Promoting conscious competence by introducing mindfulness to social work students
Abstract
Given the emotive context of social work practice, acquiring competence can be challenging. Professional aptitude involves prowess in analytical thinking and controlling emotions, however, this can create conflict within the therapeutic relationship. For trainees, analytical thinking and managing emotions are difficult skills to attain and are not always directly taught, leaving individuals to their own devices to develop possibly ineffective, strategies for dealing with complex emotions and resulting stress. As evidence suggests social workers are vulnerable to burnout, thus managing work-related stress becomes a career-long necessity and, if not managed, has serious consequences for organisations and service users and workers themselves. To address this gap, we piloted mindfulness sessions based on Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction programme (MBSR) with final year social work students. These sessions are being increasingly and successfully used in a wide variety of organisations across the globe and there is an increasing body of research evidencing numerous benefits for those involved. Feedback from our students suggests these sessions produced a number of personal and professional benefits and includes promoting their resilience and conscious competence.
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These findings are broadly echoed in the limited number of UK studies currently available.
“These findings are broadly echoed in the limited number of UK studies currently available (Howie et al., 2016;Roulston, et al., 2018;Kinman et al., 2019).”
From Critical Mindfulness in Social Work: Exploring the Potential of Reflexive Self-Care in the Journey from Student to Social Worker (2022) · cites this paper as Howie et al., 2016
The key themes to emerge from a pre-programme qualitative questionnaire were difficulties managing stress and desire to find ways of improving this.
“The key themes to emerge from a pre-programme qualitative questionnaire were, difficulties managing stress and desire to finds ways of improving this, which is consistent with other research (Howie et al., 2016).”
From Critical Mindfulness in Social Work: Exploring the Potential of Reflexive Self-Care in the Journey from Student to Social Worker (2022) · cites this paper as Howie et al., 2016
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- Authors
- Howie, J., Innes, D., & Harvey, P.
- Affiliations
- University of the West of Scotland (GB)
- Venue
- The Journal of Practice Teaching and Learning
- Publisher
- Whiting & Birch, Ltd.
- Published
- 2016-03-23
- Volume
- 14
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 88-104
- ISSN
- 1460-6690 (ISSN-L)
- 1759-5150
- OpenAlex
- W2384320249
- Cited by
- 6
- References
- 29
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2020: 1 · 2018: 1 · 2017: 2
- FWCI
- 1.34
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- The Journal of Practice Teaching in Health and Social Work (publishedVersion)
- The UWS Academic Portal (University of the West of Scotland) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Mindfulness and Compassion Interventions
- Social Sciences › Public Administration › Social Work Education and Practice
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Stress and Burnout Research
- Keywords
- mindfulness, social work students, mindfulness-based stress reduction, emotion regulation, burnout prevention, occupational stress, resilience, professional competence, therapeutic relationship, social work education
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