts of who we are.

Maybe we find it hard to turn off our helper response and become further drained when we most need to recharge. Maybe we lose a sense of spontaneity as we learn to be more mindful of how we behave when we are with others. Or perhaps we are so attuned to the pain around us that we miss some of the lightness and joy that is also there.

And maybe others reinforce this feeling that we continually need to be in role. Small talk becomes an unexpected consultation about intimate problems. If you’re not willing or able to respond to every request for support, maybe you don’t really care. If you struggle with something related to your field, you’re expected to be able to resolve it yourself. If you can’t resolve it, your ability to support others with similar challenges may be questioned.

Carpet layers need to look after their knees, physiotherapists may need to learn how to incorporate elbows to save their thumbs, and plumbers are not bad people if they have a leaky tap. And we need to protect ourselves from getting fused with one part of our identity.

We can embrace broader, more encompassing ways of being. We can actively cultivate other parts of who we are. And we can support each other to step out of role when needed, the way we might help someone take off a jacket or unload a pile of bags if they’re getting tangled and would like an extra hand.

If a clinical research trial shows that one intervention has better outcomes than another intervention, and the difference is statistically significant, that’s worth paying attention to. And if the same result is found in multiple independent studies, it’s important to take that into account when making treatment recommendations.

What it doesn’t mean is that the first intervention will necessarily be better for everyone. Within any treatment condition, there will be a spread of where individual results lie. It’s more when we look at the patterns we can start to draw conclusions about one treatment compared with the other.

But we have a long history of conflating ‘as a group’ with ‘in every case’. The law of averages becomes lore, and the treatment becomes the holy grail of evidenced-based practice.

To be fair, N = 1 is not a good clinical trial – there’s only so much we can draw from looking at the experience of one person. But N = 1 is a person. Not everyone will respond the same, and some people will have insignificant or adverse reactions to an intervention that works quite well for a lot of other people.

Sometimes research will miss important mediating variables that, if we knew them, might make us read the findings differently or in a more nuanced way. Some variables are easier to measure, giving particular interventions an advantage when they are being investigated. Just as clients have individual differences, so do we. The same treatment delivered by different clinicians does not get the same results.

We need to consider the possibility that this person would have been an outlier in the research we are relying on. It’s not them being non compliant or resistant, or us being incompetent, it’s just not a good fit for them. We need to stay open and curious so that we can work together to discover what will work for each person.

Some things, once we learn them, stick. They might even be harder to unlearn as they now seem obvious or common sense. Other things can fade from immediate memory if we don’t use them for a while, but come back readily enough once we start to use them again.

And some things need to be learned 10,000 times, where each time they feel like a fresh insight only for us to realise, in hindsight, that we’ve been here before.

Conversations are full of them. The power of listening. The value of slowing down and exploring the other person’s perspective. The importance of not jumping into giving people advice when they share a dilemma.

And then there’s the personal 10,000 lessons. The hard won, easily lost, destined to be repeated many more times lessons that feel like a revelation each time only to disappear like smoke as soon as we lose focus. We each have our own versions, but there’s some popular ones many of us share.

Mistakes are inevitable, even essential, otherwise it’s hard to learn and grow. We can’t mind read, no matter how much pressure we put on ourselves to do so. We won’t be at our best 100% of the time. It’s ok to need help – in fact many people like to help as much as we do. Comparing how we feel on the inside with how other people look on the outside is a path to pain. We’re not as special as we hope but we are absolutely more than enough as we are. Buying more things won’t fulfil a yearning for connection or meaning. Change is inevitable. We’re all interconnected. Love is one of the most powerful forces on the planet. As is gravity.

It can be tempting to be hard on ourselves each time we re-remember, telling ourselves we should never have forgotten the lesson in the first place. Yet if we can accept the comings and goings as part of the deal with the 10,000 lesson, it becomes easier to respond more with “Ah, hello friend, it’s nice to see you again.”