Emotional Intelligence Stops Burnout & Builds Resilience

✨ Emotional Intelligence, Burnout Immunity & Exploring Stress Resilience for Mental Wellness

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Highlights: 📍
🧘‍♂️ Stress Tolerance: Discover how some high-performers withstand stress without succumbing to burnout, and the role emotional intelligence plays in fostering resilience.
🔎 Self-Awareness & Regulation: key strategies in recognizing personal burnout triggers and managing stress proactively.
🔗 Meaningful Connections: Learn the significance of nurturing deep connections with your values, work, and colleagues to maintain a positive outlook even in challenging times.


Join us for a discussion with Dr. Kandi Wiens, Director at the University of Pennsylvania's Master's in Medical Education Program and author of "Burnout Immunity." Kandi shares her personal journey through a severe stress-related health scare to her intensive research into why some remain unaffected by burnout.

We dig into Kandi's findings on the interplay between individual traits, learned stress-management behaviors, and the impact of cultivating strong emotional intelligence skills. 

➡️ For leaders and individuals looking to build resilience and foster a healthier relationship with work. Learn to navigate the complexities of burnout and discover pathways to immunity.
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Transcript

Burnout rates are soaring, but not everybody is affected. Hi, I'm Chester Elton and this is my dear friend and co-author, Adrian Gostick. Well, thanks, Chester. Today, we're going to figure out why some high-performing people manage to avoid the crippling effects of burnout, despite being under intense stress. As always, we hope the time you spend with us will help reduce the stigma of anxiety at work and in your personal life. And with us is our new friend, Dr. Kandi Weens. Kandi is the director of the University of Pennsylvania's Master's in Medical Education Program, and co-founder of Big Sky Leadership Labs. She is the author of the new book, Burnout Immunity, how emotional intelligence can help you build your resilience and heal your relationship with work, published by Harper Business, our publisher. So Dr. Kandi, we are delighted to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for finding the time. Thank you, I'm excited to talk to you both. Well, we're gonna make you vulnerable right from the beginning here and ask you about your experience, Kandi. You began, you say, researching burnout after your own life-threatening experience. Can you walk us through that experience and how it brought you to the work you're doing today? Yeah, I did experience a life-threatening incident with burnout. Let's see, back in 2013, 2011, I'm sorry, I was a management consultant and like many management consultants was on the road a lot. I had three young kids at home I was working 70 80 hours a week pretty intense type of work to a lot of change management work, which is quite demanding emotionally as well as Mentally, and I I carried a high level of stress and anxiety, but I thought that was really pretty normal for me I'm pretty type a and I didn't really think that much about it. Went into, I had other signs coming up that I ignored most of the other signs, but it really hit me when I went to the doctor just for my annual exam. And that's the kind of exam where you go in and out and you think, oh, I'll get my A plus and I'll be home in about 20, 30 minutes and get on my calls for the afternoon. Well, it was the opposite of that. I was in the exam room with the nurse. She checked my blood pressure once, twice, a third and a fourth time, and didn't say anything to me. She left the room, a few minutes later, came back with the doctor, but while she was gone, what do you think I did while I sat there by myself with my cell phone? You started working. I got back to work, of course. That's what we do. We're dedicated to our clients. So when the doctor came back in, she asked me, Candy, how are you doing? And I said, I'm fine. And the scary thing is, is I actually felt fine that day. I didn't necessarily feel any more keyed up or anxious than I typically did. But what was going on was a blood pressure reading of 200 over 110, which is considered a hypertensive emergency. I was 41 years old and quite healthy otherwise. And I knew it was because of stress. It wasn't, in my case, it wasn't genetics or physical health or anything like that. It really was just chronic stress that I wasn't taking care of. So she ordered me to bed rest for five days. I went home and I spent a lot of time on Xanax, just kind of chilling out and taking care of myself. She told me I couldn't go back to work for at least five days, which of course when she told me that, I thought that's not going to happen because I have a big leadership development program to run next week. Again, putting more anxiety on myself, my expectations of myself. Then my second thought when she told me that was, finally, someone's giving me an excuse to go home and sleep. And then my third thought was, well, she's right. I do need to pay attention here and take some time to really think about not just my stress but also my relationship with work. So that's what I did during those five days. I took it really seriously, started reading a lot of self-help books about anxiety and stress and emotional intelligence and things like that. And one thing led to another and I became so curious about this and I wanted to solve it for myself. So after reading all this material on my own, I decided to start a doctoral program in 2013 at the University of Pennsylvania and I chose to study why some people get burned out and others don't. So my studies primarily look at people who experience a very high degree of stress, considered severe, very severe, or worst possible stress for a long period of time, typically six months or more, yet when I measure if they're burned out or not, they are not burned out. So I look, I interview them, I have the in-depth conversations with them, sometimes multiple times, and sometimes it's observation where I'm, you know, with them in their jobs and observing their behavior and how they manage their stress and anxiety, but I'm looking for how, specifically how they're using their emotional intelligence to manage their stress and protect themselves from burnout. So that's what I do today. That's I'm focusing my career on helping people learn the skills of burnout immunity so we can all protect ourselves and see hopefully make an impact on the global burnout levels. Yeah, we're sure at all time highs right now, right? The wave from the pandemic feeling like we've got to catch up on the two years that we lost kind of thing. Hey, I have a question for you though, because you're saying how to be immune from burnout. Can you really be immune? Absolutely. Yeah. Is someone born with that kind of tolerance or is your instruction the way to do it? Well, it's a little bit of both. So some people are naturally more, what we call stress tolerant. And most of us have met people like that. So let's say all three of us work in the exact same environment, we experience the same stressor, same boss and all of that. Some of us just naturally are, because of our temperament and our personality, more tolerant of certain types of stressors, maybe not all stress, but certain types of stressors. But then it also has more, actually just as much, if not more, to do with the way we are conditioned, the way we learn how to manage stress as we grow up as kids, young adults, and then into, you know, early parts of our career. So as we're observing from other people how they manage their stress and anxiety, we are picking up on that and we're conditioned to develop protective patterns. Those protective patterns may work for us when we're young or when we're young adults, but then when we get into the workforce, a lot of times those protective patterns don't work as well. But yes, absolutely, someone can develop burnout immunity. Well, so it's interesting. You talk about, you know, we know people that it just doesn't bother them that much. My opinion on those people is they just don't care. And so is that part of like the way you grew up? He's like, I guess I should care what you think about me, but I don't. I mean, is there a personality type that is a little more immune to stress? So I've done research on both personality types and temperament, two different things. And so the thing with personality is people who have neuroticism, is that how you say it? Easy for you to say. Right. But they tend to be more prone to burnout because they tend to run more revved up and higher natural anxiety in general. But really most of what we're seeing is that people can learn skills to be more either protect themselves from burnout, in this case that you're mentioning like experience a stressor and not care about it as much. That's regulation. That's choosing not to care about something. So that's an emotional intelligence complex. I think it's a bit of a fallacy that they don't care because they just don't let it bother them as much. But it doesn't mean that they don't put in the time or effort. But some of us look at it like, well, you're not stressed out, you're not anxious, you must not care like me. And I think that is that a fallacy, though, Candy? It could be. And see, this is my case, too. You know, you think about a duck on water. I mean, I was Internally, I was feeling a lot of stuff But externally I look like calm and composed and had it all under control So, you know it I agree with you that it's not that people don't care, but they may not They they may not care to get emotionally involved in something Yeah, yeah, they're just not going to, I'm not going to let this stress me because I have no control over it. I can control what I can't control. Now one of the things you talk about in your new book, Burnout Immunity, which everybody should pick up here, you say there's some skills we need to build to develop more of our EI, our emotional intelligence, which a lot of research has shown is a lot more effective in building our success than intelligence or social skills, et cetera. And especially EI can help us with high stress situations. So can you help us understand some of those principles? Yeah, I'll cover a few of them. So the book cover, that's the entire book really. But two of the biggest ones are self-awareness and self-management, or also called self-regulation. So let me take self-awareness first. A couple of big things there that help us manage stress and protect us from burnout. One is understanding and really being aware of what makes you more vulnerable to burnout. What is it about your personality, your temperament, what it is you really want and need in a work environment, and then also having an awareness of when there's a mismatch or misalignment with what you're actually experiencing from the job. Awareness also includes what makes you more vulnerable. What are the kinds of things in your work environment that might make you more vulnerable to burnout? But awareness also covers what I call what makes you tick and what ticks you off. So what makes you tick is having an awareness of what motivates you and really energizes you and gets you excited to get up in the morning and go to work. And what ticks you off, that's understanding and really having a solid awareness of your triggers. Really not just knowing what your triggers are, but the underlying reasons for those triggers. Where did that come from? Again, the three of us could work in the exact same work environment. One of us could be triggered by something that the other two aren't. So that's self-awareness. And then the other biggie is self-regulation. And that is all about regulating and managing our emotions, our thoughts, and our behaviors. But it's also about knowing our nervous system, which is self-awareness of our nervous system, and being able to regulate our nervous system. So one of the things I personally have been working on for a number of years is learning how to really pay attention to my physical signs and other signs when my blood pressure is going up. I can actually feel it now, I didn't feel it before. And so regulating my nervous system, for me, it takes, and one thing that works is going out for a walk. So if I have a break between calls, I'll go out for a 10 or 15 minute walk, get some fresh air. Looking at pictures of my kids or watching a funny video that they recorded for me. I mean, there are different things that we all do to regulate our nervous system. But those are the two big ones. And then the rest of the book is really focused on what I call meaningful connections. And those are meaningful connections to our values, meaningful connections to work that matters to us and other people, and meaningful connections to the relationships we have at work and at home. It also includes our outlook at work. Do we have a positive outlook? Those that do have a more positive outlook, really despite even extremely challenging circumstances, like a lot of the police chiefs that I interviewed, very extreme stress that they were under during the pandemic and in the summer and fall of 2020, yet many of them that I interviewed really did maintain a positive outlook and felt that the work that they were doing was, things would get better, but they had to be a part of the solution. They had to be a part of making it better and changing the culture of law enforcement. And then the final chapter really gets at one of my favorite things to help people work on, which is how to recover from burnout, how you use your emotional intelligence to recover from burnout. And there are a number of tips and strategies for how to incorporate micro recovery, as well as like longer-term recovery. If you need to really heal from work, you might need to get out of your current work environment to actually mentally and psychologically heal. And then those folks that are then healing from burnout need time to reconnect to the people, places, experiences that really make them happy and bring joy. And then the final part of using their emotional intelligence to recover is about reimagining. So after healing or being on that journey towards more positive psychological health, it's really reimagining. What is the relationship that they want to have with work going forward? You know, how what does that look like? What's the ideal work environment for them? So that's it's a there's a lot packed in there in the book as far as how to use your emotional intelligence Well, you touched on something I'm really curious about because you know We all get feel like we're trapped in certain jobs, right? Whether we're trapped because we're making more money than we thought we'd make and we can't replicate that money anywhere else. And we've all felt like this is just too much at some point. So what do you counsel people on when you say, look, you're just working in the wrong place. This doesn't align with you. I mean, you gave us some tips in there, but yours was your doctor said your job's killing you. So that's a pretty good red flag right there. What are some of the things that people that are listening can say, you know what, I'm kind of feeling that way at work that kind of lets them know that maybe it's time to move on. Like you say, for some people, they've just got to leave that job and recover somewhere else. Are there two or three triggers you can share with us? Sure, yeah. I wrote a section in the book called, Know When to Get the Heck Out of Dodge. And it's really knowing yourself, that self-awareness. It's really paying attention to What? Sacrifices you are making you know what are the sacrifices that you're making to your psychological and physical health your relationships Your how is your performance being sacrificed? Because of what you're experiencing stress wise and then when I'm coaching people or even in the book There are a number of tips for so once you really can compare the sacrifices that you're making to your physical, psychological health and your vision of your ideal self, and if those two things aren't really matching up, those are big indicators that you might want to create an exit plan. eventually get out of the work environment. That was not the right, it was a great place to work. I loved the work I did, but it wasn't the right place for me and my well-being. So how do people learn more about the work you're doing now then, Kandi? Where would you send them? Yeah, I have a number of free resources on my website, which is KandiWeens.com. K-A-N-D-I-W-I-E-N-S. I have a number of Harvard Business Review articles and we've got a fast company article out there that I wrote a week or two ago And then I'm gonna start writing for psychology today. We'll have a monthly newsletter with psychology today coming out I think next week so free resources there if if you can't get your hands on a book It's a very little credibility. Okay, so just just Harvard psychology today fast company, okay Okay, yeah, so nothing, that's great. I was published in the Summit Grocery Store free flyer here in New Jersey, so, kind of the same thing, really. That's true, they asked him to do a regular column. Hey, some stress is okay, Candy, but too much can kill us, is kind of what you're saying here, that some stress gets us excited for the work we're doing, as you said, you enjoyed what you were doing. So how do we determine our sweet spot of stress, that's gonna let us be motivated but not burn us out? And how do we regulate that, that we back off when the boss is screaming for deadlines and there's the usual pressures of work? How do we do that? Yes, well that's absolutely right. We all need some amount of stress to help us feel engaged and motivated and to start to get to a point where we're performing at our best and this is true for athletes as well who rely on their physical performance. Their performance improves as they have more stress put, you know, as they're conditioning their bodies to prepare for whatever it is they're going to do. So same thing with work that requires a lot of psychological effort, that we have to, we need some amount of stress to help us feel like we're learning and growing and starting to perform. And then we get into this zone, which is called the sweet spot of stress. So that's where we start to see our peak performance. We feel like we have a greater capacity to learn, to take in and retain and process new information. And that's really our growth zone. And it's that sweet spot of stress. But then we get a little more stress than that and we start to feel, like gradually start to feel a little bit anxious and then overwhelmed and then eventually burned out. So the more stress we get past that sweet spot of stress, it puts us in what's called the distress zone. So what I encourage people to do when I coach or run workshops is we help people look at what specifically are their cues or their tells that indicate when they're slipping out of their sweet spot of stress. And for everybody it's different. You might notice signs with your physical or psychological health but a lot less creative or I feel you know I notice that I'm less open-minded when my boss asked me to do something I'm noticing that I'm feeling a little bit more cynical so you want to really pay attention to the very subtle clues and and signs that you are experiencing and that's a skill to develop and then it's regulating know how to back off from that. Here's the good news about when we feel ourselves slipping into that distress zone, or maybe even to a point of burnout. The good news is that most of us have been in a sweet spot of stress at some point in our lives. May have been years ago or whatever, but if you can recall what it feels like, and really what your conditions are, what are the perfect conditions that keep you in your sweet spot of stress? I find it deeply reassuring to know that I've been there before and I can get myself back there. It's just gonna take a lot of work. It's gonna take regulation skills. Wow, you know, with the burnout levels being so high, this is such an important book that you're writing and tools. So just one more quick review. Somebody has gotten to the point of burnout, right? Give us like one, two, three steps that they can use to recover and get back to that happy and productive life. Yeah, well, the first thing I would say is, burnout is, it's a degree. It's not just burned out or not burned out. You might have a low level or moderate or high level of burnout. If you are experiencing burnout that is really compromising your physical health or your psychological health, in my case, it was physical. But I interviewed a woman who told me that she was working, she was a graphic designer, working 80 plus hours a week for a long period of time, sleeping at work, barely sleeping, I should say. And she said she hit the wall when she found herself at the rooftop of her building, thinking about jumping off. So my first piece of advice to anyone who is feeling burned out is if it gets at that level, you need to seek immediate help. That's really what you need to do. And then the rest you will figure out as you go. You need to surround yourself with the right support depending on what your situation is. But for someone who has more of a low level or moderate level burnout, which is most of what we see, there are things we can do to integrate more regular or micro recovery practices. And for me, I'm at my desk a lot, whether I'm on Zoom or I'm writing or researching or whatever. And so for me to feel like I have energy at the end of the day to give to my family, I need to get up throughout the day, at least once every hour or two hours, get up, stretch, walk outside. And so integrating whatever it is for you that helps you sustain your performance and just your energy level throughout the day. But then, of course, we all need regular long-term recovery, whether that's in the form of a long weekend without checking emails, right, with really focusing on what you need, or it might be the vacations or the sabbaticals. But for some people, like I mentioned, recovery might be more in the form of getting out of the workplace that's making you sick in the first place. So it really depends on the degree of burnout you're experiencing, where you can get your support, but as quickly as you can surround yourself with people who can help you navigate and understand more clearly what you're going through, provide empathy, help shift your perspective, help you gain clarity on your values, surrounding yourself with people that really build your resilience. That's one of the most important things that really anybody can do, regardless of how burned out they are. This has been great, Candy. I love that idea of creating meaningful connections versus just connections, those deep relationships that will support you. And I love your personal self-care tactics as well that you've woven in here. You know, going out for a walk, you know, breaking up your days, not filling hour after hour. That's been terrific. Hey, give us one last thought here. Send us off with a closing thought. Before you began this work to now, what have you learned that we all need to remember about burnout that maybe, you know, you hadn't realized before? Yeah, I would I want to leave this on a really optimistic and hopeful note, because burnout is quite depressing. And and of course, anyone who's who might be listening and is experiencing it might feel a little bit like, I don't know if I can change my situation. I don't know if I just feel a little bit hopeless. That's one of the characteristics of burnout is a feeling of hopelessness. But let me tell you from my personal experience, as well as a number of people that I've interviewed that have recovered from burnout, you will recover. You need help first. So it is absolutely possible to recover from burnout. And you just have to take the right steps. And Burnout Immunity, the book, will walk you through whatever it is in your specific situation that can help you with that. But it is possible and don't lose hope. Excellent. Our guest today has been Dr. Candy Owens, the burnout immunity author, how emotional intelligence can help you build your resilience and heal your relationship with work. You know, Dr. Owens, this has just been so great to have you here. Yeah. A little love, clap, you can't see us, but we're clapping. And I hope those of you that are listening will visit her website and will pick up her book. This is such an important topic right now, particularly with burnout levels being so high. So thanks again for finding the time and good luck with the book. Thanks for having me on. So Adrian, lots of information. Give me your big takeaways. Well, a few things to really jump out. First off, yeah, we talked about, Candy talked about near the end that, yeah. You were moving some papers or something? Sorry, that's me. It's always me. It's not you, it's me. I actually, I knew that. Okay, here we go. So, Adrian, a ton of good information, a ton of tactics. Give me your two or three big takeaways. So many today. We think of burnout as you're burned out or you're not. What Candy is saying there, no, the degrees of burnout, know where you're at. Is it something as simple as being able to take a weekend off or do you need to get out of Dodge? You've got to really see where you're at right now if you're feeling you're at that point. I think too, her personal experience obviously is driving all of this to the point where she's got a doctoral program on how to deal with burnout. It's that big a deal right now that people are burning out, so I really appreciate all the work she's doing. She talked about self-awareness and self-regulation. I love her little wordplay there, what makes you tick and what ticks you off. I thought that was great. You know, and it is so important for us to self-regulate like that. Like, where are my happy zones? Where are my stress zones? And how do I deal with it? Interestingly enough, she says, look, I have to get up and move. I gotta get up and go for a walk. And that really helps me. Pictures of her kids, videos of her kids. She knows that, and so that's her go-to, which I thought was really important for us to find those things for ourselves, right? Yeah, yeah, I say, you know, the underlying there is what makes you vulnerable to burnout? What is it that's in your environment that you, you know, you say, for example, I know somebody who says, look, when I have a boss who's not communicative, I know I'm going to get closer to burnout because it's gonna frustrate me, I'm gonna get really, where others, it's like, no, no, no, what frustrates me is, I love a boss who doesn't communicate because I can just do my own thing. What frustrates me is when I have this or this. So what is it in your environment that might set you off and be aware of that? And you may be able to take some steps to say to your boss, hey look, I know myself, and if I don't have clear instructions, I'm gonna be really frustrated. Can you help me out with this? So taking control of the situation as best we can can be very helpful. Yeah, my last takeaway is surround yourself with good people, right? I mean, that's just so common, we hear that, have somebody you can go to. Had an experience just this morning, trying to get through to this guy, we want to do some fun work with him and he's not responding. And so I asked his friend, I said, by the way, he's not getting back to me. He goes, don't worry, he didn't get back to anybody, you know? And then, oh, okay. So immediately my stress levels disappeared. That, you know, it's not me. This is, it's going to take him a week or two. When he comes back, it's going to be great. Don't sweat it. So having those relationships, having those go-to people that we can confide in and say, hey, what's going on here, right, and get that information. Love that. Yeah, I love that idea. Meaningful connections, you know, meaningful connections to others, as you mentioned there, but also to our values, to the outlook. Do we have a meaningful outlook at work? If these aren't in place, it doesn't mean you run away right now. First off, you try and work on that situation, make it better at work, and if that doesn't work, then get out of touch. Some great advice today. We want to thank Kandi Wiens for joining us, some great information from her new book. We want to thank our producer Brent Klein for putting all this together for us, to Christy Lawrence who helps us find amazing guests, and all of you who listened in. If you like the podcast, please share it, let others know about it, download it. That helps us build up our network. And we'd also love you to visit thecultureworks.com for some free resources to help you and your team thrive. Yeah, we love to speak at conferences and to groups and to different companies, whether it's live or virtual, on the topics of culture, teamwork, resilience, and anxiety. And please pick up our book. It's available in every format you can imagine. It's hardcover, it's digital, it's audible, and at Lit Video Books. What book would that be, Chester? That would be the Anxiety at Work book. I love that. I love the podcast. It's a great book. Yeah. Adrian likes to be very specific, and that's a good thing. Give us a call if you'd like us to speak or engage with one of your events, we would be delighted to do so. Again, the book is Burnout Immunity, how emotional intelligence can help you build your resilience and heal your relationship at work from Harper Business. Adrian, always a pleasure to be with you. I will give you as always, the last word. Well, it's been great to be with you as well and learn even more today from our wonderful guests. So until next time, everybody, thank you so much for joining us and we wish you the best of mental health. We'll see you next time. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.