Dr. Evelyn Gould Webinar: "ACT with Staff"

$50.00
$25.00 - Member price
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Description

Working in ABA treatment settings can be one of the most rewarding careers but it can also be one of the most stressful. Faced with challenging work conditions, distressed clients and families, inadequate supervision and support (and other uncontrollable factors, such as a pandemic!), it is no surprise that BCBAs and direct care staff are experiencing high levels of burnout. In a recent study, low collegial support and supervision opportunities predicted high burnout and low job satisfaction in early career BCBAs (Plantiveau et al., 2018). In this talk, Dr. Gould will present an ACT-informed perspective on promoting self-care, resilience and enhanced performance in the workplace. We start with the perspective that ABA is a compassionate, relational, social-justice-oriented science, centered on promoting behavioral variability, in the service of freedom from aversive control - whether that be with clients, families, groups or individual staff members. At the foundation, this work requires supervisors and leaders to view themselves as the context for establishing flexible staff repertoires that promote growth, resilience and well-being. From a behavior analytic perspective, psychological well-being involves flexibly interacting with our experiences in context-sensitive ways that connect us with a sense of meaning and purpose, even in adverse contexts. We explore how each of us can become a nurturing environment for others and ourselves; indeed modeling the behaviors we seek to establish and increase in others is critical. Finally, we propose several behavioral cusps for our work as behavior analytic practitioners and supervisors: empathy, compassion, humility and curiosity. As individuals, practitioners, and scientists, we must be mindful of these behavioral cusps in any functional analysis, and examine how the environment we create in the context of our work might either promote or hinder these necessary components of nurturance and prosociality.


Hawai'i Association for Behavior analysis

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