There is no doubt that the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was a catastrophe for hundreds of thousands of people. But for Linda Fancy, it gave her the impetus to bring together the strands of her experience as a counsellor, crisis management consultant and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) practitioner to create a programme to help relief workers cope with the emotional maelstrom of helping others in that time of crisis.
Today, Fancy, who has lived in Hong Kong since 1998, runs a more refined version of this early programme, a one-day workshop called Personal Power, to help city dwellers deal with their own personal turmoil.
'I was in Sri Lanka just after the tsunami and, like so many others, I wondered what I could do to help,' says Fancy. Although she had experience helping others in Hong Kong, she felt ill equipped to deal with a disaster of this kind. However, an unexpected interaction with a distressed man who had survived the tsunami by climbing a tree gave her the confidence to step forward.
'I was hired by the UN and the Sri Lanka Ministry of Health to support medical graduates doing psychosocial field work. I saw there was a problem with burnout, as these freshly graduated doctors and nurses had not been taught any self-management techniques, and all too easily identified with and became 'damaged' by the emotions of the very people they were trying to help.'
And so the MeManagement self-awareness programme was born, scribbled out on a flip chart and offered as a self-help programme to the graduates along with relief workers at other NGOs.
Fancy herself had a traumatic childhood with the loss of four close family members. This, she says, gave rise to deep-seated feelings of abandonment, and through her early life would make her overly sensitive to rejection, real or imagined.