Shawn Goldberg: Preventing Burnout at Work, Employee Assistance Program, and more | GYC Podcast E271

In this episode, Ben speaks with Shawn Goldberg, director and clinical psychologist at Mind Up Psychology.

They discuss burnout and how it affects practitioners in the healthcare industry. The importance of Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) and how clinic owners can support their team members to prevent burnout. The conversation also touches on imposter syndrome and its connection to burnout.

Tune in to gain valuable insights on managing and preventing burnout in the workplace.

Quotes

• "Do you feel like you're living and working within your values?"
• "Values and fairness are the two main reasons why people get burned out."
• "And when you feel like you're growing towards a core value or a belief, a mission, your own personal mission, of where you wanna be in your career, of what you want to do that would really give you a sense of passion, burnout will trickle away, because it's a bigger picture."
• "We know that in Australia, 50 to 60% of people experience burnout at work."

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro 
• 01:33 Burnout vs imposter syndrome
• 02:08 6 Triggers of Burnout
• 02:42 Surprising importance of fairness and values
• 03:11 Signs/symptoms of burnout
• 07:21 How clinic owners can support team experiencing burnout
• 09:08 Why open-ended questions are best
• 13:20 Brain hack: engage the frontal lobe 
• 15:08 Key driver to work satisfaction: personal values
• 17:04 Importance of boundaries and flexibility 
• 22:33 Does your team have passion projects? It matters.
• 30:35 Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) 
• 36:07 How to introduce EAP to the team
• 38:57 Autonomy and independence impact mental health
• 42:57 Take a step back and see the bigger picture
• 44:16 Mental health support in the healthcare industry

Connect with Shawn

• Mind Up Psychology - https://www.mindup.com.au/our-team/shawn-goldberg/
• Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/mindupclinic
• Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/mindupclinic/

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Transcript

0:00

Burnout is workplace depression. 50-60% of people experience burnout at work. I've got nothing in the tank. It's just too much. There's a sense of mental and physical exhaustion that comes with that. But when do we ever not have too much on our plate? This is what you have to go through. This is your rite of passage in some ways. And how do you help somebody in a burnout? There are six key domains that could be impacting. This is the Grow Your Clinic podcast from Clinic Mastery. So it's a little brain hack that you just to help get clarity and give some guidance. Awareness is balance and it's connection. ABCs of resilience. The burnout can occur because there's too many Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast. My name is Ben Lynch. In this episode, I speak with Shawn Goldberg, a clinical psychologist in Melbourne, Australia. Shawn has been a great contributor to the Clinic Mastery community and also achieved some great success as part of our business academy. In this episode, we tackle burnout. in particular for practitioners and employee assistance programs, the vital role they play in allowing you to sustainably grow your clinic and create an amazing place to work. Let's pick up the conversation where I share a post that Shawn had into our community that created a great dialogue between other clinic owners and how they can support their team members. So I was scrolling through my Slack a few days ago and I saw a response from you and you were replying to another member in the CM community on Slack. You'd asked about imposter syndrome and burnout. And I'm going to read the reply out for those listening and watching. And I'd love your comment on it because it really it seemed like a really great distillation, a really great framework to use when addressing burnout in particular. So you said it's good to distinguish between burnout and imposter syndrome. Both of those can overlap. And burnout is triggered by one or more of the following domains. The first one being workload. Secondly, control. Third, reward. Fourth, community. And fifth, fairness. Sixth, values. And then you continued on saying, surprisingly, the most weighted of these are the last two, which is fairness and values. The least weighted is workload. And it was in that sentence that I thought, oh, I'm having so many conversations with clinic owners, with leaders who are saying, you know, my team members are stating that their workload is too much and they are burnt out. Maybe before we get into some of the triggers that you listed there, what is burnout? Like how do you characterize and describe it? Perhaps what are the signs and symptoms of someone experiencing burnout? Well, burnout is workplace depression. Burnout is the impact that work has on people who are being stretched too far, too thin and have a not working in alignment with their core values, their personal core values. And there's this with that is an accumulation of stresses that occur. That are not dealt with at the time. And become a ball of anxiety and stress. Now, the difference between, let's say, general stress and burnout, by the way, on a little bit of a sucker for being stressed. I like working in a stress bubble. It helps me feel really motivated. It's a very interesting framing of like, it's okay to be stressed. It is. And, you know, the idea that we're stressed, because we've got too much on our plate. I understand that. But when do we ever not have too much on our plate? When is there ever a time in our lives, personal or professional, unless we're on some island and we've got no internet and no connection, that we can completely switch off, that we aren't multitasking in our life. So stress seems to be a part of, oh, I've gotta be there, I've gotta do this, I've gotta get to this meeting, I've gotta finish with this client before I can write my notes to do that, That's a level of optimal performance that we can strive and harness. But burnout is, I've got nothing in the tank. It's just too much. And so there's this sense of depletion. There's this sense of, I've got nothing more to give or whatever I'm doing right now, I've got to work twice as hard to see the same result. I feel really burnt out because I just I'm running on the spot. So people who are burnt out will feel depressed, will feel really disconnected from others, will find it hard to get up in the morning, will struggle to get to work. They will slowly feel like they're cynical about the work itself. will notice that they're feeling a lot more detached from the clients and kind of pressing play and just leaving the room in their mind, just doing it on autopilot. And there's a sense of mental and physical exhaustion that comes with that. So there's three criteria that needs to be filled. The sense of exhaustion, the depersonalization and the inefficiency. And that sense of, I just can't get through my day. I need to go home, but I can't because I don't have any more sick leave or I'm trapped. Yes. And if someone's feeling that way in your team, What are some of the things that you encourage managers, business owners to do in that situation, especially if they don't have, say, clinical skills like you do? What are some of the things that managers and leaders can do if they observe that about someone on their team? One of the comments that I get is that I'm not a psychologist. It's not my job. Yeah. It's not my job to deal with this. You know, they should see a therapist if they're burnt out. And I really like Kim Scott's approach to managing, you know, with radical candor and that it actually is your job. It is our job to step up and to be aware of how to, we've had to jump from one scenario to another, one person to another throughout your day. And how do you help somebody in a burnout? First of all, it's to understand and deep dive into what's triggering the burnout, because it's not the same for everyone. There are six key domains that could be impacting one's level of burnout. And it's important to have that conversation knowing that there's six domains to look at. For some, it is workload and a lack of control. So how do you have that conversation around workload and control? For others, it's not being recognised and rewarded for the work that they're contributing. So why would I bother giving so much help and working on this as an extra side project if no one's recognising and just taking it for granted? And that sense of feeling devalued. And how might you bring that up with someone? I realize every circumstance is going to be different, but do you have any practical insights around it? You might actually bring this up with someone and maybe start to explore which one of these domains is playing a key role for them. Yeah, just keep it really simple. Why do you think you're burnt out? What's triggering you right now? Is it at home or is it at work? I know that I've said that it's a workplace depression, but it doesn't, you can't separate it from what goes on at home either. So having that open conversation, trying to filter through, where is it that the pain started? Now, somebody in burnout won't actually have the insight. If they're really in burnout, they would just be in that level of deep stress and avoidance and pain. and really dig deep. So the first part is just to see if you can help them have some thinking space. All right, well, from your perspective, it's about, let's say, in working with allied health, you're doing too many notes, you're spending too long there and you're feeling overwhelmed by trying to catch up with everything. Let's go with that. And what we'll do is have you address and minimize the time that you're spending with the notes by doing ABCD and let's see how that goes. But generally speaking, there's something much deeper happening with burnout. And you need to understand that there's another level of distress happening that's beyond the person's conscious awareness a lot of the time. and I am getting a bit psychological here, sorry for that, but it's my wheelhouse and maybe, yeah, I think if I was to help any manager or team leader or employer really understand what they could do, it's to understand that when you're in burnout, there's a deep level of disconnect happening between the work that you're doing and the values that you have. Your core individual personal values How did it get there? Well, it happened over a long period of time. And what are the things that we can do? Well, we could be reactive to it. First of all, we have to be reactive to the person's mental health by stepping in and saying, OK, well, let's give you some space. Let's maybe for some people, it's needed to take sick leave because it is they are unwell. And when you come back, we need a game plan. So there's a sense of control on how they're going to work with their distress levels and not constantly run on a broken leg. I would say that the next part would be to understand that when you're in burnout, it is so deep that it's actually not just about values as well. There is this kind of a it's going to sound very esoteric here, but there's a spiritual death happening to in the person where there's a sense of what's my meaning? What's my purpose here? I'm working so hard, and I'm getting nowhere. I don't feel the sense of joy and excitement and passion anymore. But I keep on doing it because I've got to pay my bills and feed my family. And I'm trapped here. So when you burn of feeling trapped and you can't get out of the situation. So as a boss, as a manager, as a team leader, you want to help people move from that paralyzed, I'm stuck in this role, I can't move anywhere sense to more of a sympathetic nervous system response of feeling like they can get mobilized to act on something. What are three things that you can do this week to the work that you're doing. What are three things that you can do this week that will relieve your distress? And so you've got to keep it really simple. And I'm saying the number three, and you can use five, what are five things you could do? What are the two things that you could do today to help with this situation? What we're doing is actually engaging with the frontal lobe. To help engage with the frontal lobe means that you're able to think clearly. When somebody can reply to you with the two suggestions that will help themselves, then you're switching off the limbic system, the emotional part of the brain, which is triggering this chronic sense of stress, which is the burnout. And you're shifting the attention to problem focused problem solving question. And whenever you throw numbers into there, it automatically activates the frontal lobe. So it's a little brain hack that you do to help get clarity and give some guidance and break things down, because when burnout, it's hard to break things down. Everything feels very foggy and muddy and very yuck. a really great practical insight of just asking that question. What are the two or three things? You've spoken there a bit about values and the disconnection between someone's personal values and the work they're doing. How do you go about exploring that with a team member? Perhaps clinic owners are used to having clinic or company-wide values that they might put on the wall and speak to and be a reflection of their culture. When it comes to personal values and having that conversation, how do you go about approaching that? Are there certain questions that you like to ask to open up the discussion and explore it with team members? I'm very direct, so I don't hold back. And I would just say something to the effect of. Do you feel like you're living and working within your values? You'll notice a bit of a pause when you ask the question to somebody in burnout, because they're not thinking that way. They're thinking about how do I survive the next hour? How do I get by this day, this week? How am I going to keep on doing this work if I'm just feeling as horrible as I do? Do I just have to take out a work cover claim and just call it quits? Not my recommendation, by the way. It's an interesting one. Sorry to interrupt, but it's a yes, no question. that's what you're leading with to get a very binary sort of answer and take it from there versus maybe to what degree are you working within your values or what are your values? So it's a purposeful kind of, as you said, I'm getting direct to the point with this person, maybe to frame it in a way that they hadn't thought about before. Yes, it is a purposeful binary question, not more of a sliding scale with the person that's sitting in front of you that's quite distressed and needs binary for containment. Yeah, no. OK, down the line, it can be a lot looser. But, you know, if it's about assessing somebody's sense of disconnect with their own personal values and what's happening in the workplace, That is a direct question that needs to happen or a direct conversation, at least. But we've got two kind of scenarios happening, one where I work within the allied health industry. Right. So let me just speak to that for a moment, because there's there's the values of the organization that might be not met by the individual. So there's a cultural issue going on there. But what if it's not that? What if the culture is amazing? What if your boss is just doing everything needed and the team leader and everyone's in line and in step with the core values and that your core values are aligned to the business, then burnout, you would say, oh, it shouldn't exist. But actually values and fairness is the two main reasons why people get burned out. So where would the burnout occur if it's not between yourself and your, your clinic? Well, the burnout can occur because there's too many times that you've compromised your own core values without knowing it. And what I mean by that is that most people in the health industry wanna help do more good. Yes, their passion is to support somebody through their health journey. And what I see time and time again is that it would constantly compromise something radar. For example, this person's really in distress. They're really in a lot of pain. I'm just going to spend five more minutes with them. Now, why would that be a value issue? It's more practical. This person's in distress. I can help them. I'm going to give them that little bit more attention. I've got a good rapport with this client. But then what that does is push back the practicalities of your day. Then you've got no time to write your notes. Then you've got no time to you've got less time to see that other next person, which means you've got less time to write your notes. And the accumulation of that, if you have that kind of way of working, means that that builds up over time. So where do your notes get done? Well, it gets done after you put the kids to bed or it gets done at some other time of the day where you're focusing on self-care and you're compromising other parts of how you act out your core values. which would be to spend time with family or socialize or, you know, do something else that's part of how you want to express yourself and feel healthy and well. And so there's. Boundaries are constantly being pushed and shoved, and you're the one in control, but you don't even know that, and then burn out of petals. Other things that happen is like, what's the core tenet of empathy? and compassion. How do we show compassion and empathy, right? Well, right now we're online, but I like seeing you nod your head and smile and I'm doing the same. We're kind of mirroring each other's feedback. And that's what happens in in any clinic setting. And most people who engage with an interaction doesn't have to be health. are doing that to share that they're feeling felt and heard and understood. There's an exchange, a polite exchange. But in that comes a bodily felt sense of empathy. So when you're dealing with somebody who's suffering, let's say, you're doing something unconscious or consciously, but at the time, it's unconscious, where you're leaning forward. You're smiling when needed, not smiling when not needed, showing with nonverbal cues that you are really in tune with that person. Yes. And what if that person, as you're doing that, starts to get irritated by you or is just a really tough client? And so you've got this core value of rapport and empathy, and you've got this person who doesn't trust you. And so what do you do to compromise your own core value of how you want to work? You can't use your normal empathic skills because that's annoying the person for whatever reason. They've got their own bag, but I'm going to do my best to keep trying to work with this person so we can have the same set of treatment goals and what we want out of this whilst they trust me. That person might be belligerent or rude and you absorb it, you put your stuff aside and you go, right, my negative feelings here, my feelings towards this client is secondary. This client comes first. And so you're compromising your own sense of what respect is, core value. Rapport, core value, to help that client. Again, if that's your style and you have a lot of clients or a number of clients during the day, week, month, that keeps pushing your boundary back, you will find that you will be starting to feel more stressed and not great about work. And a lot of that happens under the radar. So coming back to the question, what does the boss do? What does the manager or team leader do around this? It's about understanding that that could be happening and there's some kind of a soul sucking experience happening at work that needs to be identified and then implement certain strategies that are necessary for that type of trigger. it sounds like there's a high emphasis on self-awareness in this sort of clinic sense, team sense. Ideally, perhaps that you're doing some of these activities before it becomes a problem. Perhaps people understanding their own values ahead of time, not when it becomes a crisis or an issue of burnout. The question I have for you is, and I've seen this without being a psychologist myself, but just observing people that I work with over time, who perhaps to that control element that you were talking about, then start to interpret things very literally, meaning the boundaries as an example that actually they go right back to being very explicit with some boundaries and not maybe having a little bit of flexibility, say in a schedule to accommodate a teammate or to support the client that actually does need it. Maybe they've been able to rein it in from, okay, I haven't had really, I haven't honored those boundaries at all or very poorly to now I'm very explicitly doing this that I've become quite rigid. How do you go about maybe in those situations, it's almost like you've swung the pendulum maybe too far. How do you go about having that sort of conversation with a team member? I think, you know, all health related aspects, we need to have flexibility, we need to have physical flexibility, we need to have psychological flexibility to be healthy. and well, and I can understand that that might be a transition period of, okay, I can't cope with too many, I'm gonna have to reduce my clients, reduce how much I engage with the team, reduce what I'm doing, and that's what I can do to cope, right? Well, that's a management plan that's temporary, just to get you through the first step possibly, right? You're constantly triaging, aren't you? And you're trying to find a way to get through this before we get to the next step. And so it's about seeing that through as a pathway of recovery, not just the final destination of recovery. And as we look through the pathway of recovery for clients, as we look through the pathway of recovery or even just the pathway of employing a team member, it starts rigid. It starts like these are the rules. This is what you're going to do. This is how and let's follow that. And then it becomes a bit looser and a bit looser until there's a lot more confidence in coping. And and so You start with the reaction phase of how do we triage and help support the most difficult part of what you're going through. And then you move into the wellbeing phase of being proactive. This is the stuff that helps you be more flexible with your work environment. This is the stuff that can help you be more flexible with the type of clients that you're seeing. These are the tools that you can use. So it's a not one size fits all scenario, but it's awareness, it's balance, and it's connection. ABCs of resilience. And you're mentioning the first part of that process. It's a great point. And just through some of the things I've observed, I think that a number of people see it as, well, I need to solve this problem. And so it's like, we're making this change and the change is almost indefinite, or there's no intention maybe to, okay, update the plan. As you said, you're sort of triaging based on their evolution. And so I really like that distinction of thinking of it as steps in a journey, as you're saying that that might be a temporary measure, a first step to get people that control that they're looking for. And I think of my own mistakes and hearing and seeing other clinic owners in our context, have that team member that's navigating burnout, that classic example of, you know, they feel burnt out seeing the amount of clients they're seeing in the day and the business owners saying, well, you're barely covering your wage or not at all. And so I need you to be able to, you know, find a way through this and I want to support you to do it. and finding that commercial balance as well as that empathy, that care for the human that's on the team. I think in those instances where the control bit that you spoke to was really interesting to circle back to that point that I started on, which was I've heard and experienced myself when you're asking that person in that situation, really open-ended questions, it sounds like what you're saying is they probably don't have the ability to answer those in that state. Where you're asking a more direct, more binary, speaks to that control element, that's a better way perhaps to start the conversation. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of research to show that the lack of control works. with let's stick to allied health, for example, lack of control of your diary, who you might see, who triggers you when you're working, what processes are involved if it's just dumped on you. And this is what you have to do. And there's no option about it. And this is a client you have to see. It does. Some people make it very hard in that they're in that world of burnout. So, yes, as an employee, you've got to be mindful that you've got bottom line to run your business and you've employed somebody who should be resilient enough to cope. But the reality is that most people will experience burnout in their career. So we better just get on board with that fact and have a contingency plan and a strategy and Sure, help get PAP or some psychologists to come in and step in to provide either a reactive response where they do the therapy to help the burnout or a proactive response, which is to arm the organisation or the clinic with the right tools to identify what's going on, understand what to do about it and what to do after. afterwards as well and create a cultural wellness. That's a great distinction. And to that point you made earlier about it is absolutely your job to care as a leader, as a manager, as a business owner. And those people either taking the approach of that's not my job or a version of that's out of my pay grade and skillset and capabilities. You mentioned EAP, Employee Assistance Program, which I think has really exploded in popularity and which is awesome since COVID and through the COVID period of time. Can you share at what point should you consider having an EAP program? And what are some of the key elements about an EAP program that can complement, as you said, that business owner or manager also you know, not just leaving it to other people to deal with, but can play an active role as well. So, you know, explain an EAP program. Well, the EAP's got a great background story, actually. It started in the early 1900s, where lorry drivers were carting barrels of alcohol from the ports to distribute throughout the countries. And this was in the US and Half of them wouldn't make it to their destination because they'll drink all the alcohol and crash the lorries. And so they, from a financial point of view, said, well, our drivers have an alcohol drinking problem. We need the alcohol distributed. We need it to get to the destination. How do we support them so they can stop drinking the alcohol? Right. So they created this program, which was the beginning of the AP back in the early 1900s. Through that over time, it just grew from, oh, it's just not alcohol is the issue. We've also got drugs and we've got family issues. We've got workplace issues. And in the 60s, it picked up and then all of a sudden they go, oh, well, not only in the 80s, it was not only our workers have issues, but the family members who they're living with might have issues which impact our employees. So we might as well just really value that they come from a family, they come from a home where distress might be part of their everyday, which they bring into work, how do we give them a sense that they're cared for? And so the question comes back to what is the business's core values? It's not, is EAP useful or not? It's more of, does it fit within your core values to help your team? And But what actually happens in EAP is there's the reactive phase where people can book in for X amount of sessions. So each team member has the ability, if agreed to from the organization, X amount of sessions per year. Usually it's two or three in Australia. In that two or three sessions, they'll ring up and be randomly suited to or choose their own therapist within the organisation that they've got the contract with. And what you can expect from those sessions, you didn't really ask me that, but I'll just expand if you're okay with that, is again, a quick session, not all issues get solved within a few sessions, but a lot. is look, I don't know if we're getting through all the things that you want to bring up today, but we've got three sessions. Let's just imagine this is the maximum that you'll ever be able to see. You can continue seeing me afterwards, but for the first three, if we could just say that the third session is the last session, what would you like to achieve by then? really distill and think about what is it they want to overcome. And then the work begins. And a lot of good work can happen within a few sessions. Of course, there's many others who need ongoing support for whatever's happening, be it at workplace issues or home place issues. It's irrelevant within the EAP space of seeing a therapist. The flip side to the reactive, as I mentioned before, is the more proactive. So the proactive space is to come in and train managers or whole teams on mental well-being, on preventing burnout, preventing compassion fatigue. Again, I'm focusing on allied health or people with other people suffering. And So the more proactive you can be, the better it is. We've gone that step further, actually, to then now send out weekly mental health tips that they can share amongst their team. And we're just constantly trying to see how we can give more value to those that we're working with. And I think a proactive wellbeing mindset is the best place to be in any workplace. It seems like it's got an exclamation mark next to it, post COVID where folks were definitely feeling it in various different ways, the disconnect, as you talked about, actually of teams of people. And it's so wonderful to hear that these services exist. And you mentioned there around the structure of a program like that to complement whatever you're already doing inside of your clinic can be a really powerful tool, I think, I hope that a lot of folks who are looking for recruitment opportunities, who are looking for new careers, are checking out clinics and looking at what is it that they offer holistically, not just what is my salary going to be and how many hours. But as you said, how am I actually showing that I care for the people that I work with? And part of that is offering something like this. What do you think makes the difference between a really effective EAP program and maybe one that isn't so effective? I might be a little bit biased here, so excuse my response. Look, I've heard and seen pretty shoddy operations where they, if you are breathing and you've got two ears, possibly two eyes, and you've got a mouth, then you can be an EAP provider, counselor, and there's no vetting of standards. And so in my opinion, there's been some damaging kind of therapy done that way, but I can't give you stats and they're few and far between. I've just heard worst of the worst stories as they can come out in any industry, right? So I don't want to pick on EAP providers at all. There's some amazing operators too. The things that you just need to consider is some EAP providers won't allow the client to continue seeing the EAP therapist beyond the allocated sessions. So you get to open up to somebody and then that's it. You got to go and find another therapist if you wanted to have ongoing sessions. So one thing to consider is if that's part of what you'd like to sign up to or not. The flip side is that you've got continuity of care. That's just one example. Yes. In terms of being able to introduce an EAP program to your team, and perhaps address or reduce the stigma of team members taking that up and business owner, clinic owners all on board thinks that this is gonna be a great opportunity for supporting their team. The team aren't quite sure, should I take this up? What does that say about me? How do you perhaps educate or inform business owners, managers, leaders to successfully introduce this to their team and get them to say, yep, I'll do that. Yeah, well, the uptake in the AP is about five to 7% across the board across Australia. And we're noticing the same as well. So all the company about five to 7% of the current workforce will take will use it. Yes, unless they cycle a big distress point or distressing culture. Yes, that that that would be outliers. introduce I'll be part of the onboarding coming and speak to the team members themselves. I'll give a little talk about what to expect. Ask the psychologist any question you want. Usually there's a lot of silence and I can understand why. hoping to do is break down the stigma and just say this is just how it is and sometimes you need some extra support and it's confidential. And then there's extra things provide more proactive workshops so that they can get to a bit more time than just a quick 15, 30 minutes of chatting to see how that organisation works. And that that's another way. But I'm big into also training team members today. You know, I think our goal is to be redundant. You know, I wish everyone was healthy and so no one needed mental health, but that's not the case. And so how do we empower team leaders and organisations to do it themselves. And that's, you know, I think a big part of it too, that they can capture it. Along that line, are there any sort of specific approaches or techniques that you like to encourage or invite others to take up to build some of that resilience, to maybe be a little more independent, to deal with things by themselves, not that they have to, but they're maybe spending an hour with the psych in their week or their fortnight and all these other hours on their own sort of term. So what are some of the things that you like to encourage people to do to have a little bit more autonomy, independence in helping themselves? I think the key word is perspective. So whenever we're in distress, it's hard to get perspective. But at some point down the track, we can possibly look back at whatever we were distressed about, as big or small as it may be, and go, I think I overreacted there, or this is why it upset me, I didn't know at the time. So how do we encourage perspective? The perspective mindset needs sometimes a little bit of fine tuning. Not everyone's great at it. And there are some tools that you can take on, you know, just really basic stuff like breathe, do a 30 second or a one minute breathing exercise four times a day or go and be more proactive about your exercises like mindfulness or meditation or something even more physical, you know, go and work out a little bit, get those endorphins and good good hormones flowing through your body so you can get some distance from whatever your distress is. So that's one part of it. But also it's the idea of helping people get a macro picture of their life. Perspective needs you to step back. And When we can see that we're on a trajectory of our career and that actually we're going to fall flat on our face many times, we're going to struggle with a particular type of client many times until we get it right, until we create the right clinical boundaries to be able to care without over-empathizing, that we'll get it right with the type of workplace that we want to work in. And we're going to learn along the way from our failures more so than our successes. then it changes how sharp the pain point is. And that's the job of the management. That's the job of mentoring somebody. I believe that we can draw this out and say, this is just a long road. You've got 30 years, hopefully 40 years in you in this career, if this is the right career for you. This is what you have to go through. This is your rite of passage in some ways. Let's find another way for you to build resilience right now and put those blocks in and slowly build that up. So whatever drives perspective and getting distance from the pain point is important and will really help guide anyone. I just wanted to cycle back to your question about burnout because it kind of fits into this question. I thought it's important to also talk about, it's a bit of a segue, but the underwhelm of work, right? So people assume that burnout is triggered by the overwhelm, that we're just overwhelmed by all these bad things that happen. And now we're not aligned with our values and the client's behavior or the workplace behavior, the sense of unfairness workload, that's all true. But what, I'd like to add there that a lot of people experiencing burnout will feel underwhelmed by the work. And what that looks like is that you could see a client, for example, press play and leave the room. You're just on repeat. You're saying the same thing and you do not feel challenged by your work anymore. Now, coming back to what are things that you can how does that work with perspective and how does that work with management a heads up on what to do, will understand the trajectory of growth of your workers, of your team players, and understand that they're here, and they're in this level of fluid intelligence, let's say, where they're learning as quickly as they can all the bits and pieces that they need to do to be a good clinician, practitioner, worker, it doesn't really matter what role. But at some point, they're going to plateau out, they've learned that bit, and they're not growing anymore. So again, as mentors, I believe that we need to always help them feel like there's a trajectory of growth. And when you feel like you're growing towards a core value or a belief, a mission, your own personal mission, of where you wanna be in your career, of what you wanna do that would really give you a sense of passion, burnout will trickle away, because it's a bigger picture. thing that you're working on and you don't have to focus on the little bits here. And if you can set that up and guide people through that at work, I really believe that if I have passion projects, you know, people call them portfolios. Now, to me, portfolio feels like that's what the boss told you that you got to work towards a portfolio, a passion project that really comes from somebody or somebody's heart or what they want to create a difference and do. and guide them through the steps and see how they can become excellent and a specialist in that particular area. We can't say specialists in our field, but somebody who really can focus on that as their It's a great distinction, one on the language, two on the action of being able to create pathways for meaningful progress for team members in projects. It's a very interesting distinction on the underwhelm in a role versus the overwhelm in a role. I think when I've seen clinic owners and leaders within clinics support their team members really well, I think there's at least a structure of regular conversations where they're able to try and address how they're going in their role from a more holistic perspective rather than waiting for something to happen and purely reacting to it, though we always have to react to a lot of things in business. So I think one of the keynotes for me is how can the mentoring, the support of a clinic owner for and with their team perhaps be a little more holistic, a little more robust about some of these sorts of conversations about the passion projects, about their personal values, about what they want from their work. I think that I've seen in a lot of clinics have a structure so that's done consistently and consistently well. Not saying they won't ever experience this, but that might be a good way for the proactive element that you're talking about. I love the addition of the EAP as just another way to support the utility belt of a clinic, of a business, to support the humans that are on their team. as you see a lot of changes in the industry happening and unfolding, what are some of the things that you're sort of excited about that are on the horizon, some of the new approaches or innovations to employee welfare, to supporting people in organizations, to get the joy, the fulfillment progression, to have the resilience along the way when they do fall flat, as you said, What are you seeing that is particularly of note and exciting in your industry? Good question. I was quite shocked by the great resignation that happened from COVID. And this is worldwide. We know that in Australia, about 50 to 60 people, 50 to 60% of people experience burnout at work. We know that one in three people are considering leaving their job to go somewhere else. And so we know that there has to be some drastic measures taken to address this overwork, this lack of control, the values and the fairness that aren't being aligned to the person that you're employing. And so what I'd say, is that this is the right time and has been the right time to really pay attention to this in your workplace. Have those conversations and understand that you're working alongside people to reach a similar goal and you're trying to merge your vision and your values so that it really sees through into a healthier workplace. And so the technology or the approaches that you're asking, I think, are there, it's just being, can we utilise it and can we systemise it a little bit more? There's a lot of opportunity, I think, to support more businesses and a lot of good businesses are doing good things for their team. And there are a lot of people out there supporting those that are experiencing burnout. I think we can go a little bit further. I think we've been talking about burnout for way too long without some kind of national program that's standardized across the country. I'd like to see that through in some ways and work with allied health and doctors in Australia to have evidence-based practice that is rolled out. And that would be a vision of mine that we can actually execute in the next year or so, I'm hoping. We're working on that with RACGP and we're just trying to find a way to support more GPs and on the side doing more work with allied health. So there's lots of stuff there. And then the other scary part of it is AI. and where psychologists are top 10 professions that might become redundant if that's possible from the use of AI over the next few years. And it's really hard to predict what's gonna happen, but it's in the makings right now. So I'd like to lean on that as another avenue to support people rather than be scared by it. great approach to take to harness the technology that is already here and rapidly evolving. You offer EAP programs, you support businesses out there. For someone that's listening or watching us here, what's the best way that they could get in contact or follow up to see whether this is right for them? Well, with us, it's just a matter of booking in scope and call and we can just chat about whether it will help them or not. to find out what their concerns are. If it's not with us, just call around a few places and see what they have to offer and put that in as part of your policy and create that as a go-to for anyone in distress and managing that. It looks like as well that you had a special setup for CM members on the windup. So be sure to note that if you are part of the CM community as well. Well, thank you so much for the insights, Shawn. This is a very topical conversation, routinely comes up as you probably see inside the Slack community where all the members are about managing burnout with their team members. What I love is the framework that you've got here to help a clinic owner have a crack themselves, but also know that there are programs like the one that you offer the EIP to support and complement what they're doing to create a really great place to work. So thank you so much for sharing. We'll have all the show notes and links over at clinkmastery.com, and no doubt we'll have another conversation in time. Looking forward to seeing how this resonates with the community. So thank you so much, Shawn. Thanks, Ben. Thanks for tuning in to the Grow Your Clinic podcast. To find out more about past episodes or how we can help you, head to www.clinicmastery.com forward slash podcast. And please remember to rate and review us on your podcast player of choice. See you on the next episode.