Lessons from the Shearing Shed - Teamwork, Rhythm, and Letting Go of the Prickly Stuff

In this episode of From Stress to Strength: Navigating Life on the Land, part of my Farm Life Psych podcast, I’m taking you into the shearing shed — not just for the wool, but for the wisdom.

Currently we are navigating the chaos of shearing, a time I love and find exhausting - all at the same time. (Remember, it's all about the AND). 

Shearing season is a masterclass in teamwork, routine, and finding small moments of joy in hard work. I share five lessons from the shed that can help us all — whether you run sheep or not — to look after our wellbeing:

• The power of the team (and why going far together beats going fast alone)
• Finding rest and rhythm in your days
• The lift that music and joy can bring
• Fueling your body for the work ahead
• Letting go of the “prickly bits”

It’s about finding practical ways to carry these lessons into everyday farm life, so we can keep going — together — even through the busiest, most exhausting seasons.

This From Stress to Strength series is proudly supported by Ski for Life, a grassroots organisation promoting mental health, wellbeing, and suicide prevention in rural communities across Australia.

Resources & Links:

• Learn more about Ski for Life: www.skiforlife.com.au
• Connect with me on Instagram or Facebook: @stephschmidt.farmlifepsych
• More episodes & resources: www.stephschmidt.com.au/podcast

If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who’d appreciate it, and leave a review so more people can find it.

Disclaimer:
The information in this podcast is for general information and education purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are struggling or feel you may need support, please reach out to a qualified health professional. In Australia, you can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Regional Access on 1300 032 186 (in South Australia). You do not have to go through difficult times alone — help is available.

Connect with Steph

• Steph's website
• Steph on Facebook
• Steph on LinkedIn
• Steph on Instagram
• Steph's upcoming events

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There are times when we can do it alone. But there is a little saying that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Welcome to Farm Life Psych with me, Steph Schmidt. This is episode six in a series supported by Ski for Life from Stress to Strength. If you are new to the podcast, welcome. I am Steph. I'm a farmer, a psychologist, a mum of three wonderful boys, and a fellow navigator and juggler on this journey of life. This series, sponsored by Ski for Life, is all about bringing some practical and accessible tools to you as you navigate the juggle, the challenges, the rewards of farming and rural life. I'm really grateful to the support from Ski for Life to bring this series into life. If you're not aware of them, Ski for Life is a fantastic organisation across rural South Australia where they fund and promote activities that support mental health promotion, mental health skills, conversations, suicide awareness, and really just all around good people. So get behind them and thank you, Ski for Life, for the support. So as this episode goes to air, I will most likely be busy in the shearing shed as we kick off kind of round two of our shearing. Last week's episode was all around capacity, managing our capacity, checking in on our capacity and protecting that wherever it may fall. Something that I realized is I, like all of us, only have limited capacity as well. And sometimes I get a little bit of brain drain when it comes to creating content, planning these episodes, and I realized I've got a fair bit of helpful, hopefully, content behind the scenes or sitting there in the archives as well. And so drawing today on the fact that shearing is firmly in my mind, I looked back and I had a blog article that I put out about two years ago now, which were just some lessons that I took away from Time in the Shearing Shed. Really, we tend to be shearing between July and August. It's a time of lots and lots of toasted sandwiches, a little bit of chaos, but sometimes a little bit more organized chaos than everyday life. So what I wanted to share with you today were a few of the lessons that I have taken from Time of the Shearing and some things that might help you to apply, even if you even if you don't run sheep, I think they can be practical and helpful lessons as we navigate and take care of our well-being. So the five lessons that I kind of took away or take away each time we're doing shearing is the importance of the team for one. Number two, finding rest and rhythm. Number three, music and joy, number four, fueling our body, and number five, letting go of the prickly bits. So number one, the importance of the team. So, okay, I get it, the shearers kind of consider themselves as king in the shearing shed. There's no denying that shearing doesn't happen without a team. So each year as we head into shearing, I'm often in there, I get the meals ready, but then I'm working alongside my husband, the three kids, the shearers, the rouseabouts, and I've reflected over the time on where we started. So 16, well now two years on from writing this, 18 years ago, I would come up to the farm on weekends around my uni, and my husband pretty much did his shearing himself. He also was a shearer to make money off farm. So he'd get through his own shearing with the smaller amount of sheep that he had, then I'd help out on the weekends, and then as our sheep numbers grew over the years, so did the need to grow the team we have around us. And now, interestingly, as the family's growing and the capacity, like I look back and I've now been shearing with children for 10 years, but my youngest just turned five, so there's been a big shift in that time to navigating shearing with newborns, with toddlers, the extra demands that that has on to now they all take on their own roles, like the older two go out and get in mobs and sheep on their motorbikes. My oldest lives and breathes, I think shearing is pretty much his favourite time of the year. The younger ones get in as much as they can, so there's been again another transition, but there always needs to be a team. And life, I guess, is really no different. There are times when we can do it alone. But there is a little saying that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And so I think we can see everyone in the shearing team plays a pretty vital role. So without the shed hands, there'd be no sheep ready in the catching pens. Without the shearers, the wool wouldn't be shorn. Without the classer and wool skirters, the fleeces would just get thrown together and bring down the value. And without the cook or me, no one would have the energy or the fuel to do their jobs. So it really is a hundred percent a team effort. And it's something I guess I have reflected on within my own business as well, of the times where I've taken on extra support, stepped back, tried to do it all myself. I'm now in that process of delegating and taking extra support on as well, which sometimes feels like it takes more work to get started because you can't just wing it and do the things as you can make it work. You have to plan, you have to put in the email explaining what needs to be done with the bass, or you have to kind of do the preliminary work. But once you've got that team in place, it does lighten the load. And so I think sometimes we need to think outside of the box of who or what we can add to our teams. It might be getting a cleaner or delegating the bookwork, but if that's not possible, what else can you add in there to kind of build in the team around you? Okay, so lesson number two, routines and rhythm. One of the things I really do love about shearing time is the rhythm, the routine, and the consistency. So our farming life in general has a whole lot of unpredictability. But aside from maybe the chance of rain at times, which will throw off shearing for a day or two, shearing is fairly constant and predictable. 7:30 till 9.30, 30 minute break for smoke co. 10 till 12, 1 hour break for lunch smoke, 1 till 3, and then a 30-minute break, and then 3.30 to 5, or maybe 5.30 with some gentle encouragement. We all know what's expected and when. And when also, I guess when you have a bit of insight into how a shearing shed works, you can walk in, drop in the food or smoke o and if there's 10 minutes left, you can take up a role and slot in. So it might mean that you can step in around the table and do a bit of wall classing, it might mean that you can help pen up. Everyone generally has an idea of what the roles are and what needs to be done. And again, how to bring that into your everyday life. I don't know, I'm not 100% on the answer of this one because bringing that rhythm and consistency is something I do struggle with every day. But it might be just starting to set out what are those things that need to happen in the family day-to-day, what are those things that need to happen within the farm day to day? How do we create a little bit of rhythm and consistency around that? How do we create it? I know a lot of farms and businesses have a Monday morning toolbox check-in where everyone checks in on what the week ahead is looking like. It might be a review at the end of each Friday, it might be setting in a little piece of consistency with the kids when you get home from school, bringing in that rhythm so people know what's expected when. Something that I think is also really vital in the routine and rhythm in the shearing shed is the time allocated for meals and rest. So everyone in the shearing shed pauses at morning lunch and afternoon smoking. Yes, for us running the shed and the rouse abouts, there's always a few extra jobs to make sure the shed is ready to go, the bales pressed, the catching pens are full, ready to go for the next run. But there is always a moment of pause in there. Fuel your body with some food and then just rest. Might be a bit of chatter as well. But also, what I always notice every lunchtime, the one-hour break, there's a bit of chatter, conversation as people connect around the lunch table. But then after that, the shearers especially will just lie down flat on the floor for 20 minutes or so. And that pause and rest is really crucial for their bodies to continue into the afternoon. And so I wonder what would the difference be if we brought in that work and rest routine into the rhythm of our day and our day-to-day life outside of the shearing shed. What would it look like if you did implement a bit of a rhythm and consistency? If you've got an office day, do an 8:30 to 10:30 work slot and then give yourself a 15-half an hour break away from the office. Sit outside for a bit. Or if you've got a busy day on the farm, see what happens if you slot in a lunchtime just to sit and reconnect. I know I find it hard to pause when there's so much work to be done, but sometimes that just five or ten minutes taking the time to enjoy a cuppa or even just lie down flat on the floor can give us that pause and get us ready to start again. Okay, so lesson three, bringing in some joy and music. My kids have been raised on shearing shed music, so the the songs in their Spotify playlist are probably questionable. With my five-year-old, he likes to play music when he heads into kindy, but he has to check in with me whether this is kindy appropriate or not. But it's been something the importance of music has really played out from the sheds into our everyday life. So shearing or just hard physical work without music is hard. Having that music there helps power through a day. I think it helps the shearers get through to the next sheep and the next one after that. If you've ever been in a shearing shed without any music blaring, it's kind of weird. It's a little bit just more work focused. It's it feels more pressured. So I think again, this is a lesson we can take into our everyday life. So yeah, Spotify is where I get my music. Not sponsored wherever you find your music. It's pretty good with picking up and getting to know you. So I now have a collection of morning, evening, Saturday afternoon playlists which might help me power up or wind down or find joy in just the mundane, everyday jobs. But you don't have to leave this up to Spotify either. You might create your own playlists that yeah, help you to get through those tough slogs, get through cleaning the house or get through whatever it is you need to do. Have a power-up playlist or a window. And go back to the golden oldies as well. It doesn't all I don't know, whatever you love, whatever floats your boat is perfectly fine. So lesson four, I think, losing track is fueling your body. So, yeah, my role during shearing is farm cook or shearers cook, and I probably don't embrace my inner farmer's wife at shearing time. Again, coming back to capacity as life has become busier, it really is just getting it done, simple and simple food. So I often embrace a shop bought cake. People live on toasted ham and cheese or fritz and sauce, toasted sandwiches for a couple of weeks for lunch and afternoon, morning and afternoon smoko. But lunchtime meals are often like a slow-cooked meal. So there's a mixture of nutrition through that. But those veggies, proteins, carbs charge up the batteries for the afternoon ahead. And I think when we're outside that routine of the shearing shed where we're having morning, lunch, and afternoon. And look, if you're in the office, you probably don't need to eat quite as much as you do in the shearing shed. But it can be easy to forget to have even just a decent meal at lunchtime or to pause for a mid-morning snack and not just uh the greys in the pantry for the chocolate cupboard for a chocolate biscuit. So taking that time through the day to fuel your body, whether you are working in the shearing shed or getting through the bookwork and office jobs or just looking after the kids, fueling yourself, not just the scraps from their plate as well, is a really important step that we can't forget. And finally, but definitely not least, I think one of the biggest lessons is don't hold tightly to the prickly stuff. So skirting the fleeces is often one of my jobs in the shearing shed. And when you get a fleece of wool, you don't try and skirt it, get through it with it all bundled up in a heap. You throw it out on the table and you skirt through. There'll be prickles, there'll be dags, like there's always a bit of a mix of everything. Sometimes the prickles are much worse than others. Sometimes it's they're softer, gentler fleeces to sort through. And you soon learn this art of not holding too tightly to the prickly bits. It's this kind of balance of holding firmly yet lightly to separate the fleece wool from the shanks, the pieces, the bits that you skirt out and separate. And life is filled with both the prickly stuff and the soft stuff, the fleece wool that we want to keep. We can learn to gently but firmly hold on to those things that help us and let go of what doesn't help us. When those prickly or painful thoughts and feelings do show up, just experiment and see what happens if you acknowledge them. Notice that you have to pull through them and maybe hold them lightly, but then choose to let them go. You're not there holding on to the prickles and the dags with your hands full and shoving it in your face. You skirt through them and then let them go. So rather again than grabbing hold of them and letting them define your perception of reality. Skirt through and check in. Is this helpful? Is this not helpful? So that's a takeaway of five of the lessons I've learned in the shearing shed. And there's a whole lot more than that. Ask me again in a couple of weeks and I'll probably have more ideas. But I think we can take away the importance of the team, finding that rest and rhythm, bringing in a bit of music and joy, making sure we fuel our bodies with some good food, and letting go of the prickly bits. And it might be that simplicity of teamwork or the value and satisfaction. Like, is there anything like having that shower at the end of the day when you're just bone weary and ready to head into bed? And so, as much as me does get exhausted as we get to the end of shearing time, I also hold it with a gentle fondness. We really do connect and work together as a family. It's a season on the farm that is flat out full on, but I really do enjoy it. Prickles and all. I'd love to hear your takeaway from this week's episode. If there's any parts that you've found helpful or insightful, make sure you share it. Send it on to a friend, share it on social media. You can tag me or follow me at stephschmidt.farmlife psych. Or send me an email with any reflections, steph at stephschmidt.com.au. Big thank you again to Ski for Life for their generous support. You can stay up to date with the podcast and coming episodes at the website stephschmidt.com.au slash podcast. Until next time, take care of you and don't forget to fill your silo.