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MTS: Prepare for change

Thursday, 18 January, 2007

One of the best pieces of advice I can give to someone starting MTS is to prepare for change. This is something that we were never told and I fear that a lot of MTS workers are never told it either. There is going to be some amount of change, and given that this is MTS we're talking about, it's probably going to be more than minimal. All change is stressful in its own way (even good change, like taking holidays). Stress can be good or bad, but when you're under too much stress, it is very bad. (I should blog about MTS and stress another day.) A lot of people say, “Make sure you have a decent holiday before you start MTS.” What they don't tell you is why. It's not that there will be no time for holidays later. It's so that you will be fresh and ready to face what's coming.

The amount of change that occurs when you start MTS varies from individual to individual. Ben and I went through a lot of change when we started MTS: we moved house, we changed churches, we started new jobs (and our income went down) and we started hanging around a whole different set of people—some of whom we knew from our Uni days but most of whom were complete strangers. We were fortunate in that we were quite familiar with Wollongong. I had lived there during my undergraduate days—first in residential college, then in shared accommodation. We knew the university and the way it worked, we knew most of the people on the staff team, and we had been through ECU and we understood how it worked. So it wasn't all new.

Nevertheless, I think one of our biggest mistakes was not giving ourselves enough time to adjust to all the changes. We should have started slow but instead we hit the ground running and signed up for more than we could handle: Bible study leading, Sunday school teaching, church band, training groups, and so on. Then we realised too late that we weren't handling everything and we tried to cut back.

The best thing to do is to start small. Sure, you're going to get roped in to do various things and you'll be assigned various tasks but try to separate what's core business (if I can put it that way) from peripherals. What do I mean? Well, for us, Uni was our main focus. Uni—ECU—was the reason we were in Wollongong in the first place. And while we were in Wollongong, we just happened to start attending St. Michael's Anglican Cathedral. But St. Michael's wasn't core business for us, and if I could have my time again, I wouldn't have committed myself so early to so many things at St. Michael's before I knew whether I could commit to those things.

The second best thing to do is to block out days (and if you can't do days, part-days) which are your rest days on top of your normal rest day. Plan ahead and plan early: look at your calendar and purposefully set aside days for you to relax, set aside your work and do something nice for yourself. One of the ways to combat stress (as I mentioned in my depression talk) is quality R & R. It's not a cure; it's a coping mechanism. You need to put into practice the stuff that Peter Brain talks about in Going the Distance about good self-care.

You should also take some time to get to know your environment. If you've just moved to a new place, spend some days exploring—walking around your new neighbourhood, finding out where the shops are, getting a friend to show you the nice parts of the area (Mount Keira!) or discovering them for yourself. This is particularly important if you're not familiar with the place you're working in (e.g. a Uni campus). It won't feel like home at the moment but it will eventually get better as the strange becomes familiar. Just give yourself time and space to adjust.

And above all, don't feel guilty about doing it. It's good foundations for what lies ahead.

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