Ep21: Burnout: The pandemic you didn’t see coming (Part 2)

Is burnout the next global pandemic? 

👉 Catching up? Part 1 is here

In Part 1 of this 2-part series, we learned that we could be on track to lose more than half of our workforce due to absenteeism and turnover as a result of burnout. For businesses to survive, and thrive, well-being and burnout prevention need to be at the top of the agenda.

In Part 2, we welcome back our panel of expert guests, including

• Cait Donovan, Burnout Coach & Host of Fried: The Burnout Podcast
• William Hasek, PhD, Board Certified Clinical Psychologist 
• Sally Clarke –  Burnout and Well-being Researcher, Expert and Best-Selling Author

Taking a practical view of burnout in a workplace setting, we discuss:

• How to know if your team is burnt out and what signs to look out for
• Why burnout happens
• The commercial impact of burnout
• How to prevent burnout
• 5 Recommendations to improve well-being and prevent burnout
• Resources to help you and your business thrive

Listen in your browser using the player below, or find the episode in your favourite app.

Resources

All the links mentioned in the show.

Read The State of Burnout 2023 Report:

• https://infinite-potential.com.au/the-state-of-burnout-2023

Cait Donovan

• Website: https://caitdonovan.com/speaking
• Request a conversation: https://caitdonovan.as.me/inquiry
• Listen to Fried: The Burnout Podcast: https://friedtheburnoutpodcast.com
• Join the Fried Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/friedtheburnoutpodcast
• Watch Cait’s Speaker Reel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPTLgV7FU-I
• Follow Cait on Instagram:  @friedtheburnoutpodcast

William Hasek 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamhasek/

Sally Clarke

• Website: https://www.salcla.com/
• Twitter: @salcla
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallyclarkeevolve/
• Instagram: @salcla.

For more on psychological safety, check out ‘The Secret to Building Great Teams with Stephan Wiedner: https://chrt.fm/track/28555/traffic.megaphone.fm/HS6779121311.mp3?updated=1670331446

For more on the RX7, go to Oblonghq.com and book your free consultation: https://oblonghq.com/book/

Connect with your hosts

• Connect with Al on LinkedIn 
• Connect with Leanne on LinkedIn
• Join the discussion about this episode on LinkedIn
• Email: podcast@TruthLiesandWork.com
• Follow us on Instagram @truthlieswork
• Chat with us on Twitter @truthlieswork
• YouTube channel for the podcast @TruthLiesWork
• Check us out on TikTok (LOL!!!) @truthlieswork

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The Transcript

⚠️ NOTE: This is an automated transcript, so it might not always be 100% accurate!

[00:00:00.090] – Al
I had two car accidents in nine months. I think.

[00:00:03.010] – Leanne
I don’t know this. Tell me this. Hello and welcome back to The Truth, Lies and Workplace Culture podcast, where we help you simplify the science of people. My name is Leanne, I’m a business psychologist.

[00:00:18.590] – Al
And my name is Alan, my business owner.

[00:00:20.710] – Leanne
And welcome back.

[00:00:21.910] – Al
Hello.

[00:00:22.790] – Leanne
Hi. Oh, after you.

[00:00:27.240] – Al
No, please.

[00:00:28.140] – Leanne
No, please.

[00:00:29.230] – Al
I was just going to say that if you’ve listened to part one, then you’ll know it’s all about Burnout. And we had a chunky episode. It was almost an hour, I think, and we still had a good amount of material left. Couldn’t leave it out. So I think it was Casey said, good interviews are when you can’t leave things on the cutting room floor. So that’s what we’re doing this time. So we’re going to go back through the rest of the material that we got through these amazing interviews. Anyway, sorry, Leanne, I felt like I did interrupt you a little bit there.

[00:00:56.530] – Leanne
Not at all. I think you said what I was thinking. So, yeah, we are going to pick up on the topic of Burnout today. And I think actually it’s split, I’ll be honest, accidentally, I wish that we’d had this foresight, maybe we did unconsciously, but I think the first episode kind of fit quite nicely into kind of an individual perspective. How do I know if I’m burnt out? What is burnout? How do I recognise it? And this episode, we’re starting to look a bit more widely at an organisational level, so how you can recognise in your teams what it means for your business and what we can do as business leaders and owners to prevent it, to help us do that. And again, if you and I love this, I love it when people start listening to the podcast at part two, I think Rebel and it always pleases me when I just see kind of part two take over part one, I’m like, you guys are crazy. But, yes, if you didn’t listen to part one, that’s okay, you can go back. But I’d like to reintroduce our amazing expert guests that make up our panel on Burnout.

[00:01:52.040] – Leanne
First of all, we have Kate Donovan, who is a Burnout coach, keynote speaker and host of Friday the Burnout podcast. We also have Sally Clark, who is a Burnout and well being expert and researcher, and one of the researchers between the State of Burnout 2023. And finally we have Will Hasek, a board certified clinical psychologist.

[00:02:12.210] – Al
Yeah, three fantastic guests with very different well, not very different, but quite different ways that they approach the Burnout with different stories. In fact, I think all three of them have experienced burnout, just that they’ve kind of come from different angles of it. So we’re going to kick off with Will just reminding us of the three early signs of Burnout. And then you’ll hear back from me.

[00:02:33.110] – Will
Somebody can become very cynical without yet feeling the kind of emotional and physical exhaustion. Or somebody might start to have a kind of diminished sense of personal accomplishment before the cynicism sets in. Personally, I think that’s something that workplaces have to be very careful about because those can be early warning signs of burnout. Right? If you start seeing just kind of pessimism setting in among employees, they might not be burnt out yet, but they’re probably on the path to burn out.

[00:03:05.550] – Al
It’s funny because now I hear this, I think back, I haven’t had many jobs because I sold my first business at like 25 or something, but when I was working in offices or teams or whatever, there was always someone like Angela in account, so it just seemed really grumpy. And now I look back and use this lens that Will have given us I’m like, she was probably just burnt out, or she could have just been a miserable bugger. Anyway.

[00:03:28.850] – Leanne
A little bit from column B. Yeah. I think just to kind of recap there the three components of burnout emotional and physical exhaustion, cynicism and pessimism, and a diminished sense of personal accomplishment or lacking meaning in our work. Usually burnout is taught from the perspective of exhaustion. And the point Will is making there is that is not always the case or not always the first sign. So if you’re trying to figure out if your team may be experiencing burnout, then those changes in behaviour are going to be a sign of burnout risk. So, as Will said, a bit more pessimism, a bit more cynical, and just lacking that energy and enthusiasm in your work.

[00:04:10.430] – Will
I think one other kind of big warning sign that shows this isn’t just sort of a transient stress state, but that a person is getting burnt out, especially if you’re dealing with a high achiever kind of star employee. If they start to get very passive, that can be concerning. And it might look like a positive thing, like they’re learning to be a little more laid back and accept things, but actually that’s because they’re detaching. It’s not a good thing. They no longer are emotionally invested in their work anymore. Are you familiar with the movie Office Space? It’s a great movie, but the main character, Peter, he’s definitely burnt out at his job. And anyway, in the middle of the movie he kind of starts to go into work and he’s really laid back and people think, oh, this is great. He’s changed. He’s learning to deal with the stress more and actually he’s given up. Right. That’s what’s happened. And that’s a very bad sign, even though on the surface it might look like something good.

[00:05:13.510] – Leanne
So as Will mentioned, there changes and shifts in behaviour. If you’ve got someone who was just straight talk, it was just a pain in your ass who was always coming to you with ideas and problems and solutions and different ways of working. The intent is pure and wonderful, but is a pain in your ass. And then you have a quiet week from them and you think, oh, this is nice. It’s not nice, it’s not nice. That is a sign of something that may be wrong. So even the most subtle shifts or obvious shifts in behaviour can be a sign of burnout risk. Let’s hear a bit more from Kate.

[00:05:50.710] – Cait
The first thing that you’ll want to see is a change in attitude. So if you have a person who is typically upbeat and was fairly upbeat and fairly positive for three years and the past three months they’ve been on edge, something’s not right. If you had someone that was always willing to take the extra shift and always wrote back emails at 10:00 p.m. And now all of a sudden you can’t catch them after 03:00 p.m. And their productivity has dropped drastically, something’s not right. So you should be looking at productivity levels, not because you need to change them necessarily, but because they are an indication of how people are functioning. You should be looking at emotional levels of how people are showing up in the workplace. You should look for especially interrelational conflict. So if somebody was really pretty cool with everyone for a long time, and now all of a sudden, you’re sort of hearing whispers from everyone that so and so is a pain in the ass and can’t get any work done with steve, and susan is never showing up on time, and, oh, I’ve got to do this thing for sally again.

[00:06:51.140] – Cait
Because when you see that happening a lot around, one person be worried.

[00:06:55.550] – Al
So you might be listening to this and thinking of someone in your life, or maybe a friend or a family member that you think is experiencing burnout. What do you do? Well, Sally’s got some advice on this.

[00:07:05.690] – Leanne
It’s really difficult.

[00:07:06.600] – Sally
It’s one of the questions I get most often when I speak about burnout is I think I know someone who’s in Burnout, what can I do to help? And unfortunately, because when we’re in that heightened state of alert, when our sympathetic nervous system is engaged, which happens when we’re in Burnout, our vision literally becomes more focused and narrowed. We are less capable of being objective and seeing what’s actually going on. So we can often respond quite poorly when people might suggest that we’re not doing so well. I certainly was that snarky mean person often when people would try to ask with genuine kindness whether I should maybe be working that much. But I think anything that we can do to become more clear on our own values, on what matters to us as individuals. Also, the way I frame it in my first book is Self Compassion. Self knowledge and self awareness. Self compassion, really believing that you are intrinsically worthy and not that’s not connected with your productivity. Your value is just you as yourself as you are now. Secondly, self knowledge. So knowing your values, understanding what your needs are, what your priorities are as an individual, and self awareness is creating practises and daily habits so that you can really tune into the signals from your body, your emotions and your environment to really be checking in on am I living in accordance with my values?

[00:08:23.500] – Sally
How am I feeling now? And rather than pushing the emotions away or the uncomfortable truth that we’re not feeling so well away, having the courage and the energy, I guess also to be able to course correct and continue to make healthy decisions for ourselves. I don’t know, Leanne, whether I would have listened to that twelve years ago, but I certainly hope if someone’s listening right now and feeling like perhaps this resonates with them, I really encourage you to act on it now.

[00:08:49.770] – Al
So this is something which I’ve experienced with Leanne, my co host and wife, about three or four years ago. You’re working on a contract that wasn’t exactly what you want to be working on, if I remember, and came to New Year and we sat down, we’re having this nice little mail and stuff, and I said to us, let’s talk about our goals for the next twelve months. And I think you basically basically said to me in the nicest possible way, go away, Al. I think there were a few more expletives than that and it was just such a character because the end is normally quite optimistic, not nearly as stupidly optimistic as I am, but she’s certainly very realistic and optimistic at this point. I think I acted like a petulant Giles at the time because I was like, oh, well, if you don’t want to talk about it, don’t worry about it. That was the sign, I think, that I didn’t know back then. Possibly you hadn’t actually appreciated it, but you were burnt out.

[00:09:38.600] – Leanne
I hadn’t seen it fully until that point. That was my breakthrough moment, really, was, because I remember the exhaustion was kind of there, but I still felt able to keep going and keep working. I was definitely very pessimistic, very cynical, and I think that’s what came out in that moment, which is cynicism. I remember saying to you something really horrible like, who do you think you are to ask me questions like this when I’m just trying to get through from one day to the next and on it? And we’ve had this conversation before, haven’t we? And quite surely after that conversation as well, thank goodness, otherwise she might have left me. But it was an out of body experience of kind of going outside myself and thinking, who are you? I don’t like you right now. And that for me was like, enough is enough. I’m not sacrificing who I am and who I love for a job. It’s just not worth it.

[00:10:28.600] – Will
Yeah.

[00:10:28.940] – Al
And I think because Leanne is very self aware, which she was able to see that, but sometimes it would need like if that continued for a few weeks it would need some kind of intervention, I’d need to sit it down and go look, I think something’s not right. So I think that burnout happens when we experience long periods of stress because I mean, let’s be honest, stress is a normal part of our lives and we do have coping mechanisms to better manage stress. A job that is rewarding will always have challenges, so you always can have stress. But the problem is that over time when you are coping with continual and relentless stress, then these coping mechanisms are going to be less effective and often are going to mask the reality of the psychological and physiological symptoms of burnout that we’re experiencing. Let’s hear a bit more from Kate about this.

[00:11:11.510] – Cait
So if you are feeling overly stressed that’s the sign. Burnout is a result of chronic stress that’s gone unmanaged for extended periods of time. So if you’re feeling stressed on a regular basis you are at risk. For you it would be these things. But I think prevention is so difficult and recognising it is so difficult because we are al so accustomed to our problems and the way our own bodies react that we don’t always pay enough heed. I first for instance, am a migraine sufferer, so if I have a headache for a week, I don’t really think that much of it because that’s normal for me, but that should be a sign. And it’s really easy as stress builds up in your life and as time passes, for you to create coping mechanisms to deal with things so that you don’t even realise that they’re happening anymore. You’re tired, so you have an extra coffee. Your head hurts, so you’ve gotten a new keyboard tray that goes underneath your desk. And now you’re working at a standing desk. And now there’s so many ways to shift what you’re doing to change your symptoms that it’s really, really easy to have all these things pile up over time and have you really not notice.

[00:12:23.080] – Leanne
I think he paints a really clear picture there in terms of his individuals, how he can develop different coping mechanisms and in extreme circumstances on the road to burnout, use these to mask what’s actually going on. The trouble with burnout is that it’s often discussed as an individual level. Like we mentioned in part one. Is it the snowflake generation? Cana they not just hack it? Maybe they don’t have a stamina, maybe some people just can’t keep up with the pace. Overwhelmingly research is showing us that the dynamics of the work environment that we operate in so not us as an individual, our environment, that environment is the most likely cause of burnout. So let’s hear from Will to sum up the research findings.

[00:13:08.070] – Will
There’s a lot of research on what are the larger organisational factors that predispose people toward burnout and I’ve got a whole long list in front of me here that I could go through, but I won’t bore you. They basically fall into three big categories. One is when people lack any kind of meaningful control over their job. That makes them much more prone to burnout. When people lack resources to do their job, that also increases risk of burnout. That can include a department being underfunded, not having the proper tools. I mean, it can also be time, just being asked to do things and not having enough time to get them all done. And the last is, I guess I’d say, a kind of broad category I’d call like, chaos and ambiguity at work. That can include working in just a physical space that’s very chaotic, like noisy and not a lot of natural sunlight and just an unpleasant kind of place to be, but also kind of lacking clarity around your role can be a big burnout factor. I’ll tell you a funny thing. This is an issue that comes up in therapy so frequently and it’s not something I think a lot of people would expect.

[00:14:27.820] – Will
I have so many people come to me stressed, depressed, we’re kind of getting into why is that a big factor? I go to work, I don’t actually know what my job is. I’m not sure. I’ve talked to my boss, no one’s telling me what I’m supposed to do and that’s really overwhelming for people.

[00:14:44.990] – Leanne
The will highlighted there that it’s often the organisation or the environment that we’re operating in that will have the biggest influence on whether we are experiencing burnout. One of the largest studies on burnout is from Gallup and they found basically five main sources of burnout within the workplace. The first was unfair treatment at work. The second was an unmanageable workload. The third, unclear communication from managers. Fourth, lack of manager support and finally, unreasonable time pressures. Those five causes have one thing in common management is so, so crucial to supporting employee wellbeing. And we said this in our predictions for 2023, and it’s more of a hope is that this is a year the penny will drop, that there’s one thing you get right in your business to enable growth, to enable employee wellbeing, to enable both your people and business to thrive. It is investing in great managers environments where people are ignored, disrespected, not supported. Environments like that make people miserable. And what we know is a manager’s effect on a workplace is so significant that it can predict up to 70% of the variance in team engagement, which is very closely linked to employee wellbeing as well.

[00:16:04.870] – Leanne
It doesn’t matter if you have the best interventions, the best well being programmes, the best development programmes, you could get everything else right in your business. From a people and culture perspective, if you don’t have the right managers, it won’t work.

[00:16:19.260] – Al
I think there’s also something to be said for this case of not being able to own up, which, again, I think is probably down to the culture of the business. So, for example, if you are worried about putting your hand up and saying, I’m really stressed, then you’re naturally going to not put your hand up and hide it. If burnout is a sign of weakness, and particularly amongst men, I think, and I don’t think I’m being sexist, I’m talking about, we do tend to be a bit more like kind of thing. We can deal with it. But if burnout is a sign of weakness, then the last thing we’re going to do is to disclose it, particularly in some high pressure environments. If it’s very male led or it’s very ego led or very high pressure, I’m thinking of Wall Street and Wolf of Wall Street sort of thing, you know, that’s going to be you can’t put your hand up and go, I’m stressed, because you’re just going to be laughed at by your peers and by your managers. So clearly, I mean, that is the workplace of old. That film was based like 20 years ago, I think.

[00:17:15.770] – Al
So clearly the solution is more honesty, more acknowledgment, and also for, as Leanne said, from the top down, a manager being able to say to, it’s okay to tell me you’re stressed, it’s okay to tell me you’re burnt out. And I think that’s probably the way that things should be going forward. Let’s hear from Kate.

[00:17:30.150] – Cait
And the more people within your company that know what the risk factors are and what people can do, the easier those conversations will be and the more creative problem solving will happen around when something pops up. So I think, really, when I first started speaking on burnout, it was in 2019 and a lot of people said to me at the time, oh, can we talk about resilience? Can we not use the word burnout because it’s negative and we don’t want to like, make people burnt out if they’re and I was like, that’s not really how it works. Like, nobody’s going to suddenly be burnt out just because we said the word. But people are afraid of that, were afraid of that. Then the pandemic happened. People are no longer afraid of it. They’re like, our employees are talking about burnout, we need to talk about burnout. My best selling keynote is titled Resentment Is Your Superpower and people are buying it. So people are not afraid to have the conversations anymore. And I think this is key to unlocking the whole culture around burnout and what we need to do as a society to shift out of this.

[00:18:32.200] – Leanne
It’s funny, I’ve seen a lot of backlash recently about resilience training because I think it has been this kind of plaster that organisations have used to mask burnout and not actually address the problem. So I think Kate is bang on. We need to using the word burnout is not going to create burnout. We need to have honest conversations about it with ourselves. As leaders and with our people. So just to recap on that very briefly, how do you know if your team is burnt out? Look out for any early signs of exhaustion, cynicism or just that lack of positivity, lack of energy, lack of contributions within the workplace. These changes in behaviour could be an early sign of burnout. Why does burnout happen? Whilst it’s easy to put that on the individual, overwhelmingly the research shows us that burnout as a result of toxic work environments and finally the way to start to address that really invest in managers in terms of supporting people, nurturing wellbeing, and as Kate said, let’s start those open, honest and transparent conversations about burnout.

[00:19:37.380] – Al
This is brilliant. Now, as someone who runs businesses and has always run businesses, then I’m really keen to see what the business case is for burnout. Because I started my first business in 2002. I know that I was burnt out. I got it. I think I almost died. I went bankrupt. Well, no, I didn’t, but well, actually no, I had two car accidents in in nine months, I think.

[00:20:02.350] – Leanne
I don’t know this, tell me. I don’t know this, tell me this.

[00:20:05.230] – Al
Well, this isn’t like, you know, they were like going into the back of someone. It wasn’t like huge, like, you know, sort of nine nine, nine thing, but it was just two car accidents in about nine months. And this was when I was running my beer business. And so I was working basically I lived in the warehouse. I would work from, I’d basically start work about, sort of 03:00 in the afternoon and then I’d work through till about seven in the morning. Then I’d go to the cash and carry for 2 hours, go and get all my beer for the next day, come back, take it out the van, put in the refrigerator, stop at about eleven and then usually have a bit of a sleep and then get up at three and do the accounts and stuff. And I was doing this sort of seven days a week and and I remember distinctly these two cars. I was just thinking about other stuff and I went in the back of someone twice in nine months that’s clearly like I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing and I ended up going bankrupt because of that business.

[00:20:58.160] – Al
And it was almost like a relief that it was like, thank God I don’t have to do this anymore. I don’t want to do it. So I think there is a business case for burnout from leaderships. There’s also a business case from burnout, from your employees, from your teams. We’re going to talk to Will and he’s going to tell us the big problem and why it is bad. Burnout is bad for business.

[00:21:20.160] – Will
Yeah. So first of all, I’d say burnout is a huge problem. The United States, I mean, I can’t speak to what the stats are in the UK or in other countries. But I know Gallup did a poll, this was in 2018, like pre pandemic. I’ve got some notes here I’m referencing, but, you know, about 44% of employees said they were feeling burnt out, which, I mean, that’s almost half the workforce. And around like 23%, we’re saying they were just like chronically just burnt out all the time. So it’s a big issue and obviously, I’m sure you’re aware it’s bad for business, it leads to turnover presenteeism. It certainly hurts the reputation of businesses. I think we’re seeing that right now a lot in health care in the United States. There’s a lot of turnover, particularly among nurses, but also places are having trouble hiring doctors. Hospitals and larger healthcare systems have really burnt out some of those employees so much that at this point, many of them have a bad reputation and are having a hard time attracting new talent.

[00:22:33.910] – Leanne
So Will covered some of the statistics there from the US and I have dived into the recent stats for anyone who is in the UK. And typically we see quite a lot of synergy between the UK and Europe as well. So what we know, and these statistics are taken from the back end of 2022, we know that one in five British workers feel stressed more days and months than they don’t. So high levels of stress within the British workplace. We also know that almost half of UK employees are close to burnout. According to a research conducted by Westfield Health, 46% of UK workers are close to burnout. And if we’re looking for that commercial case as well, it’s estimated that 13.7 million workdays are lost every year in the UK alone due to work related stress, anxiety and depression, costing an unbelievable 28.3 billion in lost productivity.

[00:23:32.860] – Al
That’s a lot of money. So I think we’re building the business case to manage stress and to look out for burnout.

[00:23:38.610] – Leanne
We are. And Kate was also very clear on the commercial case for preventing burnout here’s.

[00:23:43.040] – Cait
Kate latest Gallup poll showed that disengaged workers are costing the global workplaces $7.8 trillion a year. If that’s not reason enough, I don’t know what is. The first thing you do when you are overly stressed and burnt out is disengage. You quiet, quit, you pull yourself out of everything that you possibly can and you do the bare minimum because that is quite literally all you can handle. On top of that, I think we have another 3.7 billion being spent on mental health issues in the workplace. Burnout is related. So I just think that the basic cost of not dealing with burnout is so high and it’s been calculated a million times over in a million different ways. So to me, there’s nothing left to talk about. It’s a financial issue as well as a health risk and everything else. But the people that are doing it well are people that just remember that the people that work for them are human. At the bottom of all of this, putting aside business rules for a moment and saying, hey, what’s going on with you? You okay?

[00:24:48.570] – Leanne
So, at a macro level, we can see very clearly a commercial case for helping our employees with their well being, creating environments in which people can thrive. But let’s make that a bit more tangible for business leaders out there. What does it actually mean for you and your business? These statistics come from our guest Sally and her research, the State of Workplace Burnout 2023. What they found is that people who are not burnt out, so people who are experiencing positive well being are 49% more engaged. That means lower turnover and less quiet quitting. They feel 50% more psychological safety. That means increased innovation and creativity, better problem solving. 30% have a higher sense of belonging. That means not only they’re committed to your organisation, but they’re going to advocate for your organisation. They’re going to work proactively to get other great people into your business. 50% of people experiencing burnout also said that they’re much less productive. So if you’re seeing signs of productivity going down, efficiency going down, chances are your people are burning out. Asking them to work longer and harder is not going to make a difference. And finally, people who are experiencing burnt out reported 47% lower quality of work.

[00:26:04.290] – Leanne
So even if they are working harder, even if they are putting the hours in, the quality of work isn’t going to be there. And that means unhappy customers, less revenue, less productivity.

[00:26:13.120] – Al
So clearly this is a business case for managing stress. Yes, there are going to be people who are going to be trying it on and trying to get sick leave, but you know who they are. The real people who are genuine and just are overwhelmed are burnt out as stressed. We need to look after these people because it’s costing us business owners, it’s costing us money and a lot of it.

[00:26:33.440] – Leanne
So let’s go through some practical things you can do as a business leader, as a business owner, to nurture wellbeing and prevent burnout within your team.

[00:26:41.940] – Al
So, firstly, you should reflect on your behaviour as a leader. So just be honest about your own experiences in your earlier career. Deal with any kind of lingering psychological consequences. Just because you went through it doesn’t mean others have to. But on the contrary, don’t hide it, just be honest about it. So you probably started your business to change your life, the status quo, so you have the power to change your teams and change your workplace environment. Let’s hear from Will.

[00:27:12.940] – Will
I think sometimes when people have struggled to get to a certain place in their career and maybe have had to put up with an abusive boss and put in the long hours, there’s this why I did it. Why can’t you maybe even a sort of defensiveness on their part of maybe they. Don’t want to acknowledge how damaging that was for them and have to rationalise it as like, oh, it was good for me, it helped me become the person I am now. I actually think this is a big problem right now in the US among law firms, because lawyers, very demanding, intense job. I think a lot of the people at the kind of partner level have had to climb a very vicious, difficult, competitive ladder to get to that point in the career. And then they see these younger lawyers coming in and they’re just sort of like, well, yeah, I went through all that, why can’t you write? At some level? I wonder too. I think that can happen with leaders who have a kind of perhaps domineering streak to their personality and authoritarian approach to management that they maybe don’t recognise yet within themselves.

[00:28:42.890] – Will
I think if you find yourself kind of shaming and blaming employees, it’s probably a moment to kind of step back and ask what’s going on there? Because that’s never worked as a management strategy. I mean, if you’re going to try to shame people into following you, good luck, but that’s not going to work, right? So I definitely encourage anyone who’s having that kind of response to talk to a coach or therapist and really kind of look at what’s coming up within themselves that’s making them feel that disgust toward the people that, frankly, are keeping their company going.

[00:29:28.380] – Leanne
Building your own self awareness as a leader is one of the most powerful things that you can do to better manage yourself, your behaviours and support your team in the most positive way. Think about engaging a coach, think about going through some of the psychometrics to really understand and reflect on your own behaviour equally. Understand your own relationship with burnout may also prove really important to reducing your own risk, especially if you’ve been burnt out in the past. Let’s hear from Kate.

[00:29:54.600] – Cait
I think so, yes. I think that once you’ve burnt out, it’s kind of like being an addict or an alcoholic. You always have to be on the lookout for it. The fact of the matter is, my stress management system doesn’t necessarily work as well as other people, so if I don’t meditate and exercise and eat well, I’m going to be at risk. My basic self care has to be a little bit higher probably than your average persons because of my previous burnout.

[00:30:23.550] – Al
So this is point number one, is to reflect on your behaviour as a leader and these are like the ways we can prevent burnout. Number two is to invest in your own wellbeing. So you need to think carefully about your own psychological state or your own feelings of burnout. Like Leanne always says, you need to put your mask on before you can help others. Now, Kate has worked with leaders as a burnout coach and an expert, and she has one key emotion to look out for, that may mean you’re at risk of burnout.

[00:30:50.690] – Cait
One of the things that I do ask people to look out for is high levels of resentment. This, to me, is the key to everything. If you are getting an email from a particular person and every single time you get an email from that person, you roll your eyes and you sigh really loud and you think, oh my God, this person again? What else could they possibly need from me? If everything that happens during the day is the straw that broke the camel’s back and just sends you into it so you have your to do list and somebody put one extra thing on it, one extra thing that’s literally like you have to write back Tuesday at 02:00, but it throws you over the edge. That’s a really bad sign. If you are someone who typically enjoys service and being of service to people, but you’re mad at everyone, can’t get out of your own way and really don’t feel like helping people right now, that’s a bad sign. And all of those things are rooted in resentment. So if you find yourself feeling really resentful and feeling that you are giving much more than you’re getting, you are at very high risk for experiencing burnout soon if you’re not already deep in it.

[00:32:03.190] – Leanne
We’re in the middle of some research oblong it at the moment on the relationship between leadership behaviours and employee well being and an early finding that really surprised me, that employees are really keen to seeing their leaders is their leaders investing in their own wellbeing and their own mental health. Not only is it going to be beneficial for you to invest in your well being, invest in your own self care, that’s also going to reflect really well with your employees. That’s what they want to see in their leaders, that’s what’s going to help boost their engagement and their wellbeing as well. It all comes down to being that great role model. So if this resonates with you and you want to start investing more in your own wellbeing, kate offered some advice as a starting point.

[00:32:45.460] – Cait
I think the steps are number one, foundational self care. When I say self care, I don’t mean pedicures and baths. What I mean for foundational self care is pee when you need to pee. Drink when you’re thirsty, eat when you’re hungry. Move when you need to move, stand when you need to stand, sit when you need to sit. Rest when you need to rest. The basic thing that needs to be put into place in your life for you to recover from burnout is a sense of safety. When your alarm system has been going off your whole entire life, it’s convinced you that every situation that you’re in is unsafe. When you are recovering, your job is to increase your body’s sensations of safety. Your body is going to feel safer if you give it what it needs when it needs it. People often want to skip this step and ignore these things. We laugh about it on my podcast all the time. My podcast listeners will walk around the world saying pee when you have to pee. It’s sort of an inside joke that we have with one another, but it’s one of the truest things that I’ve ever found and something that no one is talking about.

[00:34:08.080] – Cait
When it comes to burnout, if you are not telling your body that you are going to show up for it, it is not going to feel safe. If you don’t feel safe, your brain cannot recover the way that it needs to. So this is number one foundational self care.

[00:34:23.170] – Leanne
Kate’s raised a really important point there. Foundational self care is so important. She also talked on part one with her own experience of burnout, how she engaged a coach and a therapist. So here’s will with some advice on identifying which type of support you need.

[00:34:36.890] – Will
I think with a coach, if somebody’s starting to feel kind of burnt out and they’re just noticing a kind of listlessness setting in and they’re really just kind of not feeling like themselves and no longer seem like they have the same passion or excitement about work, but more or less, they’re doing fine. They’re still functioning, they’re getting things done. I think that’s where coaching is more appropriate. And I think when somebody’s getting burnt out to the point where they’re really struggling to get by, that’s when looking at therapy is better, right? So I’ve seen people where they’re kind of burnt out to the point that they’re not sleeping well, their health is starting to suffer, their families just noticing you’re not the same person you used to be. That’s when it’s like probably your mental health is suffering at a level that you really need to talk to a mental health professional. There’s a lot of discussion of different whatever, coping strategies, cognitive behavioural therapy, mindfulness, whatever. I think those are all important, but for me, the core issue is that this person is having a crisis of meaning that they have sort of lost the thread.

[00:36:15.760] – Will
They no longer have this vision for their life and for who they are and for where their life is headed. Kind of tying that back in with what we were talking about earlier. This is why I think the kind of cynicism piece from a mental health angle, I think is one of the most important to look at with burnout. Because if you’ve lost hope, you’ve lost everything, right? There’s no point in even getting into how do we meditate or whatever, if you just feel like there’s no hope for your future, right? So for me, I think one of the first things I really look at in therapy with a person is reattaching them with their sense of purpose. And this can be not just with work, but with life more generally. So we’ll look at their strengths, we’ll look at their values. And I like to ask people about when did you feel most alive? When you look back, what were these peak experiences in your life and in your career where you just felt like, I’m doing what I was meant to do and I like to kind of break those down and really look at what was happening in those experiences.

[00:37:44.850] – Sally
And.

[00:37:45.910] – Will
How can we kind of restore that? How can we bring what was going on then into the present moment and from there, kind of once we’ve identified what was happening in those kind of peak moments, that’s when I might get into more of starting to get into coping strategies. Let’s start developing a plan to sort of put some of these factors back into place for you. But for me, I think the question of meaning is what’s most important and really kind of helping that person feel a sense of hope for their career and just for themselves.

[00:38:29.670] – Al
There’s some really good advice there for investing in your own. Wellbeing, let’s go on to the third point.

[00:38:33.720] – Leanne
So our third recommendation is to think of yourself as a leader, as a manager, or if you’re a business leader, to help your managers in this type of development, managers as coaches. This is all about open conversation, not coming with the solutions, but coming with the questions. Discuss with your team what Burnout is as a starting point, improve their understanding and create this shared vocabulary so you can talk about it openly and honestly as a team, then you’re a manager, you’re a leader. You wouldn’t have got there and you wouldn’t be doing such a great job without your emotional and political intelligence. Use that to approach individuals in a way that will resonate with them in a way that they’ll hear your concern and respond to it. Kate explains more.

[00:39:19.220] – Cait
You have to just have a conversation. I think the biggest issue, one of the big issues and one of the things that I like to do most in companies is go in and just explain what Burnout is, the ins and outs, the ups and downs, so that everyone has language to talk about it. It’s really hard to have this conversation with somebody. A lot of people that Burnout are very high achievers, so going to them and saying, it seems like you’re burnt out is probably going to make them defensive. So your job in that case is to be more curious and say, hey, it seems like you’re not yourself lately. Is something going on? Can I help in some way? Do we need to take some things off your plate? Then this is when we go to the list of things that Christina Maslow and her team have deemed to be behind Burnout for the past 40 years, and we go through that list and say, which of these things can I give you more of to make your life easier.

[00:40:12.710] – Leanne
As we’ve said, having great supportive measures in place is one of the most effective things you can do to nurture wellbeing and prevent burnout within your business. Having these open conversations creates psychological safety, which we know has so many benefits, both for us as people and for our businesses. If you want to hear more about psychological safety, go back a few episodes and we’ll link it in the show notes. So on to our fourth recommendation in terms of preventing burnout in the workplace. Measure it? We can measure it. I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again. As a business, how can you possibly plot a route forward to where you want to be if you don’t first take the time to understand where you are? And if you won’t listen to me, listen to Sally.

[00:41:02.950] – Sally
This is it. I’m a big hiker and I just always think of when I’m like, I’m out hiking, I’ve got my maps. In order to go where I need to go, I need to know what my starting point is. And so measuring and knowing that starting point and being honest about it, which can be quite uncomfortable often, but it is so important, because only then, when we really acknowledge what the current situation is with honesty and humility, cana we change anything.

[00:41:28.330] – Leanne
So, in terms of measuring burnout or measuring well being within our businesses, there are a few different tools that you cana use. Kate mentioned earlier Christina Matlatch, who is American Social Psychologist. And she created the Matslatch Burnout Inventory. It’s a widely accepted tool for measuring burnout, but as always, choosing an assessment, any assessment like this or a psychometric, is important to consider the objective behind it and the context it’s being used in. No tool is perfect. Each is going to have its advantages and disadvantages. So my advice would always be to speak to a professional, or even several to help you decide. But, yeah, to give you a very brief overview. As a starting point, the Mass Latch Burnout Inventory, or the MBI, is a 22 item survey that covers three areas. It looks at emotional exhaustion, depersonization and a low sense of personal accomplishment. So very much embedded within the definition of burnout. From a scientific point of view, its reliability has been found to be good and since it was created, various versions have been created to improve its validity. By looking at the three dimensions of burnout separately, the MBI can also help you to understand how people are experiencing burnout within your organisation.

[00:42:43.730] – Leanne
As Will mentioned earlier, there can be a tendency for organisations to focus on the exhaustion aspect of burnout, whereas using the MBI is going to help you look at a more broad and holistic view of burnout within your business. As Will explains, the other problem with.

[00:42:58.090] – Will
Just focusing on emotional exhaustion is I think it leads to solutions that are only going to be partially effective. Right. A big thing now is like mental health days. Take a day off, relax, recharge. For somebody who’s tired and fried, that’s probably not bad. That could help with the exhaustion component, potentially, but it’s not going to make them feel any less cynical, it’s not going to help them feel attached to their fellow employees anymore, it’s not going to help them feel like they’re moving toward their goals. The mental health days strategy is one I’ve seen a lot of organisations embrace, but it’s missing a lot of components that could be playing that need to be addressed when fixing burnout.

[00:43:56.290] – Leanne
So, as we’ve said there, the MBR is a really good tool to measure the three core components of burnout. My only observation would be that the results may be somewhat narrow in terms of application, and I think this really depends on whether or not you have other assessments within your business. Currently, if you already have an employee engagement survey or a wellbeing survey within your business, the MBI will no doubt offer some really interesting insights and depth into the state of burnout within your organisation. If this is your first time gathering employee data, I’d recommend looking at something a bit broader in terms of its measurement of employee wellbeing and something that’s also going to measure the aspects of the environment your employees are operating in. If we understand the environment and how employees are thinking and feeling, we can start to make connections between what might be causing the stress or the reduced wellbeing within the organisation. That could be work demands, it could be relationships, it could be managers. If we are looking for a free tool, the HSE Management Standards tool is really useful, as it does measure various psychosocial risk factors within the business that are related to stress and burnout.

[00:45:07.000] – Leanne
Or of course you have oblong RX seven. That’s our personal tool that we’ve developed to measure employee wellbeing and engagement within the context of culture. So the RX Seven measures seven foundations of workplace culture that are essential to positive employee wellbeing and engagement. So those seven areas are reason, role recognition, resources, relationships, resilience and remote. To find out more, you can get in touch with Alloy through LinkedIn or visit Oblonghq.com.

[00:45:36.400] – Al
And of course, the reason why it’s called RX Seven is because there’s seven of them and they all begin with R. That pleased me. Great.

[00:45:41.720] – Leanne
It did in there. You’re a little marketing smile. Yeah. So I think that the point is, data is only as good as a method you use to collect it. I know you want a simple answer and Will and I laughed about this. As a psychologist, your immediate reaction is, well, it depends, and it does depend. But the thing is that if you want to make that investment in your organisation, in your employees well being, gathering this type of data is really going to help you understand the investment that you need to make. Where you need to make it and how it’s going to have the most impact. This might sound a bit cold to think about the commercial aspect of well being and mental health, but it’s also the only way to make sure we’re actually helping our employees in the best possible way.

[00:46:31.860] – Will
One of the issues I’ve seen now, I see it a lot on LinkedIn, you’ll see these posts, whatever here’s, ten Strategies for dealing with workplace mental health. And it’s not like the strategies are wrong or bad, but I think they’re so abstract that I question how effective they’re going to be. I think one of the first things for any leader who wants to start addressing workplace mental health, one of the first things they should do is get very clear on what exactly is the mental health problem that’s happening here, because otherwise you’re just going to be throwing solutions. Mental health days, EAP manager training on how to recognise mental health and refer. And again, all of those might be, like, somewhat helpful, but they’re not targeted in a way that I think is really going to go in surgically and make sure you’re really addressing that root cause.

[00:47:34.530] – Al
Clearly. What we’re saying is that you need to understand the specific problem in order to address it. You can’t just say, oh, we’ll do a likely ends thing. Pizza Friday, sushi Friday, why don’t we have a team open day? That’s like doing advertising and your adverts aren’t working, so you go, all right, well, I’ll just put some more money and I’ll just put my logo bigger on it. It’s just a sticking plaster. It’s not going to work. You need to think about what actually is the root problem and fix that. So, talking of the work environment, number five is focusing on the work environment. We talked about this, no fancy interventions. You just increase the control that your team members have. You provide the right resources as well. Said earlier, people don’t know what they’re doing at work, they’re not clear on their role. So you need to reduce ambiguity. And also this, you need to empower employee voice. These sound like fancy sort of terms that companies with two and a half thousand people would vandy around. But the fact is that if your employees feel psychologically safe and able to talk about things, then your creativity is going to go up, your problems are going to be out in the open straight away, and you’re just going to feel so much more empowered.

[00:48:43.810] – Will
I think organisational interventions that target those are going to be really important. Finding ways to give people an opportunity to participate in decision making, to have some control over their schedule, to have some influence on the decisions management is making, checking in with people about, do you actually have what you need to get your job done? What are you missing? Right? Do you need more support from me? Do you need more funding are all the tools present. And really, almost just from a basic HR safety, occupational safety perspective, making sure the work environment is safe is just a reasonably pleasant place to be and that people have a clear job description and very a manager who knows what that job description is, clear performance goals, those all make a huge difference.

[00:49:52.850] – Leanne
Kate also has some thoughts on aspects of the workplace that may be contributing to poor employee well being and in some cases, burnout.

[00:50:00.370] – Cait
So if the workload is too heavy, take some workload off. This is very simple, right? The next one is lack of community. So if your team doesn’t work well with one another, people might need to be moved to other teams, there might need to be some personnel adjustments, because if there’s no community in your team, they’re not going to feel safe. The next is a lack of fairness. So if you haven’t dealt with a pay gap, or if so and so always gets more attention from you because you like them better, or we’re at basic, basic, basic levels of is it fair? Are the things that happening fair? And if you say, well, too bad, like, you’re an adult, deal with it. I’m sorry. Basic fairness has been shown for years and years and decades to be important when protecting people from burnout. The next is a lack of recognition. Are people being praised specifically for things they are doing well? Are people being recognised for their work? You can’t just give it an adeboy, pat somebody in the back and walk away. It has to be, hey, Elaine, I saw that last week you wrote an email to that one customer we were really struggling with it, really seemed to smooth things over.

[00:51:15.030] – Cait
Great work. It’s got to be real specific to be useful, right? So positive feedback in the workplace is important. The next is a mismatch of values. So the mismatch of values can happen on two levels. The first is between the company’s spoken values and values in action. So if the company says, we have a mission to la and then on a day to day basis, they do the opposite, that’s going to be problematic for people. This sometimes the managers cannot do or and leaders cannot do much about this. Is that’s a really difficult place? The next mismatch of values is between the person and the company. When we have a mismatch of values situation going on, I think that really the only true thing that you can do, is get into a situation that suits your values better. This is what leads to moral injury and other problems. And it’s just if the values don’t match, you’re not going to make them match. It’s not going to just match magically at some point. And the last thing is a lack of autonomy. Do your people have enough say in how they’re getting their work done, what hours they’re getting their work done?

[00:52:26.670] – Cait
Within, what kind of tools they use, et cetera. So if people have no autonomy and a heavy workload, the job strain will be really high and that leads to high levels of burnout. So you have to know those things and then sort of work your way through them.

[00:52:40.340] – Al
So all really good stuff. Another recommendation to help prevent burnout comes from Sally and her colleagues when they remember we said she did the State of Workplace Burnout Report 2023. Now they claim that leaders can create a competitive advantage by adopting people first policies. So we asked Sally to explain a bit more.

[00:52:59.690] – Sally
I think having the starting conversations, they’re talking to people about how their mental health is doing. So sort of having these opening up conversations about how we’re actually doing as human beings and not segmenting our lives into sort of professional and personal, I think being encouraging people to be their whole selves, their full, authentic selves at work. I think also looking at things like the very basic things like how is email used, how are tools like Slack or other communication devices used, how much time are we spending in meetings and asking people? Also, I think, to sort of, for example, to take stock of what their tasks are for the day and then at the end of the day, having a look and saying what impacted me, what stopped me from being able to do what I needed to do and really looking at work in a very sort of basic way and seeing what is stopping the flow. Where are we having interruptions and how can we reconfigure work to be more effective and efficient? And that might be workflow, that might be decision making, hierarchy. It sort of really depends on the size and the nature of the organisation.

[00:54:12.910] – Sally
And I think also we touched on this in the study as well. The importance of creating an environment of psychological safety that is a space at work where people feel that they can comfortably take interpersonal risk without fear of consequence is a really big one as well. So that obviously has implications for the willingness to take risks and innovation and really beautiful things that can happen in the workplace. But I think it also really directly contributes to our capacity to thrive at and through work and thereby avoid burnout as well.

[00:54:45.920] – Leanne
We’ve presented five recommendations there for you in terms of how you can help prevent burnout within your organisations. One, reflect on your own behaviour as a leader and think about investing in leadership development. Two, invest in your own wellbeing. You need to put your mask on before you can help others. Three, develop your managers as coaches. Have those open conversations. Discuss with your team what burnout is and how you’re going to address it. Four, measure it. Measure the state of burnout within your organisation. Measure the state of well being. If we know where we are, we can plot a path of where we want to get to. And finally, number five, focus on the work environment. Forget these fancy interventions. Sushi Fridays, mindfulness at lunch, meditation Mondays. They’re not going to work. If your work environment is not nurturing wellbeing and supporting people to thrive, start by focusing on the work environment. So what can leaders expect to see if they adopt these recommendations? What turnarounds have others experienced in terms of employee wellbeing and performance? Sally provides us with an example.

[00:55:55.030] – Sally
So I’ve been working with a couple of companies in the Netherlands, and one has gone through a shift where they’ve actually shifted to a four and a half day working week. And the recommendations that use the Cana study. And they really wanted to sort of change the way they were working. And it takes really evaluating, I think, their own company values that they had espoused, and they were starting to see that they were drifting away from these company values that set them probably five or six years earlier. But the lived experience people were having just wasn’t correlating with the values. So they’ve seen an uptake in quality of work. They’ve also seen an uptake in employee well being and even just sort of morale in the workplace. So it is something where I think it’s surprising, actually, how fast you can start to see results in these kind of situations.

[00:56:49.000] – Al
So in a second we can just go through some resources with you. But just before we do, I want to go back to Kate, who’s got an important message about the role of self compassion and awareness. When you’re managing and recovering from burnout.

[00:57:01.290] – Cait
Give yourself some grace. This is not your fault. No matter what’s going on. There is a combination of internal and external factors that brought you here. And even the internal factors are likely based off of coping mechanisms that you created before you were conscious of what a coping mechanism even was. So give yourself some grace, number one. Number two, talk to someone, anyone. I really often recommend that people see their GPS, their doctors first, do blood work, do a urine analysis. Make sure that you’re not just iron deficient or vitamin D deficient, because you can have a lot of the symptoms, the fatigue and the irritation, because you don’t have enough B twelve. So go find out that your nutrients are okay before you jump down a whole gamut of fixing your mindset, which is not going to do anything if you need vitamin D, right? So go to your doctor, figure that out, and then after that, find a community of people where you can talk about this, where you don’t have to be ashamed of what you’re going through, where you can find out more, where you can learn, where you can grow with people that understand you.

[00:58:17.460] – Leanne
The first resource we’d like to offer you is the State of Workplace Burnout 2023. The report by infinite potential. I’ll guess. Sally is one of the researchers behind that report. We’ll include the link in the show notes, but it really is a nicely presented and indigestible view of the current state of Burnout. Awareness is always a really great place to start, so we suggest starting with that. The second resource is offered by our guest Kate. She is host of Fried the Burnout podcast. Let’s hear a bit more about that.

[00:58:48.900] – Cait
Fried the Burnout podcast has been around almost four years now and we have a Facebook group that’s dedicated to discussing the podcast episodes. But really it’s about anything that you’re going through with Burnout. There’s currently about 1300 people in the group and I try to answer a lot of what goes on in there. I try to stay really active in the group, but the other people in the group that have gone through Burnout and recovered are so helpful toward one another that often they have said what I would say anyway before I even get there. So there’s a tonne of interpersonal support there that I find really inspiring and really helpful. Somebody wrote in just this week that without this group she would have never recovered.

[00:59:32.570] – Leanne
A really great community offered by Kate there, if you haven’t already. The links are in the show notes. Go and cheque it out. Fried the Burnout Podcast and the link for her Instagram and Facebook are in there as well. Our third resource comes from Sally and she has written two books on Burnout. The first, Protect Your Spark How to Prevent Burnout and Live Authentically, and her second book and more recent relates, Your Spark How to Heal and Evolve After Burnout. Sally shares some insights and techniques.

[01:00:01.510] – Sally
The two books, so Protect Your Spark, is really about identifying. We spoke to the fact that individuals really can’t empower themselves fully against Burnout because so many of the causes are extrinsic and very subtle. But it’s the kind of book that I think I would have liked to give myself a couple of years before I went into full burnout, to maybe give myself some of the practises and some of the self care. Tactics that can actually empower us to retain some level of objectivity and to really focus on our own self worth and sort of build some healthy self awareness as well. Because the problem with Burnout, as you all know, is it narrows our focus because we’re in a heightened state of alert and it means we very quickly lose the ability to see with objectivity what’s happening to us. It also means we lose the capacity to make healthy decisions for ourselves. So it’s almost like I wanted to give myself that book a few. I don’t know if it would have changed anything, but that was the thinking and Relax Your Spot was kind of inspired by my own healing journey and then a great deal of research into what it actually takes to heal and evolve after Burnout.

[01:01:14.350] – Sally
I tend to try to avoid the word recovery because I do believe that burnout can have a really positively sort of impactful effect on us. And that’s not to reduce ordinary, to ignore the fact that it is a really debilitating experience as well. But my experience was that through being mindful about my healing journey, I was actually able to grow through burnout and shift to a place of much more profound sort of, I think, self love, basically self compassion and self awareness. So the sort of core things that I identify in the book in terms of healing, the four steps are if you take the vowels out of the word burnout, you’re left with BRNT. So that’s breathe. That’s about really using our breath and other techniques to engage the parasympathetic nervous system so that we can really engage the wisdom of our bodies to start the healing process so that we can start to restore some of the systems and the physiological damage that we’ve done as a result of burnout. The second is R for rest. So that’s really about restoring our systems and again, taking a break from work, if that’s feasible, making sure that we’re getting breaks as often as possible at an in between work to again just allow our bodies to restore.

[01:02:34.920] – Sally
We’re not meant to be, we’re not built to be in a constant state of heightened alert. The third is N, so that’s nourish, and that’s of course what we eat and drink, but it’s what we consume more broadly as well in terms of the information that we take in the news that we read, even down to the people that we surround ourselves with. So when we’re nourishing ourselves on these sort of multiple facets, that also really enables us to start to rebuild the energy that we need in order to sort of shift out of burnout and into a place of healing and evolving. And the last one is Tea, which is Talk. And I think this is actually the most important step in burnout healing. It’s about firstly acknowledging to ourselves that we’re in Burnout, that something dire is wrong, and it’s also about talking to either a trusted friend or a professional and saying I’m not okay and I need support. That can be very difficult, I think, for particularly those of us who are high achievers and used to just always being able to get away with everything. And at a certain point, the most wise thing we can do for ourselves is acknowledging the truth of the situation and reaching out for help from someone else.

[01:03:48.380] – Leanne
In terms of reaching out for help. Sally and Kate both offer coaching services for people who are experiencing burnout or recovering, so we’ll leave their contact details in the show notes as well. Our third guest Will, as you know, is a board certified clinical psychologist and he offers therapeutic services, a whole range of therapy services to people who are experiencing high levels of stress, mental health challenges and potentially burnout as well. So if you feel you need more of a therapeutic intervention, we’ll also leave wills, LinkedIn details in the show notes. And finally, if you’re a business owner or leader listening and you’d like to know more about how to measure wellbeing or the current state of burnout within your organisation, get in touch with us through the podcast or through Oblonghq.com. If you go to our website, oblonghq.com, you can also then book a free consultation to talk about everything culture and wellbeing.

[01:04:41.120] – Al
Also, if you haven’t subscribed yet, then please consider subscribing if you’ve enjoyed this next week’s episode, he’s with the amazing Jim Young, who is he calls himself the Centred Coach. He’s men’s burnout coach. He’s written a book called Expansive Intimacy and he’s just a really down to earth, really nice, amazingly, brutally honest guy. The kind of person, I think if we were in the same country, I’d definitely go for a beer with him. So cheque him out next week. And this is but thank you again for giving us another hour of your time and I hope if you got any feedback, then go to, well, either Oblonghq.com or you can go to our actually dedicated website, which is Truth Lieswork.com. In fact, it’s not. It’s truth, lies and work. I think both of them get you there.

[01:05:25.910] – Leanne
Thank you so much to all of our expert guests who have contributed so much value to these two episodes and to our listeners. You are awesome. We really appreciate you. And, yeah, go cheque them out on Socials, on LinkedIn. The conversations that are already happening are really inspiring.

[01:05:42.240] – Al
So we’ll see you next week. Bye.