SYZYGY MISSIONS SUPPORT NETWORK

(with respectful acknowledgements to the AA)

Earlier this year I was at a conference where the speaker tried an icebreaker.  ‘If your organisation were an animal’, he asked, ‘what would sort of animal would it be?’ Everyone around my table was studiously avoiding eye contact, trying hard not to go first.  I was muttering to myself ‘I hate things like this.  I’m just not creative enough for this’ when he asked his second icebreaker: ‘If your organisation were a car, what sort of car would it be?’

And it instantly hit me – Syzygy is an AA van*.  We help broken down mission workers.  We fix the problem.  We get you where you’re going.  And though you might only see one person when you deal with Syzygy, there’s a whole team of experts behind him.

Within a matter of minutes I had refined this image further, to detail the types of services we provide:

Roadside assistance: We’re there for you when you break down.  Advice on stress, debriefing, mentoring and hospitality can help get you back on the road.

Relay: Wherever you’re going, we’ll help get you there!  We provide practical  support, from lending you a car to advice on preparing for re-entry, with online guides to missions on our website.

Homestart: When things start going wrong in the field, we can help by providing pastoral visits, problem solving, crisis management and relief staffing.

As a result of that revelation, we are changing our image.  We think that this imagery fully encapsulates our ethos of help, support and practical problem solving.  In future we’ll be using a photo of a flashing orange light as our logo, and we’ve adopted a new tagline:

THE SUPPORT SERVICE FOR MISSION WORKERS

I did think that ‘rescue service’ or ‘emergency service’ sounded more punchy, but on reflection we decided that this doesn’t accurately reflect the fact that much of what we do is not done in a crisis, but is about preventing a crisis happening.

A new image, but the same service – striving to keep mission workers in good physical, emotional and spiritual condition so that they are able to at carrying out their God-given mandate.  Our new flyer is out this week.  Click on the image to the left to read it.  If you’d like some copies to display at church or in your workplace, please email tim@syzygy.org.uk

*Other breakdown services are available.  Actually I should have chosen RAC because at least they’re orange like Syzygy.

It’s a while since we last talked about stress, but it hasn’t gone away.  So far in this series, we’ve looked at recognising our response to stress, and using some simple management tools to analyse our selves so we can identify our optimum working conditions.

This week I’d like to examine what is one of the principal causes of stress from mission workers – overwork!  There are others and we’ll be looking at these in future blogs, but this is one of the most immediate and one of the most critical.  I lost five years of my working life due to stress-related illness brought on primarily by overwork, and I’d like to think I’ve learned some of the lessons!

Overwork is commonplace in Christian missions.  It seems that there are never enough workers to meet the needs, and we all end up doubling up, taking on more responsibility, and working long hours.  Most of us also have to work on Sundays, so we seldom get a full weekend break.  These factors all add to our stress levels, and when compounded by the effects of colleagues being on Home Assignment or off sick due to stress, add up to a working environment which is often critically short-staffed and places the surviving workers under often health-endangering levels of stress.

The solution to this situation is for management to either engage more staff or take on fewer responsibilities.  Focussing on the core ministry of the organisation may help eliminate superfluous activities, and reducing dependence on ex-pat workers could ease staff shortages.  While these are organisational issues which it may be above our pay grade to resolve, we can however manage ourselves and our own situations better, and one solution can be to say no.  This is a skill few Christians have.

(with acknowledgements to Rob Cottingham)

The reason for this is partly the protestant work ethic.  We seem driven to pay off the debt we have incurred by accepting the ‘free’ gift of salvation.  We believe in ‘laying down our lives’ and expect to suffer from overwork without complaining about it.  We’re just following in the footsteps of our predecessors (a predecessor, interestingly enough, is someone who has pre-deceased you!).  While it is true that Christians are called to make sacrifices, as Kelly O’Donnell writes in Global Member Care, we should try ‘to balance the realistic demands of suffering and sacrifice with the realistic needs for support and nurture in our lives.’ Failure to take care of our legitimate needs does not allow us to maintain ourselves in peak mental and physical condition, and paradoxically means we are less able to carry our workload.  Surely our prime responsibility should be to keep ourselves in a condition to be able to carry out our other responsibilities!

The other principal reason behind so many people taking on too much work, is that they suffer from low self-esteem, though most would deny it until confronted with the evidence.   Many people find it hard to say no because they want people to like or value them, and when they deliver results, they are affirmed.  How often does your manager affirm you for what you have achieved rather than who you have become?  So we work harder, in order to achieve better results and reap more plaudits so that we can feel good about ourselves.  Yet when we have worked so hard that our deteriorating health forces us to stop, we can’t carry on earning plaudits and so cycle down into depression.

If any of the above rings bells with you, stop work for a while (yes, you can!) and consider the following questions:

• Do I regularly work more than 50 hours a week?
• Do I regularly work weekends without a day off in lieu?
• Am I carrying the responsibilities of more than one person on a regular basis?
• Am I trying to prove something through my work?  What?  To whom?
• Do I feel guilty when I’m not working?
• Am I unable to finish work ‘early’ occasionally just because I want to?

If the answer to any of those questions was ‘yes’, have a think about how you can say ‘no’ in future!

One of the best ways of managing stress, is to know yourself.  Understanding what works well for you, how you like to do things, how you respond to varying situations, will help you recognise potentially stressful situations and develop plans for managing it, and your own response to it.

There are innumerable tools, models and theories out there vying for your attention, and it can be hard to know what is going to work, and what isn’t.  The simplest is good old-fashioned common sense, which someone once observed, is clearly not common at all.  Though it should be relatively easy to work out whether you’re a morning person or not, and to plan your work pattern accordingly.  It’s also easy to work out whether music playing in the background distracts or invigorates you, or whether for you office banter makes the atmosphere congenial or chaotic.  Armed with this knowledge, you can plan your work area accordingly, and discuss with your colleagues how to make things work well for all of you.

But there are deeper issues which can lead you to feel frustrated with your work or your colleagues, and which if unresolved can lead to significant problems resulting from stress.  These are personality issues which affect who people are and the way in which they approach life: why does that person never get his paperwork done?  Why can’t she finish the job properly before starting another one?  Why is he so bureaucratic?  There are many reasons for the way people are – culture, upbringing, nationality and gender are some of the typical ones – and until we understand that the way people are is unique and often very different to us, we aren’t fully equipped to make appropriate allowances for the differences.  Which is where self-analysis tools are useful.

My personal favourite is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which helped me to understand not only why I like to do things in a certain way, but why others can misunderstand my actions and motivation.  It relieved an awful lot of pressure!  I think MBTI should be compulsory for all new mission workers, and many sending and training organisations provide it as part of their preparation or ongoing team development.  You can find out more at http://www.myersbriggs.org.  Some people criticise it because people can easily us it to label others, but that’s the fault of the labellers, not the tool.  This tool needs to be used by a qualified trainer, and there are many in the UK and abroad who provide this service.  Please contact Syzygy for further information.

Another popular tool is Strengthfinder, which works on the deceptively obvious premise that rather than working to strengthen our weaknesses, we should concentrating on doing what we’re naturally best at.  It will help you focus on what your principal skills are so that you can reorganise your commitments around them.  This tool can be used by yourself, working through a book, but can also be used together with an experienced counsellor.  See http://strengths.gallup.com/110440/About-StrengthsFinder-2.aspx for further information.

The Belbin Team Role Inventory concentrates on behaviour in the workplace and is focussed on the role that each individual will play within a team.  It helps team leaders work out who is best at starting something, keeping it going, and finishing it, since it is highly unlikely that one person will be able to do all three roles well.  The result is that people can be assigned to role which suit their aptitude, and thereby increase their effectiveness and reduce their stress.  Go to http://www.belbin.com for a further explanation.

So there are three different tools, each focussing on different aspect of who we are:

• Our core personality (MBTI)
• Our key strengths (Strengthsfinder)
• Our ideal team role (BTRI)

Of course, you don’t always need to go to the trouble of this level of training.  Sitting down and creating some thinking time, perhaps with a trusted friend, and asking yourself whether there might not be a reason why you find a certain situation or person stressful, can lead to more self-awareness.  If only we had the time…..

How do you respond to stress?

One of the reasons people do not always recognise that there is too much stress in their lives, is that they don’t understand their own response to it.  People react in different ways, and knowing how you react is a good way to understand the warning signs.  When I worked in Zambia, I knew that when I spent the evenings going round apologising for how I treated people during the day, it was time to go on holiday.

One of the key determinants in anyone’s response to stress is whether they are introvert or extravert.  Many people don’t know which they are, and sometimes people assume that because they are shy or lacking in social confidence they are introvert, or that if they’re outgoing, they’re extravert.  But that’s not necessarily true.

A quick and easy way to tell your ‘version’ is to ask yourself what you feel like doing at the end of a busy week.  A week you’ve worked late every evening to hit a deadline.  A week when a sick child has kept you up every night.  A week when crisis has followed crisis and you haven’t had time to eat properly.  And now it’s Friday, and it’s all over.  What do you feel like doing?  Getting a few friends together and going out for a meal, or do you want to shut your door and read a book by yourself?

By and large, extraverts want to gather their friends around them, because they recharge their batteries in community.  Introverts would rather be alone, since solitude provides them with the space they need to recuperate.  Neither is right or wrong, they’re just different, and knowing which you are will help you interpret your behaviour when you’re under stress.  It’s particularly important that couples understand each other’s response to stress, since if one wants to talk while the other wants to hide, there can be significant relationship problems.

So if you find yourself locking the door, turning off the phone, and pretending you’re not at home, that could be perfectly normal behaviour for you.  Likewise spending an evening at a café till it closes might be your way of managing the stress.  But if you find yourself doing this every single night, it’s a warning that you’re under more stress than you can reasonably cope with, and that’s when you need to do something about it.

Next month: tools for self-analysis

I wonder what you think when you see the word ‘stress’.  Does it make you tense up?  Do you feel you have already experienced all you need to know about stress?  Does it make you want to stop reading straight away?  If so, you’re probably suffering from too much stress.

Stress is something with which we are all familiar.  It’s part of the territory for missions workers.  We expect to have it.  But we don’t always realise the long-term impact of it in our lives, or know how to unload it.  So I am going to publish a series of articles about stress on this website: what it is, how to recognise it, how to deal with it, where to get help, and what happens if you don’t get help.

Much has been written about stress, and we don’t claim to be the experts.  There are many other websites where you can find experienced counsellors or detailed descriptions of the psychological impact of stress.  Most of the missionaries I meet suffer from some level of stress, often resulting from  over-work, the strain of living in an alien culture, or working in cross-cultural teams that often cause more problems than they bring solutions.  Many of them are ill as a result of stress.  It concerns me, because mismanaged stress can lead to burnout, which is a major cause of dysfunction and attrition in missions workers.

I’m sure we’ve all seen a small vehicle that’s overloaded with too many passengers.  35 people balanced precariously on the back of a Hilux.  You think it’s going to be fine, and perhaps it is at first, but it puts an unseen strain on all sorts of hidden but essential parts like tyres, brakes and suspension.  So it can easily overheat, or struggle to go uphill, or even worse, it will fail to take a corner and end up having a bad accident.

Stress is just like that.  We think we can cope, but underneath, it’s taking its toll on our heart, blood-pressure and brain.  All it takes is one extra demanding event and there’s a breakdown.  So if you’re thinking you’ll be fine, you’re nearly there and nothing’s gone wrong yet, stop right now and throw off a couple of passengers.  Get rid of one or two burdens.  Lighten the load.  It’s better to leave one or two by the side of the road than to have the whole lot crash.  You can always come back and pick them up later if necessary.

It’s important that we talk about this issue.  It’s a personal issue, so I’m not asking for comments on the website, except of a generic nature, but anyone who’d like to discuss their stress is welcome to email me confidentially on tim@syzygy.org.uk.  Alternatively, talk to a friend, a pastor, a colleague.  Talking to someone is the first step in resolving the problem, so do it today.

Welcome to the revamped Syzygy website and blog!  I’m Tim, and I’m one of the directors of Syzygy.  One way or another, I’ve been involved in supporting missionaries for 15 years, since I realised that too many of them are either coming home for entirely avoidable reasons, or heroically labouring on under difficult circumstances.  Syzygy is resolved to do what we can to  support such people, help them continue in their mission, and become more effective.  And more importantly, we hope to encourage their sending churches and organisations to get behind them to do in the long term what Syzygy’s doing in the short term.

I hope that through this blog we will be able to stimulate discussion around various issues concerning cross-cultural workers, and draw more people into our ever-expanding network of volunteer supporters.  Whether you go, pray, encourage, finance, or support, I hope you’ll find something here for you.

Syzygy’s directors all have first-hand missions experience, between us having served short-, medium- and long-term in four continents, and although we’re all now based in England, we all continue to be involved in our own ministries to support missions overseas.  Our mission draws its name from our belief that global mission is a task whose burden should not fall exclusively on those who go, but should be shared by the whole church.  The word Syzygy – Greek for “yoked together” – conveys the image of oxen ploughing together, and the more oxen there are in a team, the easier it gets.

Join us!

For information on how to get involved with us, go to the CONTACT US page.