In the lead-up to IWD2022, we spoke with Amanda Lamont, strategist and adviser on disaster resilience, emergency management and climate action, and co-founder of the Australasian Women in Emergencies Network, to learn more about the importance of connection, knowledge and trust, and how women can move forward with hope into the post-pandemic future.
You have quite an impressive CV with extensive experience working in various sectors. What are the main lessons from your various roles so far? How have your experiences shaped you personally and professionally?
It’s a constant evolution. I’m still learning many things and still working out who I am.
But it’s interesting because I started my career at university, studying law. I blindly followed my peers along the journey and had visions of being a big, important corporate lawyer with stilettos, shoulder pads and a briefcase – running the world. I had no idea who I was, what my values were, and what I cared about then. By the time I was in my mid-20s, while I was absolutely committed to the elements of social justice, I realised that the corporate legal environment was not my thing.
What I’ve been able to do throughout my career is learn more about myself and what my passions are and what I want to be doing with my time – and to continually evolve into that and the things that I care about.
I’ve been lucky enough to find myself always doing things I love and learning more about the particular job I’m in, which then leads me into the next [job]. I then explore something else related to that love or take a deeper dive.
So, in terms of what I’ve learned personally, it’s that I’m a pretty adventurous person and I like new experiences. I like to continually learn new things, build on knowledge, ask lots of questions, and I’ll put my toes over the edge and take any opportunity to really explore as much as I can. From a personal perspective, my sense of adventure has given me the drive to try new things.
Professionally, I’ll draw from an African proverb: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together’. That’s been a really good representation of my story professionally, because I was very eager to go a long way, but I was just doing it by myself. As I’ve gotten older and more experienced, I’ve realised that the way we achieve collective, shared, sustainable visions is by doing things together.
From my own lens, I can’t save the world. I need to be doing it with other people telling me what that looks like [from their perspective] and what their needs are.
So, I think that’s really what’s driven me: the motivation to go and try new things. And personally, just that curiosity to get out there and ask questions.
Community resilience is something we’ve all needed throughout the Covid pandemic, especially those on the frontline of healthcare, which includes pharmacy assistants. What is your advice for pharmacy assistants in terms of developing and maintaining resilience to get through challenging times without burning out?
Resilience is a keyword for me. But I prefer to talk about finding resilience and maintaining or building resilience, because I truly believe that, as humans, we’re resilient creatures. And sometimes this word gets bashed around a bit. Some people think resilience is passing the buck and saying, ‘You know, just step up and be brave and carry on, be more resilient.’ That’s not the lens I see it through.
The lens I see it through doesn’t mean resilience every hour, every day, all the time. Resilience is… sometimes our cup is going to be empty – we actually feel like we have no resilience left – but I do know that that [an empty cup] doesn’t stick around, and what we need to do is find the things that fill our cup again, our resilience cup, and enable us to manage the shocks and stresses and bad things that come our way. It’s to understand ourselves, first and foremost. So: looking after ourselves first.
I do a lot of work in psychological first aid training with the Red Cross, and more broadly. One of the key things we teach people is that before you can support others and assist others in psychological first aid or other support, you need to be all right yourself because you can actually do some harm. And in humanitarian work, we have this principle of ‘do no harm’. If you’re not OK, it’s pretty hard to help others.
So: self-reflection. How are you doing? What’s going on for you? And what do you do to make yourself feel better when you’re not feeling right? And going back to that connection with nature, there’s so much evidence to support the fact that connecting with nature is really good for our health and wellbeing and how we feel. Hence why we’re supporting communities in bushfire recovery through connecting them with nature’s recovery – that helps nature, that helps people, so let’s do that together.
For pharmacists and pharmacy assistants, I would say, what’s going on in your life personally? And how can you look after yourself first? And, particularly talking to women, this is a really hard thing.
People hear it a lot – probably get bored of it: the notion of looking after yourself first, putting on your air mask first before others. But it’s really important because it’s very hard to be the person you want to be in your personal and professional life if your cup’s empty.
In terms of that resilience, and professionally for pharmacy assistants, they’re there because they love working with people and helping other people – that empathetic lens. Once they’re in that right spot, it’s all about asking questions, and stopping and listening to customers, because we sometimes apply our own judgments, contexts, feelings, beliefs, how we’re feeling at the time, to other people. So, we need to suspend ourselves for a moment and focus on that person, step into their shoes, listen to what their needs are and understand what’s going on for them.
So, going back, if your cup’s empty, that’s hard. If you’re burnt out, you’re not going to have the skills and capability and capacity to be empathetic. Be really brave and honest and ask yourself: are you really ready to help others? And if not, you could be doing some harm.
The advice is: stop, listen to others, look after yourself, enable other people to help and ask for help.
Your IWD bio says you’re “passionate about realising our collective wisdom and knowledge to build our collective strength to achieve our vision”. Can you tell us more about this? How can pharmacy assistants implement this mindset within the pharmacies they work in?
We talked earlier about what I’ve learned from all my jobs, and a really big thing for me, as well, is knowledge and knowledge sharing.
When I was working at the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience, I started this tagline, which is still being used: ‘knowledge is power’.
My view of building resilience, both individually and collectively, is giving people information –people building knowledge and sharing knowledge because we don’t know everything ourselves. We know bits and our neighbours know a bit, and governments know bits, agencies know bits – everyone knows a little bit of the puzzle, but none of us knows it all. If we share a little bit that we know, when we put it all together, we can have a much better chance of knowing all the information, knowing the facts. Because, ultimately, we’re so interconnected with each other, with nature, with infrastructure, that understanding that we’re all connected – if we all bring a bit of knowledge, then we can achieve our vision.
Having a clear vision is also important. So, what are we collectively trying to achieve? The thing that you’re working on at the moment – what’s your vision? And then what are bits that people can bring to that so we can achieve that?
So: that sharing knowledge, knowing what you know, and knowing what you don’t know, understanding what you can do can to contribute, and how and who else would need to help you – that’s what that’s all about. It’s really about that working together and sharing stuff we know with each other, and then we can move forward together.
We’re much stronger together. You’ve heard that before. Stronger together than apart.
As someone who has had such a diverse and impactful career, what is your advice to pharmacy assistants when it comes to staying resilient and determined in achieving their personal/professional goals and vision?
The first thing is to know what your goals and vision are. Understand what makes you wake up with a smile, what drives you and what you’re passionate about. Understand what that is for yourself: what is your vision, what are your goals?
The second thing is to understand that these [your goals and vision] change. Just through life experiences, you often find that you go down a particular path that’s different and you deviate because something has caught your attention while you’re there. Have visions and goals but be prepared to be flexible in what they are.
When people talk about what they’re going to study, or what job they’re going to have, I always say the word ‘next’. It’s just the next study or the next job. When we make decisions now, it’s not for the rest of our lives. We have the opportunity now to make the decision about what we do next, based on what we’re feeling and what we want to do in that point in time. But we also have the opportunity then to take that somewhere else if that’s what’s driving us.
My advice is: understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, and what success looks like for you – what’s your legacy and what do you want to be remembered for in that job or in your life? And continually strive to achieve that.
It’s really being flexible and open to opportunities as they come along. Don’t get too fixed on a path because you might get stuck and just feel like you’re not where you need to be. And be courageous. Go for it. Just go for it. What’s the worst thing that can happen?
This story is part of the feature that was originally published in the March issue of Retail Pharmacy Assistants e-magazine. To read the feature in full, visit: rpassistants.com.au/retail-pharmacy-assistants-march-2022
