Skills Get You Hired. Attitude Gets You Asked For.

Anyone can execute a checklist. You train a person, you drill the steps, and pretty soon they're running through tasks like a machine. Support work is no different. There's a script. There's a competency framework. There's a box for every tick.

But here's the thing nobody tells you at TAFE, sitting in a classroom full of people nodding along to slides about manual handling and person-centred care: none of that is the job. Not really. My classmates probably know this already... some of them have done this before. I'm still finding out, one shift at a time.

I got my first real taste of it with the old lady I met through Mable... the kind of woman who could size you up in about four seconds flat and decide whether you were worth her time. Read about that one here. My four-days-a-week run with Steve and his family has only hammered the point home harder.

My agency's support coordinator said it first. Steve's mum said it again, in her own words, not long after:

Skills you can teach. Attitude, you can't.

She's cycled through more support workers than she probably cares to count. And still... she asked for me. By name. Over whoever else the agency had queued up.

Today she told me: "You are very poachable, Naveen. Unfortunately, I cannot."

Not because my work is flawless... though, let's be honest, it's not far off. 😉

It's because we get along. There's banter. There are jokes. The work gets done, and it gets done well, but somewhere in between the linen changes and the wheelchair transfers, a relationship is getting built.

And this doesn't happen on competency alone. They get built on conversation. On the small, unglamorous act of actually being interested in someone. The client. their family.

Here's what I've learned...

Clients can smell fake a mile off. Every time. You're better off being cold and mechanical than showing up with some plastered-on customer-service smile that doesn't mean sh*t. Fakery has a scent, and it lingers in a room like a bad fart long after you've left it.

Show up like you give a damn. That's it. That's the whole trick. Nothing - no training module, no certificate, no perfect technique - replaces that.