Ep. 68: How to Prevent and Recover From Burnout

Did you know that burnout is an actual medical diagnosis? In this episode, we are going to discuss how to prevent and recover from burnout using the Cha-Cha. We are going to dive into how to:

• Connect
• Heal
• and Act

to help keep yourself operating at your best.

Transcript

Kyla Cofer: 0:05

Welcome to the Leadership School podcast. I'm your host, leadership and self-care coach, Kyla Cofer. Here at the Leadership School, you'll hear leaders from around the world sharing their stories and expertise on how to lead with balance and integrity. Our goal teach you how to be an extraordinary leader. Welcome back leaders. So today's episode's a little bit different. This is actually a live presentation, so this is one of my most recent talks. Title The Talk is "Creating Long-Term Solutions to Burnout." In this talk, you're gonna hear my three step method to preventing and healing from burnout. I wanted to share this talk here on the podcast because this is a topic that we're all talking about a lot, and I have a lot of expertise in burnout prevention. As a life coach, I've spent a lot of time teaching people in personal development. My goal is to really enhance the personal development of any growing leader and just to support leaders in their journeys. So burnout prevention is a really big part of that, especially in leadership roles. So this is going to really walk you through what can you do? How can you take care of yourself, how can you support yourself? And here are three very practical steps on how you do that. So there will be some times when there's been some audience participation. We've cut that out for just some length and clarity as well as, uh, if an audience member has asked a question or responded to something, I typically repeat that so that you can hear it. So if you aren't quite sure where it's going on there, that's probably an audience member has asked a question. So, like I said, just a little bit different of an episode this week, but I know that it's really valuable and wanted to make sure I got it into your earbuds. You have a great day and thanks so much again for listening to Leadership School Podcast. Hey. Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for that introduction, Lakeisha. So burnout solutions to burnout. What I wanna do is I wanna give you in the next 30 minutes, three very practical, tangible things that you can do, starting right now to not only prevent burnout, but heal from it at both an individual and personal level and at corporate or organizational level. And I know we're kinda in a afternoon post lunch, we might be feeling a little sleepy, a little sluggish. So I'm gonna give you a quick little warning. I'm gonna get you guys up and moving around and interacting here in a second. So just a warning for that. We're gonna take things up just a little bit here. Um, before I do that, I wanna make sure that we are all operating on the same page about what burnout is .When we say solutions we usually mean that there's a problem, and I think we all, I've even heard somebody mention it this morning that burnout is a issue that we're experiencing in our organizations. But what is the actual definition of burnout? So the actual definition of burnout, it is the mental, emotional, physical exhaustion from overwork or stress. Now, this is actually a medical term, a medical definition, because now you can be medically diagnosed with burnout. Just like you can be diagnosed with cancer, diabetes, or a broken leg, burnout is a condition and it can take years, years to heal from burnout, two to five years. There are different levels of burnout. There's a whole scale. I'm not gonna go through all the different levels and all the symptoms and everything, because we're gonna focus on solutions. But just be aware that there are all those different levels of burnout and um, just different stages. So, let's break this down a little bit. I wanna make sure that you all, um, can remember this definition very clearly. So I wanna break it down in a way that's easy to remember. So if we think about who we are as humans, who you are as a person, We are all spiritual beings. We're spiritual beings trapped here in a physical body. And I can touch it. I can see it. You can see me, smell it. We have a mind with thoughts, a soul with emotions, and you put all those things together and then they start to break down. You work too much. You have all this stress on you, you get one stressor and it stacks with another stressor. What's really interesting about stress that when we experience a stressful situation, you have the stress that's happening, but the stressor, the situation, but the stress is actually what happens to your body. And if you don't get out of that stress cycle, your body just stays in it. And so you, your body stays in stress and then another stress comes and you stack it on there. Here we've got stress, more stress, and your body takes on so much of it you become exhausted. And when we say the word exhausted here, we're not meaning like the tired at the end of a two day conference or the tired at the end of just a long workday, dragging your kids to sport events. This is complete depletion. This is the exhaustion after our line of long days. So we put all this together. We have the mental, emotional, physical exhaustion from being overworked or stressed. This is burnout. So we're gonna operate off of this definition. So when we get to these solutions, it's really helpful to think about why we need solutions in the first place. So I'm gonna offer you, uh, a quote to start us off from Ariana Huffington. I'm a huge Ariana Huffington fan, founder of Huffington Post and Thrive Global. Um, she suggests that typically we measure success with two metrics. Money and power. We notice someone's successful. They've got a lot of money or a lot of power, but her suggestion is that we start operating off of a third metric of success, which includes our health and our being, first of all, because if we sacrifice that, what do we have and our own capacity to tap into our own wisdom, our own sense of wonder at the beauty of life that we just so often miss and our capacity to give and to be kind. Can you imagine? What would it look like and feel like if we focused our success and attributed our success to how well we were, how that would change our organizations, our companies, our customers that we serve, our communities, it would completely change everything. This is why we talk about solutions to burnout, because burnout is a problem. It's preventing us from this wellbeing. The purpose of life is to live. If we don't have that, what do we have? So I promise I, I was gonna get you guys interacting and moving around. We're gonna get to that right now and we are gonna get to these three solutions. But I have a couple of questions I wanna propose to you if you're following along in your workbooks. Um, could you flip to the last page of the section? There's a worksheet in there and we're gonna actually just use that. The slides will be up here if you want 'em. But, um, we're gonna use that last page of the worksheet. So I wanna propose a question to you. Um, if I want you to kind of work with the people next to you, um, continue to turn around and make a small group of a couple people. I wanna ask this question. When you think about humans in general, just people, what are your beliefs about the way humans should be treated? What do you believe about how humans should be treated? I'm gonna give you guys 30, about 30 seconds, just throw out some answers in some groups and let's just discuss what do y'all believe about the way humans should be treated? All right. I wanna hear what you came up with really loud. Just shout out on me of the answers. What'd you guys say with respect? How many people said with respect all across the room. What else? Grace. Anybody say Grace? Yeah. What else? Compassion. What else? Fairly. Dignity. Who else said dignity? Treat people how they want to be treated. So we're kind of all on the same page here with some of these general terms of how people should be treated. That's good. And that leads us to our next question. My next question is speaking, do this again with your groups. I'm gonna give you a little bit more time this time because I wanna know, based on these beliefs that you just discussed your personal beliefs and in within a group, what practices do you put in place towards yourself for those words? I'm not saying like I need to treat people fairly. This is how I treat people fairly. I wanna know how you treat you fairly. What practices do you put into place towards yourself? I'm gonna give you a little bit more time, but go ahead and discuss. Alright, what'd you come up with? Let's hear it. None of the above. Okay. I'm glad you're in this session. What else? Boundaries. Yes. A little foreshadowing to the later in this talk. Thank you. What else? Self-awareness boundaries. Take a moment and breathe. Sleep affirmations. Meditate, be kind to yourself. Beautiful. Okay, one more question for you and this one we're just gonna do as a group. I wanna know what kinda hobbies we have in our group. We talked about this some lunch and it really fun to everybody's different hobbies? Um, what do you guys do for fun? We're here at a work conference. Y'all work. We know that we go to work, but what do you for fun? Crochet!. I've got a crocheter! I like crochet. I need a new project. Go ahead. Back there. Workout. What else? Read. I heard something Yoga. Garage sales estate sale. Uh, state sales. Did I hear? What did I hear? Sing. Oh my gosh. Read this is so fun. Okay, so I have several hobbies. Obviously I have, I have a lot of hobbies. There's a lot of things I love to do. I love to read. Um, I've got two kids and we'd like to play board games, but I like watching tv. Who likes watch TV and movies. That's a hobby, right? Another hobby that I have is dancing. In college, I learned, um, to dance cause I wasn't allowed to dance growing up. True story. So I like really got into dancing and I really, really loved, uh, salsa dancing and you could not keep me out of the salsa clubs. I love it. So I'm actually going to force upon you all one of my hobbies. We are going to all learn how to do the basic steps to the Chacha. The reason I do this, because we're gonna use the Chacha as a pneumonic device to help us remember the three solutions to burnout, connect, heal, act, c h a, repeat Chacha cha. So if you are able, I would love to have you all stand up if you're not able to see if you can find a way to connect with us either. The only rule that I have right now is that we're just gonna really have fun. I mean, let's just acknowledge it's kind weird that you have a speaker up here who wants teach you the steps to the chacha, but let's be okay with that. We're going to have a little fun. It's going to be brief. It's going to be painless. I promise we're not having a competition. Okay, alright here we go. Okay, so to be able to dance the Chacha, you have to count to four. Now, I'm not a professional. If there are any professional dancers in here, please don't judge me we're you have to be able to count to four and it goes like this. One, two cha cha cha. Three, four, cha cha cha. Let's do that together. Ready? One, two, cha cha cha. Three, four. Cha cha cha. Thank you. Awesome. We are gonna take our steps and we're gonna start out going this way. We're gonna take a step out. We're not going to be stepping our neighbor's toes. We're not taking the leap here. We're just gonna take a step out with our right foot and we say one, one. Then our left foot feels kinda lonely. So when we to join, its and we bring it back together as the two. Two. Let's do that again. I know it was really hard. Ready? One two. Easy enough. Now we have our cha cha cha. We just moved our left foot, so we're gonna pick up the right foot. And, um, we are going to just, cha cha cha, you pick up one foot at a time. Each time we pick a foot up we say cha. So cha cha cha. This is like not marching band. I was in marching band. You had to like kick those knees up. Nope. We're just cha cha cha. Can you even do it in place? Okay, so let's do the whole thing. We'll start at the one. You ready? 1, 2, 3. One two. Cha cha. Excellent. We're not done, I promise. We gotta count to four. We gotta go back the other way. Exact same steps. So it's a left foot out. Three, four cha cha cha. Let's do it all together about three times. Okay, ready on three. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2. Cha cha cha. Three, four cha cha cha. One, two cha cha cha. Three, four cha cha cha. You really wanna move? Get the arms and hips moving. Get the Latin moves going. I love it. Give yourselves a round of applause. Great work. Great work everybody. Y'all can have us. Pete. Thank you. Thank you. You know, the reason I do this is because the research shows us that when we connect our bodies, To our minds, we remember things better. And I really want you to remember this because it's really important to me. I have had plenty of my own experiences with depression, anxiety, burnout, um, a long history that I don't need to go into. And this is why this matters to me, because of my own experiences with it. And I really don't want y'all to go through it. This hurts you. It hurts your organization, it hurts your employees. It hurts our community. So I want you to remember it. Okay? I'm gonna get really serious. We're having some fun. I'm gonna get really serious here for a second. So I started this podcast because I wanted to learn and grow in my leadership journey, and I have been so incredibly inspired by the guests and the conversations, and especially recently with this college tour, I've really learned so much. So once the interview ends, I actually keep the conversation going because I have found that sometimes the richest part of the conversation is when we feel like the interview's over and we can just kind of have a relaxed, more casual conversation. Also, if you've noticed, if you've been following this podcast for some time, I used to ask every guest two questions. What does Integrity mean to them and what does balance look like to them? Well, I haven't stopped asking those questions. We're just putting those over on our Patreon page. So go check it out at patreon.com/leadershipschool, and for $6 and 50 cents a month, you can support this podcast. It takes a lot to produce every single episode. Honestly, I could use a little bit of support. So anything that you're able to contribute would really mean a lot to me and would able to help me to continue to bring these high caliber guests in to have conversations on what does it look like to be an extraordinary leader, and how do we practically, uh, Do that. So those conversations are continuing over at patreon.com/leadershipschool, where I'm asking guests some extra questions, some bonus questions, and you'll get some bonus content over there. So be sure to go check it out. Thanks so much for your support, and thanks for so much for subscribing, listening and sharing this podcast. It really does mean a lot, and I'm so honored to show up here in your podcast feed. Our first solution to burnout is connection. C is for connect. Let me go back. This is our circle of wellbeing. We're gonna, I'm gonna break this all down, so don't freak out. That's a lot of data, but our C here is for connect. So when I say connect, what I mean is both internal and external connections. Why did I ask you about your hobbies? It's the way we internally connects, the way we connect back with ourselves, with who we are. That person that we were designed to be. How do we reset and connect with this, this person? What brings us life? What brings us joy? Did you notice when you talked about your hobbies, how light you felt like everybody was smiling? No one said, oh, I have this terrible hobby. Like you like your hobbies, you do them cuz they bring you joy and they bring you life. So what are the things that bring you life? I'll never forget an assignment that I had in college when I was forced to go sit in nature for an hour with a journal and not move and not talk at all. And I thought it was really weird until I did it. And then I realized it was the first time in my life I'd been allowed to just be and to just exist and to not have any expectations. Just have this moment. It's because I was connecting with myself. I mean, I'm awesome and I'm amazing and you are awesome and amazing and it's sometimes we're our own self critic and we forget that we were created to be incredible. We have to reconnect with ourselves. This is why this is so important because it is impossible, and I mean, impossible to have wellbeing without connection doesn't exist. We can talk about self-care, we can talk about solutions all day long, but it does not exist without connection. And of course we have external connections as well, connecting with people, pets, nature, places, things, things outside of us. How do we connect and how do we encourage connection at work in our families? How do we make that effort to be intentional? So I am a big fan of practical things. I really wanna give you something practical that you can walk away with today. So we're gonna do a connective practice. Has anybody here ever done a breathing practice? Someone mentioned breathing. Okay, so some people are familiar with it. We're gonna do a breathing practice together. I'm gonna teach it to you. It's pretty simple. The reason I like breathing practices, because it's very literally connecting to your body. The air that's inside of you, but you're also getting the external connections. You get both cause you're connecting to the air around you. And what's interesting is if you practice breathing and just being intentional about taking some breaths in a room full of people, you'll actually like them better. It's true story. You'll like them better and you'll get along better because you are just sitting there taking a breath. So if you've never done a breathing practice before, it can be kind of awkward at first. You might like breathe too fast and not, and exhale too fast and not be able to match up the timing. And it's okay. Just don't worry about that. Just practice it. The more you practice, it gets better. I started practicing this maybe two years ago and it has significantly reduced my levels of anxiety. I also stopped drinking caffeines that helped between the two. My anxiety almost is almost completely gone. Just from being intentional about taking breaths. So this is a four step breathing practice. We've already established that you can count to four. This is called square breathing. I'm gonna teach it to you and then we're gonna do it together. So what you do is just go around the square and you inhale while you count to four. You hold that breath while you count to four, exhale while you count to four, and hold it again while you count to four. So I'm gonna count and y'all are gonna breathe. Feel free to close your eyes, open them, whatever works for you. Ok, we're gonna do it three. Ready in 2, 3, 4. Hold, 2, 3, 4, out, 2, 3, 4. Hold, 2, 3, 4. In, 2, 3, 4. Hold, 2, 3, 4, out. 2, 3, 4. Hold, two, three. Last time in. 2, 3, 4. Hold. 2, 3, 4. Out 2, 3, 4, hold, 2, 3, 4. Every time I do that, I'm like doing the counting and not getting to breathe, but it still just like resets me. I've noticed as when my stress levels start to rise, mostly when my kids are screaming and I can just do this practice, I can be a calmer parent, I can be more available when stress is getting at work and I, my to-do list is too long. I can manage it now. So this is something that you can do personally, but you can also bring this to your organization. You guys can implement it to the beginning of staff meetings, different types of breathing practices. There are breathwork facilitators, taking a break when you hop on a Zoom call. But before we start Zoom, we're gonna take a quick breathing there, even apps that can help you with that process. So it'll show you pretty like ocean or something and have a countdown. So we're gonna breathe. That's our connection. Internal and external connection. C is for Connect. Now we have healing H. The H here is really just about being intentional, about being a aware of your health, uh, your self-care. But we have, I break this down into two-part, health knowledge and mental wellbeing. So this is like being aware of your own physical health and your own mental health, what that looks like and what you need, and what resources you might need and pay, just paying attention, attending to being intentional about it. So an example might be if you're a diabetic, you need to know how to manage your diabetes, what foods you can can't eat, how to take your blood sugar when things aren't right. You need to call a provider cause your doctor's not following you round all day saying, eat that. Don't eat that. Time to check. That will be ridiculous. It's your responsibility. So this heal is just acknowledging that it's our responsibility to take ownership of our health on all fronts, physical and mental health. And being able to find resources or use those external connections by reaching out when we need some support and help. So our health practice here is very, very simple. It is. It's just a rating scale. So this can, it's just a good way to acknowledge and figure out like, where am I right now? So think about your physical health on a scale of one to 10, one being like, it's really great that you showed up today. A hospital might have been a better choice, 10 being like, I'm the best health of my life after this. I'm running a marathon. Where would you put yourself on that scale? Then do the same thing with our mental health. You know, these are things we think about, but unless we're intentional about pausing and saying, how am I, we kind of forget about them. We get busy and caught up with things. So your mental health, same scale. One is like, again, hospital might have been a better choice today, 10 being like, my life is unicorns, rainbows, and everything's going my way. Where would you put yourself on that scale? Acknowledging a couple things. First, sometimes it's completely outta our control. Tragedy, trauma happens. We might not actually have control over this. And having compassion for ourselves and accepting that. Second kind of thinking through what am I capable of? What do I really want here? What is does my body allow me to do? And being okay with that. Knowing that we can't be at a 10 at all times in our life. Like you're not living your life at physical health at a 10 for a hundred years, or mental health at a 10 for a hundred years. Our life ebbs and flows. There's ups and there's downs. Just knowing that if you're at a down moment, there's hopefully gonna be an up moment coming. So the next question, we life coaches like scales and circles and asking questions. So the next question is if you, whatever number you picked, are you okay with that number? If you are, great. Stay there. Keep on, keep on. If you're not okay with that number, if you have a two, what number would you rather be at? Would you rather be at a six or a seven or a three or a four? Where would you prefer to be at? What is in your control to move the scale? What are some little things that you can start doing to just go up the scale just a little bit? Cause we're talking about our life satisfaction here, right? Success being our wellbeing. So if we're rating our success on how well we are and we're not feeling well, what are some things that we can do to take ownership of? So that's our Heal. H is heal. Moving on to our act. Can't dance without moving your body. We gotta take some action. We can connect, we can heal, have self-care all day long without actually doing something about it. We're not going anywhere. Education, conferences. Great. What are you gonna do about it? How are you gonna move forward? So I breaking this down at a few pieces, I wanna start over there with the third one over, depending on which way you go. I guess good hygiene. What kind of makes me laugh a little bit. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you all that you need to brush your teeth or bathe more. I'm pretty sure you've got that covered. What I wanna tell you though is just a reminder that good hygiene, all it is, is it's habits, it's daily habits. It's something that you do to take self-care. Care of your actual physical body every single day. So a night owl, and there was one night I was staying up like way too late, I guess. I just think that I can't go to bed at a certain time or before a certain time. So I was exhausted and I said to myself out loud, I'm just gonna go straight to bed and skip my whole nighttime routine. So I did. I got up, went straight to bed, blinked, and I was standing in the bathroom with toothpaste on my toothbrush, having no idea how I'd gotten there, because it's a habit. I have brushed my teeth like 10,000, 15,000 times before, before I go to bed. At this point in my life, I just do it every night without thinking, what habits do we have that we're just not thinking about? This is self-care, connecting, making things habitual, caring for ourself and our wellbeing, that it's just second nature. You already have those habits. Are they the habits that you want? And if they're not the habits that you want, how are we gonna take some steps to move ourselves forward? I've also got physical activity and healthy eating up there. If you live in the United States, you've heard about this before. Not gonna rehash it, but I'm gonna say that this does not mean you have to be perfect, healthy eater, vegan, organic, biodynamic, or that you have to be the like, buffest person at the gym. That's not what we're saying here. What I'm saying is if you have a body that you need to move, then keep moving so that it can keep moving. Keep doing the things that you need to do for you. Same thing with healthy eating. Get some nutrition cuz the nutrition converts into the energy that you need to be awesome. So if you're eating ice cream, three meals a day, you'll notice, you'll feel sluggish, right? But eat the ice cream, enjoy it. Just make sure you eat some broccoli too. Our last thing we've already heard mentions is rest. You cannot have wellbeing without rest. Paul Rudd, very famous actor, was recently asked, uh, what's the most important part of your training regimen in this answer? Sleep. Our bodies need physical rest, but our minds need rest too. How many times have you been working on a project at work and you're like, I'm so stuck. I just can't think about this another second. I don't know how to do it. And then you just like walk away. You take a break, you come back to it later, the next day and you're like, oh, it was right there the whole time. I get it now. It's cause your mind needed that rest. We need time to let our thoughts wander. Our bodies need rest and our mind needs rest. This is when those hobbies come in, right? One last thing, do not wanna neglect my favorite word, you've already mentioned it. Boundaries. Action is boundaries. Setting boundaries at work, setting boundaries with ourselves, with people that we work with. Really all a boundary is, is remembering that when I say yes to something, I'm saying no to something else. When I say no to something, I'm saying yes to something else. I'm saying yes to sleep. I'm saying no to working 70 hours a. But I'm saying no to that extra project. Maybe I'm saying yes to more time with my family. Doesn't matter. Own it. Just own it. Whatever it is, just own it. That this is a boundary for you. Our action practice. Very, very simple. Master one new habit. Maybe incorporate one new thing in your organization. Being intentional about how we're moving forward with wellbeing. We want long-term solutions. We wanna prevent burnout, but if we're there, we need to take steps to healing it. This matters in our organization. So master pick one, new habit. You know, you can think about connection, internal connection, external connection. I need to heal. I need to get physical activity. I need to healthy eat, I need to get sleep. And it's all so overwhelming. Where do I even start? Start with one. You don't have to do it all, especially if you've never done any of it. And if you're so burned out that you're being in the hospitalized, you start with one thing that might be getting rid of a habit or picking up a new one. So something that matters to you, just take a step in that direction and reconnect to who you are. So, This is our circle of wellbeing. We're gonna do the Chacha Connect, heal, act, repeat. Now, if you are burnt out, if you're at any level of burnout, you're starting to notice maybe GI issues, heart problems, depression, anxiety, low self-worth, difficulty making decisions. My number one recommendation to you is to do what I call the dancing skeleton. Go to the skeleton. You need to cut everything out. It's gonna be hard, but you can do it. You'll have a chance if you do cut it everything out, that's not essential. Just start saying no as much as you can. And once you've gone through a healing pro process and you are back to who you are, you have that opportunity to start saying yes to some things again, but this time with some healthy boundaries. Hey, thank you so much for listening. If you've liked what you heard and you want some more tools and resources to help you on your journey, go check out kyla cofer.com/free stuff.