11 Jul, 2018

The Stress Management Workbook: De-stress in 10 Minutes or Less (Review)

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:13:43-04:00July 11th, 2018|Categories: Self & Community Care|Tags: self care|0 Comments

I first came across Dr. Ruth C. White a few years ago through a travel platform. We connected via social media, and I discovered that she’s not only a fellow social worker; she also has a passion for helping others take control over the stressors that can impact everyday life.

Ruth has been very transparent is sharing her story of writing her doctoral dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley, while teaching classes at San Francisco State University, working part time at a research institute, and being a mother and wife to her daughter and husband. Ruth eventually ended up being admitted to the hospital due to stress she faced.

What’s different about Ruth’s story is that, instead of returning to the status quo, Ruth decided to do a deep dive into how to live a happier life while managing life’s stressors. Ruth used medication in her recovery, but she also wanted to focus on how to behave her way to mental wellbeing.

Ruth reached out to me a few weeks ago to offer me the opportunity to review her latest workbook, The Stress Management Workbook: De-stress in 10 Minutes or Less. (Althea Press, 2018)

Ruth claims that The Stress Management Workbook: De-stress in 10 Minutes or Less will “teach you how to keep your brain sharp, improve your mind’s response to stress, and develop strategies for minimizing stress in your life. You will learn to keep anxiety at bay, reduce the likelihood of depression, and keep yourself calm, centered, and in control of your emotions and your psyche. You will gain the knowledge and skills to perform better at work, be a better friend, parent, partner, and colleague, sleep better, increase your endurance, and be healthier in both mind and body.”

In a fast-paced world that doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon, I’m always on the hunt for new and more effective ways to de-stress (and to do it as efficiently as possible.) So, Ruth’s workbook is right up my alley. And I’m all for testing out any claim that will have me feeling de-stressed in under 10 minutes.

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6 Jun, 2018

Ask Nicole: How Do You Find Consulting Clients?

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:12:40-04:00June 6th, 2018|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Ask Nicole, consulting|0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to be featured? Let me know.

If you’re interested in working for yourself, having a side hustle while being employed, or you’re already responsible for landing clients for your employer, getting clear about who you want to work with is important.

In the beginning, I had an idea of the types of clients I wanted to work with, but I also took on clients who didn’t fit my “ideal client” because I wanted to build my expertise and confidence. I also tried to figure out how to market myself. I started with emailing and posting on social media to my friends, letting them know that I was seeking new clients.

Along with letting friends know I was opened for business, I also tried to figure out the whole marketing thing. It’s been an ongoing process, and I found myself being resistant to what I see many people do: send multiple emails about service and product launches, create paid social media posts, and host webinars that are marketed as free but serve as product pitches.

But that’s not the focus of this month’s Ask Nicole question. This month, I wanted to share my thoughts on how I find clients. Or rather, how clients find me.

The short answer: Relationship building

The long answer: My clients come from a variety of places, with the majority being through some kind of interaction or relationship. For clients who have come to me through referral, the people that referred them to me were people I highly respect or people who I may not know but they have some kind of connection to me (i.e. social media, my blog, or my newsletter, etc.) For clients that I already had an interaction or relationship with, they met me at an event (my workshops, a panel I sat on, a conference, etc.) And I have yet to pay for a sponsored post or blast my newsletter subscribers with promotional emails (yet).

Here’s what I know to be true for finding clients:

1) You never know where your next client will come from, 2) Clients may not be ready to work with you when you make an initial contact, but when they’re ready they will come back, and 3) It’s more fun when you allow clients to come to you instead of chasing after them.

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11 Apr, 2018

Ask Nicole: What Don’t You Like About Social Work?

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:12:16-04:00April 11th, 2018|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: Ask Nicole, Social Work|0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to be featured? Let me know.

Back when I doing direct practice client work, I had a client who was undergoing a housing issue. The issue was at the fault of the client, and the client asked for assistance in eviction prevention.

One day while interacting with this client, the client blamed me for not doing enough to help fix the situation. I could feel the anger growing from within. When the client told me, “You don’t know what I’m going through,” I wanted so badly to remind the client that the situation was occurring because of the client’s own doing. More so, what I really wanted to say was…

“…And you don’t know what I’m going through!”

In addition to personal matters, I was dealing with the death of one of my favorite clients and the suicide of another client, of which I was asked for documentation that proved I did as much as I could to prevent the situation. I was on edge, to say the least, but luckily for the client, the situation worked itself out and the client was able to remain housed.

I’ve gotten a few emails from social workers and students over the few past months asking me share the aspects of social work I don’t like, specifically from a direct practice perspective, including dealing with difficult clients and how to stop caring about clients once the work day is over. There’s plenty of professional advice on this the you can do a quick Google search on.

But to answer the questions, my short answer is this: Establishing boundaries isn’t enough, empathy is everything until it isn’t, leaving your clients problems at the office is not easy, and clinical/direct practice social work ain’t for everybody.

You’ll hear of social workers leaving the field for a variety of reasons, but for me the answer was pivoting to another aspect of social work that better suited me.

As a disclaimer: Is what I’m about to share the case for all direct practice social workers and case managers? Not at all. In fact, everything you learn in clinical studies and practice—engagement, assessment, planning, implementation, evaluation, termination, and follow-up—translates to most social work positions, and is the model I use with my consulting clients. So I did learn a thing or two while working in direct practice.

When I landed my case management position 3 months after graduation from my masters program, I was just happy to be employed. When I first started, I had a caseload of around 25-30 clients. By the time I left nearly 6 years later, I had close to 90 clients.

That may not seem like a lot, but having to engage with 90 clients (and their providers and emergency contacts) on a monthly basis was taxing. It did a literal number on my self care, self esteem, and my desire to remain in the this work.

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22 Feb, 2018

How to Weave Storytelling with Statistics

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2023-09-12T16:44:09-04:00February 22nd, 2018|Categories: Research & Evaluation|Tags: program evaluation, Research, storytelling|0 Comments

Dr. Jennifer Aaker, marketing expert and professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, once shared a story of a marketing researcher who asked students to each give a persuasive one-minute pitch to their classmates. While most students included statistics in their pitches (an average of 2.5 stats), only one student included a story in their pitch. Afterwards, the researcher asked the students to write down every idea they remembered from each pitch.

While five percent of the students remembered a statistic, 63 percent remembered the story.

The reason? Aaker offers three:

Stories are powerful tools that force people to slow down and listen.
Stories influence how people see you.
Stories move people from complacency to action.

Statistics may bring attention to a cause, but stories elevate their impact. In short, stories can give numbers more credibility.

Some people are hard numbers folks, and I get it. Especially if you’re someone that’s responsible for illustrating impact, such as a grant writer, funder, nonprofit manager. Social workers and others in the helping professional rely on hard numbers because it can lead to increases in funder for their programs and services.

It’s easier to pull numbers. Just create a survey and send it out.

But if the marketing researcher’s discovery is any indication, stories draw people in and have greater impact.

Take the “identifiable victim effect”, for instance. This refers to the human tendency to offer greater sympathy and aid when a specific person is observed under hardship, compared to a vaguely defined group with the same need. The identifiable victim effects puts a “face” to a problem, causing greater impact.

For example, last night, CNN aired a town hall featuring survivors of the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people (including 14 students) were killed. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control show that, on average, 96 people die by gun violence every day in the United States. An average of 96 people doesn’t sound like a lot, but hearing the voices of the survivors and family members during the town hall (and seeing the faces of the victims from the shooting) literally puts a face on the problem of gun violence in America more now than it ever has.

As a follow-up to my “Who Are The People Behind the Numbers?” blog post from 2014, I wrote a Try This exercise on using storytelling as a tool for Reproductive Justice. Sharing personal stories resonate with us and helps to build powerful connections with others while also helping to build compassion, especially when we’ve never had a particular experience.

Sometimes seeing a high percentage raises awareness; but numbers alone may not fully capture the entire picture. And there are even people who say that storytelling should replace numbers. Don’t throw out your spreadsheets and statistical software just yet, but don’t stress yourself out with figuring out how to tell the most compelling story without numbers to back it up. Instead, use storytelling to make your numbers stand out (and vice versa). Here are 5 ways to weave storytelling with statistics.

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14 Feb, 2018

Try This: Appreciative Inquiry

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:11:01-04:00February 14th, 2018|Categories: Research & Evaluation|Tags: program evaluation, Try This|0 Comments

Have you ever noticed that when you go looking for problems, more problems tend to appear?

It’s like peeling back the layers of an onion and chopping it. It’s never-ending and your eyes water in the process.

The same goes for conducting community needs assessments. When designed to identify the pressing needs of a community, they often focus on deficits, which doesn’t do much for community morale. Continuous focus on the problem increases the likelihood of seeing the problem everywhere. This isn’t to say that communities should turn a blind eye to what’s happening, but there’s something to be said about raising awareness of this practice, as it can immobilize communities to create change.

A while back, I wrote a blog post on asset mapping as a tool for community organizing and engagement. One reason why asset mapping and similar strengths-based tools are growing in popularity is due to an increasingly mindset shift away from solely deficits-based to identifying community strengths. Whereas deficits-based practices are problem-focused, needs driven, and questions what’s missing, strengths-based practices are opportunity-focused, strengths driven, and identifies what is currently available that can be built upon.

Today, let’s look at another strengths- based practice, appreciative inquiry.

What’s appreciative inquiry?

Appreciative inquiry (AI) is strengths-based approach, developed by Dr. David Cooperrider in the 1980s. First used in organizational development and change, AI has helped institutions worldwide integrate the power of the strength-based approaches to multi-stakeholder innovation and collaborative design. It quickly gained ground in program evaluation following the 2006 release of Reframing Evaluation Through Appreciative Inquiry by Hallie Preskill and Tessie Catsambas.

AI focuses on identifying what is working well, analyzing why it is working well and then doing more of it. In other words, AI teaches us that an organization will grow in whichever direction that people in the organization focus their attention.

If this can be done in organizations, why not apply it to community change?

Here’s what you need:

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The Stress Management Workbook: De-stress in 10 Minutes or Less (Review)

Ask Nicole: How Do You Find Consulting Clients?

Ask Nicole: What Don’t You Like About Social Work?

How to Weave Storytelling with Statistics

While five percent of the students remembered a statistic, 63 percent remembered the story.

Try This: Appreciative Inquiry

What’s appreciative inquiry?

Here’s what you need:

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