Posts tagged as:

Mark Hawthorne

Mark Hawthorne on Coping with Burnout

January 29, 2010

I think this will be the last post about avoiding burnout for the next little while, not because we’re done, but because I want to think about other things for a bit, so I’m going to pass the torch, so to speak, to Mark Hawthorne, who literally wrote the book on animal activism (you can see our review here.)

Consider this a homework assignment: check out Mark’s talk on burnout. The video’s an hour and a half long, but Mark’s portion of it is in the first 20 minutes. The middle chunk (Robert Roop on Coping with Compassion Fatigue) is interesting, but I’ll admit I didn’t watch all of it due to time constraints. The last 20 minutes are Q&A with both Mark and Robert, and you might get something out of that too.

And yeah, I know that even after I’ve picked out the highlights from 90 minutes of video for you, some of you don’t learn that way, so I’m going to give a quick summary of Mark’s “ACTIVE approach” to avoiding burnout.

As you might have guessed from the all-caps presentation, ACTIVE is an acronym that stands for these tips:

A: Allow yourself to be human. Give yourself permission to have a good time without feeling guilty.
C: Create something tangible to remind you of your victories. A notebook, a binder, a website, a scrapbook with clippings of your successes. Something to turn to to remind you you’re fighting the good fight.
T: Talk to someone you trust. Have someone with whom you can dare to be yourself. It’s critical to be able to unburden yourself. Use a therapist if you don’t have someone else you can turn to in your personal life.
I: Ignore upsetting images. Give yourself some space if at all possible.
V: Visit an active sanctuary (or volunteer at one.) Get some face time with the faces you’re working to protect.
E: Exercise. Walk, hike, bike, go to the gym, yoga, pilates, whatever you can do.

I could write a whole essay about how each of these tips have made positive changes in my life by both helping to avoid burnout and making me more effective, and if you can’t, then there might be something missing in your burnout prevention kit, so I highly recommend giving them a try.

If you’d like to follow more of Mark’s work, you can check out his blog, where he does incredibly in depth reports on activism opportunities, his Twitter feed for shorter updates, and of course his book, which I think is a great one to have handy whenever someone around you says they’re thinking about getting into volunteering or activism.

{ 1 comment }

Is every book an activism book?

June 11, 2009

Mark Hawthorne (activism expert and author of Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism, which we reviewed over here) has a new post up about the recent explosion of animal activism books that’s occurred over the past year, and it fascinates me for (at least) two reasons.

First of all, wow, there are a lot of books coming out on this topic! I’m trying to figure out if it’s the whole “niche-ification” thing in action, where it’s simply not enough to publish a general purpose activism book anymore, or if it’s an example of Mark Evans’ theory of the onset of DIY creation culture where, as he says, “people who would have never thought about writing a book are now getting the opportunity to do so because they been working on their writing chops for the past few years, built an audience, and shown publishers there may be a market.”

Secondly, I think Mark’s headline of “Activism Guides for Everyone” is an apt one. These books are suitable for anyone who wants to do what’s in the title. The thing of it is, though, that while these books are all relatively new, every book I’ve read in the past 10 years has been about animal activism. No kidding: when I read something, a part of my mind tries to apply it to outreach. There are the obvious matches like business books etc., but even fiction triggers this effect in my brain, like when a character says a line of dialogue that doesn’t have anything to do with veganism but makes me think about human nature and how people are wired and how best to approach the psychological buttons that we all have.

Thankfully TV doesn’t hit me the same way or I’d never get anything done :)

All that said, I’m really glad to see this trend. It’s a whole lot easier to get key concepts without that translation layer in between, and the titles alone are enough to inspire action in people who spot them on the shelves, so it’s a clear win. And hey, maybe I’m an outlier on this one, or maybe not – what happens when you read? Do you have any books that you think are great for activism even if they don’t say so in the title?

{ Comments on this entry are closed }