Welcome! 

The ‘E’ of CARE refers to empowerment.  Cultivating compassion, mindfulness, and the other resilience techniques you have been learning help to broaden your emotional bandwidth and your ability to cope with (and even thrive on) what life throws at you.  In this sense, they are all practices that empower you.  One of the dimensions of burnout is a sense of reduced personal efficacy; empowering practices help to address this.  Most of the focus of our training so far has been on how you can change your own attitudes, intentions and behaviors in order to strengthen your resilience. 

As you no doubt know, though, external factors can be major stresses.  Sometimes, of course, it is appropriate to address these factors. For example, an abusive or hostile workplace, social injustices and so on can lead to stress.  Sometimes practices like mindfulness and compassion are criticized for allegedly putting too much emphasis on the individual’s ability to cope with problematic conditions, detracting focus from external or systemic sources of stress.  This is an important consideration.  The premise of the CARE program is that by developing our own coping capacities we are not avoiding addressing external factors, but developing a stronger and more stable platform from which to address them.