The people who stay calm in a crisis feel stress too

By Gareth Wren

After working in children’s homes for a few (!) years and now training with PRICE Training for a few more, International Stress Awareness Week got me thinking.

I wanted to risk sharing some thoughts on the reality of working in education, care, and social care, through my new lens as someone who no longer works directly in these settings but trains the staff who do.

The people I meet on our courses work in environments where pressure isn’t an occasional visitor. It’s practically a member of the staff team.

They spend their days keeping vulnerable children, young people, or adults safe. Somewhere between direct support, endless admin, and trying to remember when they last had a lunch break… their own needs quietly slide off the to-do list.

Stress in these roles doesn’t always arrive with a “big” incident. It creeps in. It accumulates through missed breaks, tough shifts, a lack of effective debriefs, and the daily grind.

Before long, stress becomes the background soundtrack of the job – constant, familiar, and rarely acknowledged because “that’s just how it is”. But familiarity doesn’t insulate us from its effects.

The people who attend PRICE courses are some of the most courageous professionals you’ll ever meet. They remain calm in situations that would send most people sprinting for the exit. And yet… here’s the irony I see all the time, especially on our Train the Trainer programmes:

• The practitioner who I know can calmly support someone in deep distress at the end of a 14-hour shift, suddenly becomes sweaty-palmed at the idea of standing in front of their team with a PowerPoint clicker.
• The person who can walk into a room where emotions are running high without flinching, looks terrified of delivering a 20-minute training session to their workmates.
• The person who can manage physical risk with absolute composure, clutches their training notes like they’re about to perform Shakespeare at the Globe.

It’s funny, but only because it’s so common and very, very human.

I’m not equating delivering training with the direct work participants spend their days engaged in, on the contrary I often tell people that my own job now is relatively “stress‑free” for me. I have a managed workload – I can only deliver one PRICE course at a time. I’m compelled to give participants a lunch break so always get a break in the middle of my day!  I get to focus fully on the people in front of me.

I’m very aware of how lucky that makes me, especially compared to the environments many of our participants work in every day, but I think my point is to highlight how different situations and experiences can impact on people in different ways and how easy it is to miss this difference in our colleagues and ourselves.

We all know that colleague (or it maybe you!?), the one who is always first to step into a crisis, always calm under pressure, always ready to support others. The person everyone relies on but, delivering training is a different kind of exposure. It’s not about supporting people in crisis; it’s about being seen. It’s about sharing knowledge, holding space, and feeling responsible for the learning of others and, consequently, the quality of life of people being supported in services. For some people, that’s far more anxiety‑provoking than any incident they deal with on a normal day.

So, if your usually unshakeable colleague looks a bit tense before a meeting, check in on them. If they’re delivering training, sit near the front. Smile. Nod. Laugh at their questionable jokes. Let them know you see their effort.

And if you are that typically unshakeable colleague facing an unfamiliar weight in the pit of your stomach: take note of it. Let someone know. Share the load.

Stress doesn’t always stem from crisis. Sometimes it comes from a quiet fear of not being good enough, or the pressure we put on ourselves to perform perfectly every single minute. That’s not realistic and we need to accept that.

For me, International Stress Awareness Week shouldn’t just be about noticing stress. It’s about noticing each other.