[00:00:00] Marie Vakakis: Hello and welcome back to another collaboration between the Inside Social Work Podcast and the becoming an A-M-H-S-W, the podcast with me, Marie Vakakis, and me Ashton Hayes. We are three episodes into our mini series, and the question we’re talking about today is, what would your 25-year-old self think about where you’re at now?

[00:00:26] Marie Vakakis: What would she think, Marie? I had no idea that this was a career path that I would’ve done about 25. I think I had just finished my masters of social work, done my honors thesis, like the the research pathway, and I was expecting a career in. Non-for-profits. Mm. Maybe working with, you know, larger, non-for-profits.

[00:00:49] Marie Vakakis: Like I had dreams of sort of more community development, like with World Vision or the Red Cross or Oxfam or something like that. And I really thought [00:01:00] once people know. And learn about what we are doing. And they see when we talk about the systems and the importance of our work, one, like people just don’t know this.

[00:01:10] Marie Vakakis: And once they know it, they’ll be on board and there’ll be money flowing into these programs. Anything from food security to housing. And so I was still so bright-eyed and bushy tailed around. This idea that if people just knew they would do something different. Mm. That it’s so clear that these things change lives.

[00:01:31] Marie Vakakis: Mm. And I had no idea I would end up doing not one, but two podcasts. I hated public speaking, like loath dirt. And the only way I pushed myself through was, well, first my language exams. When you do a language, you have to do a little kind of spiel. A presentation was my mental health first aid instructor training.

[00:01:55] Marie Vakakis: Okay. So you do all the learning, but then you have to actually [00:02:00] instruct. Right, right. Because you gotta, they gotta see you deliver. And I was up. For hours rehearsing and practicing and I had like one section. I was doing the psychosis bit and I was rehearsing it and rehearsing it and getting cranky at my partner ’cause like he made a noise.

[00:02:14] Marie Vakakis: I’m like trying to focus here and had flash cut in practice and it was fine. No one died. It was good. Good. And so now I can run the whole workshop without any notes if I needed to. So I would never have thought that I would be talking in front of people, making videos, doing podcasting, creating content on TikTok of all places.

[00:02:37] Marie Vakakis: Like just, I would never have thought that any of that would’ve been possible or even a thing. Mm-hmm. And I would never have thought of running my own business and being my own. Boss and running a team. So I think she would be a little confused maybe. Yes. Sometimes I think I gave up on a dream. I would still like to do some humanitarian based work, but there’s a whole lot of [00:03:00] ethical considerations that I have around this idea of.

[00:03:03] Marie Vakakis: Mostly white people going into a place, doing some stuff and leaving. Right. So I’ve really tried to think about how do I support causes intentionally, sustainably, and not be a fly in, fly out kind of worker. Mm-hmm. So I’m still trying to figure out how that. Works. And so I do, I try to do some more local impact things.

[00:03:24] Marie Vakakis: Okay. More around environmental causes. Even things like, I think I posted not long ago, but on LinkedIn around even just buying the big issue. Yeah. Like doing small things on a community level, and then how to align with an organisation and be sort of an ambassador for a particular cause because it’s so overwhelming and you can have causes around physical health, mental health, cancer, relation.

[00:03:47] Marie Vakakis: There’s so much to do. So. I want to revisit that. Mm-hmm. A little bit. But I think she would be, Terry Fu told her this is what she would doing. Be Absolutely not. There is no way I’m putting my face out on there. My voice out on [00:04:00] there. There’s no way I’m running workshops. I forget it. I just want to head down, bum up, and keep learning.

[00:04:05] Marie Vakakis: Okay. And maybe I’ll still keep learning. I do love studying and learning, but I think she would be scared. Right. Was if I told her, this is what your career’s gonna look like. 

[00:04:17] Ashton Hayes: That’s really interesting. Yeah. 

[00:04:18] Marie Vakakis: How about you? How about your 25-year-old 

[00:04:21] Ashton Hayes: self? Well, I’m just trying to remember back that far, but my 25-year-old self was definitely on the lawyer track, so she would be very surprised that she is a social worker specialising.

[00:04:37] Ashton Hayes: In mental health. I think though, when I think back, it was family law. I was a family law paralegal back then and studying law, and I think that when I consider the broader context of the work that my family did, everyone really has been in [00:05:00] some form of helping profession and. My grandfather was a mental health clinician in that he was a, uh, very senior psych nurse.

[00:05:12] Ashton Hayes: So when I think about it now, I’m not surprised. I was exposed to all of that. I didn’t take it on board. When I thought about nursing, I thought about the cute outfits, which back in the olden days, and that’s what I would see. 

[00:05:27] Marie Vakakis: Cute outfits or is that more like fetishized? 

[00:05:31] Ashton Hayes: I think it was because when I was very little.

[00:05:36] Ashton Hayes: What I saw in nursing was the white dresses and the fancy hats and the pretty red capes. And did they wear 

[00:05:46] Marie Vakakis: red capes? 

[00:05:47] Ashton Hayes: Well, some of the seniors did in mental health, and what I saw was a helping profession that was stylish. When I realised what nursing actually was, I realised that that was [00:06:00] probably not something that I was cut out for.

[00:06:02] Ashton Hayes: But the, at its core, it’s a helping profession, and the work that I saw people doing was helping work and it was helping in mental health. 

[00:06:10] Marie Vakakis: Can I ask, because when I was growing up, I think this is all pre beyond blue’s sort of multi-year long campaigns around mental health. Mm-hmm. Mental illness back then was psychiatric institutions.

[00:06:25] Marie Vakakis: Mm-hmm. Asylums. Mm-hmm. You know, remembering lobotomies being done. People essentially imprisoned Yes. And detained for hysteria, like the environment and the conversation around mental health mm-hmm. Would’ve been incredibly different to what it is now. So even mental health nursing would’ve, there would’ve been no trauma informed.

[00:06:48] Marie Vakakis: Work research. 

[00:06:50] Ashton Hayes: No, but when I look back now at the work that particularly my grandfather was doing, and I’ve read some of the [00:07:00] letters of commendation and some of the. Documents around him and his work, and certainly he didn’t do that in isolation. But just for the purposes of our discussion today, what I see was early trauma informed work.

[00:07:13] Ashton Hayes: What I see was support with people with mental illness and mental health issues to engage in self-care. So the concept of self-care back then, and I just wanna be clear, I’m talking about a time before I was alive, but it originated from the idea that we need to go from having you have your hair brushed and your bathed and whatever in those, in those institutional type spaces to let’s learn how to actually take care of ourselves, brush our own here, have a, have some autonomy as part of.

[00:07:48] Ashton Hayes: Moving through that recovery. And so what I was exposed to as a young child was the, was I guess in some ways trauma informed safety. That’s what [00:08:00] a lot of that work was around safety, because the concept of being put into an institution taken away from your community, not being able to access your normal supports and being in a scary space where people perhaps had different differing levels of need.

[00:08:15] Ashton Hayes: Could feel extremely unsafe. And we know that feeling unsafe is absolutely the opposite of what we wanna do if we are working towards recovery. So I think yes, when my singing slash acting career did not pan out, that I still had a little bit of a glimmer of hope in when I was 25. And I realised that I did wanna go into a helping profession.

[00:08:35] Ashton Hayes: It was the legal space that I was looking at. And so I don’t think 25-year-old me would have seen myself here. But the age that I am now, which I’ll just leave that out, uh, feels very happy and lucky to be in this career. What would’ve surprised you most? My 25-year-old self? Yeah. I think the social [00:09:00] media, because I feel incredibly uncomfortable with having my face everywhere.

[00:09:05] Ashton Hayes: And I think sometimes the perception is that when you see someone. Putting themselves out there, it can seem like, oh wow, they’re super confident and they’re not worried at all. Whereas I, yes, feel strange about social media. I will say that it’s interesting when I’m delivering training or whether I am delivering, for example.

[00:09:28] Ashton Hayes: Speaking at a conference, I’m okay with a really big audience. It’s the smaller audiences that induce my anxiety a little bit more. And I think, you know, I’ve certainly had to speak to all different sizes of audiences, but yes, that makes me feel anxious in a small room with a few people. That’s a tricky one for me.

[00:09:48] Marie Vakakis: Maybe we can talk about that around imposter syndrome. Yes. So for people listening. One takeaway or one, I guess I invite you to think about [00:10:00] writing your 25-year-old self a letter. Mm-hmm. Any other prompts that listeners could put into that? Do you have some ideas? 

[00:10:08] Ashton Hayes: I think it’s okay to write out your expectations and have them listed for something that you look at a few years down the track.

[00:10:17] Ashton Hayes: I really like that. What is, what would your future self, 

[00:10:20] Marie Vakakis: yeah, so maybe there’s two parts of that. If you are. A younger listener than maybe thinking about what you would like in the next five or 10 years. Not necessarily. I would encourage you to think more around values rather than goals like tick box items.

[00:10:38] Marie Vakakis: I agree that’s maybe the acting side of me coming out. And if you are on the other side, more seasoned worker or mature age student, have a think about what you would’ve liked your 20-year-old, 5-year-old self to know, or what he or she or they would’ve maybe be surprised about. And we are coming at it from a place of empathy.[00:11:00] 

[00:11:00] Marie Vakakis: Curiosity. 

[00:11:01] Ashton Hayes: Mm. 

[00:11:01] Marie Vakakis: And I think we, the goalpost keeps moving. 

[00:11:05] Ashton Hayes: Mm. 

[00:11:05] Marie Vakakis: And we don’t often take a minute to look at what we might’ve wanted back then. What’s possible now? Have we strayed off a path that maybe there’s bits of that we wanna get back? Like I was sharing about my desire to align with a cause, have that more longevity.

[00:11:22] Marie Vakakis: And if anything it sparks for you, let us know. I’d love for you to. Tag us in a post. If you do a, I dunno, a reel or a story, let us know what your 25-year-old self, you know, or your future self would like. And we wanna hear from you. So let us know. We absolutely do. So thanks for listening to episode three of this miniseries, and we’ll be back very soon with another episode.