Let’s be honest: HR professionals, mediators, coaches, mentors and other “people” professionals are the ones quietly holding the line while everyone else comes undone. We’re the organisational first responders, managing distress, conflict, redundancies and trauma while keeping a straight face and a calm tone. We’re expected to hold everyone else together, including those we work most closely with, yet rarely does anyone stop to ask who’s holding us.

The same empathy and emotional intelligence that make us good at what we do also make us vulnerable. Absorbing other people’s chaos day after day takes a toll leading to compassion fatigue, burnout, and a slow erosion of energy that doesn’t appear on a spreadsheet but quietly eats away at our effectiveness. The strain isn’t dramatic; it’s cumulative. It builds through the endless cycle of conversations, crises and compromises that drain your reserves one quiet interaction at a time.

Compassion fatigue isn’t just tiredness or stress. It’s what happens when you’ve cared deeply for too long without enough recovery. The empathy that once came easily starts to thin out. You don’t stop caring; you just run out of space to feel it. Add in vicarious trauma; the quiet imprint left by other people’s distress, and the emotional residue begins to settle in. Slowly, you move from connection to detachment, empathy to cynicism, feeling everything to feeling nothing.

Depending on your role, the emotional toll looks different. HR carries the organisation’s pain while being expected to stay compassionate yet compliant. Mediators hold hostility and grief that doesn’t belong to them but lingers long after the session ends. Coaches and mentors live with a quieter fatigue, watching potential stall or self-sabotage repeat. DE&I professionals carry a double load: fighting for fairness while often living the very inequities they’re trying to change, in a world that still treats equity as optional rather than essential.

Even surrounded by people, many work in isolation with no option to debrief due to confidentiality. “Resilience” is worn like a badge of honour, as if coping quietly is something to be proud of, but it’s not true resilience; it’s survival. This is the hidden reality of the people professions: constant empathy without reciprocity, emotional exposure without supervision, and responsibility without relief. It’s little wonder compassion fatigue creeps in. So how do we protect those who protect everyone else?

The SPARK™ model is a framework I developed through practice and research into the emotional impact of people-centred work. It’s designed to bring structure and sustainability to roles that deal in emotion every day, recognising that those who hold space for others also need systems that hold them. (© Marie Coombes / We Restore Calm, 2024. All rights reserved.)

S - Self Awareness
P - Physical Wellbeing
A - Assessing & Managing the Process
R - Resourcing Professional Development
K - Keeping Boundries

SPARK™ reframes self-care from indulgence to infrastructure, encouraging practitioners to notice when empathy starts to fade (Self-Awareness), to use the body as a barometer for stress (Physical Wellbeing), to build decompression time and reflective space into their work (Assessing & Managing the Process), to seek supervision and learning as standard practice (Resourcing Professional Development), and to protect the capacity to care through clear limits (Keeping Boundaries).

The truth is, we can’t keep asking people professionals to hold the emotional infrastructure of organisations together while pretending they’re made of steel. Empathy has limits, and even the calmest heads have breaking points. The answer isn’t more resilience training, it’s redesigning the systems that rely on it. When we see wellbeing as professional integrity not a perk, compassion becomes renewable rather than depleting. That’s what SPARK™ does: it turns care into structure and gives the “people people” the same support they’ve always given everyone else.