Appolgie Production. Hi, my name's beck Woodbine and welcome to Tenderness for Nurses.
Do you need to burn out to have those insights? While I'm talking about it now? But you know, came to educate the world about it, but.
I didn't want anyone to know that I was so unwell. I don't know when it was ever okay to yell or scream or abuse somebody. We need to have support and know where to look for support and know how to look after ourselves, not just professionally, but personally as well. It was quite profound and I learned a lot from that one action.
Hi.
Everyone, Welcome to Tenderness for Nurses. Today, we have the lovely guest and friend of mine and Coney, who owns and runs equenty leadership and learning business. She's here today to chat to us about leadership but also burnout, which has had a very personally experienced with and I have to.
So we're going to chat through what it is, how you can help prevent it if you're at that stage, what you can do to promote your wellness and health, and it's something I think we as nurses all need to be very aware of with burnout especially in very high stress situations, but also how we can be good leaders to each other within the nursing environment. So thanks Ange for coming in.
I really appreciate it. Thanks for inviting me. It's my pleasure give us a little.
Bit of a rundown on you and what you do.
I am a leadership coach and management consultant, and that means I'm working every day with leaders at some level from the front line right through to the senior executive, who are feeling the pressure to deliver in the business environment, and they're trying to deliver results for their organization and as well as look after their personal wellbeing and be good leaders in the process.
Since COVID, do you think it's got worse to deliver more for less.
I think the dynamics of work and the experience of
work has changed. So we're all aware that we now have more flexible ways of working and that's challenged some of the more traditional leaders, although for nurses, you still need to turn up in the hospital and other care environments, and so you've had less flexibility and perhaps more pressure in your industry than other industries that have felt the relief of working from home and the relief of flexible hours and the blending of work and life in a more integrated way.
I think people have realized how much money they can save not communing and time and energy time and but yeah, you're right. In the hospital setting and healthcare, they didn't have that opportunity. In fact, I think it got more stressful.
Yes, I would imagine.
So you yourself have had and spoken quite openly about burnout. And I know during the COVID stage and after COVID there was a lot of burnout in nurses just because of high stress. I know we didn't have the huge numbers that came through the hospital like they did overseas, and I know from colleagues overseas it was horrendous.
What was the.
Tipping point for you to realize that you were burnt out?
I guess, to be honest, I saw it coming months in advance, and I felt it building, and I felt like I wasn't in control of my work schedule, which I was, but I didn't feel in control of it, like I had commitments to clients that I needed to see through and deliver, and I didn't feel like I could take the break that I knew that I needed and several months later, four or five months later, I was sitting outside of Coals with a shopping trolley full of groceries, and I sat on a bench and I realized,
I'm cooked. I'm done. I've got nothing left. And I rang my mentor and said to him, I've got a problem. I'm at Coal's with my groceries and I don't think I can get home.
What one little thing happened that made you just tipped you over the age.
I don't think it's ever one little thing. I think I was traveling relentlessly. I was been through a divorce, so I was financially having to take care of myself, and I was really over committed in my work, traveling every week of the month, and I'd moved house to Brisbane, and all of that I think just added up. Maybe the straw that broke the camel's back was the trip to Cohole's. I don't know, but I I knew I was. I was depleted. Like I wasn't depressed. I was interested.
Actually at the time, I thought, what is this burnout? And I googled it and the World Health Organization has a definition of burnout, and just to put it in very high level summary terms. It's when you're depleted, not depressed, just depleted. There's nothing left in the tank. Your energy is so low you're not productive. So even when I opened the laptop and want to to work, I couldn't. It was like the brain wasn't working or computing. You
start to care less. It's kind of like you run out of fs to give, if I can say that, And you might want to give them, but they've got none left to give. And so it's that depletion, the lack of productivity and just the inability to care anymore that characterizes burnout in their definition, And that really resonated with me. So by the time I did get home and unload my groceries, and I took a few weeks off, and then I realized that's not going to do it.
Taking a few weeks off after deep burnout didn't even touch the sides of healing and recovery. And it's taken me four years down the track now and I would say I'm still in recovery from burnout. Wow, I'm far more productive. I'm probably back at full capacity, but I work and live far differently now as a result of that experience.
So you are very aware of triggers and how you're feeling.
Yeah, exercise, yes, diet, look, yes, it's all those things like if you're burning out now, sure rest, eat a vegetable, go for a walk in the sunshine, get some water on board, drink a little less right, do those things for sure. But for me, my biggest realization through this process was that's all surface level stuff. What's underneath that is your pattern of thinking and being at work and how you approach work and how you busy yourself with work.
In my case, I speak for myself. I busied myself with work so that I didn't have to face some deeper issues that were going on. You know, in my history and in my life, seemed like the easiest thing to do was to get busy with work until I burned myself out doing that. So you know, when you talk about exercise and healthy living, sure do that, it's
a no brainer. But underneath that, you can take a break, you can take a holiday, you can eat well, but if you return to work and work in the same pattern that you did that burned you out, you'll just get back there quicker.
What do you recommend for nurses who don't have those options, Like they have to go to work, they have to do the shift work they're employed to do, you know, three four days a week, full time. How do you manage that? Then, if you're a shift worker.
I think if you're still able to work even though you've got a high pressure, fast paced environment, you've got to address your internal dialogue to allow yourself some grace and compassion and to be present in the experience so
that you're kind to yourself in that testing experience. Because I think what we can do is harden ourselves to our work environment, harden our minds, harden our hearts, harden professional relationships just to get through the shift, and I think over time that does not contribute to a person's health and well being. It's kind of like you can't do anything about the external environment, the environment outside of you.
You're still going to be on shift in a caring situation with multiple people who need you at one time, with reports and administration to take care of all of that continues. What you can change is the internal dialogue that you have with yourself, and it needs to be one of kindness and compassion and grace.
I know from experience, the other route is so much easier to take than being kind to yourself. You know, we beat ourselves up, burnout, depression, anxiety, and the shame around the word psychiatric. For me, there shouldn't be, but it's visceral, like you nearly recoil when you hear the
word psychiatric if you've been down that pathway. I just find it one of those words that just stereotypically shareful, being kind and caring for yourself and that internal dialogue is really hard when you've come from a place where you just overworked, underappreciated, have had some depression, anxiety, stress. I mean, my mind goes straight to emergency department and what those guys deal with on a day to day, out our minute to minute basis. How do you mitigate
those issues around self talk and looking after yourself? And I don't know, it's really tough well and I don't think they're doing it well.
I have done some consulting in hospitals where I've worked with both management of the hospital and with the nurses who manage the teams on the boards. I think there are a couple of components to how to deal with this, you know, because I'm a leadership coach. Of course, I'm going to say leadership skills. You've got to be leading yourself. If you're a leader, you've got to be leading yourself well before you can lead anyone else well with credibility. Right.
The second thing would be to build a functional and constructive, healthy team. That's your responsibility. And if you're on a team, if you're not in a leadership position, then your responsibility is to show in a way that contributes to being constructive and functional. And perhaps you know just because your team is playing not a great standard or a lower standard than that right now, and doesn't mean you need
to fall into that as well. You need to maintain your own integrity and identity and sense of yourself in this. And so when you feel like you're starting to lose some of your humanity at work, I think it's a moment for pause as far as your day to day experience. Again, I'm not a nurse, so I won't preach, but I can let you know a strategy that I've personally used, and that's to just simply be present in the moment that we're in. You know, we're both having a busy
day to day. We've got lots of things going on in our world. But right now I'm allowing myself the experience of being fully present here with you, and I find that quite calming and soothing. There's some acceptance. I think if you're a nurse on a water on a shift that Okay, I'm here right now helping the person that's in front of me, and I'm doing my best, and then I'm going to go and help the next person. The better I take care of myself in the process.
And I know nurses who don't go to the toilet or eat, you know, throughout the course of their shift. And you know, we can all suffer from that in our professional lives to some degree. But the better you take care of yourself, the better you're able to show up constructive and functional for your team, for your patients or clients.
In my case, it's nearly like a badge of honor. This is go I have an eving to the toilet today.
I think as a coach, I'm encouraging people to be in full self responsibility. So that means that even when we're employed, even when we don't have our own businesses, we don't get to blame the people around us for how we show up, we can always remember our choice to show up as constructive and functional as we can
be in this moment. And if that means I remember to drink some water and go to the bathroom and eat something and just sit down for a moment or two, even if it is on the toilet, to compose yourself
guaranteed quiet time comes with me. Just to take those little moments for yourself, to preserve your groundedness and scentsiveness and internal calm throughout the day, even when you're what's going on in your external environment is chaos, and that's you in full self responsibility for taking care of yourself.
I just completed a course with doctor Wendy Macintosh about boundaries and ethics, and it was brilliant. She talks about the limbic system and how it controls you know, stress, anxiety, and how controlled breath is so underutilized but so powerful. You know, the box, the box breathing, box breathing is so good, but we forget to do it.
And the way I always explained to me, and the way I teach my clients is that you would inhale for say, account of four, hold for account of four, exhale for account of four and then hold for another count of four before you inhale again from account of four, and you repeat that cycle, and you can imagine in your mind that you're creating a box shape for that count of four. And what that does is allows you
to spend less time breathing in. It creates that anxious state and more time being present and through your exhale. And I'm no doctor or scientist, but I understand that this activates within your nervous system a calming response.
In summary makes such a difference, and it makes you present in the moment because you can't think of anything else. You've got to think of that. They suggest that in high stress situations, if you can take the time even to do a couple of those cycles, it brings that racing heart down, the adrenaline drops, It helps you make a better decision in a really stressful moment.
You can feel it in your body, that visceral relaxation. I think the trick is to remember to do it. I prefer to think about how can I tune into the signals of my body and to be alert to those that if I'm feeling tightness in my chest or a bit sick in my tummy, or if I've got tension in my jaw or my shoulders or a headache, how can I be observant and tuned into those signals
and allow that to be informing my response. So I'm really honoring the signals from my body, because when you think about it, it was the fact that we weren't doing that that led us into burnout.
My dream would be to have my own art studio, have a kiln out the back, you know, an easel at the front, the dog running around, and just do art and craft like seriously, that to me would heaven.
Well, now that you've expressed it and put it out in the world, you're a step closer to that.
We can only hope. It's an interesting thing how we as nurses as givers and here I've always thought of myself as a healer. We feel like we're not being good nurses if we're not.
I love that. Yeah, thank you for saying that out loud. I'm not being a good nurse unless I'm giving. Logically, that doesn't sound right when you say it out loud, but emotionally, there's all sorts of things that drive nurses into this caring profession. As a patient, I've met nurses across the spectrum of like really beautifully present and caring through to hardened and treating me like a number in
a machine. And as a consultant in hospitals working with leadership teams, I see nurses deploying those strategies as coping mechanisms because they're fatigued by showing so much compassion and
drawing on that empty cup. And some of the models and frames that I teach in leadership coaching and on the leadership programs are all about how can I be in full self responsibility for filling my own cup, not expecting my boss to do it, not expecting my organization to do it, although would be nice if they offered some more support, but how do I be more in
charge of my own experience? And it's everything from what we've discussed, taking the breaks in the healthy food, but just allowing yourself full presence in the moment.
I worry that we're going to end up going down that whole American insurance healthcare. I am someone that believes there should be free healthcare for all. I'm also realistic enough to realize how much it costs because I run my own clinic, and I know how much it costs every week to keep those doors open from insurance laser licensing. It is expensive, so I can only imagine how much
it costs to keep a major hospital open. So I have no doubt that at some stack we're all don't have to pay for healthcare in some way or another. I don't think it can be free forever.
If you want to maintain a good organizational culture, then you've got to consider the realities of those commercial drivers and constraints with the human factors. And I feel like that's where we're possibly a little out of balance in the workplace. At the moment. We're quite concerned with compliance and profitability, and if we have to dehumanize the experience of work to achieve that, then that's what we do.
And I think that that will have a consequence not just for individuals in the workplace, but for the overall experience of work in the long term.
I thought, just pop into my head, and you might be able to sort of give us a little bit of an idea, your opinion within the aesthetic space where I work, cosmic dematology, I as a nurse, don't feel like I should charge more than the other staff in my business. However, I've got fifteen years more experience, and yet because I'm a nurse as practitioner, I feel like I can't charge more than my team. However, I'll make down the road who's done two years of injecting? But
is a doctor. I'm not banking doctors. I have some amazing friends and colleagues that are medical practitioners. He charges four dollars more a unit for an anti wrinkle treatment. What is the psyche with that?
Well, he doesn't have the limiting beliefs that you have.
But why do so many nurses have that?
I think it's human nature. One, you're in a hierarchy and a hospital environment and nurses iientifically at the top. So there's that aspect. I think it is also human nature to have some what we call limiting beliefs. So as part of my practice as a leadership coach, I do neurolinguistic programming. Part of that practice is to identify
what are the limiting beliefs that I have. Stories that I've told myself over and over again so much so that they've become true for me, whether they're true or not. How do we start to challenge some of those limiting beliefs. So for you, there's something underlying there, something deeper around my worth and my value and my ability to express that is being constrained by a story of not good enough,
not deserving, you know, don't add enough value. Yeah, what does it mean if I charge as much as a doctor? Do I have tickets on myself? Some of these sorts of beliefs, you know, they're pretty common.
Oh so common in nursing that you know, she thinks you should be a doctor, or it is such a tall poppy syndrome.
Yeah, and so if you had a belief that was different to the rest of your team, then you wouldn't be fitting in. You'd be isolated. You could be you know, picked on, bullied. You know, it's quite a tribe. What we call a tribal mentality is that you want to fit in, and fitting in means that you have those limiting, subservient beliefs, and that's what you'll do to fit in. The people that I work with are tired of that mindset.
It's been brought into their awareness one way or the other that I've got that mindset, the I've got those beliefs operating and they don't want them anymore. So through the process of neurolinguistic programming and a particular tool within that suite called timeline therapy, I'd be looking to understand what are those limiting beliefs and how do we start to challenge and diffuse the effect of those limiting beliefs so that you could replace them with more positive ones.
So you know, why don't you value yourself enough and charge enough? Well, that's I believe often at the heart of it, no matter what you put on your pricing schedule, no matter how good your marketing is or your sales conversation is, at the end of the day, underneath that, you've got to believe that you're worth it and feel aligned and comfortable in what you charge, and that requires
some self awareness and self development. I would say something I'd noticed about the medical profession, and it's the same in academia as well and some of the other more traditional disciplines. When we think about how we develop ourselves and become more confident and competent so that we can charge our worth. We do what you've done up until now,
and that's invest in your discipline. In education, within your discipline, and unless you meet that with a degree of leadership and personal development, in my experience, then you'll be a very knowledgeable individual with very poor self awareness, self leadership,
self regulation, and self worth. And so you need to balance all of your nursing knowledge with the knowledge, the tools, the theories, concepts, frames, practices that allow you to become whole feel whole more of the time as a person.
I've gone off and done work on boundaries, ethics as well as my own professional development. But to round that all off and to be a really great nurse leader business owner also should come in and do some work on leadership skills and personal developed personal development. I'm putting all of that together.
So that you can be a whole human at work and a whole human at home. And you're actually the same human, you know.
So regardless of where you are. So you don't put on your nursing hat, and you don't or your work hat and your home hat. That's ange and that's ae work and ange at home.
I personally have thrown out the idea that I'm going to turn up as a different human in my professional environment than I do at home because the transaction cost of taking my personal head off and putting my work head on was too tiring. It contributed to the burnout. It's putting a mask on to go to work, and
I'm just not interested in doing that. So I think when you can feel whole in your life and you realize that work is a part of your life and in that work part of your life, you get to feel whole there too, and keep all of your humanity in the work environments. People be going and you're delusional. Have you been in a hospital? Have you been on a an, a water on a shift? I can't, I have, you know, I haven't been a nurse, But of people there and they're like, this is what we have to
do to survive. And I think if that is your mode of operating, then you'll get to burn out eventually. But if you can bring to work a level of comfort of this is who I am holistically in my life, and I am someone who takes care of others, and I'm someone who takes care of myself, and I can feel integrated and aligned and whole in that, then I'm going to have a far more sustainable experience of work. Whose job is it to create that experience? Well, it's
not your boss, although they contribute. It's not your teammates, although they contribute. It's how you choose to show up and how much work you're prepared to invest in yourself to be able to show up in that way.
It's a bit of a common theme of self betterment, and you know every other person is on some self development self. Yes, I know. When I was well with see I even have trouble saying it anxiety and depression. I didn't know how sick I was, and now that I do, now that I'm looking after myself, me coming first, So getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising downtime, doing my
art comes first. But when you've got no insight and you think you're doing all these things which I thought I was, how do you get to that point other than falling down a black hole.
Look, we've all got a different set of programming in terms of our genetics and our upbringing, our social conditioning that inform our sense of our own value. So I think it's going to be different for every person. For me, as it turned out, I did have to have that burnout experience to understand how anchored I was to achievement as a source of love. That was it for me.
If I'm not achieving, I'm not worthy and lovable. For nurses, it could be more the story of if I'm not giving and caring for others, then I have no value in the world. Now, when I say that out loud, it sounds ridiculous, but this is often the deeply held belief. One of the big themes that comes through my coaching is that I wanted detach your identity and your sense of value from what you do. They're unrelated, they're not linked.
You think about your children who were born as perfect little chubby babies, regardless of whether they brought home an ABZ hopefully not a D or E. But even if they did on their report card, they had a value. Whether they scored a goal on the weekend, or whether they came first in the running race. You know, whether they were polite to mister and missus Smith at the shops. They actually still have an innate value as humans that they were born with and that you want to see
them hold retain throughout their lives. No matter how much they do or don't achieve today, how much they do or don't help or serve, they have a value as humans, and we forget that at work, and we start to connect our identity and sense of who we are to what we do, and we're acknowledged for it, rewarded for it by society and parents and teachers and bosses so on. We get paid different values for it. I think when we start to remember that as a human, I have
an innate value I was born with. It can't change depending on how much I serve today or how much I achieved today. And there's freedom in that. There's freedom to remember that actually I can sort of tap back into my own voice and that it has a value and the signals from my body and I can start to honor that. And this is self responsibility. And when I say self responsibility, I don't mean you need to
be harder on yourself and more disciplined and committed. Well, all of that just makes me want to be sick, right. It's not tenderness, nurses or anyone for anyone. Self responsibility is how do I show up whole and aligned and honor myself so that I can serve and that I can be an example and that I can be a good contributor in the world and a good human in the world unless I'm doing that from an aligned place, that I'm not in full integrity and I'm having to
put a mask on to do it. People, whether they can voice it or not, they notice as you approach a person in a hallway, their central nervous system will tell them whether or not you're a safe person to be around, whether you're in a good mood, whether you've got good intent, good energy. You know, whether you're going to be a threat to them. Absolutely, our nervous systems tell us that. And so unless you're in anything but full integrity and alignment in your service to the world,
other people will notice that as well. Do you need to burn out to have those insights? Well, I'm talking about it now, but you know, keen to educate the world about it. But frankly, sometimes you've got to have that experience for you to stop long enough to learn the lessons and integrate them in your life in that way. I think burnout has been a blessing for me. I didn't have the choice to stop. I had to stop and learn those lessons because, believe me, I was a
different person before burnout. Operate very differently.
I feel that nursing is and has always been very much part of my identity. That's why I like to say I'm a healer, not so much a nurse, because I've always looked at myself as healing, helping. I don't know touch for I don't know.
How you've turned that inward. You turn it outwards to others, and now you've turned it inward. And what alignment you're creating through that experience?
What advice would you give to nurses or health professionals that are feeling like they're getting close to burnout but can't afford not to work and have to shower up every day and have no sick leave left.
I would say, hold this one question in your mind, and that is what is the most nurturing nourishing thing I can do for myself today? Is it to make sure I visit the bathroom while I'm on my shift? Is it to make sure that I take a break and eat something. Is it that I maybe don't pour that glass of wine or that extra glass of wine
when I get home tonight? Is it that I stay hydrated, that I allow myself to be present in this moment of work and to be fully accepting of my experience, that I am at work right now, and there's just a level of acceptance around that so that I can be fully present here and now. There's so many different ways that we can extend ourselves care and the way to know what to do is to tune into your own body and ask, what is that most nurturing, nourishing
thing I can do for myself right now? Do that, rinse and repeat every day until you start to build up a practice, until it starts to become more habitual, that caring for yourself is part of your daily approach to life and work.
You've got to show up for yourself because you can't show up for others if you don't show up for yourself. So well summarized, Yeah, we're too from here for you now moving forward.
Burnout has been an interesting period, like it's been a force four years now. It's only in the last four to six months that I have felt safe to have career goals again. I wasn't interested in them because I was too busy healing and recovering and recharging. So now I've got some goals. From the perspective of leadership coaching and management consulting, I'm working with change leaders who are
making a difference in issues of sustainable development. So anyone that's aligned with the sustainable development goals of the United Nations that are working in environmental social governance change. I work with scientists, engineers, like good people doing good things in the world. I want to help them have that
aligned experience of having the insights match the outsides. I'm talking to a lot of them on the Secret Life of leaders podcast, through my consulting, through leadership programs, and I really just want to lean in to working with people with that good intent so that they can have a better, more impactful, more powerful experience of leadership and make a bigger difference in the world.
If there's one thing you want to share today that relates back to tenderness for nurses, So if you were talking to a group of nurses, what is the one thing you would recommend they try and do on a daily basis.
I would say, have enough grace and compassion for yourself so you can make the insides much the outsides, so that your grace and tenderness and compassion care for yourself. The way that you bring that to the world is just an extension of what you're doing for yourself. So you can be aligned in the experience of caring for others. Yeah, instead of giving from an empty cop love.
Thank you so much for coming in. I have got so much out of today with you and let's hope we get your backcine.
Yeah, thank you so much for having things sane.