Student Affairs

About the Session

Research on Student Affairs highlights "burnout" and attrition as signicant issues in the profession. Handling crisis, long hours, care fatigue, staff turnover, and the work alcoholic culture of Student Affairs often not only lead to “burnout” or attrition, but hinder personal health and wellness. In order to best serve students, Student Affairs professionals must work to promote their own health and wellness. By integrating positive health and wellness habits, professionals can lead by example to students and colleagues to change the culture of Student Affairs at Appalachian and beyond. During times of high stress, crisis, long hours,
additional responsibilities, and seemingly constant change, Student Affairs professionals can integrate positive coping mechanisms to impact not only their work and life, but the others
they work with. 

Self-care is the ability to prioritize activities that bring an individual a greater sense of wellness or well-being. For many self-care is an elusive skill that seems difficult to master even off the clock and unimaginable or unthinkable to add to our daily work related responsibilities. Countless articles in the profession provide suggestions and tips to obtain a healthy work-life balance to ensure practitioners are able to fully deliver the best services and selves to their campuses. It is clear this is an area that the profession recognizes as a wide-spread issue that has found no long term solution.

Additionally, the word self-care is by definition a responsibility left to a single individual. Through integration, we assert that creating a culture of care is a responsibility of not oneindividual when they are off the clock but also that of the environment in which they lead. Integration of healthy coping and leadership skills in turn leads to a culture that prioritizes wellness on a fundamental level. Integration is what turns self-care into community-care and leads to and creates phenomenal creativity and productivity on a campus and in businesses alike.

In order to reap the rewards of a culture that truly values CARE for all we must first take inventory of ourselves. Here we identify at least one goal for our personal care development. If we’re brave we can dive deeper to identify both the healthy and, more commonly, unhealthy ways in which we have historically dealt with our stressors, be it from work or personal lives. Negative coping mechanism for stress management common for all professionals in the western world typically center around numbing in the form of over-eating, binge watching tv, avoidance, and other like habits. Creating culture thus, begins at the individual level of recognizing a need and having a desire to improve for the good of the whole. Integration then asks the individual to incorporate healthy habits into their life. The presenters are by no means experts at this, we struggle, experience highs and lows. Recognizing our own needs to be better, and engaging in conversations with our colleagues has been a tremendous help. This presentation seeks to continue the
conversation, learn from each other, and integrate healthy habits into our lives so we can best serve ourselves, colleagues, and students.

Session II, McRae Peak, 137B

Learning Outcomes

As a result of this presentation and discussion, participants will leave with tangible options and resources related to self-care.
As a result of the presentation, participants will be able to identify self-care struggles of Student Affairs professionals.
As a result of the presentation, participants will be able to identify a self-care goal to work on for 2019-2020.

Presenters:

Gabby Dickey (University Recreation) dickeygb@appstate.edu 

Brandon Nelson (University Housing) nelsonbe@appstate.edu