Note: We use AI transcription so there may be some inaccuracies
Danielle Cobo: In this episode, we explore the art of building trust within your team and unlock an insider's guide to drive motivation, boost resilience, and beat burnout. Discover how mastering the a, b, C building blocks of motivation can help you and your team push past obstacles to reach success. Today's guest is Paula Davis.
Danielle Cobo: Founder of the Stress and Resilience Institute, an author of Beating Burnout at Work, why Teams Hold the Secret to Wellbeing and Resilience. A former lawyer, she studied applied positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Hi, Paula. I am so excited to have you join the podcast today. You and I have had the opportunity to speak a little about your background, really focusing on burnout, prevention and resilience, working with not only individuals, but as well as teams.
Danielle Cobo: Can you share with our listeners a little bit about your story and what you brought you into being an expert on resilience and burnout?
Paula Davis: You bet, and thanks so much for having me on your podcast, Danielle. I'm so excited to talk to you about these topics. I practiced law for seven years and I burned out during what became the last year of my law practice.
Paula Davis: And so it was a very frustrating, not fun period of time where I was very exhausted. I was very cynical, so people were really annoying me, especially my clients, you know? So it was outwardly very professional, but a lot of internal eyerolling going on that just led me to wonder and start to ask, is this really what I should be doing?
Paula Davis: Is this, Highest and best use of my talents being a lawyer, and I ended up discovering through a coach that I hired the Master's in Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania. My undergrad is in psychology and the positive psychology lens toward how do we help individuals, teams, leaders, workplaces, develop a sense of wellbeing really spoke to me.
Paula Davis: It was sort of like the thing that I had been searching for all along in terms of what really resonated with me and how I wanted to work. I just started to consume everything that I could that fit under that umbrella of research and applied to the program, and I got in. And I was the fifth cohort, so the fifth class, so kind of on the newer end of being part of that program, but it was there that I really developed and started to study the science of resilience.
Paula Davis: The professors at the University of Pennsylvania are really the world's leading experts, not only in what that science entails, but how you actually teach it to other people and how you teach it within the workplace. So as soon as we got to that segment, it's just an area of the science that I've just never gotten tired of.
Paula Davis: It's never left me. I could see practical applications toward it very easily. Amazingly, as I was finishing up my studies, I had a chance to stay on at the University of Pennsylvania and do my postgraduate work there as well. Which was phenomenal because I look back and I think hitting the research is one thing, but then actually translating that and figuring out how to teach it to adults, especially as a whole nother ballgame.
Paula Davis: Cause I was a lawyer, I didn't know how to teach science stuff to people, but I had an opportunity to be part of Penn's program teaching resilience, their version of resilience to United States Army drill sergeants and soldiers and their families, and then eventually DA civilians. That program changed my life.
Paula Davis: It's really though also where I really started to understand how the science of resilience gets used and applied by people. Once that work was done, being able to focus a hundred percent in my business and across profession, not only kind of focused through the resilience lens, but then also thinking about how to help people manage stress and prevent burnout, because that was.
Paula Davis: Initially the thing that brought me on this journey to begin with, and so there's a lot that I have learned over the years about both of those pieces of the puzzle.
Danielle Cobo: As military community, we know that they are often put in very high stake situations that some of us can't even comprehend what they're in, cuz it's very difficult to see not only the aftermath of war, being in war, seeing how it affects the people, the civilians that are affected by the war as well.
Danielle Cobo: These soldiers are put in these very high stressful situations and there's still. Expected to work as a team in order to be successful in executing their missions. What have you found to be that key factor of what fosters resilience among some of the teams? I'd like to know what are the breakdowns and then how do you foster it?
Paula Davis: That was a big part of what I wanted to research for my book. Cause I wanted to take a very like teams and resilience angle to a lot of what I talked about in my book. I just dove into the research and I looked at my own research and my own experience. Working with all sorts of populations. There was a framework that emerged and different pathways that emerged that I codified into what I call a primed model.
Paula Davis: So the acronym primed standing for one, each letter standing for an element of the pathway. The foundation of building resilient teams starts with the letter P, and so it's two things. It's psychological safety or trust. And so I, I'm sure you know this as a military spouse and I certainly saw this in my work with the military and continue to like, that's a key element.
Paula Davis: There is an extraordinary amount of trust that gets developed within military teams because when you're talking about operations at that level, you can't not have it. I mean, you have to be able to rely on your brothers and sisters in arms to be there in all sorts of situations. That trust piece is critical across all professions.
Paula Davis: And the other P is psychological needs, which is such a research-based term, so I use it for purposes of my acronym working. But I also call them your A, B, C needs the, the sense that we all need a sense of autonomy for flexibility and control with our work and what we do, we need a sense of belonging. We have to very critically feel like I'm part of a team that matters to me.
Paula Davis: I have leader support. People have my back and I feel cared about. Which is interesting I think, cuz people might not think about that so much with the military because you're thinking about drill sergeants and people with intense personalities. But it is a very, very core piece, as you know. And in the C is competence or mastery.
Paula Davis: I wanna continue to get better at goals that matter to me. And those two things are not just nice to haves, but they're foundational. They're very critical to. Orienting a team in a resilient way, in a thriving way, in a wellbeing way, and what have you. So those two pieces are ultra important.
Danielle Cobo: I've seen when organizations have maybe lacked the training and development for their employees, and I can see where you're saying a lack of belonging.
Danielle Cobo: Because when organizations, I've seen on the flip side, when organizations invest in their people, they invest in the training and development and up-leveling their skills. Brings in this sense of belonging, it brings in this sense that the organization cares about me and the future of my success within the organization.
Danielle Cobo: It helps foster a positive team culture. I agree with you a hundred percent, that when organizations provide that caring element and saying, we're gonna be investing in you and the future of your success, it boosts morale and it boosts employee retention
Paula Davis: as well. I guess if you know people, no one's really asked me this specifically, but if, if somebody asked me, if you could boil down, if you could solve the burnout problem, if you could increase resilience of teams and you could do it quickly and you could do it with one thing, what would you say is the most important thing?
Paula Davis: And to me, my off the cuff response would be, because I hear this so frequently in various different ways, would be to make people feel like they belong. To help people feel like they belong in their organizations and on their teams. Because the results are, as you suggest, and. When people feel seen, so not the gift certificate, gold watch type recognition, which I'm not saying we get rid of, but when you make them feel like they matter, when you make them feel like they are seen for their contributions and who they are and what they do and their skillsets and their capabilities, I.
Paula Davis: There's a whole host of positive results that come from it, and there's even a new study in the legal profession showing that when lawyers feel like they are valued for their humanity, for what they bring to the table in terms of their skillset, they're far less likely to say, I'm thinking of leaving the profession because I'm stressed and because I'm burned out, and because.
Paula Davis: I don't like it around here. And so there's very tangible, real world consequences to a lot of these elements, but particularly that one right now, I think we're having a really hard time with it. So many companies are trying to navigate a hybrid model of work with various levels of success, mostly not so successful.
Paula Davis: And that's a big piece of the puzzle right now. Is, how do we foster the sense of community and belonging and recognition and appreciation when people aren't physically present? These
Danielle Cobo: younger generations we're, they're doing a lot of research on the new and emerging generations that are coming with Gen Z, and they're saying specifically that these individuals, this generation, is looking for organizations that have a sense of purpose, community involvement in the community.
Danielle Cobo: So very different. Each generation kind of. Depending on its upbringing, depending on what events that have taken place in each generation have different kind of motivators within the workplace, but specifically the Gen Z is really looking at what I want, a sense of purpose and my work. I wanna choose a company that has a sense of purpose and contributing to the community overall as a whole.
Danielle Cobo: And that's becoming more and more apparent right now. And then also I'm seeing the organizations that take a step back and look at how can we incorporate everybody within the organization. It is very much against the thread, which before it was, here's upper management. We're gonna tell you guys what we're gonna do.
Danielle Cobo: This is the way we're gonna do our business. This is how we're gonna execute things. However, the organizations I've seen be most successful are the ones that create the advisory boards and inclusive of everybody from the top level executives to middle management, to even down to some of the newest members on the team because they come from this curiosity approach and ask questions that sometimes when we get stuck, this is what we've always done.
Danielle Cobo: It creates conversation and it's including everybody within the organization, helps build belonging and trust and purpose and part of the organization.
Paula Davis: There's so much to say with what you just said, and in part, it's almost thinking about it as a reverse mentoring situation where we intuitively tend to think like people who have senior levels of experience have a lot to offer in terms of teaching people who might be newer to the company or newer to their careers.
Paula Davis: A lot of information, and that's certainly true. What we forget though, is exactly what you said, is that people who are fresh to a team, are fresh to an organization, are fresh to their career even. They're looking at the world in a little bit of a different way, and they're looking at it with more of that curiosity mindset, and they're asking questions like, well, why do we do it that way?
Paula Davis: Have you ever thought about this? Or, I read somewhere over here that maybe this is something that we should consider. And that's one of the hallmarks too, of a psychologically safe environment, is you allow for those conversations to take place and to happen. And you don't shut them down by your reaction or by only listening to the two people who report directly to you or what have you.
Paula Davis: And you value people's opinions at all levels of end stages of their career. When you talk about the generational differences, I tend to think about those as work values. So we have different work values depending on how we were raised and how we came through the workplace system. So you have baby boomers who were raised in a very specific way, and a lot of them, when I'm talking about recognition and belonging and things like that, they're sort of like, why do I need to thank you?
Paula Davis: Right? Your paycheck is, thanks enough. I didn't get a lot of praise coming through the system, and so why are you telling me I gotta hand it down all the time? It feels really soft. I don't see the need for it. There's a very big disconnect there, and we can start to label the generations in ways that aren't productive.
Paula Davis: Gen Z and younger millennials are, they're just these meaty young people who, you know, need to have feedback in. They're handheld all the time and things like that, and it was, they were raised in a different way, and they have a phone in their hands since they were 10, and they've given feedback. They're the ones writing a lot of the reviews that we see online for all sorts of things.
Paula Davis: And so they're just used to giving feedback about things and they expect feedback in return. When you take a step back and you ask, is that really a bad thing? Is it a bad thing that they're asking to be given a sense of how they're doing? Is it a bad thing to be asked to be recognized in a way that makes them feel like they're cared for?
Paula Davis: And that creates this sense of belonging. The answers are resounding no. I think there's different pieces about every generation that you could probably hang your hat on or argue with. Or what have you. But we have to get out of that mentality of thinking the way that we did it is the only way that we can do it, or the way that I was raised in my world of work is the only way, and now they have to suffer and struggle or whatever we're thinking, go through the same exercise in order to get where I'm at.
Paula Davis: And the answer is you just, I mean, that's completely wrong. And not only that, I just think it's a lazy way to think and a lazy way to lead. There's a lot for us to dig into and I think about those intersections, but those are some big, I mean, you opened up a lot. Of really great stuff there with those comments.
Paula Davis: And to
Danielle Cobo: add to two of the topic, two of the points that you just brought up, one of 'em being that we can learn a lot from the newer members that are part of our organization. And I also wanna add to that. Different industries because so often I see recruiters or hiring managers saying, you need X amount of years of industry experience.
Danielle Cobo: And as a hiring manager myself, I often found that I like hiring people from different industries because there's different ways that they approach their business that we get to learn from. So if we only stick with you need X number of years of industry experience, then you really don't get to see how other organizations or industries.
Danielle Cobo: Go through their processes, how they organize, the way that they approach the business, how they react to different approaches of business. So I see that all the time with recruiters, and it kind of does light my fire a little bit. I'm like, no, no, no. You're preventing innovation in that way. I want everybody, I wanna build a team with different perspectives and different industry experiences and different values and strengths.
Danielle Cobo: In addition to that, when you were talking about work motivators, I know that a lot of times, The millennials were pegged as lazy. I understand, but when did we take a step back cuz you're also talking about how was each generation raised and the millennials, at least some of the older millennials. They entered the workplace during the 2008 market crash.
Danielle Cobo: So here it was. You're graduating college, congratulations. Oh, by the way, we're going through a recession. There's no jobs. And yet millennials were being pegged as lazy because they were living at home. Instead of taking a step back and saying, well, wait a minute, look at the situation that they were brought into.
Danielle Cobo: And I always say, ultimately, I'm responsible for the upbringing of my kids, so however they turn out is a reflection of my own parenting. We can't do the blame game. Planning an event with a specific goal in mind. Are you looking for a high content speaker with a motivational style? Interested in how to reengage your employees?
Danielle Cobo: My clients know the power of developing the grit, resilience, and courage to thrive in a complex and changing market. After a highly successful career as a Fortune 500 sales leader, I now share strategies on leadership development, change management, and burnout prevention. To discuss keynote speaking, corporate programs or individual consulting, go to danielle cobo.com.
Danielle Cobo: And let's talk about how I can make a difference in your business.
Paula Davis: Leaders really have to adopt that mindset and the mentality and when you bring up such a great point, and I think that now that we're 10, 15 years beyond the crash, that was a really profoundly. Horrible event, particularly for people coming out of school.
Paula Davis: I think people forget, like there just really wasn't a lot to really grasp onto in terms of job opportunities and work and everyone just sort of went inward, like, we gotta protect, but we're gonna protect cuz the world just completely shifted. Especially financially, and we don't know what we don't know, and this is bad.
Paula Davis: And so we've gotta like go into protection mode and so we're gonna lay off or we're gonna clamp down or we're not gonna hire or what have you. And so that really, really shapes you when you go through an experience like that. I mean, it really makes you think and rethink about what you want from your world of work, what you expect from your world of work and what you're willing to do for your world of work.
Paula Davis: And then you get to the pandemic. Where you've seen a lot of people just go through that same series of questions again and you can see them, is this really what I wanna do for the next 15 years? Not so much. I'm showing up and they think I'm a cog in the wheel is, that's not fun, right? There's no meaning in that, and we're not collaborating and we're not sparking innovation, and we're not doing all of these great things that motivate us.
Paula Davis: And so it's sort of like, what else could I do? It reminds me of how I started to think toward the end of my law practice, and we have to take those big events seriously.
Danielle Cobo: I would say that almost I'm on the older cusp of the millennial. I'm gonna actually embrace this because I'm on the older cusp, but I'm gonna embrace it.
Danielle Cobo: Mm-hmm. I believe that the resilience of starting my career through the market crash taught me how to be a saver, how to prepare myself for the future, because here I saw my parents, my grandparents, losing their retirement almost overnight. I also lived in California. I was part of that mortgage industry where all my friends were making all of a sudden this money and then just like in a snap, they had no job.
Danielle Cobo: They weren't savers. So I believe that that experience actually is what taught me resilience. And then fast forward to the pandemic is when I started a business. I started a business during the pandemic when companies were laying off employees. So I do believe that instead of pegging some of these generations, Into these segments.
Danielle Cobo: Let's look at the positive that came out of a very much resilience that's been brought through these situations.
Paula Davis: Resilience is not just about bouncing back, it's also about bouncing forward. So it's taking the lessons that you learned going through a challenge, an obstacle, a change in adversity, a problem, a stressor, a failure, a setback, whatever word you wanna put to it.
Paula Davis: In applying those lessons to future events going forward. One of my favorite concepts associated with resilience is called self-efficacy. That sense of. I don't know. I know you have young kids and I have a six and a half year old. The little engine that could is a popular kids book. Um, at least it was when I was growing up and the little engine always said, I think I can, I think I can.
Paula Davis: So when you can activate that mindset of, I think I can, I think I can. Even if it's tough times, even if there's an adversity, I can see that I'll lean on something like a network or I have internal capabilities or a thinking style that's gonna help me get through difficult things. That activates so much power in terms of increasing our resilience and increasing our motivation and our perseverance and our ability to just stick things out when we need to be able to stick things out.
Paula Davis: That sounds to me like what you're talking about is that going through those tough times taught you some lessons that you could apply and made you feel like this might be kind of a crazy time to start a business, but there's something about me that knows that I can do it and so I'm gonna try it. It might not work, but that's okay.
Paula Davis: I'll pivot and then we'll figure it out. But I'm gonna put a stake in the ground and try this thing out a little bit. So I think it's fascinating.
Danielle Cobo: And that's exactly how it was. I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna go for it, and if it works out, awesome. If it doesn't, then it's a matter of pivoting. I can always fall back on anything else that I had done.
Danielle Cobo: And that's absolutely true. It's the challenges that you overcome in life. Help prepare you for that next step if you've been through X, Y, Z. Okay, well, it's preparing you for the next. And I wanna shift a little bit on the words, cause I love that book, that little engine that could, I absolutely remember reading that as the child.
Danielle Cobo: Mm-hmm. But now shifting it just a little bit and saying, I know I can, I know I can. I know I can. Because it's very powerful when you sit there and you say, at night. I tell my kids, we do it together, we do affirmations and we say, I'm smart, I'm kind, I'm caring. I can accomplish anything I put my mind to and, and now going into, I know I can do this.
Paula Davis: That's a really powerful distinction in the language because you're right. I think I can, I think, gets us to a certain level in terms of a confidence mindset, but I know I can is what I hear is a much more powerful version of that. It takes some time though for us to be able to get to the, I know I can point anytime that we're trying something new or trying something that feels scary or might feel outside of our comfort zone, I think we're always gonna have mindset of, gosh, is this gonna work?
Paula Davis: Am I good enough? And being able to harness and manage some of those counterproductive thinking styles, which is also very central to resilience, helps in being able to get to the point where you can finally say, I know I can't. Really, really amazing, I think really hard step or mindset to be able to get.
Paula Davis: But you're right. I mean, once you get there, it's just sort of like the sky's the limit. You're not gonna stop me. That
Danielle Cobo: think I almost feel has a little bit of self-doubt in it. If that, think even if it's an 80% confidence and 20% self-doubt, I still believe it's there. But saying it, I know I can. And even if you don't believe it just yet, there is studies and research that show when you start to tell yourself positive affirmations, you start to believe it in itself.
Danielle Cobo: And as I said, if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. But at least you can lay your head down at night and say, I tried. I at
Paula Davis: least tried. And I learn from, and I think about that a lot cause when I'm on podcasts and being interviewed a lot of times, like we did here, and I'll talk a little bit about my story and people wanna know, how did you go from that to this?
Paula Davis: There's always a moment in those journeys where you think to yourself, should I make the leap? Can I make the leap? Why am I thinking of doing this crazy next step potentially. But then you get into it and you get further down your journey, and then you start to reflect and you start to look back. And I think to myself, like I could have gone back to the law firm that I worked at.
Paula Davis: They loved me there, and I did really well. And it would've been the easier and safer choice. And for a whole host of reasons, I just decided to go in in the opposite direction. I think about the people who wouldn't have come into my life and the experiences that I wouldn't have had. With the Army soldiers and beyond that really profoundly influenced and changed me and how I even decided to approach my business going forward.
Paula Davis: I mean, a big part of what I learned from the Army soldiers is the power of vulnerability and the courage to say, here's something difficult that I went through. So I say it's like weird that military people are the ones who taught me the most about vulnerability. But at the end of the day, they've been through so much and when they shared their stories, it made me feel like I could share my story.
Paula Davis: Cuz I never talked about my burnout story at all up until that point because I didn't feel comfortable doing that, and that switched a light on for me. That's hard. When you're in the beginning of it to see, you can't see all of those things. And I think Steve Jobs mentioned this in his, he has a famous college graduation speech that he gave, I think it was back in 2005 or so, but he always says you can't connect the dots looking forward.
Paula Davis: It's only when you're down the road and you reflect back that you can connect the dots and start to see like, this is why I did this, and this is what was meant to be. And so knowing that there will be these things coming down the road. It's hard to imagine that when you're starting something new or tough or outside of your comfort zone, but.
Paula Davis: They're the greatest rewards once you get there.
Danielle Cobo: And so for our listeners out there, this could be whether you're looking to start a new business or whether you are going for a promotion within your organization. Maybe you're getting a new job or maybe you're just trying something new in your existing role.
Danielle Cobo: You may not always know the how, but it's a matter of stepping into that uncomfortable area and believing in yourself and trying it and putting that action step forward. And then one day you'll possibly be looking back and going, wow, I'm so glad I took that leap of faith because I learned something through the process.
Danielle Cobo: I grew through That process became the person I am today. Thank you for joining our podcast today. Tell us where can our listeners find your book?
Paula Davis: Yes, so a couple of spots. You can go to my website, which is stress and resilience.com. So there's lots of resources there, including my book. You can also go on Amazon and find it, so it's called Beating Burnout at Work, why Teams Hold The Secret to Resilience and Wellbeing.
Paula Davis: Both of those spots are good
Danielle Cobo: and I'll be sure to include the links and the show notes for you listeners out there so you can just open up the show notes. There'll be the links that you can go ahead and purchase the book, either from both her website or Amazon. Thank you so much for joining it. I really appreciate it and I know our listeners will as well.
Paula Davis: you're so welcome. Thanks so much, Danielle.