Valuing Individual Creativity in Social Work

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When people find their own path they follow it. When instructions are imposed, they tend to go ignored.

When we try to press our beliefs on another person, it is really a reflection of ourselves, it clearly indicates that we have not allowed that other person to truly open up to us and tell us who they really are, we have not experienced their ‘specialness’. When you apply pressure to people they hide their true selves from you and you don’t get a true picture. When you try to press your ideas on another, even at the low level of giving friendly advice, you deny that individual the use of their personal creativity. Advice is not usually enabling, more often it is disabling. Sometimes people ask for advice but their request is not an offer to follow your advice, they are looking for alternatives from which they will make their own choice based on the facts at their disposal.

Human beings crave independence, to be as much in control of their lives as they are capable. Clients, just like the rest of us want happiness and success, but most of all they want to feel good about themselves so that for me is the starting point. Social workers often talk about people being the experts on their situation, we need to put this idea into practice, to work with the individual on their terms, in their context, with their hopes, dreams and beliefs so that in the end they can say ‘I did it using my own strengths and resources’ instead of feeling that something was done to them. If you do people’s thinking for them you deny them the opportunity to be creative, to develop and think for themselves, you become an ‘expert’ who has all the answers so undermine people in subtle ways, ultimately making them dependant.

Sometimes people seem to want you to be the expert, they seem to want a miracle worker to come in to the family and cure everybody. When this happens it is easy to get involved in a very interesting cycle. There is a great desire in all of us to come up with helpful suggestions, it inflates the ego and makes us feel good. So when people try to hook you in to rescuing them, your ego will get all puffed up and think ‘aha, here’s my chance to feel good about myself’. They want you to be the expert and you get hooked in and start to look for solutions. You come up with an idea and they tell you that sounds like a really good idea and they will try it. When you go back and ask the client how it went, they tell you that for some reason it didn’t work: ‘they didn’t listen’, ‘they just laughed at me’, ‘I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do’, ‘I lost my purse’, ‘the bus didn’t come’. Any number of pretty transparent reasons for your suggestions not happening.

The response to your suggestions can also be more blatant: ‘I tried that before’ or ‘that would never work’, or ‘they would never listen’, or any number of reasons for your suggestions not being appropriate or useful or practical. Their manner is ‘okay Mr clever-clogs, expert, see what wonderful ideas you can come up with now to sort this out!’ You end up feeling that they do not really want your help, that they want to use you to support their inability to make changes, to get you to say ‘poor you, there is no cure, it must be awful for you’. People crave independence but they are capable of tricking themselves into thinking that they already have independence and even with their independence there is no cure for their ills, clever wonderful creative creatures that they are. They do not want your cures, that would make them dependant on you to heal them. They want your cures to fail so that they are justified in their failing. When somebody wants you to be an expert it is just bait on a hook and at the end your hungry ego will make you look arrogant and silly.

Progress flows from working with your clients, using your combined creativity and compassion instead of battering against a hard and unyielding enemy. We are not there to impose our beliefs on anybody, we are there to help our clients function to the best of THEIR ability. They need to be able to sustain any change after you have gone and so it has to be their own change that they have decided to make, not your change that you have pressured them to make. Of course there will always be conflict, we may have different ideas about childcare for instance, but it is clear that the social workers role is not to oppress but to teach and learn in a spirit of partnership.

Effective social work treads lightly on human lives and spirits. Communication that is effective is graceful and effortless, there is no resistance, no pressure. If our words come from the intellect and the depths of our humanity instead of from our more damaging and superficial emotions such as fear, anger and ego, then work flows naturally from our compassion, from our love and from our being, it becomes an effortless and graceful flow, work but somehow not work, progress without undue effort. If you feel that the universe is working against you - it is you who are working against the universe. Accept what is and work to create what could be.

This article is drawn from 'The Barefoot Helper’.

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