You're listening to a CNA podcast. Hi, welcome to the Work It podcast with Tiffany and Gerald. Last month, we talked a little bit about high pressure jobs with a CNA Today colleague, but after that podcast went out, I thought we really need to talk about how to cope with workplace stress. Each day at work, I have multiple things on my to do list. Sometimes I have to have lunch at my desk and once I'm locked off, it's off to my second shift, my life as a mom.
Now Gal, you manage your own time and business. What are some stresses you typically face and do you try and add in some, you know, me time or self-care time in your day? Well, Tiffany, I'm with you on this. For me, it's a lot about dealing with things in my mind, right, about dealing with expectations from others and of myself as well. I think being a business owner plus the many other things that I do in my other parts of my life like my church.
I do need to know how to prioritize and also know what to react to and what not to react to. It's definitely not easy and in Singapore, we often hear many people struggle with like time and everyone is just in a perpetual busy mode. So this question about how do we take care of ourselves when our work is so demanding. And do we really need like a lot of leave
brakes just to fully recharge? So today I'm really happy that we have two people whose jobs are extremely demanding, but yet at the same time, they have found time to put together a book on how small actions can make a difference to their work, right? So with us, we have Dr. Adaira Landry. She's an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Hi,
thank you so much. Thanks for having us.
And we also have Dr. Risa Luis, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Hi, it's great to be with you.
Thanks so much ladies for speaking to us all the way from the US. Now both of you have worked in emergency medicine and I'm sure when you were there, everything felt pressing, right, because you are making life and death decisions. Was there a turning point where you realized that Your body was holding on to too much stress or any indication there was something wrong. Ressa,
I think in selecting emergency medicine, I knew that I was selecting a field that wasn't necessarily consistent with circadian rhythms, i sleeping. And really good physical, mental, social, emotional, all the ways that one could be healthy. Now, when you're in training, you don't want to get in trouble, you want to do a good job, you're working hard and the responsibilities for you to take care of patients. So the shift never had any time to take a
break to eat built in. However, in the hospital where I worked, there was a coffee shop. So I shared the story of speed walking to the coffee shop, grabbing a small coffee, grabbing a bagel, and by the time I had sped walked back, I had inhaled the bagel and I had the coffee for the rest of the shift.
And actually, Adara and I wrote an article about agency and how Microskills is certainly about navigating the workplace and professional journey, and we believe though that amidst these large institutions where you feel like you have no control and no agency, there really can be agency. And so I think it's really important even on the busiest shifts to figure out ways to eat, to figure out ways to make sure
you get sleep. And the final thing that we talk about in medicine, and there's more than 3, but these are 3 that we, we called out. is calling in sick when you're sick because it's kind of funny, not funny. We see many doctors in training and faculty doctors like walk around the emergency department with an IV in their arm. Maybe they had food poisoning because they ate something bad. Maybe they're pregnant in the first trimester and have morning sickness, or maybe they have
a bad migraine headache. We've certainly seen people kind of just work through it with the IV in their arm, medicine, fluids to continue to see patients and You know, again, we all know that that's not right for anybody, for patients, for the doctor, for the teams, for anybody. I'll add, I think one of the harder parts is that it's not modeled for us, how to take care of our own health, our own personal health. And I would say I did not learn how to
take care of myself from a colleague. I actually learned it from a patient. I had a patient, he came in with terminal cancer. It was very obvious that he was not going to be living for much longer, and I happened to just ask him, because it was a slow shift and I love to get to know my patients, how did you come to get diagnosed with cancer? And in that story, he shared that he was on
his last day of working as a consultant. He hung up the phone and looked at his wife and said to her, I'm all yours now because he had really been spending his entire mid-adult life consumed by working, and he was finally able to spend time with his wife. They were actually in the car when he told her this, driving to a primary care doctor's appointment because he had been having some back pain and his doctor was like, oh, it's probably just a kidney stone. Let's just check.
And within an hour of him hanging up the phone, he was in the doctor's office getting a diagnosis of terminal cancer. And what he said to me was so striking. He said, I worked my entire life for just that one hour of freedom. And at that moment I was like, oh my God, I am this person. I, I am this person who was just like, my own needs, my own health.
And not even just my own personal needs, it's also like the needs of my family, hanging out with them, spending time with them, my own hobbies, all of that was being deferred to this like later life that was assumed to be there, right, retirement. And I think in our line of work, we see so many people not reach that journey of like freedom. And for me, I don't think I really ever had an attending, so a supervising doctor.
sit me down and say, hey, it seems like you're not really prioritizing your own needs.
So there was always a reward for pushing yourself. I think Tiffany, that sounds like us in Singapore as well, right? It's not just in medicine, but I think in many, many areas of our work. People glorify themselves by saying that they're busy and they didn't have time to eat. It's almost like a badge of honor, right? And it perpetuates this thinking that then if I have to do self-care, it has to be long. It has to take up time, I have to take 3 holidays a year.
I have to spend a whole day by myself, but all these things take time, right? And from your experiences, is there a way to just have pockets of self-care during the day, throughout the day so that you don't kind of like run out of steam.
I think you really set up for us to discuss deliberate rest. Deliberate rest could be having a meal with friends. Deliberate rest could be making sure you exercise. Deliberate rest could be reading a book, not for your profession, but for pleasure. It can mean also like taking a walk in nature. So these types of breaks, these deliberate intentional breaks where you're resting, when you return back to the work, you're even more efficient, you're even more focused, and that
has proved true over and over again for me. So I really have reworked the way I schedule my days and my evenings.
So it's interesting that you brought up examples about taking walks, reading books. If I'm reading a book, I'm sure my mind stays on the book, but if I'm walking, my mind will start to wander. So I bet
all four of us are like that, that even though we're walking in nature, our mind is still going like right when I'm done with my nature walk, I need to do this, I'm going to do this. The science shows that even just being in nature exposing to nature does something to us and I'll use the example, there's a book called Your Brain on Art. If you go to a museum or if you go listen to music, like you feel it, it does something
to you, it moves you, it penetrates you. And so sure, maybe we're still thinking about the work we need to get back to or our to do list, but we've taken ourselves out of that environment of work, of sitting at the desk, of staring at the screen, that actually is restorative and does give us that break and I actually think about it, it allows me to also like, as I'm thinking, I'm like, oh, you know what, that's not important. I can take that off my task list.
So you know what, that is high priority. I got to make sure I, that's the first thing I need to take care of. It allows you to sort of reflect, these of be quieting the mind. There are many ways to quiet the mind, swimming, something where you're doing a repetitive behavior can do. for some people.
In this book that you've written, microskills and there are 9 steps on 9 micros skills to help with self-care. The other tip that I've noticed and I thought it was really interesting is to have a personal board of directors. Explain to us what is that and who should be in your inner circle.
A personal board of directors is what it sounds like. It's a team of people, a very dynamic team, meaning it's not a static group of people who are around you at all fixed times of life. It's shifting, it's changes in proximity. So someone might be very close to you for one period of time and then 6 months later, perhaps they're a little bit more drifted away because the need is changed. But it's this idea that you have people around you who have specialized skill sets.
That can help support you. For instance, around my personal board of directors, I might have someone who I go to once, twice a year for personal finance questions about investing strategies with taxes. I have someone else who I go to way more regularly in regards to raising my children because I have mentors for motherhood. I have someone for writing, someone who I go to to help me sort of better learn
the craft of writing. They read a lot of my work, they comment on it, they meet with me regularly. And so these are people who just have like finite skill sets and they sit at this theoretical table around me, almost like a long boardroom table you would see if you walked into a business room, right? And they sit around me and they add to my growth. It's important
to remember that this team is always expanding, right? So there's always this like open seat where you're hoping that as you're networking and meeting more people, you find others. Who you can bring onto your personal boards. One last comment about this idea of networking that we talk a lot about is it's not just taking from others. There's this very important need for you to also think about
how you can help give. And our first microscope of the book is nourishing relationships for people you trust because we think it's important to not just siphon off content from them, right? You have to give back the reciprocal nature allows you to really nurture that relationship.
You know this idea of the personal board of directors, it really requires us to allow people into our lives first, right? It really requires us to be that little bit more vulnerable, be willing to stop to listen to what other people are saying. I have a friend and I will consider this man to be on my personal board of directors and he always asked me this question. He said, How are you resting? It's like he doesn't ask,
how are you? because my response would be like, I've been busy, I've been doing this, he said, how are you resting? He goes straight to the point, right? Allowing people like this into your life, it can help with the self-care part because you do sometimes need that that check-in somehow. Yeah. So some people would ask, I mean, if they can get behind the concept of personal board of directors, but I guess the question is how does
that translate to self-care in the workplace? Like how do these people help me to care for myself at work?
I think it's really good to have someone on your board of directors really emphasizes that question you just mentioned, Gerald, like, how are you resting. So for me, I'm an advisor for the Harvard Medical School, so I have like 45 students who I oversee regularly. They all sort of consider me their self-care board member because I start every single meeting, every single time with tell me about your mental, physical, and social health. And I'm very direct about asking. So
how's your mood? How are you feeling about life? How are you exercising? I asked someone, something similar, how are you resting or how do you relax? And then I asked, who, who have you spent time with recently,
just to try to understand their social dynamic. But we talk about that much more than we talk about their projects and their research and their grades, because all of that is usually a reflection of those first three things, their mental health, their physical health, their social health.
And so I think it's important to try to recruit people who you think value well-being and have those folks in your corner who can check in with you and discuss with you strategies because it's a skill, like well-being, self-care is Not something that is intrinsic to many of us who are probably more so hyperproductive, workaholics, or we just feel intimidated to actually set boundaries. So people always think your bored must be people that are older than you or more experienced than you.
The same way we picture mentors, and I say that one of my favorite kind of mentors, peer mentors, people that are my same level, same age, same experience. To date, one of my long standing personal board of directors is a university friend. He has been my go to person with whom I discussed, for example, if I'm considering a job position. Number one, weighing it, but also then talking about how to negotiate. He's also someone that I call, and I have a few people because you don't want to tax one
person more than others. You want to spread out sort of the asks. This is someone I call when I have a difficult conversation, we role play the conversation and that's actually one of the great ways to work with.
board members is to say, hey, can I practice this conversation that I'm a little concerned about, but he also, even though he is not in medicine or in healthcare, has really highlighted for me that all of these different industries is all about communication, people management, morale building, navigating conflict, these themes which are the themes of our 10 chapters, literally go across all work industries.
Risa, you mentioned about practicing a conversation. There is a conversation that I would like to tap on both of you for. There's this one tip, one microscale that's in the book about offloading routine tasks that bring you no joy or purpose. Many Singaporeans will want to rehearse that conversation because they can't wait to get things off their responsibility, but they don't know how. They don't know how to speak to their bosses about it.
They would just suffer in silence. So tell us, how does that practically work out?
It's very important for us to make it clear that we are not referring to the core roles of your job. I have given many lectures on this exact topic. We should have a sense of happiness, a sense of purpose, a sense of growth when we're doing work, right? And if you're not having that, then perhaps the work you're doing is not right for you. And inevitably, every single time I give this lecture, Someone more senior raises their hand and says, Are you
telling people to quit their job? Because if I hired you for something and you tell me you're not going to do it because it doesn't bring you joy. I can't keep you there. And so I think that's a big, very important distinction, right? Like I'm a physician, I work clinical shifts, and if I were to say to my boss, I no longer want to see patients, that would be a problem as far as me keeping my contract, right? Because that's like the core aspect of
why I'm hired. What we're referring to is different. These are a lot of the more optional tasks that still fill our plate, that still cause mental overwhelm and burden. In the book, we actually try to take some of that challenge off of your plate by providing some scripts that will allow you to sort of have a starting place.
And from there you can workshop. I mean, I would say Chat GPT and all sorts of apps can even help you further along, but I have used Chat GPT as well for navigating conversations in anticipation for having it. And so there's all sorts of ways you can do it. The idea though is to make sure that the thing you are quitting or or leaving behind is not something
that would actually keep you from keeping your job. And and if that is the case, that's an important discussion for you to have with your personal board of directors. So the way I do it typically is there's something I don't want to do. I think about the stakes of this. Like, is this something where if if I say no or I quit, my supervisor would be upset or disappointed. It would impact my salary, my promotion. Like, what is the stakes of this thing that I'm stepping aside from?
If it's low stakes, a lot of that fear goes away. If I'm worried, that's when I go to my personal board of directors and I'm like, Hey, I'm thinking about stepping down from this, and I want to know what your thoughts are. Is this the right timing? Is this the right messaging? Who do I go to first? How do I make sure I control the narrative around this? And once you get used to this process, it becomes much easier every single time.
Yes. There's a really good graphic in the book where we talk about automating, delegating, and there are two others, and some things can just be taken off the plate. And so certain things, certain tasks can be automated.
Certain things can be delegated is say you want to train up someone who hasn't learned the skill that you no longer really are feeling it and you actually don't need it for doing the core roles and responsibilities of your job by taking things off the plate, that leaves opportunity for more things or for you to actually do some more of that deliberate
rest. Another thing that resonated with me when I was reading your book was to set limits on time spent during meetings. Now, this will be a very interesting one for our listeners because some people would say, look, I'm not the one chairing the meeting, so I can't set a time limit on the meeting that I'm going for. Can you help us by teaching us how to communicate with our peers and our bosses on trying to make a meeting like a half an hour meeting rather than a 1 hour meeting.
I think this is a challenge. I mean, we don't say that any of this stuff is easy. It's possible. It's a skill, and I think this is a very common challenge. I've been in this exact situation. I used to have almost 2 hour meetings regularly, and it was painful because I think we were probably only productive for about 30 minutes or so. There's this part of me that wanted to see how my peers felt first before I even raised anything.
Up to the person who was leading this meeting. And so I, I definitely remember asking other folks who were on my team, like, hey, what do you think about these meetings? And a lot of people were like, yeah, not very productive, not very helpful. So that was step one, making sure that my intuition was correct. The second step was really trying to understand the personality of the person who's leading this and how they will
respond to any suggestion. And that was a really important step because there are different leadership skills and styles, personality types, and so you want to know who you're working with. We talk a lot about learning your workplace culture and a big part of that is observation, observing just how sensitive someone is, how quick they are to respond in positive or negative ways. And so I think that was my second step was just trying to understand like how well does this person
take feedback? What are the best ways of giving them feedback? And then from there, I actually asked a mentor of mine what they think about my strategy, what they think about telling this person, and I got some feedback there. I think I started with just this idea of What's best for the team, and I think what's best
for the team is us being efficient. Yes. And so I really framed it around efficiency and sort of use language like we have these regular meetings and I'm curious if there are ways for us to be more efficient towards goals that I think would benefit all of us. So instead of having like a two hour meeting regularly, What are your thoughts about 30 minutes, and instead we use like an hour for our individual goals and we
work asynchronously. And it actually took some time, I actually think it took COVID, because we used to meet in person, but it took some time for us to really just like
Welcome. This is a better way. But I think for me, it was this idea of like not just like running into it and saying, Hey, these meetings aren't working for me, but it was like making sure that my intuition was correct, understanding who I'm working with and what's their best way of getting feedback, getting just a little bit of coaching on the language. And then phrasing it in a way that benefits them and the team, and it's not just like all about me.
Like this isn't working for me. It was, this isn't working for everyone. Here, here are ways that we can help everyone.
Yeah, well, if there's one thing that I'm taking away with with me from today's sport, it's really about how everything the micros skills are there for us to practice, but yet it's a challenge. It's a challenge. It requires us to adapt it into our own context and to be deliberate intentional in practicing them. So I'm really glad that both of you came on here to give us this reality check, right? Yes, there are micros skills, but you got to be deliberate about it.
So thank you for your time, Dr. Adara and Dr. Risa. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Thank you. Hello,
this is our Ask Me Anything segment where we take on a work-related question that you have sent to us. Do continue to write to us. We really, really love answering them. Now today's question is sent by our listener, Josiah. Let me read, Josiah says, I am job hunting now and I understand that it's important to write my resumes for the job that I'm applying for. But I find it a waste of time to write
cover letters. Are cover letters really necessary? And if I must submit one, how do I make my cover letter stand out? Josiah, I feel you. So I'm going to ask Gerald this question. Why do we even need cover letters in the first place? I think Josiah asked a question that many people have in their minds as well when they're job seeking, right? Like writing the resume is painful enough, right? And then now you got to. The cover letter to it and you don't even know
what it's for. So I think if today we go back a little bit in history to where the cover letters start from, right? In the 50s, right, in the US, they started to ask for cover letters to try to understand a bit more of the context of why this person is trying to apply for a job. So at the back of the cover letter, they have your resume, right, or your qualifications, your experiences, but in the front, it's meant to be that summary, a quick snapshot of what you have and also
So why are you applying for this job, right? So this was done in the 50s and as the name suggests, cover letter is meant to cover the the resume. So it's the first thing that you should see. But this was in the 50s and right now today in our modern society where the number of job applications outnumber the number of jobs on average I think 200 plus, easily 200 plus per job applicant. So you can't imagine a recruiter reading everything, right?
So what I've often observed is recruiters will just skip the cover letter. They go straight to the resume, they will take a look and then they would come back. They would come back to the cover letter. So instead of reading it first, they may usually last the second thing and of course they will spend more time reading the front page, the cover letter, if the contents of the resume fit with what they're looking for. OK, OK, so don't write a generic cover letter that's what you're saying.
Understanding it right that put effort into your resume first so that it will peak the hiring manager's interest, then write a good summary for your cover letter because then if you are shortlisted as the top 5 people that they want to maybe send to the next round, they may then read your cover letter. Yes, I think the cover letter still has its purpose. I wouldn't suggest to omit it. But like what you mentioned, right, the resume, it should be a strong one, right? And then your cover letter
reinforces what is on the resume, right? There are a few other things that you can do with your cover letter as well. The first thing is to add a little bit of personality, a bit of the why. Why are you attracted to the company, or what about the product or the service is relevant to what you have done before. So these are some of the things that you may not be able to add into your resume that much, right?
So think of your cover letter as a little bit of the forward piece while your resume is like a training back in your career experiences. OK, but I never read the forward part of any book. So just assume if let's say today the recruiter is printing out some of these documents, right, and the first thing that they put on top is the cover letter, right? So then Their eyes would glance and they would see some things
on the cover letter. You catch the eye, right? So that's why it's important to also have some good formatting on the cover letter page, bullet points, numberings so that they don't have to read the whole letter, but when their eyes are drawn to something very concise and they see that and they like what they see, and then it will encourage them to turn back, right? The other thing often I remind people is in a very tight race where many people are hunting for the
same job, sometimes smallest preparation makes the difference, right? The things that you do slightly differently, with a bit more effort, a bit more heart, it might just get picked up and you're just hit by that. Yeah, so don't give up on the cover letter. That's what I'm saying. Some people I know, some companies I know they, they
may even take it as incomplete. If you don't provide a cover letter, it just, OK, so I know of this recruiter, this one person, I won't name who this person is, but I observed that the person tended to omit applications that didn't come with cover letters. They infer it as like you're not sincere because we asked for a cover letter and a resume, right, and you didn't want to provide that. So I'm just going to meet you lah. It's incomplete and basically the person
halved the number of applications to screen. Wow, wow, so half of them didn't provide a cover letter and automatically they were not considered. So I think you can be a little bit more cautious and just provide. But make the most of it lah. Don't just provide something that is similar to what you've written, customize it a bit, add your personality, a bit of your why you're going to be there. And of course, ending off
with a call to action, right? Put down your phone number there again, right, because again if it's on the first thing that they see, you're just making their life a bit more convenient. Yeah, exactly, make it easier for them. to contact you. Yeah, I mean that I can get behind because I think with the resume we are all kind of just throwing out sometimes the entire bus, right?
The bus and the sink and everything. So with the cover letter, you're saying it's OK to put bullet points, show a bit of your personality and also the tone is be nice about it and then lastly to have the call to action. Well, yeah, so that answers my question too, because I've always wondered like how much effort should I put in my cover letter and how do I actually even stand out among the CEO of cover letters. Well, if like Josiah, you have a work-related question that you think we can
help you to answer, do write into us. We are at CNA podcasts at Mediacorp.com.sg. We're also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Me Listen, and YouTube where a video version of this is at. The team behind the Workki podcast is Christina Robert, Joanne Chan, Junai Johari, Sayey and Alison Jenner. Video by Hanida Amin. I'm Gerald and I'm Tiffany. Have a super work week ahead.