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The foundations of good conversation are no mystery to the point they can sound like a cliché: listen, ask open questions, reflect understanding, seek to draw out the other person’s wisdom, be selective and restrained in offering your own.

We know the kind of qualities we want to embody: respect, curiosity, kindness, empathy. We know the kind of relationship we want to foster: collaborative, equal, honouring, empowering, safe.

Yet we are also all too familiar with the things we do over and over that, when we have a chance to reflect on what we’re doing, we know aren’t so helpful. We talk when we need to listen, persuade when we need to understand, jump ahead into solutions when we need to slow down, pay attention to the task or paperwork rather than the unique, complex and precious human in front of us.

Because the basics aren’t basic. Understanding something, even on a deep intuitive level, is not the same as being able to do it effectively and, just as important, consistently.

And in helping conversations the basics are not being done in simple circumstances. Walking seems straightforward until you find yourself on an icy footpath, trying roller skates for the first time, nursing a sprained ankle or on a tightrope above a ravine.

When it’s hard to maintain the basics, it can be tempting to reach for something more, something else, something technical. And sometimes that can indeed help. But sometimes what we really need to do is return to the basics, and keep returning, until we are able to spend more time there.

Much like the level of focus we need to stay present in mindfulness practice, protecting the foundations of good conversation is an active process that we can spend a lifetime refining.

When we turn up to support someone, we are offering something – an ear, faith, knowledge, a process, an experience of acceptance and worth, skills, hope. Whatever it is we want to be intentional and do our wholehearted best for the other person.

But to fully embrace what we offer we also need to be able to receive it. To accept someone’s desire to support us, to pay attention to what it feels like to be truly heard, to receive someone’s goodwill and positive feedback with grace.

We want to be familiar with the different reactions we may have and not just on the good days when it felt good to receive the support. We need to lean into the discomfort too. When the help isn’t wanted, we’re not ready or it’s not what we hoped to hear. When it’s clumsily delivered or misses the mark.

And we need to be willing to go out of our comfort zones because we ask others to go out of theirs every day we show up to help. To risk failing, to risk succeeding. To face the unknown, to see ourselves and our potential with fresh eyes, to look for our blindspots and biases, reflexes and defences.

We need to embrace the whole two-way process or we’re only doing half of our work. We need to be able to ask for what we need because we want the people we support to be able to do that too. And that, quite possibly, is far harder than learning a new technique or strategy.

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.

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?