Speaker 1
Hello, and you’re very welcome to today’s webinar. We’re going to be exploring how to protect the well-being of content regulators. My name’s Keira Conley. I’m a well-being specialist here at CFO Health, and I’m going to take you through the training today. Before we begin, I just want to make a short disclaimer.
Here at CFO Health, we are committed to supporting you on your journey towards improved health and well-being. Our trainings aim to provide you with high-quality information supplemented by useful tools, practices, and behavior change strategies.
However, it is important for you to know that our content and recommendations are all general in nature, and they do not address specific individual requirements that may apply to you.
Our content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical diagnosis or treatment, so please seek the advice of medical professionals with any questions or concerns that you may have regarding your health. So let’s get stuck into what’s on the agenda today.
So we’re going to look at identifying emotional needs, analyzing our triggers and stressors, and exploring our symptoms too, therapeutic intervention, creating a plan to enhance your well-being and to soothe any difficult emotions or behaviors that you’re currently dealing with, but also as well, exploration of strategies, and this is where we have suggestions of new habits and techniques to incorporate into your routine to help get you back to a state of thriving and flourishing.
So this is all going to be in relation to how we support content moderators today, so we are going to be doing this through the eyes of the content moderators. But first, to give us an understanding of why this is so useful and where it actually plays a role in day-to-day life, we’re going to just take a moment of reflection to identify our own emotional needs.
Now, guys, what I want to do is bring this to the room. So I’m going to ask you all to take part in this exercise should you feel comfortable.
So it’s really important to recognize that we all have emotional needs, and these all include having realistic limits and allowing ourselves and giving ourselves permission to express how we truly feel, allowing those emotions to come forth, and practicing emotional management to help soothe and reduce ones that are uncomfortable, or listen to ones when they deliver an important message and then make a change to prevent them from creating prolonged or future stress and anxiety.
It’s really important that we allow this time and space for ourselves so that we feel safe, and we know that we’re minding ourselves and also kind of setting an example for those around us, that it’s also okay to prioritize themselves and their emotions too.
It’s not always easy, especially if we are dealing with emotions that are more comfortable than others, or we may have grown up in a culture or society, whereas maybe we’re encouraged to express our emotions.
Speaker 1
But hopefully today, we’re seeing the change in narrative and change in conversations, like the one we’re having right now, that we are encouraging people to express their emotions and to reflect inwardly and learn about themselves, their values, their wants and their needs, and try to use this information as almost like a roadmap of how we live our lives.
So what I wanted to ask you guys is to go through these five different questions. So what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna read out five separate questions and I’m gonna pause for a short moment so you guys can reflect and ponder a little bit and maybe you might come up with something. But what I’m going to do is I’m gonna hand over this magic wand, okay?
And if you could express freely and clearly to anyone, friends, family, managers, whoever it is, how you feel and what you need, what would it be when you consider, number one, what would make you feel like you have a work-life balance right now? you What would help you to feel safe and supported? you What would bring you a sense of autonomy?
Speaker 2
What do you value?
Speaker 1
So what’s important to you as you consider your responsibilities inside and outside of work? And lastly, what are your social, fun needs?
Speaker 2
Okay, taking back my magic wand now.
Speaker 1
Hopefully, we’ve all come up with maybe one or two answers to those questions. So what we’ve done is we’ve controlled for those external influences, we’ve pushed them all out, and we’ve just focused on ourselves and what we need.
So now what we want to do is bring back all those external influences, because now we’re going to see with this information, with this now that we’ve identified our emotional needs, how can we make them fit into reality? And this is really how we support the wellbeing of trust and safety clients. Remember, everyone’s emotional needs are different.
That’s why it’s so important that when we’re facing that therapeutic model, that we really listen to what the client wants or what they’re missing in their life or what support they need, and then we figure out how can we bring that into their reality.
So obviously, we all have responsibilities, chores and tasks which can make this very difficult, but that’s why it’s so important that we try to find whenever we make any changes that they are realistic and they do fit into our routine. There’s so many things that can disrupt that routine.
We’ve so many different kinds of stressors or unexpected events that can come in and disrupt the balance in our life. So if we’re trying to cultivate that balance in life, we want to be aware of these stresses. These could be major life events that happen, such as the death of someone close to you, discovering that your pay has been cut, urgent deadlines or upcoming exams.
It could be something related to your physical wellness, illness or an injury, but also could be personal as well, such as conflicts within relationships with friends, partners, colleagues and children.
So when we have people coming in and we’re helping them to cultivate balance, helping them move towards flourishing and thriving, we recognise that it’s not going to be, you know, when someone walks out of a therapy session, that that’s it, problem fixed, check. What we’re actually doing is teaching them skills.
So whilst they are dealing with the ups and downs that come with life, that they have the skills in their backpack to apply to help them time and a time again, navigate change, navigate stress, navigate anxiety to allow them to cultivate that balance again. So some of the ways we do this is through proactive interventions and reactive interventions.
The proactive interventions is that we aim to get there before crisis kind of happens or at any period of turmoil or difficulty.
So we do this through psychoeducation, offering clients lots of different trainings like the one we’re doing now, but also as well in peer group sessions and also personal and professional trainings through personal effectiveness sessions where we look at stress management, time management and assertiveness and effective communication.
All crucial skills to help us get us through life personally and professionally as well. With regards to our reactive interventions, we are there to support clients on an ongoing one basis or a one-self basis.
Speaker 1
This can be through counselling interventions, critical incident management, but also as well crisis intervention. We can be there to help connect people to supports that they need, be it the guideee or whoever it is at that time. Our clients, while this is always number one and to connect them to supports that they need to get to is very, very important.
But to really give you an insight of how we support the wellness of content moderators. But to give you a real sense of how we support the wellness of content moderators, what I’m going to do is take you through the next few slides of a client case to show how we apply these interventions and how we keep people safe.
So you’ll be able to see some of the techniques that we use, but please note that all of this has been anonymised and all of this has been generalised then to respect the confidentiality and the anonymity of the client as well.
Okay, so if we’re looking at proactive intervention, the employee, supporting the employee through cultivating, balance and re-establishing a CAM in their life, first of all, I’m going to introduce you to this client, IFA, so IFA is 32 years old, living in Dublin from America. So she is a T&S specialist, she’s a content moderator, working for a large company.
IFA struggles with time and stress management at work and in her personal life and she feels like it’s impacting her progression and work. So IFA originally attended her six month wellbeing check-in and she disclosed difficulties in work and feeling used up at the end of the day. So it was within this session that IFA decided that she would like to reach out and book in for one-to-one support.
So then IFA did, she booked in for her first session which was 15 minutes long and in that session we planned on working on the key areas. These included stress, routine, time management and an implement and relaxation for physical symptoms that she was experiencing too. So I started to help IFA in understanding her own cycle of stress and what caused it.
So we’re currently in the middle of CBT for stress and mindfulness techniques.
We’ve done five sessions so far and we will probably do about eight to 10 and we’re continuing to work on reducing IFA stress but so far she has scored that her anxiety, sorry, her stress has reduced from an eight to a five which is absolutely fantastic as we’re seeing that the different tools and techniques that we’re implementing are actually very, very beneficial for IFA in reducing her stress.
So IFA continues to attend group trainings like the ones we’re doing today, learning lots about emotions and stress and is continuing her one-to-one sessions currently. So what’s the outcome so far? So IFA has seen a meaningful reduction in stress in her life.
She’s reported spending more time with her colleagues, speaking up and saying no to work and also has more energy at the end of her working day which are all very, very positive outcomes which I’m delighted to be seeing.
Speaker 1
But to give you a sense of the different interventions that we used here to help IFA, what we were trying to do is identify what is triggering the situation with regards to the stress that she was feeling. So using the CBT model, we call this the hot cross bum intervention. What CBT believes is that the way that we think impacts the way we feel and the way that we behave.
So using this, we’re looking at the thoughts and how the emotions, behaviours and the physical symptoms all connect to each other. So these can all also trigger each other too. So if we’re having the physical symptoms, say when we often think a stressful thought and our heart starts racing, if our heart starts racing, we start my having stressful thoughts.
They all are connected and they all influence each other. So when looking at this exercise with IFA, very quickly IFA was able to identify that getting in trouble or for not meeting work expectations was one of the thoughts that was triggering the situations that was triggering this stressful and anxious response within her.
So some of the thoughts that she’d have during this time was, I’m never going to get this done, I’m so stupid, I can’t do this. She reported that some of the emotions she felt during this time was anger, shame, fear, and also loneliness. And behaviour wise, she noticed that she tends to avoid a lot of things, a lot of void situations that kind of make her think or feel this way.
She described that she procrastinates a lot and putting tasks that she’s worried about on the long finger. She discussed about how she put tasks that she was concerned about on the long finger. She noticed that because of this, she was so stressed. She often found that she made more mistakes than usual and also as well that there was a lot of worrying.
Physically, she noticed that when she was having stressful thoughts, her heart would begin racing, she had sweaty palms, muscle tension, particularly in her jaw, she would clench if she was stressed and also that she was very, very fatigued. One of the things IFA did describe was that she felt very used up at the end of the day.
So when working with IFA, what we wanted to do is try to tackle some of the things that trigger this stressful cycle. So we’re going to implement different interventions, which I’ll get to in a second and work and collaboratively work together in problem solving. How do we address this? How do we reduce the likelihood of this happening?
So it means IFA had to change her behaviour and add something into her routine or possibly take something out. Making change can cause quite a lot of anxiety or even some may argue, hey, if she’s stressed, is this not going to add more stress into her life? Well, what we are looking at is the theory or the concepts of habituation.
So this is where we experienced a decreased response to stimulus after repeated exposure. This was very effective when working with IFA.
Speaker 1
So the more we expose ourselves to various situations, the less anxious it will be over time. So both stress and anxiety have a natural peak and drop. So as you can see here in this graph, you can see the peak of anxiety and quietly with a short time after it drops. Now, as you can see, this person here is actually experiencing quite a lot of stress. There’s one, two, three, four, five peaks.
But what we do know is that they drop after them as well. Even though some emotions can feel really overwhelming and they’re uncomfortable and we can kind of feel like we’re stuck in that situation, it’s really important to know that all emotions are transient meaning that none of them are permanent and they do all absolutely pass.
With this theory, though, the more that we engage in it, the less the kind of reaction or the peak becomes. So as you can see here in the second graph, the first time someone engages in an anxious task or a stressful task, the reaction can be quite high and significant. However, you can see from the second, third and fourth time they were exposed to this task, it reduces.
So we definitely used this in Aoife’s work, in her therapeutic work. So there were certain things Aoife identified that she needed to change. She knew she had to stop saying yes to everything because her workload was already full and she was already struggling. So she knew she’d had to set up a boundary and learn how to say no.
She knew that she found it very difficult to ask for help for fear that someone thought that she wasn’t doing her job well or risk of losing her job. So she knew that that was something that would help to relieve some of the stress if she felt confident enough to be able to ask for help and support when she needed it.
And thirdly, she also recognised that having a routine was going to be really important, especially starting work and finishing on time as well. She found with the stress she was starting work early, starting work late to try and get tasks and on to try and stay out of trouble.
So what we wanted to do here was to start with the least anxiety provoking and then repeat this until Aoife’s anxiety dropped to about 50%. So we started with implementing changes to her routine, first of all, starting work and finishing work on time. And once this reduced, we then moved up to the yellow section that you can see on the screen, beginning to ask for help when needed.
And then once Aoife feels that she has a 50% reduction in this section, we then will move up to saying no and use different supports to help her to get there as well. Some other really helpful techniques that helped Aoife at the start of her journey was getting organised. The very first one we focused on was finishing work on time and then finishing and starting work, apologies, on time.
This was really important. But one thing Aoife often said throughout the sessions was, oh, I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, Ash, or I just kind of go with the flow.
Speaker 1
Aoife recognised that not having a plan or not having the structure in her day was actually feeding into the stress and also making it very difficult for her to establish a balance because she didn’t know what she was trying to balance. So what we implemented was the Eisenhower matrix or the Eisenhower box.
So at the start of every morning, she would fill out this box here that you can see on your screen to help her organise her day. She would organise her task from urgent to important, these ones she would do first, not urgent and important, these ones she would schedule, urgent and not important, that she would delegate to other people if she could and then not important or not urgent.
She would eliminate from her day if her workload or caseload was too full. So as you can see, she would just use a simple post-it note or even her diary and she’d start by just doing the little cross here that you can see on the screen and she’d fill in each one.
So the ones that she has to do, these could be things like if there’s a crisis in the office or she has a pressing deadline, the things that she had to decide on, like when to do during the day, these could be things like going to the gym, spending time with her family, the things that she delegated maybe to someone else or to a different day would be like scheduling appointments or making meetings and the deletes were things that were not urgent and not important at all such as like scrolling on her phone or social media, putting posts up, maybe buying a birthday present for someone that was in a couple of days.
If her workload was too full, these would be taken off her to-do list for that day. Other things that she found really effective to help her in her routine as well was to write everything down. One thing you might have noticed in that previous slide was that we talked about work tasks but also personal tasks such as buying birthday presents and spending time with families.
She found it very, very helpful to put personal and work tasks all in the one place because that is what’s on her plate for that day. Even when there was no formal deadlines, it can be really helpful to create deadlines for yourself.
Anyways, this can help you to stay accountable and also help you to stay motivated and give you that kind of roadmap of what your day looks like and you get that sense of accomplishment once you can tick them off as well. Avoiding distractions. One thing I tried to do was intentionally steer clear of any competing tasks.
The phone would often go into the handbag to avoid to avoid possibly getting distracted. Sometimes if she was working, her office was in an open plan office, but there were kind of individual meeting rooms that were available.
So what she could do was if she had a task that required a lot of attention, she knew that her colleagues were working on kind of other tasks, which they commonly asked for advice. When she had to focus on big tasks like this, she would take herself and put herself into one of those small meeting rooms, which was very helpful, and again was a considered effort.
Speaker 1
So when your task list is becoming too much, prioritise according to effort and breeze through those easier tasks first because they’re quicker to get done.
So for example, if I go back just one slide, sometimes the important and urgent things are things that take quite a big chunk of our day and they can cause more stress knowing that even when we finish that big massive task, we still have loads of smaller tasks to do first.
So sometimes when this was causing stress, Aoife would get the smaller tasks done first because they were easier to fly through and then have the big task where she could give and devote all of her attention to that one task. This was very effective.
So even though we’re putting in all of these skills and techniques, Aoife then has shown that she has the ability to kind of tweak them to make them fit and work for her. She’s shown that psychological flexibility, that autonomy, making decisions for herself and taking control of her workload, which is very, very promising.
One other thing that Aoife really, really responded well to was learning those relaxation techniques, which I’m going to finish off with here today. So I invite you all to just get comfortable for just a couple of minutes and this is how we’re going to close off our session today.
When we’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed and we want to kind of go into kind of solution mode, fixer mode, how am I going to get rid of this stress or fix this problem? Sometimes we just need to take a moment to pause and relieve the stress that’s building up in our mind and body, so to help us to be able to think a little bit more clearly.
So I’m going to invite you all now to engage in a lovely mindfulness technique called progressive muscle relaxation, where we are going to address the tension that’s in our body and learn how to release it.
So I’m going to ask you all to just get comfortable in your chairs, try and unfold your arms, leaving them resting down the chairs or on your laps and cross the feet, have them placed kind of firmly on the floor. And if you feel comfortable, you can close your eyes. Okay, so what we’re going to do is take the deepest breath we’ve taken in all day, breathing in.
Speaker 2
and breathing out, breathing in.
Speaker 1
This time I’m going to hold the breath and breathing out. So what I’m going to ask you to do now is every time you breathe in we’re going to cause tension in the muscle. When you hold I’m going to ask you to hold the tension and then as you breathe out we’re going to release the tension. Let’s begin at the top of our shoulders.
If you have any injuries please feel free to skip any of these exercise or repeat the one we do previous if you found that to be beneficial. So taking a deep breath in together we’re going to raise the shoulders up towards the ears, hold the breath, hold the tension.
Speaker 2
And then breathing out.
Speaker 1
Breathing in, I’m going to ask you to make fists with your hands and then hold the breath, hold the tension, squeezing the fists and all the way up the arms.
Speaker 2
And exhale.
Speaker 1
Breathing in, squeeze in the stomach, hold the breath.
Speaker 2
breath, hold the tension and then breathing out.
Speaker 1
Breathing in, pressing your knees together.
Speaker 2
tensing the thighs, hold the breath, hold the tension, and relax.
Speaker 1
Breathing in, curling the toes, fold
Speaker 2
breath, hold the tension and then exhale letting go of all tension. Last one now we’re going to tense the whole body.
Speaker 1
and then relax. So breathing in, tense the shoulders.
Speaker 2
Holders tense the arms, the stomach, thighs and toes, hold and then relax. All right.
Speaker 1
just shake out your muscles now. This will allow your muscles to relax even further. Open your eyes when you’re ready. And thank you so much for joining me here today, everyone. I hope everyone is feeling lovely and relaxed. I hope we’ve all learned something here today. If you’ve any questions, any feedback, please, please get in touch. You can get us at hello at evohealth.com.
Guys, my name’s been Keira Conley. It’s been an absolute pleasure and I hope to see you all again very soon. Bye, everyone.
