VOICES

THE COURAGE TO RECEIVE

Julie Scott discusses how to accept care yourself as a practitioner that spends their life giving

There is a question that I suspect many of us answer almost automatically. Someone asks how we are, and without really thinking, we reply ‘I’m fine, thank you.’ It is such a familiar exchange that we rarely stop to consider whether our answer is true. I remember someone asking me that question not so long ago, someone who was not asking out of politeness but because they genuinely wanted to know and I answered instinctively, as I always do, only realising later that I had not paused long enough to ask myself the same question.

For those of us who spend our professional lives caring for other people, looking after ourselves often becomes something we intend to do rather than something we actually practise.

We become remarkably good at recognising distress in others while overlooking it in ourselves, noticing the subtle shift in a patient’s body language, the hesitation in their voice and the emotions sitting beneath the words they choose, yet somehow ignoring exactly the same signs in our own lives.

What happens when the person who needs support in the consultation room is not the patient, but you?

WHEN CARING BECOMES YOUR IDENTITY

One of the privileges of working in healthcare is that caring gradually becomes woven into who we are. It stops being something we do and becomes part of how we see ourselves, and over time we become the colleague who can be relied upon, the practitioner who remains calm under pressure and the mentor who offers reassurance.

Patients trust us at some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives, and those are privileges I have never taken for granted. The difficulty is that when caring becomes your identity, receiving care can begin to feel strangely unfamiliar. We become so accustomed to being the steady one that we forget we are allowed to wobble too, and so practised at solving problems that asking for help starts to feel like failure rather than wisdom.I do not think anyone ever explicitly taught me that; I think I absorbed it.

Medicine, nursing and aesthetics all have an unspoken culture that seems to celebrate resilience, where we admire the colleague who keeps going despite personal difficulty and the practitioner who never appears flustered. Those qualities are valuable, but somewhere along the way resilience can become confused with self-neglect.

We become remarkably good at recognising distress in others while overlooking it in ourselves.

BECOMING EXPERTS AT FUNCTIONING

One observation has stayed with me over recent years, which is that healthcare professionals become extraordinarily good at functioning. Sometimes it is only when someone asks a simple question with genuine curiosity that we realise quite how exhausted we have become.

Functioning and flourishing are not the same thing. One keeps you moving, while the other allows you to remain fully alive in the work you do, and I think many practitioners convince themselves that functioning is enough because the alternative feels uncomfortable to acknowledge. If we are still turning up, still delivering good care and still meeting expectations, surely we are doing all right? Perhaps. But surviving your profession was never supposed to become the benchmark for success.

WHY ASKING FOR HELP FEELS SO DIFFICULT

I have often wondered why asking for help feels so much harder for those who spend their lives offering it. Part of it, I suspect, is responsibility; we worry about burdening other people, and tell ourselves we will be fine once things settle down, after the conference, after the clinic, after the next deadline, although the difficulty is that there is always another deadline.

Sometimes it is also pride, although not in the way people might imagine. It is not arrogance; it is the quiet belief that because we are the experienced practitioner, the mentor or the educator, we ought to have worked it all out by now. I have felt that myself, and there have been moments when I have known exactly what advice I would give a colleague in the same situation, yet found it remarkably difficult to apply the same compassion to myself.

Functioning and flourishing are not the same thing. One keeps you moving, while the other allows you to remain fully alive in the work you do.

THE GIFT OF BEING TRULY KNOWN

A few months ago someone said something to me that I have thought about ever since; they told me they wished they could give me the gift of seeing myself as they saw me, and those words landed more deeply than the person who said them probably realised.

It made me think about how rarely we allow ourselves to be fully known, and how many people know only the public version of us, the composed version that turns up ready to work each day. Far fewer know the person behind those roles, the one who occasionally questions themselves, who feels deeply, who sometimes worries they have not done enough, and who simply gets tired.I have come to believe that one of the greatest protective factors in any career is having a handful of people who know that person too, not people who flatter us or tell us everything is wonderful, but people who know us well enough to recognise when something is not quite right, often before we recognise it ourselves. Those relationships are not luxuries; they are professional safeguards, and worth protecting with at least the same care we extend to our work itself.

LEARNING TO RECEIVE

Receiving is surprisingly difficult; receiving help, receiving kindness, receiving rest, receiving reassurance without immediately dismissing it; all of these things require a quiet kind of permission that practitioners often struggle to give themselves.

For years I found receiving uncomfortable because it felt passive, and I preferred being useful, preferred solving problems, and it took me a long time to realise that allowing other people to support you is not weakness but trust. Just as our patients place their trust in us every day, we occasionally need to place our trust in others.The irony is that we encourage this all the time, telling patients they do not have to cope alone and reminding colleagues that vulnerability is not weakness, yet many of us quietly exempt ourselves from the very advice we so freely give. Perhaps one of the greatest acts of integrity is allowing ourselves to live by the same principles we encourage in everyone else.

WHAT HAS HELPED ME

Over the years I have learnt that protecting yourself is rarely about dramatic changes; more often it is built through small, intentional decisions repeated consistently. For me, those have included recognising when I am moving into survival mode rather than simply feeling busy, becoming honest with a small circle of trusted people instead of automatically replying that I am fine, creating space in my diary before I actually feel overwhelmed rather than afterwards, and reminding myself that asking for support is not an admission that I am struggling to be a practitioner but a recognition that I am still a person.

Most importantly, I have stopped believing that I have to earn rest. Rest is not a reward for reaching exhaustion; it is part of remaining well enough to continue doing meaningful work, and treating it as anything less is a quiet form of self-betrayal that I think many of us have grown far too comfortable with.

CLOSING REFLECTION

For much of my career I believed that strength meant being the person who could carry everything, and I admired resilience, independence and composure. But I have come to realise that perhaps the strongest practitioners are not those who never need support, but those who recognise when they do, and who have the quiet courage to receive it.

Perhaps the next stage of professional maturity is not learning how to give more, but learning that receiving is part of giving, because every time we allow ourselves to be supported, rested or understood, we are quietly protecting the quality of care we are able to offer everyone else.

Next month, I would like to explore another powerful aspect of our profession: the difference between perfection and excellence, and why the relentless pursuit of being perfect may be one of the greatest barriers to becoming the practitioner we truly aspire to be.

Scott Shares.

Reflections for practitioners who care deeply.

JULIE SCOTT

Julie Scott RGN, NIP, PGDip(Aes) is an independent nurse prescriber, Level 7 qualified aesthetic injector and trainer with more than 30 years of experience in the field of plastics and skin rejuvenation. She is an aesthetic mentor and international speaker, who has won the Aesthetics Awards ‘Aesthetic Nurse Practitioner of the Year’ in both 2022 & 2024, and ‘Best Clinic South of England’ 2023 awards. She also sits on the Aesthetics Reviewing Panel for the Aesthetics Journal, is a Board member for DANAI and is an ambassador and KOL for the JCCP and several leading aesthetic brands.