Better #45

Hello there,

In the immortal words of every consultation comms everywhere…

… it’s time to HaVe yOUr sAy!

I’d love to hear people’s takes on 2025 and what they’re aiming for in 2026, and I know lots of you will want to, as well.

So I’ve put together a short, anonymous survey - the results will give a sense of what people are going through, plus a bit of reassurance and inspiration for the year ahead.

You can access the survey by clicking here (it’s completely anonymous and only takes a few mins).

Feel free to share it with colleagues, and I’ll publish the results in the next edition of Better.

Cheers,
Seamus Boyer 👋

Today I’m chatting with Tommy Livingston, a mate of mine from my journo days.

Tommy was as good a reporter as I’ve worked with - keen, intelligent, dogged. But also a quiet, thoughtful person who cared deeply about the people he worked with, and the people whose stories he told.

He’s now a performance coach and counsellor, and he understands the pressures many of us face in this strange little comms world of ours. His thinking is calm, practical, and really helps to put things in perspective.

You might find this one challenging and thought-provoking, but also reassuring and genuinely helpful.

Enjoy.

👇👇👇

Firstly, Tommy, where do you work, and what do you do?

I work with individuals and teams to improve their performance, wellbeing and culture. This can look like sitting down with CEOs and discussing the pressure they are under, or chatting to a parent about how they want to show up better for their children. 

What’s the biggest thing you’re noticing about how people relate to their work right now - especially in public-facing or reactive roles?

To begin with, whenever we have a conversation around well-being, we need to acknowledge that what we're actually talking about is people's nervous systems. When I work with a leader or someone that's working in the public service, the key thing I'm wondering is: how is their nervous system, and what kind of stress has that nervous system been under? 

Essentially your brain is a prediction machine. Its job is to scan the world and make predictions about what is about to happen. The problem with working in social media, or in media or politics, is that you're often working in an unpredictable environment, and your risk radar - your ability to scan for threats - has to become heightened. It can be very difficult for your brain to be able to just turn off that part of itself that is scanning for a threat. 

You have your week where you may have one or two things that are problems and do require a full sort of emergency response to deal with it, but then for the rest of the week, your brain doesn't register that you're not actually operating in that space anymore. That's where the unpredictability becomes a problem - you're never able to come back to proper regulation.

A key thing I notice in people that operate in these environments is a level of mental fatigue or burnout, or a sense of despondency, like they have little control, and that can bleed into other areas of their life as well.

Are some people better at dealing with that than others?

Everyone's nervous system is as unique as their fingerprint, so no two people will handle the job or the stress the same way. If you're working as a team, perhaps managing social media, and you’re responding to a natural disaster and you get through that, everyone in that team is going to have a different response to that experience. Our nervous systems are built up from a range of different experiences in our lives, as well as our genetics.

What are some of those responses? What does that look like?

I think the key thing that our generation is dealing with at the moment is fighting off burnout. For a lot of people that I work with in the politics space, they are constantly trying to battle burnout, or recovering from burnout, or going into a burnout phase. One thing I say to managers, but also people that work in the social media space, is that we need to think about longevity - how we can make sure we are able to do the work long term. 

That requires a few different things, one of which is boundaries. Social media is probably quite unique because it's very difficult to put boundaries in place. The whole point of social media is that it grabs your attention and keeps your attention. And when we talk about boundaries, we're not talking about distance. People often think when we start talking about boundaries, it's like, how do I create distance from my work? When we talk about boundaries, we're actually talking about connection. So how do I stay connected to my work in a healthy and long-term way? 

Everyone has to figure out what that is for them, but the relationship you have with your phone is a key indicator of your well-being, and that's something I'll always ask: what is the relationship you have with your phone? Because if you're unable to switch off, if you're unable to put it down, if you feel like you're grabbing it every two minutes to check stuff, it's not going to be good for your nervous system. You're not giving it any time to decompress and regulate.

How much responsibility for that is on the employee, and how much responsibility on the manager or workplace?

That's a good question. Whenever I'm working with someone, I try to empower them, because often what happens in a workplace is that people feel very disempowered, and that's what can feed into the burnout.

I think it's critical for leaders to make sure that they are monitoring and talking to their staff about what boundaries they're putting in place - how they turn off from work.

But I also think it's critically important for individuals to take that responsibility, because ultimately your boss isn't going to follow you home and make sure you turn your phone off, or put it in the drawer, or don't sleep next to it at night. That comes down to the individual. 

But small things can work, and I've seen this in the clients that I've worked with. The basic formula for wellbeing is sleep, diet, exercise, connection. So if you can make small improvements in those four areas, it will benefit you.   

From what I see in the public sector, in charities, in NGOs, people can be very passionate about the work, the mission, the values. Does that make it harder to have some of those boundaries, and to disengage?

This is something I've noticed in people I've worked with and coach - particularly in politics. An inability to switch off from the mission. And I come back to longevity. Of course that piece of work is critical, but if you aren't there in a year's time or in six months time because of burnout, that’s really bad. 

So what I try and encourage people to do is go, ‘Okay, how can I step back? How can I gain some perspective? How can I take my foot off the throttle and just allow myself a little bit of grace and breathing room?’. 

Over the past few years there’s been a real increase in anger, aggression and negativity towards both public servants and frontline staff. Social media advisors are both. What happens if you're facing and absorbing this kind of negativity daily? 

One thing that seems to be coming back into fashion is the idea of supervision in workplaces, where instead of just sending people off to talk to an EAP counsellor, you have regular check-ins. Whether it's someone within the organisation or outside the organisation, as a group or as an individual, you just talk through on a regular basis what it is that you've been exposed to and been dealing with. That processing, the externalisation of what you're experiencing, can probably be enough for a lot of people. I don't think everyone needs a counsellor or a therapist or a coach. I actually think there's other ways in which people can process and decompress and make sense of what's going on. 

Within any team, there's going to be some people that are going to struggle more than others, and that's totally fine, and they're the ones that might need some extra support. But in general, just creating space for people to be able to process and talk about what it is that they're going through, or what they're noticing, or what is being thrown at them, I think is critical. And that's probably one of the things that is the easiest to do. 

People fail to do it because managers are often too busy, they're too stretched. They're too focused on outcomes. But if I were working with a social media team, the first thing I would look at is, where are your regular opportunities to debrief and reconnect - to just chew the fat.

And then the other thing is, ‘How can I increase my capacity?’ Whenever I'm working with someone, the whole goal is to increase their capacity. Often people come to talk to me because they're finding that they do not have the capacity to do their job or manage their life. So the question is: what does it look like to increase that capacity? That will look different for everyone. But it’s helpful to flip the script slightly to focus on longevity and capacity as opposed to mission and outcome.

I sometimes worry about more junior, early-career people coming into some of these roles. And the expectations for people without so much life experience, or without so much conflict management experience, being thrown in the deep end managing social media.

One of the things that may be difficult from a wider organisational and business perspective is that people think about social media and they wonder, ‘How can that be stressful? What can be stressful about social media?’ That sentiment is probably still quite pervasive.

For younger people coming into those roles, there's a balance to be struck between creating the right support and making sure that they have opportunities to debrief, making sure that they have good mentorship. But also, not falling too much into a therapeutic culture. I think we have to be weary sometimes of therapeutic well-being culture sometimes making the job seem harder than it actually is. What I mean by that is, I don't think it's helpful to tell people, ‘This job is really hard, this job is really hard, you're going to burn out’. What we want to tell people is, ‘This is a job that has unique pressures, and therefore we've got these things in place to help you with these unique pressures, so that you feel equipped to be able to do this job. But it's not an easy job to do.’ I think being upfront and clear about that is important.

That’s really interesting. Within the sector and within the role of social media managers, there is this kind of collective acceptance that everything is extremely hard and it's going to ruin you. I think it is a way of expressing solidarity, but it also feels quite unhelpful.

I think in terms of social media, we want to be careful we don’t fall into victimhood, because when you become a victim, you lose all power and control. 

A key thing that I always want to do with people that are struggling in their work or their lives, is ask, ‘How can you feel like you have more control, and how can you feel more empowered?’ Because it is very enticing to sit in victimhood and to talk about how hard everything is, but actually that just makes things harder. So I think there is a balance to be struck where we can acknowledge the unique challenges that these roles bring, but also that we can celebrate and acknowledge and enjoy parts of the role too. So it doesn't just feel constantly heavy, like we're walking through mud.

It can feel on social media like you’re a bit of a punching bag sometimes. We don’t always have the agency we’d like, especially when we’re on the end of negativity and we can’t really respond how we might like.

Yes, but I also think we need to be careful talking about being a punching bag in terms of social media. Yes, the social media team is having to respond to and deal with all of this stuff coming at them, but the people aren't attacking the social media team most of the time. They're actually attacking the policy or the decision-makers, or maybe they're just shouting into a void. Unfortunately these people are at the other end, having to moderate their comments and respond. 

It’s really important to keep reminding people that actually this is not about you. This is about something different. If we personalise everything too much, then that's going to be a recipe for disaster.

You help people recover from burnout. How do you go about that?

One of the first steps is to help people realign with their values - the things that matter most to them. People have to feel like they've moved out of victimhood, and that they have a sense of control, a sense of agency. That's really important. People also need to feel like they have a sense of boundary around who they are, so that they can recognise that they are not what is being said about the council on social media. 

I think people need to feel like they have a sense of balance back in their life as well, that they have a sense of perspective, that they have a sense of knowing where they stand in relation to everything else that's going on in the world. 

How that happens is really unique for everyone, and everyone's journey out of burnout is different. But it doesn't have to take a long time. Often people just need some minor readjustments, and then they are equipped and ready to go again. It often does require sleep, diet, exercise, and all those critical things getting back into order. But when we say ‘burnout’ it seems like this massive scary thing, when actually a lot of the time I'm probably not so much dealing with burnout, but people that have just lost their way somewhat. 

What would you say to someone who is reading this, who loves their job, but suspects maybe it's also doing them some harm?

The first thing you can do is try and get some external perspective, because often, when you're in it, it’s very hard for you to get a good gauge of what's going on. Whether that's with a professional or someone in your life who you trust, being able to talk to someone to help you get a sense of where you're at and where you want to be, is a good first step. People spend too much time ruminating on their own thoughts, and the minute that you actually talk to someone, it helps clarify things a lot more. 

That’s it for today.

A bit heavier of a topic, but one that we need to be talking about more often, I reckon.

If you get value from this newsletter and would like to support me, please consider forwarding it to colleagues who may find it helpful.

And please send me any feedback by hitting reply on this email - I love hearing from you.

See you again in two(ish) weeks.

Ciao 👋