Sundown Social Work

1. Get a friend at work. Or leave.

Friendship is one of the key factors that make the difference between a bad job and a good job. This research comes from a huge poll from Gallup. Tom Rath, the Gallup pollster who puts data into bestselling books, wrote Vital Friends, which, in a nutshell is about how it’s nearly impossible to hate your job if you have a friend at work.

I have found this to be true. You could have that nagging feeling that the work is not right for you—maybe you’d be better suited in another field—but you will not dread going to work if a friend is there for you.

This is a big one for me, and I think it’s huge when working in mental health. You need to have some levity in the mental health field when you’re not actively working with difficult patients. Having friends at work is a huge contributor to whether you’re getting the release you need in between sessions. A lunch with friendly coworkers in the middle of an intense day is a HUGE plus for me. It can change the entire day.

You Want a Social Life, With Friends

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn’t time enough, my friends–
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends–
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.

—by Kenneth Koch

…

The conventional wisdom is that you can’t do it all. But he said you can. Just not all at once.

I find this really interesting… Do you think that you can have the ultimate job, the perfect marriage, and a great friend dynamic, all simultaneously? I believe there’s a lot of truth to the idea that you can’t have all three of those things without one of the three suffering.

Odds are, if you’re throwing yourself fully into a truly rewarding and challenging job, and you come home and devote yourself fully to your wife/husband, then your friends might be missing you, and likewise with any other possible combination.

The good thing is, you can still be a pretty content human being with a little imbalance in certain areas. Different areas need a different amount of attention at different points in our lives, and I think that’s okay.