Mentorship, Burnout and Nursing with Dr Lendra James

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Hi, my name's beck Woodbine and welcome to Tenderness for Nurses.

I'm grateful for the person that I have the opportunity to be.

So I hit it and parked it for Nelly four years.

We always have free will, We always get to choose.

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Hi. Everyone, thank you for tuning back into Tenderness for Nurses. Today we have doctor Lendra James from the US having a chat to us about mentorship, burnout and her journey in nursing. And it's going to be a really interesting discussion.

Thank you for having me. I am good. It's actually a beautiful day here in the US.

So can you just tell us a little bit about yourself, how you've ended up in the role of running your own business, writing programs, mentoring, dealing with other nurses with burnout, How did you get to this point.

Or sure, so I have.

I've been a nurse for over twenty over twenty years, like about twenty two years, and I've worked across the country in the US, I've worked in several different areas of nursing, worked my way up to nursing leadership, and it was during my time in leadership that I experienced a transformative shift in my purpose. Right the onset of the COVID nineteen pandemic. It really highlighted the pressing need for self care, wellness promotion, and preventative.

Education within communities.

Just witnessing the stream on hospital resources, the lack of attention to staff well being, I chose to redirect my focus towards a greater emission, which for.

Me was self care advocacy.

And my vision was and is to create a lasting legacy right that ensures widespread access to self care, wellness and preventative health education. Just in recognizing that I was intrigued by the operational, by the business side of healthcare, I embarked on a new chapter, which was entrepreneurship, and I launched my own company, leveraging my leadership skills and my certification as a nurse executive and my Doctor of

Did you yourself have been out?

Oh? Yes, so I experienced burnout.

Like I said, it was during my time in leadership that I experience a level of burnout.

And we don't talk about it enough because a few years ago died.

You know, burnout was something that was considered a weakness and or it was tap tapoo, right, you know, you don't say this is what we were trained to do.

How can you be, you know, burned out. We were trained to know.

We were trained clinically, and we were trained to provide a service, and we were trained with skills and that you know, made us become experts in what we do. But we no one talked excuse me, no one really teaches or empowers about the taking it, taking hold of your setting boundaries right and really prioritizing yourself because as nurses were so used to prioritizing others, and we don't

Is not your norm.

It's when you start to realize that, oh my gosh, I'm experiencing burnout, and burnout is a symptom. It's a symptom of something else. And that's why I started to experience. I started to experience that symptom and it started to affect me, and excuse me, affect me and areas of my life personally and professionally.

It's so interesting with the podcast, the number of nurses that I've spoken to here that really have developed burnout moral injury to some degree. Some of the nurses have had PTSD with things I've had to deal with. It

And it's because it has a ripple effect, right, and it impacts you in every area of your life.

And when you're.

Burnt out, you stop pursuing those things that once or you.

Enjoy, both personally and professionally.

And I've seen so many talented nurses who put their dreams and their career aspirations on whole because they're simply to exhaust it and they're not realizing that they're dealing with a symptom of exhaustion. And it's not just career you know, stagnation either. Burnout takes a toll on your self care. As I mentioned, for nurses who are natural care giver is we often forget to take care of ourselves because.

We want to.

And when you mentioned trauma, think about how we as nurses. We can code a patient for about thirty to forty minutes and have to and say that person doesn't survive or they do. But after dealing with that, we now have to walk into that next patient's room and act like everything is okay.

But that's what we're trained to.

Do, and no one really sits us down and say like, that's kind of not okay, right, because think about if someone wants to see someone get hit by a car in the middle of the street and this person tragically die, that's traumatizing. So we deal with trauma on an ongoing basis. And one a solution from in my opinion is organizations really have to look more into the mental health of

It involves you know, you being able to see a.

Mental health expert for three sessions.

And sometimes that's not enough and sometimes.

Some places it's fifteen minutes, some places that maybe thirty minutes, and sometimes that's not enough. What about someone coming in on a consistent basis to be able to provide mental health services to your employees, whether they understand or know that they need it or not. But this is how we really start to move the needle and shift their perspectives and shift the outcomes for our healthcare workers.

Do you think the hospitals in the States, because you have a very different system to us here in Australia, because it's so money driven making money, do you think they value nurses? Do you think I want to spend that money on nurses to keep that retention right and the nurses healthy.

That is such a great question. So there's two sides.

If you acts an executive leader that question, they will say yes.

If you ask a nurse that question, they.

Will say profit or the patients. And I say that because I have you know, I know a plethora of nurses who they don't feel valued and they don't feel that the organizations and this is part of the problem, right, And this is why and I don't know about Australia. This is why a lot of the hospitals in the US are striking because I'm a big part of it

Broke their hip. That's a nurse sensitive indicator.

So the hospital will now not be paid because this patient fell and broke their hip, and the hospitals won't be paid for that. Or let's say they get an infection from a central line, where they get an infection from a fully catheter, the hospital won't be paid for that.

And there's been.

Hospital who has been in hospitals where they've been fined in the million, the seven figures because of these infections. And so now what that's more push on the nurses to do more, but they're doing more for less. And now so you see how the shift and the burnout because now there's a huge you know, push from the higher ups to you know, now we have to do that. We have to have zero clapses, we have to have zero qualities, we have to have zero you know, zero falls.

And I get it because we don't want to do harm to our patients. But what we.

Don't realize is that we're now pushing the nurses to do more with less because we're not necessarily giving them the tools and the resources that they need like staffing, for instance, right or investing in bet alarms, or investing in the tools and the resources that they'll need in order to in order to stop these falls or in order to prevent these clapses and these qualities from occurring.

The directives that are coming from the higher ups.

So I say all this to say, and again this is just you know, an example, but I say all this to say, this is why and how nurses are not feeling appreciated. So you're not giving me the resources because you're making me work short staff, but yet you're telling me that I still have to make sure I prevent that fall from recurring.

How can I prevent that fall if I.

Had eight patients and we only have one nursing assistant, or if there's only three nurses on the floor. So yeah, I've beenished situations where I've had nurses working short staff, and.

Thing was still able to.

Prevent those falls from recurring because you know, we instill a level of empowerment and pride in them so that they took pride in making sure that their patients were safe.

Because most nurses, they want to make sure that their patients. Absolutely, but if you're not empowering them and engaging them, you don't understand how you're leading to that exhaustion.

You're leading to that feeling of being undervalue, their feeling of being underappreciated, and that's not what you want.

And I love that term of empowering your nurses. I think that's through education, through correct staffing. That's so important. And I think since the pandemic, we weren't hit anywhere near as hard as you were in the States. When I went for a conference last year, I interviewed one of the nurses that I met at the conference, and she had worked in Philadelphia and she was on the COVID ward. She arrived, everything was shut down. They went in and they were locked into the ward. They couldn't

It was terrible.

And she left. She's gone into the aesthetics space. She just didn't want to deal with that rubbish anymore.

And that's exactly what happened.

There's been a huge shift of nurses leaving the traditional setting and going into spaces like aesthetics and wellness and met spars.

As you mentioned, I myself on a met spar well.

I own an alternative form of treatment on a wellness business. I own a IV hydration vioment therapy, so we offer that and we offer wheat loss services as well. And we also have added a component of wellness right, a wellness service for stress management, burnout and such. And I say that to say the pandemic it just really gave rise to a huge shift and a lot there were a lot of epitomes, epiphanies, excuse me, and you know,

No, I'm not going to New York. I'm going to get COVID, so I'm not going there.

But guess what, So they were coming over into New Jersey and they were still getting COVID because we got all of the overflow, all of the patients from from that tri state area, from Brooklyn, just all over New York. They used to they would come to New Jersey they still had COVID And just what that nurse mentioned to you, that is.

Exactly how it was.

It went from I'll never forget it went from us having one patient to after it was one weekend went by and have the unit was COVID positive and exactly no one wanted to come on.

To the floor.

You didn't see anyone. All the doors were closed and even during codes. I can remember doing codes. Nurses would be in the rooms running the codes on their own, and the doctors would be at the door writing signs, you know, putting the paper up against the window, saying like pul socks, like what's the pull sox? Like are you kidding me? You know, so you want us to intubate the patient too, like.

What are we doing?

Nurses were dispensable, but doctors weren't right.

And that was unfortunately, that was the feeling now. I will say in the area where I was, doctors were you know, we had doctors who we actually lost due to COVID, and doctors were just as suicidal as nurses were, right, and because there was a time where we felt like we were losing patients at such a rapid rate, and there was a feeling.

Of what are we doing wrong?

You know, we didn't know what we know now about the disease, and there was a feeling that we felt like we were doing you know, we were doing something wrong, and healthcare professionals were actually committing suicide and becoming suicidal, and all of those elements that you talk about about feeling isolated. People were sleeping in their cars, people were

So again, so when we.

Talk about like burnouts, that's a whole different that's a whole different level of just mental health and burnout.

That's what it is.

It's a symptom of mental health, and it's often a mix of being overworked, underappreciated, and facing systemic issues. And the COVID nineteen pandemic was definitely one that was you know, we didn't know how long it was going to last.

We didn't know, there was nothing we knew about it.

The policies were changing every day, these you know CDC every time, you know, they were changing.

I felt like the policies and the rules change daily.

So we got to a point where it made no sense to write anything down because you know it's.

Going to change tomorrow.

And it did, right, So sometimes things would change like two or three times a day.

So we went from needing to have.

In ninety five to know you can just have a surgical mass, right, and like, wait a minute, So now we just lost one hundred and fifty nurses who caught COVID because you're saying we only need a surgical but they only need a surgical mask. And guess what, they still caught COVID root those.

In ninety fives.

So there was just such a lack of appropriate care for nurses. I can remember some of the nurses in New York going to work in garbage bags. But then you have the media who's coming into the hospital and they have a full astronauts suit on right, so to speak. So why aren't we protecting our healthcare workers the same way. So there's a lot of bureaucracy that leads to the burnout of healthcare professionals, and.

The way we change these things.

We have to change what takes place more at the legislative level in order, if in at least in New Jersey it excuse me, in the US, so that we can really start to affect change. So there are a

And that's where I come in. Part of what I do is I help.

And I show nurses how to start their own business, how to gain that power back because no one teaches us the business side of healthcare. And that's a part of my mentorship. And my mentorship goes.

From being.

One Most nurses will contact me because or nurse leaders and they'll say, you know, they're burned out, they're at a place of exhaustion and they're not sure.

Where to go. And we really unpack that. We set a plan.

We help to recognize the burnout, where's the burnout coming from?

And then we set a.

Plan and then we identify what are you doing about it? And what are you going to do about it? And then once we're able to unpack that burnout and really set that plan to release it and develop and grow from it. Now, what are the next steps? Is the next steps to write about it? Because I you know, that's one of the courses that I offer craft your bestseller. A lot of nurses have a authorship inside of the inside of us because we have stories to tell, you know.

You do that as well.

So there's a lot of different ways that you can escape the burnout and really advocate for yourself so that you can and really gain that power back and really start looking at other so you can stop trading time for money and other streams of income. Because when I say stop trading times for money, what is it that we do when we want to buy a house, we just go we work extra, right, Or we want to put our kids through college, we just work extra and

Yeah, without a doubt, So how many businesses do you have?

So have I own two businesses.

I own Premier Fusions and Wellness, which is my wellness business, and then I own a Deal James Consulting, So gl James Consulting is my consulting business where I coach and mentor other nurses and my podcast is listed under my ideal of Deal James Consulting as well.

And can Australian nurses access your skills?

Absolutely because the services that I offer are online, their virginal and you can definitely access me through my website which I'm happy to share. I also have a burnout Guide that I can provide to your listeners and to your nurses as well that I created, and it really talks about helping you how to beat burnout. It really provides the strategies that you will need to really take

Burnout is a pandemic, right now it really is.

And it's just now that we're starting to realize that, and it's nothing, you know, it's identifying it identifying the symptoms. You know, if you're feeling anything like I mentioned earlier, like that disconnect or that exhaustion or that lack of sleep, you know, you have to really start understanding, like, you know what, maybe maybe I am overworked, maybe I.

Am going to burnout.

And you know, to answer your question about how do I not get burnt out from just my businesses is what I've learned to do is I've learned to structure my businesses so that it revolves around my availability. So, for instance, my wellness business, I've hired nurses. That's that's that's number one. And so in my case, if you're going to have a business, you need a team. Otherwise

To be everything to everyone and we can't.

So a huge part in one of the strategies that I mentioned in that burnout guide that I created that we're going to share with your listeners, a huge one of the first things you have to do is create boundaries, create boundaries, and learn how to say now right because and I may have mentioned this, when you don't say no, when you say yes to something all the time, you're saying no to something else.

And so creating those.

Boundaries and creating those boundaries for yourself they're huge. And for me, my work schedule for my wellness business is Monday through Thursday. And like I said, I have nurses who I'm able to work outside of the business and run the business and not work within the business. And that's because I have a team. So having a team around you and being able to delegate with your skills that we learned clinically, right, those those delegation skills are important.

Started to make more sense.

Because no one teaches us the business side of healthcare, so I was intrigued with it. But I can remember having my first budget that I had to go through as a nurse leader, and like there was no no one to show me how to do this, so I had to learn things on my own. And it was the same thing when I got into entrepreneurship. I had to learn how the finance side, but I got a mentor.

And that mentorship is what keeps me from burning out.

That was why I started tending this finis is that I saw a need for nurses to support nurses and be kind to each other and to ask each other if you know you're okay, and to look out for each other. And the one thing I have learned because I go to the States a lot to see my daughter is no matter where I have been and what nurses and doctors I have had the privilege of spending time with, we all want the same thing, which is

Exactly exactly because I think you asked the question about feeling underappreciated and undervalue if you have someone to empower you, if you have someone to simply guide you so that you Because I made mispeeds as a nurse, and I'm not necessarily, you know, referring to clinical mistakes, I mean I made mistakes. As a nurse leader. I meet mistakes, but again I didn't have mentorship. And think, you make a great point. Had I had a mentor in nursing. Now I had a mentor for my business, and it

I mean, I've opened.

Programs, closed programs, open units, created programs, created policies.

I've done all the things right. My units were constantly number one.

I decreased falls throughout organizations within the hospital from using my models.

And I say all this not to toot my own worn I say all this to.

Say, imagine, had I had a mentor and actually had someone actually able to guide me as a nurse leader, how far I could have gotten my last role in nursing. I've reported directly to the CNO, so my next level would have been CNO, which is where a lot of

So when you say can I.

Help nurses in Australia, absolutely, I can help other nurses, so not just clients and patients. Through my wellness, I can actually offer my services and expertise on a broader scale. And that's what it's about, and that is where I'm fulfilling my purpose.

And doesn't that make you feel good?

And it makes me feel amazing, It really really does. It makes me feel amazing. Often we limit ourselves to the traditional setting, and it's no one's fault because that's what we're taught.

We're taught clinical.

We're taught, you know, patient care in the hospital, at least in the US, we're taught, you know, the Florence Nightingale way of going, you know, going to the hospital, you know, taking the doctor's orders. But we're not taught that empowered me of entrepreneurship. We're not taught the finance and the business things. So unless you grew up at

Is unless it's inside the traditional setting.

Absolutely, and here in Australia, for the nurses that have gone out on their own and do it within the esthetic space, there's been a lot of pushback. People you don't like nurses that go out and unfortunately in Australia we're not like you guys in the States that applaud and love people that are hugely successful. We have a little bit of that British colonialism where you know, the tall poppy syndrome and if someone's doing better than everyone else,

Absolutely, absolutely, and you're so right. We feel shamed, so to speak, when we have to step away, and that's unfortunately how we've been trained, where we've been trained to think that it's something wrong when we step away for our own self care.

And I did the same thing.

I stepped away from I resigned from my position as a nursing leader, and I didn't have a job lined up. I just stepped away because I knew that I needed to do this for my own sanity, like I needed to really rethink where I was going and what I was doing and redefine myself and redefine my.

Purpose and my purpose.

It all really came back to still being a nursing being nursing and healthcare, but it was in a different way and that made me feel liberated. And I can appreciate, Yes, they're being seeing other nurses, you know, going forward.

Trying to reach their goals or.

Doing something different, because if this is not what is making me happy, I can't stay in that situation. And I was doing it, and I was doing it because you know, I had I have a mortgage. You know, I have a family to take care of. I have, so you have all of these you know, I don't want to say burdens, but this is a part of life.

Life. Life is life, right, yeah.

And you have all of these things that you need to take care of the last thing you need is to be in a situation where you're unhappy. But you have to be here because this is what's paying the bills.

That shouldn't be. That shouldn't be the case. I shouldn't have to be just because.

We've come to normalize burnout unfortunately, and the things that we go through at work as this is just what it's.

You know, you have to noble it.

Right, And unfortunately that's not normal and we shouldn't have to deal with it, you know, we we should not have We should not normalize it as oh well, if you don't do it, you're just not strong enough.

No, that's not it at all.

And we need to start realizing that we can speak up and it's okay.

And I love that people are.

Coming with you and saying that, because that's the first sign when someone comes to you and they recognize that they need help, we need to help them and not make it feel bad that they're coming to you for help. We have to help them.

If they're coming to you, it's because they need help, and it's for me. I feel obligated.

And again it's that part of nursing where we that nurturing side where we want to help everyone. So if I can help you, I definitely will, or I'll show you I'll give you a resource that can't help you.

And I absolutely love that, Lindra. I have loved every second talking to you. I appreciate you taking the time. I do have all your information, but I am going to put it all on the show notes. I love that you know you were doing so many wonderful things for nurses. It just warms my heart. And thank you for taking the time to chat to me today. I really appreciate it.

Well, thank you for having me. It's been great.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.