Communication is very important when returning to work after a brain injury.
- Living and working with a brain injury is not something you do on your own .
- The consequences of the brain injury can impact your social and your professional network .
Challenge: if you return to your previous job , your colleagues and clients usually know you from before your brain injury.
- They may therefore notice changes in, for example, your behaviour, personality or load capacity.
- Sometimes your colleagues may expect this to improve or they may expect you to return to how you were before the brain injury.
- Not all consequences of your brain injury are visible to others.
- Maybe they only see you at your best moments.
💪Opportunity: it is important to communicate how the consequences of your brain injury affect how you function and talk about the visible and invisible consequences.
- For example, share with your colleagues that you are easily distracted or tired.
- Knowing these specific consequences helps them to understand how they can support you or why you want to reduce your working hours.
🤝Together: it might help if you prepare such a communication in writing together with your doctor/rehabilitation team .
- 🧰Tools: you can use the ICF framework, a diagram that indicates the interactions between your health condition, functioning and contextual factors.
- A written document helps you to structure what you want to say.
- Consequently, you do not have to keep thinking about how to communicate this.
- Identify what is challenging and suggest a solution where possible.
- For example, do not say in general terms that you suffer from memory loss, but specifically ask your supervisor to communicate all your tasks by e-mail. Then, you can check the tasks as often as you wish (not forgetting anything) and you can cross out what has already been done (keeping the overview).