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Self‐renewal and personal development in professional life
Abstract
The author discusses how senior student affairs administrators juggle busy lives and shares their recipes for maintaining healthy and balanced lifestyles.
... There is an overall lack of professional development for student affairs professionals to teach new competencies, such as helping skills which may encourage health boundary-setting or self-care (Tull et al., 2023;Tyrell, 2014). These use of counseling skills can facilitate introspection to find renewal in the practice of student affairs work (Reisser, 2002). However, residence life staff deal with high-stress situations and often do not cope and struggle to remain in the field without proper self-care and stress management (Rankin & Gulley, 2018). ...
... Residence life staff must find a way to re-energize from dealing with students throughout the year (Reisser, 2002). Participants bemoaned consistently negotiating student issues, especially within their immediate living space. ...
Professional experiences, particularly for live-in residence life professionals, can be very stressful, from blurring work-life boundaries in responding to student emergencies, on-call responsibilities, staff supervision, facilities management, and budgeting. However, these stressors can be difficult to compartmentalize because of the live-in requirements for many residence life professionals. This descriptive phenomenological study expands the extant research to explore how live-in residence life professionals negotiate these working conditions by identifying their stressors and coping strategies. Findings included participants’ struggles with the difficulty separating their work-life balance because of on-duty responsibilities and long hours. Residence life professionals used different coping strategies, including leaving campus, spending time with family, and exercising to manage immediate stressors. Implications for practice are suggested for residence life departments to increase individual support for live-in professionals, which include teaching counseling skills, humanizing the position, and increasing privacy.
Personal communication received on Sept
- J Houston
Houston, J. Personal communication, received on Sept. 18, 2001 at [http://www.jean-houston.org].
I Have Learned CD, Irreconcilable Similarities. Chicago: Wind River Records
- D Roth
Roth, D. " I Have Learned. " CD, Irreconcilable Similarities. Chicago: Wind River Records, 1988. [http://www.folkera.com/windriver/davidroth]