Preventing Burnout with Kandi Wiens

george grombacher 0:02
Dr. Kandi Wiens is the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Master’s in medical education program and a senior fellow. Her newest book is burnout immunity, how emotional intelligence can help you build your resilience and heal your relationship with work. Welcome to the show, Kandi.

Kandi Wiens 0:19
Thanks, George, happy to be here.

george grombacher 0:21
excited to have you on. Tell us a little about your personal life more about your work and what motivated you to write the book.

Kandi Wiens 0:27
Yeah, so I get asked this question every once awhile like Why of all things? Why would someone want to become an expert and burnout sounds like something that would be so depressing to your career too. And it’s true, but I’m on the I’m on the other side of burnout. I’ve had my own personal experience with it back in 2011. And that created a pretty serious life threatening wake up call for me. So, before coming to Penn, and before diving into this research, I was a management consultant for about 20 Something years, and very lucrative career, very successful, the kind of job where you get promoted every couple of years, and things are going really well. But you have to work extremely hard, and more insecure overachievers, like me, we throw ourselves into work, I was prone to burnout. I mean, I was just burnout waiting to happen, because I was so dedicated to my work and, and really striving to achieve a lot of big goals like many people are today. And very much in the grind, you know very much mentality towards work of, I just gotta push through it, I gotta push through the pain sort of thing. And I did, and I, for the most part, love my work. But also, you know, started recognizing some signs early on that this wasn’t sustainable, started missing out on some pretty meaningful moments with my family, like a lot of parents do, where we make, you know, we willingly make sacrifices, personal sacrifices in order to attain those professional goals. And so I started noticing I was making more and more of those sacrifices, but it didn’t really hit me. Until I went into the doctor’s office when I was 42 years old, 41 years old, and very healthy, thought I was healthy felt like I was carrying an average level of stress, just like most people, and went into the doctor, just my annual checkup and thought I’d be in and out in 20 minutes, just like you know, most of us go in, we get our A and C and later, see you next year Dr. Smith, or whatever. So go in and long story short, the nurse checked my blood pressure four times without saying anything. And then left the exam room. And I did what most of us would do, I grabbed my phone and I started working again, because I was just my mind was on work not necessarily on me and my health. And it didn’t really dawn on me that what was going on with me was a sky high blood pressure reading of 200 over 110 That’s considered a hypertensive emergency where I could have been rushed. I mean, they were planning to rush me to the hospital. And my gosh, and my doctor came in Oh, it was I mean, when the doctor came in and and started telling me what was going on. And she tried to keep me calm, of course, because they didn’t want to want to give me any more worked up. But once it the the anti anxiety medicine and the blood pressure reducing medicines started setting in, the doctor started telling me what was going on, and that I could have had a heart attack right on right on spot there, I could have potentially, you know, had a stroke or some people will even die if they have a hypertensive emergency last without any kind of treatment. So she called my husband to come and pick me up. And once he got there, she gave him instructions for what I was supposed to do, which was basically like, don’t do anything for five days, just take it easy and watch my blood pressure. And then, you know, my first thought was no way I’m not sitting for five days, I have to go back to work next week, like I have way too much to do, and people are counting on me. And then my second thought was, well, thank god someone’s finally giving me a chance to get some sleep and, and just rest and take care of myself. And it sounds funny now but I you know, I looking back in hindsight, I think my reaction was pretty normal. As I talked to people who are burned out, and not necessarily taking the steps they need to many of us have the same kind of reaction. It’s our first thought is still on work, and and our responsibilities. But once it finally dawned on me that I needed to do something different, I needed to take a very serious look at what stress was doing to me. I took it seriously. And so I started reading a ton of self help books and learning as much as I could about your stress response and how to manage stress and healthy way. One thing led to another and I decided to study it for my dissertation in my doctoral research. And that’s where I got really interested in it and started geeking out on all the other studies that had been done. And you know, to make a long story short, I immersed myself in it for the last 10 years. That’s all I’ve been doing is researching people who are in high stress roles, jobs professions, they tell me their stress level is severe, very severe or worst of all possible for six months or more, yet, when I measure whether they’re burned out or not, they are not burned out. So I study the people who have high levels of stress for a long time. But they’re not burned out. And so that’s the basis of the book are not immunity. It’s all about these people who have this supernatural ability to deal with a lot of stress at work, but protect themselves from burnout. And I show people how to do that by using Well, first of all building but then also knowing how to use your emotional and social intelligence. So that’s how I, I got to this point of becoming a burnout expert. Wow,

george grombacher 5:39
I can just see the same. The nurse just keeps checking your blood pressure over and over again, because it’s something must be wrong, because this person seems to be perfectly fine.

Kandi Wiens 5:48
Right? Yeah, I’m sure she was quite surprised. I remember the look on her face was what she was looking at the machine, the blood pressure machine wondering if there was something wrong with it. she I think she even used a second machine at one point, or the doctor did when she came in. Right. But ya know, it’s not normal for someone to have that kind of a blood pressure reading. But again, you know, I was if you asked me how I was feeling that day, I would have said, normal are fine, because I was so used to feeling that way. And you know, when I talk to people who are experiencing that kind of long, ongoing long term stress like that, the thing is with burnout, a lot of people tell me, it’s very insidious, it sneaks up on you, oftentimes, we’re kind of aware of some of these subtle signs, missing out on things are more agitated with certain relationships, we start with notice some of the signs, but many of us don’t do anything with that information when we shouldn’t be, you know, in order to prioritize ourselves.

george grombacher 6:49
So how do you feel today, and just kind of compare and contrast? Yeah, you

Kandi Wiens 6:55
know, for the most part, I feel great. One of the things I’ve learned how to do, and I write about this, in my book is I’ve learned how to regulate my nervous system, which my nervous system is different than yours, I may get triggered by things that you wouldn’t be, even if we weren’t in the same exact same environment. And so I’ve become very aware of what my triggers are, and why I get triggered by certain things. And then I’ve done a lot of work on trying to manage my triggers and, and have a more intentional response to my triggers, rather than an impulsive reaction to my triggers. And that has helped me figure out how to regulate my nervous system. When I’m in either acute stress, you know, stress is happening in the moment, my stress spikes from a three to a seven. Or if I have chronic stress for a long period of time, like launching a book, it’s like, I’m busier than ever with work in school. And then I’m launching a book on top of it. So I’ve got chronic stress. So I need to learn how to recover frequently, not just like, take a vacation after the book is launched, but really build in a lot of micro recoveries, and build in a lot of capacity. So that when I have these really long days, I’m traveling a lot. I’m prepared for it.

george grombacher 8:08
So what is burnout?

Kandi Wiens 8:10
Yeah, I’m burnout. The thing with burnout is it is overused and misused right now, to the point where I don’t know that we have a common definition of it. So it’s really helpful for listeners to know what it is, so you can recognize the signs and do something with it. So burnout is a psychological syndrome, that people experience as a result of chronic stress at work. So let me break that down a little bit. Psychological syndrome means that it can come and go, that doesn’t mean that if we’re burned out, today, we’re forever going to be doomed to be burned out for the rest of our lives or career. So syndrome means it can come and go, we can take care of ourselves and recover from burnout. The second part is, it’s in response to chronic stress at work. So chronic stress, meaning not just the kind of stress that happens in one day, something blows up. But it’s for a period of, you know, three months or more six months or more, the the more that stress sticks around, the more it’s going to grind you down. And so chronic stress for a long period of time can make you more prone to or vulnerable to burnout. And then it’s primarily studied in the context of our stress that we get from work, you know, the demands of the job, and the responsibilities and expectations. But you know, I would argue and I’m really trying to help educate people that are personal stress depletes our capacity to deal with work stress. Right? Have you ever noticed that that the more stress you have outside of work, the harder it is to deal with the stress at work, for sure. So it’s a total capacity issue. So that burnout, you know, makes people feel really emotionally exhausted. That in fact, people have told me that feeling of when I wake up in the morning I have zero energy, like I can’t imagine going to work today because I just have no emotional energy. To get up to my job, it also makes people feel really cynical. Just that attitude, really negative towards people that they work with. It also makes people feel like they’re less effective at their jobs. Like they just can’t, no matter how hard they work, how much effort they put in, it makes them feel like I don’t really feel like I’m seeing the outcomes of all this effort and work that I’m putting into it. So emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and then feeling less effective that those are the most common feelings that people experience.

george grombacher 10:32
Is it accurate to say that it’s not the stress that causes it? It’s our response to it, our ability to deal with it?

Kandi Wiens 10:38
Yes, yeah. So some burnout experts who really just studied this, from a really academic perspective, argue that that burnout is caused by psychologically hazardous conditions at work. I agree with that. But I would push it further and say it’s actually a non response to those conditions that causes us to either burn out or maintain our resilience.

george grombacher 11:03
What came into my head was certainly in emergency room physician, and a chef in a very busy restaurant, those are extremely stressful, and they’re probably are very burned up physicians and very burned out chefs, and very, very calm, happy chefs and emergency room physicians.

Kandi Wiens 11:21
That’s exactly right. And those are the people that I studied, the ones that are not burned out, every study I’ve conducted and you know, other burnout, researchers that study and they’re they’re studying and results produce findings that say 37% of the group here is burned out. But what about the other 63% If they’re not burned out, there’s something going on with them, they may be protected, maybe they’re at risk of burnout, some of them maybe, and they might be on the verge of burning out. But in almost every study I’ve ever looked at, and the ones I do, there’s always a group of people in those same environments that are engaged in their jobs, and effective and feel like they’re making, you know, making the impact that they want to and doing the work they love.

george grombacher 12:05
I imagine that there’s a continuum I’m sure he sort of talked about, but there’s a chunk that are burned out chunk that aren’t, there’s probably some people who just innately they understand how to manage things. But they imagine that the majority of it is these are learned tools and skills.

Kandi Wiens 12:23
Yes, absolutely. And that’s what this book is all about, are learning, it’s learning how to build our emotional intelligence. And then knowing how exactly to use it when we’re in either acute stress or chronic stress. And, and so one of the things I really hope to do with this book, and I think it achieves it is empowering people. So giving people actual practical tools and strategies that they can work on to build those skills, and then use those skills in the right way. Learning how to how to how to understand and manage our emotions, that’s a big part of this, you know, stress causes an emotional reaction, whether it’s good stress that makes us feel like motivated and energized. And like interested in doing the work, that still is an emotional reaction. Or if it’s the negative kind of stress, the stuff that makes us feel anxious or overwhelmed or, you know, frustrated. All of that we have the capacity to both understand those emotions and manage them so that we can use use those emotions to our advantage, use that data, use those data as energy to help us work through things.

george grombacher 13:34
That’s interesting. I’ve always, as kind of a throwaway told people, specifically my wife the other day that I’ve always operated under a healthy bit of anxiety. And that’s just, you know, there’s things that have to get done. I don’t feel like it’s, it’s hurting me, but gives me a sense of urgency. Yes.

Kandi Wiens 13:56
So I talk quite a bit about what’s called the sweet spot of stress. This comes from Kelly McGonigal research. She’s at Stanford. And there are a number of other researchers that that look at what’s called New stress, U S T RAS su stress is good stress. That’s the kind of stress that as we take, we get more stimulation. We feel more challenged and motivated. Some people work better under deadline. Some people intentionally procrastinate, because they know that that pressure they’re putting on themselves will help them actually do a better job or be more creative when they need to I did that when I was writing the book. There were times when I had two weeks to write a chunk of content, but I would wait until two days before because I knew that that pressure would spark creativity on me. So that you stress can be good. And then we get a little more stress and we actually are in that zone of performance or zone of learning and growth. That’s that’s that sweet spot of stress. But if we get more than what we need of that sweet spot of stress And then we start to tip over into feelings of anxiety, like the bad kind of anxiety that then blocks us from being creative or feeling productive when we start feeling overwhelmed. And it’s just that general feeling of like, I have way more coming out my psyche, and I know how to deal with right now.

george grombacher 15:21
That’s got to be really tricky. I don’t remember what the term, you talked about how you were you were an insecure overachiever. And so therefore, you’re probably did you find that you lied to yourself and say, No, I’m fine. I don’t need anything and just kind of keep going. So it’s hard to self diagnose, sometimes

Kandi Wiens 15:39
it is, it is. And especially when you love your job and you enjoy the work that you’re doing, it can be really easy to feel like burnout is the new baseline, that you’re living outside of that sweet spot of stress is like the norm. That’s what I thought was normal, and other people that I worked with, where we were all operating under these, you know, pushing past our sweet spot of stress not recovering as much as we needed to, oftentimes, and, and so when we’re in that state for a long period of time, it that’s what can, that’s where the insidious nature of burnout can creep up on us. And like, in my case, where I had a health crisis, where all of a sudden, it was like, smack in front of me a wake up call, other people’s Wake Up Calls are much more subtle, they start to see their some of their relationships deteriorate, they start to notice they feel a lack of creativity, or start to feel like their ability to learn and adapt isn’t what it used to be. And it’s much more subtle. But you know, what we want to do is really prevent ourselves from those big huge wake up calls. Those are life threatening ones, of course, are the ones that ruin our relationships, but also the kind of, we need to really pay attention to the subtle cues, that it’s time for recovery, it’s time to re establish and guard our boundaries, including psychological boundaries and emotional boundaries. But yes, it’s, you know, one of the things I write about in the book is mindsets. And one of the mindsets that protects people from burnout is having an aware and care mindset. That means having an awareness of what is tripping me out of my sweet spot of stress, and then caring enough to do something with that information, caring enough to say no to things that I shouldn’t, you know, shouldn’t take on carrying enough to maintain my boundaries and protect my boundaries. So and caring enough to watch myself talk, you know, what am I saying to myself when I’m stressed? And so we have to be aware, and we have to then do something with that information and care about ourselves.

george grombacher 17:47
That to me sounds like real, genuine, authentic self care?

Kandi Wiens 17:50
Yes. Yeah. It’s not just like a preventative, go get a massage or do yoga once in a while, but it is really tuning in to what you need to keep yourself in that sweet spot of stress. What do you need for your, for you to be at your peak performance and feel like you’re learning and growing and contributing how you want to think about what are the conditions that keep you in that zone. And then one of the things George that I find really deeply reassuring, when I because I’m still prone to getting myself out of that sweet spot of stress. But one of the things that’s really reassuring is that when I do notice that I’m out outside of that zone for a while, and I’m starting to become more vulnerable and burning out. I know that I’ve been in the sweet spot of stress before, and I know how to get myself back there. I know what my conditions are. I know what I need to do to take care of myself to get back on and that’s my responsibility.

george grombacher 18:45
I love everything that you’ve been talking about. How many don’t want to mislabel but tools, strategies tactics? Did Did did you sort of distill down from from your research? Are there dozens,

Kandi Wiens 19:00
dozens? Yes, every chapter is full of multiple reflection questions, exercises, listeners can actually go to my website right now and take one of my free, it’s called the burnout risk assessment. If you are wondering if you are on the fast track to burning out that quiz, it’s an online quiz. Again, it’s free take will take you less than five to seven minutes to complete. And it will give you immediate results that will tell you whether you are low, moderate or high risk of burning out. And then based on your results, I offer some really specific recommendations and even point you to pages or exercises in the book where you can go to work on you know, whatever it is, that’s, that’s specific to you. But yeah, every single chapter has a number of exercises that I designed, and then a number of reflection questions. It’s work. I’ll tell you what I mean. The book is yes, it’s a self help book, but it’s the kind of book that you will want to work through. actually use it as a workbook. up and talk to a friend or a partner or coach or mentor, about what you’re learning about yourself. And, and I still do, you know, 1011 years after my life threatening health crisis, I still work on these things. I’ll give you another just free exercises really quick that your listeners can do every single day, this one works for me. When I think about my self care practices, or what I’m doing or not doing, I asked myself two simple questions. And I asked, I do this literally every day. Number one, what am I doing? And number two, what is that doing to me? So if, for example, if I’m really stressed, and I decide I’m going to have a couple of glasses of wine in the evening, just to unwind, have some wine, and I have some popcorn that might feel good in the moment. But then I asked myself, well, what is that really doing to me? Is it setting me up for a good night’s sleep? Is it setting me up to be filled, you know, energized and alert in the morning, whenever big day? So asking ourselves those two questions can really help us gain some insight into what’s working and what’s not working for us.

george grombacher 21:05
What am I doing? What is that doing to me? I’m really having an awesome time having a glass of wine and enjoying some popcorn helps. Let’s go. That sounds delightful. But i 100% i 100%. appreciate what you’re saying. And those are really powerful. I love there’s so much power in a good question. And those are two excellent ones. So thank you. But thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? Where can we find the burnout risk assessment? And of course, where can where can we get our copy of burnout, immunity, how emotional intelligence can help you build your resilience to heal your relationship with work?

Kandi Wiens 21:44
Yeah, all of it is on my website, Kandi weems.com KAN, di wiem selling i e n s, there’s a page on there with information about my book, you can order it on Amazon and all the other online retailers. It’ll be in bookstores on April 23. And you’ll get the burnout risk assessment on my website. I have now I think 10 Harvard Business Review articles. And then I write a monthly blog. All of that is free. And that’s on my website as well. So if you’re waiting for the books, you can’t wait for the book to come out next month and you want to start reading about this stuff. Go to my website and you’ll see those HBr articles in my blog and that’ll give you a good first start of where you get the book.

george grombacher 22:24
Awesome. If you enjoyed as much as I did, sure, candy, your appreciation, share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to candy wiens.com kndiwies.com Take advantage of all those great resources that Kenny was just talking about. Take the burnout risk assessment, just find out where you are at and obviously pick up a copy of the book burnout immunity and start to heal your relationship with work and and everything else we’ve been talking about today. Thanks, Ken. Candy. Thanks, George. Till next time, remember, do your part and doing your best

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.