People’s reactions to my career change:

Saying you want to become a Social Worker seems at times be quite a scary thing to do, and I often say it with an expression that says “I know what you’re thinking”.

I’ve seen quite an array of reactions to my career change.

My best friend got it immediately and just said, I didn’t ever see you in the media for long.
My family have been incredibly supportive – they had all the normal worries, the same ones I did and do still have – what happens if you don’t like it, can’t get a job, aren’t any good at it etc and the financial concerns that come with being a student again with a mortgage to pay. But their support has been invaluable during the times when I doubted myself.

I told one of my old friends who was just amazed and questioned every element – do you really know what you’re getting yourself into? I hear radio phone ins all the time where you see SW-ers only doing paper work? How are you going to support a family with that kind of money etc.

And then my favourite one, where I told some friends at a dinner party and after understanding that one of my main motivations was about making a difference, my friend’s husband said “you could become a management consultant..they also make a difference.” I think he’s a Tory. I bit my tongue as I didn’t want to ruin the dinner party.

But it’s also the reaction from strangers – when I was out walking the dog with my mum, we bumped into a neighbour and the conversation turned to what I was doing with my life – she was like, really?! Errm wow..-

Oh and then there was the woman who was giving me a manicure who said “gosh I don’t really know how you can do that, I worked in a school once with families like “that”, it was awful and then I moved to work at Jaguar with people with money, it was so much nicer.”

Right.

It’s interesting to see people’s reactions, and to be honest, some of them did make me doubt my choice in the early stages. But it also is a small window into the public’s perception of Social Work.

When I did some work on teacher recruitment at one of the previous ad agencies I worked on, we looked at behaviour change in some detail, and one of the notions we focused on was called “anchoring”. It’s basically about understanding someone’s reference point – so asking one person to become a teacher, who had a horrendous time at school and thought all the teachers were terrible, is quite different to asking someone else who had a great time at school and who has many friends enjoying a career as a teacher.

“In the context of behavioral change work, anchoring refers to ‘a stimulus which triggers a specific physiological or emotional state or behavior’. It gives us the ability to access desired feelings at lightning speed which we can utilise to help us achieve the outcomes we desire.
Sometimes we create anchors involuntarily. For example, if you think of your favourite teacher’s name from school, or the smell of a certain food or perhaps a photo on holiday or a song you heard, you may find that you get a whole host of emotions instantly. These can empower or disempower, motivate or demotivate.”

Understanding someone’s anchor, helps you to emphathise with their viewpoint, and if you are looking to change their behaviour, its helps you to make your approach that much more targeted.

If your perception of Social Workers comes from reading the Mail, or even worse, a bad personal experience – then your frame of reference is going to be significantly different from some of my friends – for example one who works for Barnados.