[00:00:00] Hayden: Well, I really enjoyed my interview with Lieutenant General John Fruin. In fact, I feel humbled by his willingness to share his story with myself and with my listeners.
[00:00:36] The purpose of this section now is to go deeper into some of those areas, some of the things that, uh, John brought up,
[00:00:42] and, uh, for me to share some of the evidence and the research behind what he was talking about, perhaps some of the models and frameworks, uh, behind the conversation and the stories, and where possible share a few practical tips with you so that you can take some of those things and help them to, uh, build some new habits.
[00:01:00] So, the first story that John shared with us was a story around the Middle East and his time in Iraq in 2017. He spoke about, uh, when he spoke to his leadership team and he said, what's your leave plan?
[00:01:15] they thought about it and came back and said, well, our, colleagues and counterparts in the U. S. Army They're not taking leave, so we're just gonna work through and be tough and, uh, and tough it out. And he said, wrong answer. and that was really interesting because the US Army and military at the time had a, had a reputation for just toughing it out and being, you know, working through.
[00:01:36] and, uh, John had a different view. He had a view that we need to take care of ourselves, take care of our well being. And part of that was taking leave, to recover. So there's a couple of things I wanted to talk about. That one is social norms and the is the concept of effort recovery.
[00:01:50] we can't really, change social norms radically unless we are the boss like John was perhaps. But the first part of understanding social norms and that in this case, it's the [00:02:00] norms of the US Army versus the Australian army, is to be mindful of it, to be aware.
[00:02:05] of the norms that exist and to pause and reflect and then deliberately decide if you want to follow those norms or you want to change those. And in this case, John was aware of them. Uh, his leaders perhaps weren't, or they were, but decided to follow them and he challenged them to. make a different decision to take care of themselves and their well being and those people in their teams.
[00:02:28] So I think that's a powerful lesson around the ability to and importance of being aware of the norms and pausing and making a more deliberate and conscious decision by leaders to sometimes not follow them and to do something a little different. The second thing that John spoke about there was about the need to take leave as part of recovery.
[00:02:49] So there's a lot of research around a model or framework called the effort recovery model. this was originally, described or defined by Meijman & Mulder in 1998. Uh, and they spoke about four areas of recovery. before I go into those, I'll tell you about what is it though. Basically, the idea that after intense periods of effort, we need to make sure we build in recovery time.
[00:03:15] for me, I like to think about that in three or four different sort of time periods. One is every day, every week. and every year. So, uh, some of the research is fascinating. If you think about this, if you have a typical day, where, you get up in the morning, you have your breakfast, you go to work, whether that's, know, going into the, to the office or, or in your office at home, we begin work.
[00:03:37] And typically our, our performance is, is high. Our productivity engagement is high. But let's assume we didn't have a break all day. Our, our performance and productivity slowly goes down. And by the end of the day, our, performance or productivity is quite low. We have a spike just towards the end and we perform well, we've got to go home.
[00:03:59] We've got half an hour [00:04:00] to go. We do that unconsciously. If however, you take a break in the mid morning. And then lunchtime and then the mid afternoon. Your performance starts high, it starts to go down, and just before you have a break, your performance goes up again. You come back, high performance, it drops down a little bit, and then goes up again just before a lunchtime break and throughout the day.
[00:04:21] So the dips in your performance aren't so low. So that's kind of the concept of taking short little breaks throughout a day. the same thing is true throughout the week and throughout a year. So, for example, if you think about a whole year, If you have 11 months, let's say you've got 4 weeks leave, and you've got 11 months of working really, really hard, your performance will drop, uh, throughout that year, and then you have 4 weeks off, uh, and then your performance, you know, goes up just beforehand.
[00:04:49] So, but you're not really, um, uh, performing at your best level throughout the year. If you have four weeks holiday, for example, the ideal scenario would be one a week every quarter so you can work and then have the week off or even short little breaks that you can have. Now, of course, our lives can't fit neatly into that paradigm and that schedule, but you get the idea, hopefully, that regular shorter breaks are much, much better for your recovery than working hard for a very long time and then having a longer break.
[00:05:19] There's four things that you can do to recover, and they're known as psychological detachment, control, mastery, and relaxation. So let's talk about each of those briefly. the psychological detachment one is really, particularly let's say at night times or on the weekend or even when you go on holidays.
[00:05:38] Your ability to psychologically detach from the intense effort from the work, to let, go. You know, some people can naturally do that, they finish work and it's all gone out of their mind. Others are constantly thinking about, ruminating about, about work and causing themselves some additional sort of stress.
[00:05:57] And they're not recovering. So it's really [00:06:00] important to be able to switch off and psychologically detach. So whilst that's happening, your body is and your mind is recovering. The second concept is all around control. the same activity that you have control over or choice over, can help you to recover and enhance your well being.
[00:06:18] whereas if you are doing something, the same activity without any choice or control, it won't have the same impact. Probably the best example of that I can think of is, is, uh, cooking dinner. If you are a busy person and you cook dinner for your children at night time, uh, and it's out of a sense of obligation and just rushing to cook.
[00:06:37] There's no sort of recovery going on while you're doing that. Whereas if you choose to cook dinner, let's say for friends on a, on a weekend, uh, and that's something that's not an obligation. It's something that brings you pleasure and enjoyment and you, you've got choice over and control over it. Then that can give you a sense of wellbeing, to do that.
[00:06:56] So the same activity of cooking. Depending on whether you've got choice or control can enhance or inhibit your wellbeing. The third area of focus is something called mastery. let's say in the evenings, if you're totally exhausted and you flop on the couch and turn the TV on and just flick through the channels, there's no sense of sort of wellbeing or rest going on during that stage.
[00:07:21] Whereas, let's say you've got, taking up a hobby like, uh, playing the guitar, or photography, or, or cooking, or any of those things, or many other things, and in the evenings you might spend an hour or two trying to master playing the guitar, and you get totally engaged and into that activity, while you are gaining that sense of mastery and you're engaged in that activity, You're actually recovering and your well being is enhanced by gaining a sense of mastery and by being engaged in the flow in some different activity than would normally be the case.
[00:07:55] So that when you go back to work the next day, will have experienced some [00:08:00] level of recovery. And the final element in the Meisman and Moulder. is a sense of, uh, relaxation. So what are you doing in the evenings to relax? Now this could be meditation or mindfulness or, you know, self hypnosis or any of those kind of deliberate relaxation techniques, but it could be simply listening music, lying on the couch and having some of your favorite music on, Anything that helps you to, to relax.
[00:08:25] It could be going for a very gentle, uh, walk that's relaxing. So, there's four things that you can do to recover after intense periods of effort, whether it's during a day or during, uh, over the weekend to recover. Something else that John spoke about, was a story he shared around the, the Solomon Islands.
[00:08:44] He went to the Solomon Islands and he was working 18 hour days and, uh, during that period he was getting exhausted and perhaps moving towards burnout, although he wasn't aware of it. One of his, senior staff came to him with a pre packed toiletry bag. Uh, and said here you go John, here's your toiletry bag, you're going over there on that boat to go over and have 24 hours out of this environment, have a shower, have a nice meal and 24 hours off to recover.
[00:09:15] that story raised for me a few things to share with you. first one is around the concept of burnout and how important it is to take some actions well before you're even approaching that kind of burnout, which is not about, just feeling tired. there's a whole lot of research around burnout and one of my favourite, experts and gurus in this area is Professor Michael Leiter and his partner, in, uh, this research is Christina Maslach.
[00:09:41] many others, but, uh, Michael's work I've, uh, much admired for many years. He's, uh, from Canada and he's researched burnout for probably 25 or 30 years. Um, so if you're interested, have a look at Michael's work and Christina Maslach's work. There are two elements that John spoke about. He used [00:10:00] the term EQ or emotional intelligence, you know, he was saying that we need to be really aware of yourself before, you get to burnout.
[00:10:07] Many people have researched over the last 20 years or thereabouts concept of emotional intelligence or EQ which they differentiate from IQ Daniel Goleman is probably the person who has done the most sort of research into this area and has popularized the concept of EQ there's many different definitions of emotion intelligence the simple way I like to think about it there's three elements the first element of emotional intelligence is around understanding Yourself that is a self awareness side of that and particularly understanding your emotional state and your emotions The second part is understanding others and their emotional states And the third bit is emotional regulation, and that is really, in the moment, being able to understand yourself, others, and know what's required, and then that skill to change your emotional state to be more effective in the moment.
[00:11:01] So it's sort of broadly those three elements. and so in the case of burnout, John was talking about that level of. emotional intelligence, which is more about awareness of self, before you get to, to burn out. So you can take some action to take care of yourself and look after your wellbeing. The second thing that John spoke about, uh, that I want to touch on is around support.
[00:11:23] The fact that as a leader you need to surround yourself by people who have your back and people who support you and the fact that he actually wasn't incredibly aware of what was happening, he just was working through and thought I'll punch through, I'll work out these 18 hour days and that's what I have to do.
[00:11:41] but he had the right support around him to recognise. Or when he didn't recognise it was his turn to take a break and take care of himself. And so, leaders, make sure you surround yourself by great people who support you, not only in achieving your leadership, tasks and outcomes that you're driving towards, but [00:12:00] also surround yourself by people who support your well being and take care of you, particularly in tough and challenging times.
[00:12:08] The last thing that, came out of that story in the Solomon Islands for me, is around the notion of resilience and bouncing back. Now, before bouncing back and being resilient, John spoke about the need to take care of your well being in advance. In the times that are less challenging, try to get to a peak level of physical and mental and emotional fitness.
[00:12:31] so that when you do have those difficult times, you can bounce back, much more strongly. Now, you need to have a strong baseline level, first of all. To be able to bounce back to a reasonable level. Uh, I always think about the concept in resilience of bouncing back to what? levels of wellbeing prior to some challenging episode, in your life.
[00:12:53] levels of wellbeing were low prior to the episode or the adversity, then you may bounce back to a low level. If your levels were high, Your chances of recovering back to a higher level are much better. So I like that concept that, uh, he spoke about. So that's something that's really important to keep in mind if you're a leader.
[00:13:13] Um, you're going to have challenging periods, particularly where you can't take care of yourself as well as you might in normal circumstances. so it's really important to take care of yourself and have high levels of, well being, physical and mental and emotional, well before any kind of crisis or emergency that you need to deal with.
[00:13:31] The third story that John shared with us was around his time in Rwanda. Now this was a different kind of experience because this was a peacekeeping force in the 90s, The team that, uh, John led, uh, was a group that were, you know, focused much more on military action than on peacekeeping, and they went into a, a, a place in Rwanda where there had been significant trauma and genocide and many people had, [00:14:00] had died, when John and his team at the Australian Defence Force came into Rwanda, They were basically traumatized by what they saw. They saw people that had been killed, I can't really imagine actually exactly what they saw, but it was a traumatic environment that they weren't ready for. and spoke to a psychologist who came in and helped them deal with the trauma that they were dealing with. And they had these, uh, situations where they, sat around, and they shared what they saw. And they shared particularly how they felt about what they saw. It was a kind of process of normalising, their experience, so they could talk about it rather than hide it.
[00:14:43] Now, whether you're a, uh, you know, an expert in critical incident debriefing or dealing with grief, and there may be some different approaches to how you deal with grief or trauma, that the evidence and the research talks about.
[00:14:55] What was fascinating to me is that John felt that that was actually incredibly cathartic. And for them, It helped incredibly to talk about what they saw. and what they felt about that. I guess the message for me is whether you, you know, in a traumatic situation such as a war zone or a situation where you're seeing terrible things like that, or you're in a normal work environment, but there's some some level of lower level or different trauma and you're feeling challenged by that, emotionally, mentally, psychologically, get help.
[00:15:30] Whether you see a psychologist, or a counselor or a coach, seek help and talk through trauma that you're experiencing. particularly, I like the concept of talking through how you feel about that, which links to Brené Brown's work around vulnerability, I guess, and sharing your vulnerabilities and your fears and your anxieties and your worries, which is all around emotions.
[00:15:53] that's human. That's real. she also wrote a book that's, uh, that's less, well known compared to some of her earlier books, [00:16:00] called Atlas of the Heart. Where she talks through a lot of the different types of emotions that we experience. And I found that really helpful to understand your emotional state.
[00:16:10] Sometimes we, we don't have enough words to describe how we feel. We feel great or bad. there's something like 400 different words we can choose to use to describe our emotional state. But often we only have a small range of vocabulary. So my, uh, practical sort of advice to people around this is to, to learn to broaden.
[00:16:30] words you can use to describe how you feel about anything in life, whether it's a trauma or a daily basis, how you're feeling. Um, there are some really good apps that you can use. There's an app called Mood Meter. There's a number of apps that you can Google. They're free. Uh, and they can prompt you.
[00:16:48] To actually tap in on a daily basis to how you're feeling at any one stage, and that can be from negative to positive emotions to pleasant to unpleasant, uh, feelings to low energy to high energy. There's a number of different models and frameworks, but I think the key is. Understand and get used to talking about how you're feeling and describing it as accurately as possible.
[00:17:10] You know, for example, are you feeling angry or frustrated? Very similar, but different things. the more you can do that, the better you can understand how you're feeling.
[00:17:19] And then you can deal with those situations a lot better once you understand the feeling. The last thing that John spoke about that I want to, uh, go into a little bit is, the concept of self awareness. Now, John spoke about self awareness, you know, know thyself, know yourself. He also spoke about the concept of self preservation, which is a similar concept but slightly different.
[00:17:41] The self concept that John spoke about was really around saying, take care of yourself, take care of your own well being, preserve yourself. So that you can be a great leader, over a sustained period of time over the longer term. The concept of self awareness is the beginning of all of this.
[00:17:59] The [00:18:00] beginning point, the central point of taking care of yourself is to be aware of yourself. the concept of this kind of goes back a long way. I like to say, uh, starting with Socrates back in around 400 BC where he said, know thyself. More recently in 1972, Socrates, you know, he, he had left the earth at that stage, but there was some two other people who spoke about this and they were Duval and Wickland in 1972.
[00:18:28] There's a lot of other people that have researched the concept of self awareness. question is, how do you increase your self awareness? What can we all do? We know people that are highly self aware. others that have blind spots and everyone talks about them and their weaknesses but they don't know what they are or even their strengths from time to time people don't know their own strengths and yet others others do you know there's a concept called jihari window which is all around understanding yourself, how you see yourself versus how others see you and whether or not there's alignment between what you see and what others see about you.
[00:19:08] Uh, and blind spots, you know, can occur when you're not aware of yourself and others perhaps are aware of those things. So self awareness is the key. to looking after yourself. But even before that, self awareness is the key to habits, behavior change on a daily basis. If you're not aware, you're not going to be able to change any of those habits.
[00:19:28] So then the question is, how do we increase our self awareness? Well, one of those things is that we can learn to build a habit around pausing and reflecting. quite often we're just on automatic pilot. We're not reflecting and we're doing the same habits and behaviours as we had yesterday.
[00:19:46] And so we have to deliberately slow down, pause and, and reflect. Take a breath, whether it's mindfulness or whatever. Slow down, take a breath and reflect on what's going on. Get off that hamster wheel, that [00:20:00] treadmill. stop doing things automatically and bring in the rational conscious part of our brain.
[00:20:05] That's critical for, for reflection and increased self awareness. Another thing we can do is to seek some feedback and be good at seeking and receiving feedback. This is a fascinating topic for me because I've been teaching how to give feedback for years but it's only five to seven years ago that I realized that actually being able to receive feedback is more important than even giving good feedback.
[00:20:32] I came across a book that I want to recommend to you all that I think is fascinating. It's called Thanks for the Feedback and it's by Stone and Heen in 2015 and it talks about receiving feedback well, even when you're not in the mood for it, when it's not given well, all these things. It's how do we receive feedback well.
[00:20:52] Now receiving feedback well doesn't mean Now there's a lot of feedback, but the main thing is that we have to agree with the feedback, it's actually really truly listening to the feedback, and judging and evaluating the feedback later on. It's the listening part of truly listening to understand what the feedback is saying.
[00:21:07] The concept of agreeing with it, is a separate concept, and around that by the way one of the things I And what we want to teach people is to say, right, separate out listening and understanding from judging, evaluating and deciding what to do with that feedback. And so it's really important. Listen, understand the feedback fully, and then separately make some judgments about whether you think any of it is accurate or not, and then what you want to do about that. In the book, Thanks for the Feedback. Stone and Heen talk about three triggers, that is three things that get in the way of us truly listening to that feedback and, uh, understanding what that feedback is saying.
[00:21:45] One of those triggers is about the person giving the feedback. If I get feedback from somebody that I respect and think is credible, I'm more likely to receive that feedback well, but if somebody else who I don't [00:22:00] respect or think is credible or have a high opinion of, then That same feedback may not be listened to.
[00:22:07] I may discount that, So really important to be aware of the person giving the feedback and minimizing the trigger of a particular person giving that feedback. Another trigger is the truth trigger. you just think straight away, that's not true. the problem with that is that you typically either totally discount at one hundred percent, before you even really listen to understand that.
[00:22:31] Uh, and so the advantage of minimizing your truth trigger is that you actually do stop listening and understanding. It may be that only 5 to 10 percent of what they're saying is true. 90%, 95 percent could, you know, be, be untrue. But the point is if the truth trigger jumps in there too early, you're not going to listen and understand that feedback.
[00:22:53] The final one, which I think is the deepest and most challenging to overcome is. That is, the identity trigger. That is that we get some feedback that goes to against the core of our own identity. So, for example, if I think I'm a very authentic and honest person and someone gives me feedback that I'm not authentic or honest my identity trigger might bleat it out.
[00:23:17] kick in, I'm too hurt emotionally to really listen properly to understand that, uh, and therefore I discount the feedback totally because I kind of think, they don't know me, they don't know what they're talking about. And so again, what's really important there is that we pause, minimize that trigger, so we truly understand what the feedback's saying before we then make any judgment about whether it's.
[00:23:39] Helpful or right in any way at all. So the three triggers, one around the truth trigger, one around the relationship with the person giving it, and one around the identity trigger, we all have those and we can't get rid of them, but we can minimize them if we're aware of them. If we minimize them, we get more feedback and we reflect more and our self [00:24:00] awareness increases.
[00:24:01] If our self awareness increases, we become And we enhance our own wellbeing at the same time because we're in a better position to take care of ourselves. So, really interesting, and important to increase your self awareness. There's many other things you can do to increase your self awareness, but they're some of the keys that I take away from my conversation with John.
[00:24:22] in summary. Keys from what I spoke to John about for everyone that's listening to this story are around the concept of effort recovery and the need to take leave, take time out and recover and don't wait until you're in that burnout phase. when you are taking time to recover, make sure you think about that on a daily basis in terms of your daily habits, uh, on a weekly basis and on an annual basis when you're taking leave.
[00:24:48] Another concept that was really important is social norms and understanding, the social norms of the group that you're in, whether it's the US or Australian army or any other group that you belong to and pause and deliberately make some choices about whether you want to go along with those norms or, or challenge them.
[00:25:03] Another one that we spoke about was the concept of burnout, but to manage burnout emotional intelligence is really important and Support having the right people around you is key. The concept of bouncing back and being resilient was spoken about, but in particular, making sure your baseline level of wellbeing is high enough to cope with setbacks and challenges.
[00:25:26] the concept of dealing with trauma, talking about feelings, emotions, and getting help with that. And finally, probably the key right throughout this, this interview was around, that concept of awareness and how you can increase that and how that is core and central to taking care of yourself and core and central to leadership.
[00:25:43] I really want to thank Lieutenant General John Fruin for his time, for willingly sharing some really powerful stories, uh, and some lessons behind that, uh, to us. I would love to encourage the, uh, listeners. to subscribe to my [00:26:00] podcast, leave some reviews. And if you like this and found it useful, please share the podcast with others.
[00:26:07] Thank you.
