Unlocking the Resilience Code: Emotional Intelligence and Burnout Immunity

We've been fortunate to have celebrated the successes of many Penn CLO students and alumni as they have grown into thought leaders of organizational learning throughout the public and private sectors. However, in this edition, we will specifically highlight the achievements of Dr. Candy Weans, now a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the new book, Burnout Immunity.

Getting to know her a bit more, Dr. Weans holds multiple degrees and graduated from the Penn CLO program in 2016. Since then, her research has focused on the topics of burnout, emotional intelligence, and organizational resilience. She is an executive coach. She also holds a faculty position with the Police Executive Leadership Institute and a 26 year track record of organizational change consulting.

Most importantly, she says she is passionate about creating learning experiences that help people walk in their purpose and lead with their values. With that being said, we are thrilled to welcome Dr. Wiens to our program. Thank you for joining us today. May I call you Candy?

Of course, could you tell us a little bit about your health scare several years back while you were juggling work, school and also family life?

At the time, about 10 years ago, I led a very busy life like many of our current students and our alumni. I had three kids at home and I was traveling a lot for work and for school. I was in the middle of the Penn CLO doctoral program and it started to hit me. I started to notice things weren't quite right when I was sitting in class one day. It was a Friday afternoon and I got an email from my youngest son's kindergarten teacher and the email contained a video clip.

Of my son making a recording and it was just happened to be a day that they were doing what was called muffins for moms. It was the Friday before Mother's Day and because I was not in his classroom, his teacher took a video of him sending me a very sweet message, basically telling me that he loved me and he missed me and that he was proud of me for going to school. And when I was sitting in class and I saw that video, it just all of a sudden hit me that.

I was missing out on some pretty key meaningful moments in my personal life and my family life. And I had this sensation for a while that I was doing too much that I was really, losing a bit of focus on what my true core values were. It had been there, but I was burying it because I felt like I was really just so focused on pursuing my dream, which was important to me. But I wasn't realizing at the time that these sacrifices were impacting more than just me. It was impacting my family as well.

So that meaningful moment the passage of that meaningful moment was the beginning of a wake up call fast forward a week after that, literally one week later, I was in my doctor's office just for a normal checkup. The one where you go in and out of your doctor's office, you think you're going to be in there for 20 minutes, you get your a, and you go back to work. And the nurse took me back to the exam room. She checked my blood pressure.

She checked it a second time, a third time, a fourth time without saying anything. She went out into the hallway and while she was gone, I did what most of us would do, and I picked up my phone and I started checking my emails and responding to a couple of texts. At the time I didn't feel necessarily overly stressed, but I did feel a bit anxious. And I do remember thinking I've got to get back to work because I have a lot of prep work to do for this big leadership development program next week.

So anyway, , the nurse leaves the room and about a minute later, the nurse and my doctor walked in and my doctor came in and she held my hand and she sat down on the exam table next to me. And she asked me, she looked in my eyes and she asked me, Candy, are you okay? And I said, yeah, I'm fine. Felt a little anxious, a little stressed, but nothing out of the norm that felt normal to me. She said, we're going to give you a little bit of medicine.

I want you to lie down here for a bit and I'm going to call your husband and have him come and pick you up. And then I started to get pretty nervous about what was going on. She told me that my blood pressure reading was a 200 over 110. I did not know at the time what that meant. I really had no idea how scary that was. I just knew by the look on her face that it wasn't normal.

Turns out that, that a blood pressure reading that high can lead to any number of really debilitating and detrimental physical effects, including loss of eyesight, stroke. heart attack, even death. They were about to send me to the emergency room, but fortunately the blood pressure medicine that they gave me as well as a really strong dose of Xanax wasn't enough to bring my blood pressure down.

She then once my husband came, she then gave my husband some instructions because I was quite tired and lethargic at that point. But she instructed my husband I wasn't supposed to do anything for at least the next. three to five days. I wasn't supposed to go to work the following Monday. So my first thought when I heard her say that I had to stay home from work for a couple of days after the weekend, my first thought was I can't stay home.

I have a big leadership development program to run next week. I can't take time out of my schedule to just lay on the couch. My second thought was finally, I think she just ordered me to just get some rest and sleep. This is like the permission that I've been waiting for to just slow down and sleep and just rest, let my body rest. And then my third thought when it really hit me was she's absolutely right. I'm not fine.

This is not normal to have this kind of a wake up call, this kind of a physical experience where your body is screaming at you to slow down. So that was the beginning of that wake up call and what led to eventually this big interest in me wanting to understand what was leading to my stress, what was causing me to have that type of a physical reaction to it. And ultimately it's what led me to be so interested.

In stress and burnout research and eventually the emotional intelligence research as well.

But I actually just within the last several weeks, I learned recently from an author that I've been following that every once in a while, it's so important to just stop, pause and ask yourself, what am I doing? And what is it doing to me? Two questions sounds so straightforward and simple, but it really in practice, if we ask ourselves those questions throughout the day, like not just once in a while, but literally throughout the day, what am I doing right now? And what is it doing to me?

So at the time, 10 years ago, when I had that scare, I wasn't doing enough of that. I honestly, I was living in this state of almost unawareness. I was just so focused on my goals and so focused on avoiding going back to the lifestyle that I had before. I achieved some of the success that I had realized. So there were a lot of things that were driving that unawareness for me.

And that's one of the things I'm just extremely passionate about right now is just helping people understand that how important awareness is and there are so many ways that we can do that, that we can enhance our awareness.

Concept or construct of burnout goes well beyond just what we experience at work and it's a result of what we experience in our entire life. So burnout essentially is a psychological syndrome. It does have manifestations as well, but it's primarily characterized as a psychological syndrome where we experienced. Three common symptoms. And it could, those symptoms could vary person by person.

The first symptom or the first sign that we're starting to feel burned out is that feeling of just utter and total emotional exhaustion. If you've ever had that feeling where you wake up in the morning and before you even open your eyes, you think to yourself. I just can't even imagine getting out of bed today and going to work. I'm just so depleted emotionally. And primarily that feeling comes from serving other people.

That's why we see in the health professions, caring professions even in law enforcement or with educators as well, professions that require. Us to give a lot of emotional energy to other people, where at the end of the day, we just feel so drained and depleted. If we experience that for long periods of time, that can really increase that level of emotional exhaustion. The second symptom is called. Depersonalization or cynicism. And that's the feeling that we have about other people at work.

So it's that general feeling that I have a kind of a more negative or more bad attitude about other people that I work with. And that could be colleagues, peers, it could be customers or patients or students. It could be anyone in our work environment, but just having a less optimistic or positive view about other people. And then the third symptom or sign of burnout is what's called lack of professional efficacy.

And that's just a fancy way of saying that I feel less effective at my job than I normally do. And that, that occurs oftentimes when people are new to a role, they're new to a, an organization. They're experiencing some new big change at work that's requiring them to pull on new skills or develop new skills and that just makes them feel oftentimes like I just not as effective or not in my groove at work the way that I normally am. The interesting thing about professional efficacy is that.

It's the exact opposite, or it can counter affect the feelings of emotional exhaustion or cynicism. So the more efficacious that we feel at work, in other words, the more effective and confident I feel in my abilities, the less likely I am to feel emotionally exhausted or to feel cynical about other people at work. So that's the common definition of burnout that most burnout researchers and the World Health Organization agree with.

And then emotional intelligence is a construct that's been around for really literally hundreds of years. But it was around the late 1980s, 1990s that Daniel Goleman popularized the concept and brought it to the, to our attention and in the popular media. He later did a lot of research with Richard Boyatzis out of case Western, and then our own Dr. Annie McKee, who was the director of the Penn CLO program for a number of years and is still an adjunct faculty member at Penn GSC.

So I've fortunately been able to study under Dr. Annie McKee and the current most common definition of emotional intelligence is that it consists of four different domains. The first two domains have to do with Self awareness and self management. So my ability to be aware of, understand, and manage my emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. That's a very simplistic definition of those first two domains of emotional intelligence.

The second two domains of EI have to do with my ability to perceive, understand, and manage. What's going on in my social environment, my ability to build strong, healthy relationships with other people, my ability to empathize with other people my ability to participate in and lead effectively lead other people in a team situation. So the two intersect. Burnout and emotional intelligence intersect in really interesting ways, which is what my research has been focused on.

And I'd be happy to tell you more about that, but it, my, my studies have been some of the first that have directly looked at ways in which leaders and even individual contributors, and you don't have to be a leader to use your EI, but people of all walks of life, any profession, any industry in any country. My research has been looking at ways that we can use our EI specifically to manage stress and truly protect ourselves from burnout.

And then in the burnout space, it's Christina Maslach, Michael Leiter, a number of others. As far as primary research, my Research has been focused on chief medical officers. I do a lot of work with law enforcement. I've now done focus studies with a number of large law enforcement agencies, Los Angeles Seattle, Portland, Vancouver Oklahoma City and a number of other smaller law enforcement agencies where we're studying both police chiefs as well as that one or two levels below a police chief.

I've also studied leaders in many different industries, and I've been known to even interview bartenders and baristas. I will literally talk to anyone and everyone who is interested in opening up to me about what their experiences are. When it comes to stress at work and how they deal with it. And it turns out I, I believe from my research anyway, that regardless of the industry or the role, or even where you work in the country or really any country, it really doesn't matter.

These tools and strategies of emotional intelligence can be applied in any type of role leadership or non leadership role.

But one of the things that I didn't fully appreciate until I got into the interview process is that qualitative interviews are essentially an intervention. They're an intervention in your study participants lives. And just to give you one example, I'll never forget one chief medical officer that I interviewed Before our interview, he took the Maslock burnout inventory. It's basically a research instrument that tells us whether or not someone has burned out.

And I saw his results before I conducted the interview with him. And he rated his stress level as a nine out of 10, meaning that he was describing his stress as very severe borderline, worst possible stress. And he did characterize. As burned out on the mouse lock, burnout inventory actually had a quite a high level of burnout.

And in my interview with him he was kind enough to share a number of stories with me that I reported on, but towards the end of the interview, he started weeping and and we were on zoom and I saw him weeping a bit and I asked him if he was okay. And I immediately took off my researcher hat and I put on just my executive coaching hat and my supportive friend hat. And I asked him, doctor. Smith disguises name, but I asked him, Are you okay? And he said, I am okay.

Actually this Conversation is really opening my eyes. He said, I'm starting to realize more and more that I am suffering. I'm suffering and my family is suffering. And I've known for a while that I need to do something differently. So notice that his story was similar to mine, that he noticed a little bit. He had some level of awareness, but he wasn't necessarily doing what he needed to do. He wasn't what I call aware and care.

So he might have had a bit of an awareness that he was struggling and suffering, but it wasn't until the interview where he was opening up. To do something different.

There are a number of exercises that describe how becoming aware of not just what's making us more vulnerable to burnout in our current work environment, but also an awareness of my temperament and my personality and ways in which I might be. Causing and amplifying stress for myself based on my temperament, my personality and my past experiences. It also includes a whole section on having an awareness of what triggers our stress and why things are triggering us.

Melissa, for example, you and I could be working in the same stressful work environment, have the same boss, same conditions, but I might experience that stress much more intensely than you. Just based on my past experiences or again, because of my personality and I might be triggered by things that you are not triggered by. So having an awareness of all of these things and more, there's more in that chapter are the first and the most important step to then moving through the armor framework.

The second chapter is our, which is all about regulation. That's the emotional intelligence competency that we often hear of as self management. Self regulation impulse control. So that chapter is all about how we manage and regulate our emotions, our thoughts, and our behaviors. It also has a lot of information in there about how to really learn about your unique stress response. Each of us has a very different stress response, biologically and psychologically.

And so the more we learn about our stress response, the better we're able to regulate it, the better we're able to tune into what are the things that help me regulate my stress response, whether I'm experiencing acute or chronic stress. The third chapter of the book, the M is for meaningful connections. And in that book I talk about how we can use our emotional intelligence to connect to relationships.

To our values and to meaningful work and each one of those things requires us to have an awareness of what's important to us, as well as having the ability to regulate our emotions, thoughts and behaviors so that we can focus on and dedicate time and energy to meaningful connections. Our values and our and meaningful work. The O in the armor framework is about our outlook. Think of it as I think of outlook as mindset.

So the ways that we look at life, the way that we look at how we lead other people. So in that chapter, I walk readers through the four vital mindsets of resilient role models. Of people who have burnout immunity. So I talk about servant leadership, how that helps us. I talk about how having a stress is enhancing mindset, helps us navigate stress and protect ourselves from burnout.

The third mindset that really contributes to burnout immunity is having a positive outlook, which happens to be a very specific emotional intelligence competency. It really encompasses all of the ways in which we view things as either optimistic or pessimistic and how having a positive outlook really changes our subjective experience of stress itself.

And then the fourth vital mindset that I talk about is the aware and care mindset I mentioned before that it's not just important to have an awareness of what stress is doing to us, but we have to take that next step and actually care enough for and about ourselves to do something differently. So that aware and care mindset is that fourth vital battle mindset. And then the final are the final chapter of the book is all about recover, reconnect and reimagine.

It's what I call the three Rx prescription for resilience and for burnout immunity. So recover is all about how to heal from burnout, or if you are at high risk of burnout, how to back off and build more recovery into your schedule, into your life. So that you can reduce your risk of burning out. The second R is about reconnecting. So it brings us back to the meaningful connections chapter, where we learn how to reconnect to our values, our purpose, and to relationships.

And then the last R in the 3RX prescription is re imagining. So once we've healed from burnout, once we're reconnecting to the things and the people in our lives that are most important, and once we can change our view of our stressful work experiences and our environment, we can begin to re imagine the type of relationship that we want to have with work going forward.

I'll never forget a question that I was asked in an interview is that actually Dr. Annie McKee asked me this question when she interviewed me for my job at Penn. She asked me, how do you want work to fit into your life? And that question right there is about re imagining.

So that final R in that final chapter is about not just imagining your ideal self, but really re imagining this relationship that you want to have with work and how you want work to fit into your life and not the other way around.

Some of this stuff is just a mindset shift. It's training yourself to think differently. About your stressors, it's training yourself how to recognize the signs. So they're not necessarily the type of things that will take you more time or even more effort. You're just going to be thinking about things differently. And yes, you will be doing things differently. You may be setting boundaries differently.

You may be distancing yourself from toxic coworkers and putting up more emotional boundaries. But that doesn't necessarily take you more time. It's just a different way of doing things.

And I came up with the armor framework one day when I was out on a walk and it just all of a sudden hit me and I thought, wait a minute, if I can put this into a framework that makes sense when I teach it, when I teach a workshop or deliver a keynote. then maybe there is something there that I could turn into a book. So that's where it started to get real, turned from fantasy and a dream to actually do something with it. So then I started to get really practical. Okay. What do I need?

If I have the idea, I have the research, I can actually envision what will be in this book, but I need help. I can't do this alone. I felt like I was a good writer, and I knew academically that I could write I could write scholarly pieces, I could write Harvard Business Review pieces, but writing a book is a very different animal. It's scary, especially when you have a full time job and three teenage boys at home.

I started looking into writing coaches and I worked with a couple of different writing coaches who were incredibly helpful. But it wasn't until I met Catherine Nepper. Catherine was introduced to me by one of my HBR editors and Catherine and I just hit it off immediately and I knew. I need to partner with this woman. And so she and I wrote the book together. She helped me conduct a lot of the secondary research.

She took a lot of my stories that I would record into a voice recorder, or I would send her what she would call a word salad, just messy drafts. And then she would help me just put it together in a way that just made it sing. So for anyone who's considering writing a book and, but you're not quite sure about your writing skills, or you just don't have the time to write. I don't think there's nothing wrong with hiring a writing coach.

She didn't write the book for me, but she helped me learn how to write the book. And then she introduced me to my agent and then from there, it just things turned into a snowball effect of different introductions here and there.

I have a publicist actually two publicists now that I'm working with, and I'm also working with a marketing firm that focuses on bulk orders. So that group of people will help me process books. People, if people want to order 10 or more books, they help me with that part of the marketing strategy. So yes, I've surrounded myself with a lot of people and yes, It's expensive. But when you write a book that is being published by a big publisher, oftentimes it comes with a sizable advance.

So that advance has been able to help me afford to surround myself with just an incredible team.

They are pitching me to New York times. They will eventually pitch me to all kinds of media television they have a podcast strategy, but in addition to that, I continue to do a number of keynotes, which I've been securing on my own. I have a number of private clients that I work with, and then I'll have people reach out to me occasionally, just have heard from me through Harvard Business Review or have heard about me on LinkedIn and invite me to do either a keynote or a workshop with them.

What I think people will also walk away with that they may be surprised about is a feeling of empowerment and a feeling of inspiration that they will see not just from me sharing my story, but from a number of other stories of interview participants, people that I've been researching for years, that these stories are truly inspiring. These are everyday people. And executive leaders who experienced just extreme levels of stress at work, yet they are not burned out.

And so their stories are just incredibly inspiring as you read the details of what their day is like and what the types of stress that they are experiencing, yet they are applying their emotional intelligence to protect themselves from burnout. And if they can do it. I know that we can do it. I've been using and applying everything I've learned from my research participants, and I feel incredibly empowered. I know that I can do it. I rely on my organization.

I don't have to rely on other people's work. I rely on myself and my emotional intelligence to improve my psychological well being, and that's really empowering.

Of course, during the program, but also since the program, one of my very best friends to this day is someone that I met 10 years ago in the program. He was one block ahead of me and he's just been an incredible support system ever since then. And so it's not just the content. It's not just the. The work that we do to become researchers how that transforms our identity.

But it's also just the experience of being surrounded by like minded people who are just so intellectually curious about different topics. That's so inspiring. And it's almost impossible to, for me anyway, it was, would have been impossible to not transform my identity. And I see that with so many of our students and alums who go through the program who have similar experiences, just. really having that transformational identity transformation experience.

And so to every person out there who's thinking about applying to the program, just know that you will have an opportunity to be surrounded by an incredible faculty team as well as the peers in your cohort. The other thing I would just advise everybody to think about is think long and hard about. Managing your work schedule. And so if there are things you could do now to adjust your work schedule, take time off, maybe go back to only 80 percent time, something like that.

I scaled my hours back for a period of time when I was working on my dissertation, but anything you can do to just manage some of your work boundaries so that you can really focus on your schoolwork during some of those crunch times.

One woman just several months ago was in tears and she told me that was really inspiring her to make some changes that she knew she needed to have a hard conversation with her boss about her workload and her hours. To me, that's a clear indication, a clear example of the impact that this work is having on other people. The other way that I measure success is my ability to keep my stress in check. It's very easy for me, someone who's a serious. Insecure overachiever.

Serious insecure overachiever. That's hardwired in me. So it's really easy for me to throw myself into a million different things at once over commit, and then regret it a little bit later because I'm just not setting the boundaries that I need to manage my psychological health. And so to me, a measure of my success is my ability to protect myself from burnout, to really live and role model. The skills and behaviors and the mindset that I hope other people will learn

I need to order one of these for myself. So I went online and sure enough, they have an adult version of it. And the blanket feels like. rabbit fur, like bunny fur. And so when I am just like really overwhelmed, I find myself going through emails and I feel like I have way too many things coming at my psyche faster than I can manage and just starting to feel my anxiety level go up. I'll just take a moment and just go sit on the couch with my blanket and just meditate for five minutes.

And five minutes out of my day is yes. I can rationalize it as it's cutting into things that I should be doing, but no, that's probably one of the most important things I can do for five minutes to just sit with my blanket and meditate. And that right there can bring my stress response back to an equilibrium level where then I can get back to work with a little bit more of a clear head.

Include my psychological wellbeing, my physical health, my relationships with my family. So when I stay focused on my values and those values are informing my definition of success. Yes, I can have it all because I've started with the right definition.