A good day at the office
After 25 years as a professional fitness trainer, Jaron Steffens turned his professional life upside down to focus on the health of the mind rather than body.
“For decades I pushed my clients to improve their physical health using well-known tactics such as goal setting, positive imagery, and self-talk. When I was studying for my psychology degree, I decided to do my honours thesis on these body/mind connections. What I found stunned me and drove me to change my life’s work.”
Jaron started a degree in psychology that he finished in 2015 and since then he’s used his degree and work experience as a personal fitness coach.
The research Jaron investigated around the use of setting goals to engage people in physical activity or the visualisation and positive reinforcement through self-talk – Yes! I can do this! – was conducted mostly around athletes and people who already had a motivation to meet their physical goals. The use of these techniques on regular folks mostly didn’t exist and so he felt they didn’t hold much value for his clients.
“Decades ago the connection between mind and body health was not recognised at all. Today it’s exactly the opposite. If you have lots of issues with your stomach or gut, you are probably experiencing anxiety, for example.
“So I decided to help people with their own body and mind connection with personal training and coaching business, and now I’ve gone fully over to the mental health side with this new role at RISE.”
Jaron is our new Family Violence Prevention Representative. He attends the daily meetings with Police and social agencies that we call the SAMs table – SAM is an acronym for Safety Assessment Meetings. (You can read in more detail what is involved with these meetings.) One of the first things Jaron does after attending these meetings is to call the people who are involved in situations that include family violence.
“This is new to me, calling someone out of the blue following a difficult event. I keep in my mind that this is probably the worst thing that has likely happened to this person in their life. When I call and offer help or just even ask ‘are you OK?’, I can sometimes tell it’s the first time that this person has been asked how they are. Sometimes I can feel them relax through the phone.”
At the SAMs meetings the group discusses the family harm events reported to Police each day. Some of the families involved in those events are assigned to RISE for contact. Mostly these are people who are responsible for the violence and statistically these are mostly men. The people who are harmed are contacted by other partner agencies. Sometimes a female victim will also participate in a RISE safety programme.
For Jaron, family violence is a completely new field of work, though his psychology degree has given him a strong foundation.
“I use the basic structures of cognitive behavioural therapy and other theories to structure my work with clients. I always try to meet a person where, understand the space they are in, and help them from that space. Every person is a human and I go in with empathy and compassion.
“Yesterday I reached a person who was already called five or six times by other staff but there was no answer. I reached him and he said to me, ‘I’m over this. I’ve got to do it this time.’ I got him to sign up [to the RISE Non-Violence Programme] and I could tell he wanted to change his relationship and his life. I think he thought he could fix it on his own or that he and his partner could fix it together. But now he’s in a space where he is willing to accept help to make change on his own.
“I took that as a win for him, for them, and for me. It’s the start of this guy doing things differently and that is a good day at work I think.”
