Exhaustion and unhappiness when it comes to both work and life seems to be rampant right now – and what most people jokingly call it but don’t realize it might actually be, is burnout. I invited Carleen Hicks to join me on the show to talk about some of the ways we view work and why it’s so exhausting, how we might all be at more of a risk for burnout than we think, and to talk about some of the ways we can be more aware of what life and work are feeling like.
Carleen Hicks is a successful Executive and Leadership Coach who quickly builds rapport with her clients, allowing them to explore areas of strength, and vulnerability in their working life. Her approach has helped hundreds of professionals, leaders, emerging leaders and executives to get what they want at work. Best of all her approach is based on proven, behavioural science that has helped millions of professionals empower their dream careers. She brings over 20 years of experience working with businesses and leadership teams in the private and not-for-profit sectors. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Manitoba and is a certified Integral™ Master Coach.
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Podcast editing by Eric Wellman
Transcript
Lara: Welcome to today's episode of the Biz Podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about burnout or the fear of it or how it can end up really making your life and your working life feel not great. And I'm pleased to have Carleen Hicks join me today. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about who she is, and then we're going to jump into a really juicy conversation around how we can make our working life when we enjoy.
Carleen Hicks is a successful Executive and Leadership Coach who quickly builds rapport with her clients, allowing them to explore areas of strength, and vulnerability in their working life. Her approach has helped hundreds of professionals, leaders, emerging leaders and executives to get what they want at work. Best of all her approach is based on proven, behavioural science that has helped millions of professionals empower their dream careers. She brings over 20 years of experience working with businesses and leadership teams in the private and not-for-profit sectors. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Manitoba and is a certified Integral™ Master Coach.
I'm very excited to have you here and to talk about this topic. This is something that you and I have gotten to talk about a bunch of different times and how. We see people approaching work and career and success and how, unfortunately, some of the ways that we think about all of those things set us up to be on the, the edge of the precipice of burnout.
Like all the time.
Carleen: Yes. Thank you so much, Lara for having me , and yes, we're seeing this more and more. It's becoming very much in the public realm because we're talking about wellbeing a lot more, which is fantastic. This is such an amazing step forward, but we also are kind of fighting against the stream here.
Because we're seeing in a modern workplace and a modern professional life that a lot of people still have a culture of busy. And we glamorize that culture of busy, right? We like to say, oh, I'm so busy at work. And I've worked 60, 70 hours last week. And we're saying it kind of to complain, but it's also sometimes a bit of a credential that we're putting out there in terms of, you know, Hey, look at me, I must be important.
I had to work that many hours and this has been role modeled for us for years, and has created this perception that in order to be successful, we at some point need to either get burnt out, be burnt out, or have aspects of burnout affecting us. And that's a really dangerous mindset to be enshrined culturally in our working lives.
Lara: That's the hustle harder thing, right? Which I am super anti, anti hustle harder, but you see it everywhere. You see it everywhere , in how people talk about getting to success. Well, you just have to do the work, people talk about hustle as the good thing. What’s today's hustle?Right? And it's always about the more, the harder. The intensity it's become the rule in my opinion, right? The rule that people start to believe is you have to work really, really, really hard and be really, really busy and be willing to sacrifice if you want to have done well.
Carleen: Absolutely. And again, it's role modeled around us. We see it around us all the time we hear about it. Certainly, in workplaces we hear colleagues talking about how many hours they've worked or how busy they are, how important the work is that they're on, or that they have a demanding client.
And, part of you is thinking, oh my goodness, am I that important? Can I be that important? Is this what I should be doing? Is this how success looks. Is this, you know, me being important to my organization or to my business looks like. And what's interesting is you don't hear a lot of narratives around, oh no, I am so happy.
I am not the person who's doing that. I am very happy with my 40 hour work week. Thank you very much. I get to tuck my kids in at night. I get to have relaxed time. I get to make my yoga dates. You know, rarely do we hear people talking about those types of activities at work because they’re leisure activities and that just doesn't quite fit in this more masculine narrative of hard work is what's going to make this happen.
Lara: And I used to, I used to call myself lazy all the time, because I didn't want to work all the time. Right. Because I would take downtime when I wanted to do things like just watch a whole bunch of Netflix. I want to go watch the entire season of Mrs. Maizel this weekend. And I would justify it in being like, oh, I just like to be lazy.
Right. But what if it's not that it's not lazy to want to take time for yourself and to do things that you enjoy that are not work.
Carleen: Absolutely. And I think it's important too, that we're bringing in these pieces at work and we are helping to celebrate the fact that people have time to binge watch Netflix because let's face it, we're all doing it or Prime or whatever your source says to take time to celebrate with our families.
But more and more it's become sort of taboo to even talk about the fact that you have down time. To even say that. And the other part of it is too, with this culture of busy we're not allowing ourselves to be able to speak about our real lives. Right? Work life is one aspect of what it is that we're doing.
Then we're filling our time. And the, yes, it takes a lot of hours a week when you've got a full-time career on the go. But that doesn't mean that you can't talk about what's happening at home. And one of the places I see this being done the most bravely is sometimes on LinkedIn. I will see people putting things out on LinkedIn about what's happening from a health perspective or about what's happening with respect to challenges.
When you have, you know, kids who are on the spectrum and that's coming into this LinkedIn forum, which is typically this very business forum, it's been interesting to look at the comments like 90% of them are super happy to have somebody having this conversation, bringing this topic, giving it time and import and about 10% are like, why are you posting this on LinkedIn? This is where we do professional networking. Right? We need to make more space in working life to be able to showcase the fact that we are a whole person so that all of us can be welcome at work, in a professional way of course, right. We're not going to be treating work like it's a family gathering, but we definitely want everyone to feel like they can be themselves.
And a big part of who you are is your family and your personal life. And so bringing some of that, not all of it but some, of it to work and having it be welcomed, there can be a really good combatant or it can break that rule about it has to be about hard work, has to be about busy. No, I can talk about the fact that I watched the entire series of game of Thrones of Thrones over a long weekend.
Lara: Yeah. And that's, just like you were talking about how we have so many people modeling that hustle harder work, work, work model. We appreciate that there are some people who are now modeling something different and that that's starting to come out, but that we need to talk about it.
Like conversations like this, we need to talk about what that looks like right because I'm sure you must see this. I feel like the answer when people are starting to get really, really tired and exhausted is I just need to push harder.
Carleen: And it's also one of the things that our workplaces set us up for, because we have seen over the last, you know, 30 years, we've seen organizations really pushing hard for organizational health.
Right. So what does that mean? Profitability? Really good share returns if you're a publicly traded company. So there's been this huge financial focus on the performance of organizations and somewhere in that financial focus employees shifted from being what drives your company forward? the incredibly amazing resource that makes your clients happy or makes your business even viable to a cost center on a profit and loss sheet.
And as part of that, we're constantly seeing, at least it was my experience when I was working in corporate HR, constantly seeing the, okay, well, can we trim 5%? Can we trim 10%? The work didn't go away. It got redistributed. So we've been asking people to do more and more with less and less. And it has really impacted, first of all, the connection people have with their work, because they don't necessarily always feel that great about it.
Yes. To getting lots of stuff done. Yes. You're working many hours, but if you ask most professionals what they feel proud about in their careers, it would take them a moment to think about it because while they got a lot done, how they feel about what they got done has shifted because it doesn't necessarily their best work isn't necessarily quality work.
They got it done. That was the goal. And it's keeping in mind how this is impacting workplaces, how this is impacting working lives and understanding that, you know, the hours of work that we're being asked to perform through, isn't necessarily going to uphold the high performance of companies. We know this, we've seen this and also too can really of course, impact those working lives.
And we're seeing it, I think cumulate right now in the great resignation where people are saying, you know what. I don't have to try and squeeze 80 hours of work into 40 hours so I can have my family life, or I can make sure I can look after my wellbeing, but this is very hidden. So what leaders in particular were being asked to do is to push their teams.
And a lot of leaders are amazing people, and they're not going to do that. So what they're going to do is they're going to take it. They're going to take it their 40 hours pulling into 50 hours or 50 hours to 60 hours. Even their teams now faced with doing a lot more. And it just keeps welling and people do try very hard to work with it, but they're also trying hard, especially leaders not impacting others.
And this is this hidden cost that happens. It's hiding in plain sight. When we don't feel like we have an option to not deliver the work we're going to push through no matter how that's impacting our wellbeing, whatever that wellbeing piece is for you. Sometimes it can be mental. Sometimes it's physical.
Sometimes it's relational. When we're talking about relationships outside of work.
Lara: So, what do you want people to know about that? What do you do when it's like, so certainly in corporate settings it's a different thing with small business owners, but it impacts us all in the same kind of way where we think like, well, it has to be done.
What do you want me to do? It has to happen. Like, what do you want people to know about all of that?
Carleen: Well, and it goes deeper into hiding. You know, you talk about small business and entrepreneurs, business owners, right? It is so hard to put the work down because work is at home and we're seeing this across the board, you know, coming out of the pandemic and now with hybrid workplaces, working home are closer together than they've ever been before.
So it's pretty easy. When you have that big fat idea or you want to double check those numbers, or do you want to send that email just to jump onto your computer and to do all that? Even though it's 8:30 at night and you're telling yourself, oh, well, good person got it done. Right. Making sure. But what did it cost you?
And so part of what I'd love for people to consider is what kind of rules have you created in your mind based on what's been role modeled for you and what you're seeing with other people, this culture of busy, this culture of hustle, you know, stop just for a moment and ask yourself, okay. But what does it cost me?
And how ethical is it?
Lara: Yeah. And not just always accepting what is given to you, right? Like there is a certain amount that you can have some control over, and sometimes we forget that we can change how things are.
Carleen: We can in some places as well, there's a lot of trying to stand out and continuing to make sure people are connected to your work.
So maybe you're not connected to your work, but you do want it to make a difference. Right? You missed the first half of your kid's third birthday party because you were working on a proposal that needs to mean something. So that proposal better really rock. So we put a lot of pressure on ourselves and then it's really, you know, asking yourself, okay.
Is this cost going to be something that fulfills me, because if I'm sacrificing things, but it's also still not connecting to me in any meaningful way, then it makes it very difficult. And if you're doing it for other people, if you're doing it to stand out to your boss, if you're doing this to stand out in a marketplace, because you're an entrepreneur, and if you're doing this from a place of fear. That's where this really gets dangerous because when we move from a place of thinking we're flawed or we're not enough, then we will put a lot of time and energy into trying to fix. And that is a losing game for most people, because there's nothing you need to fix. You are not broken.
The system is broken. The rules we sold ourselves are broken. And some of this comes from the beginning of our careers. Right. You know, you get out of, you know, the education system, whatever the education system was for you. And you're trying to make it, maybe you're also trying to pay some student loans or get out of your parents' house or buy a car.
And so you take a lot of work and you do a lot of things to prove yourself in that workplace but at some point, you also then build your own life and sometimes the hustle really kicks in cause you want a mortgage and you still have student loans. So there's all this pressure. And then you can start a family.
And it's important for us to really step back in the careers that we've chosen and to say, is this still something I'm choosing? Is this still something that I enjoy? And if it isn't, it doesn't mean you have to stop. What it means is you have to rethink what would enjoyment look like? For me in this profession, in this career, in this business.
Lara:
Yeah.
That happens in all of the areas of people I talked to. Right. Where suddenly you started with one intention and it took over and you haven't stopped again to say, am I doing what I want to be doing? Is this what I like? and that, you know, the great resignation is happening because there are a whole bunch of people who are like, no, and I'm not doing it anymore.
And some things need to change on bigger scales, all like this is, you know, my dream for the world, right is that we stop glamorizing hustle, harder that we all think, you know what, even 40 hours a week, maybe that's a lot. Right. And unless you love it, you know, like 40 hours that’s a lot of hours on its own.
Let alone going up to 50, 60, 70. And I know a lot of people do that, and even still with years of practice of saying this, it feels a little indulgent that I say , I don't work 40 hours a week and I do not want to, but I have built the life that way for myself. That doesn't mean I have to sacrifice success.
It doesn't mean that I have to sacrifice income in this massive way, but I know that I do better work when I don't work that many hours. That when I come in, I work, I do well. I am good at my job, but I do not need to do 40 hours of work to be deserving of. And that's not a thing. A lot of people talk about, it's the kind of thing people come back to you with.
Oh, must be nice. And you're like, it is, it's a really nice, right. But it is a change in how we think about what work is supposed to be. And it's like the kind of thing that I hope can be like into corporate, into everywhere, like stop glamorizing hustle and start helping people not burn out, and the amount of people that we all know who have had to go on stress leave because they have burnt out.
Like how many people do we all know who either did take stress leave or, you know, they've actually probably should.
Carleen: Absolutely. I mean, there've been studies that have been coming out since the fifties out of Berkeley and Stanford that have been talking about what is the optimized level of work? How many hours a week is the optimized level of work that people can actually be productive in.
And the number has consistently come back at 30 hours a week. Now that's 30 hours in total folks. That's not 30 hours of work you're getting paid to do, right. This is also about the work we do to keep our houses running right, to make sure the kids are sorted out to get meals on the table, to do the grocery shopping.
This is all labour as well, and that doesn't always get taken into account either. And it's been really interesting and it's still in its infancy, but there's a lot of organizations that are toying with four day workweek as opposed to a five day work week and seeing that it has an initial at least for those that have gone into it and there's been lots of examples coming out of Europe, particularly through Sweden, Denmark Frances, another one that's been showing it that the productivity for those companies hasn't dipped. And so it's reinforcing this idea that humans really are only going to be highly productive for a certain period during the day.
And that hard work myth really, you know, doesn't take that into account. It doesn't say, hang on a moment. Yes. I'm writing this proposal at 9:30 at night because that's when my kids are asleep. And I look at me, I'm rocking it. I'm making it all happen. Yes, you absolutely are. But what's interesting is if you had written that instead the next morning, when you were sitting at your desk during work time, would it have been a better proposal?
Would it have been different? How about, what if your experience and writing that proposal was just a whole lot more positive, but again, this is not something we feel we actually have the agency to you demand for ourselves in a really busy working life. We are seeing this as, I don't have a choice. I have to keep up with my peers.
I have to make money. I have to make sure that I'm putting stuff out there and it's saying again, because it's role model for us, Yes. Yes. That's the way you need to do this. But burnout has a cliff associated with it. We can push ourselves through those boundaries where we are seeing huge exhaustion. I mean, the exhaustion beyond just being tired, exhaustion, where you are having difficulty with making sure you have enough sleep, it's interrupting your sleep.
You are fatigued even to do exciting. Right. Even to have, you know, a long weekend and know that you were actually have the three days off, it can be tough when you're hitting exhaustion to muster the excitement or the energy cause he just don't have it. Why? Because you've been burning the candle at both ends. You've been working super hard. You know, it can affect our families because we’re having emotion reactions. And we're not going to do that at work because work's conditional, right. People are only going to keep paying us if we're nice, stable, sober people. Not, you know, yelling and screaming or looking sad or crying.
And so, you know, these are things, huge pieces that everybody wants to avoid at work. It takes a lot of energy when you have overextended yourself to manage those pieces. And you know when, instead we should be looking at is what would it look like if I was working anominal number of hours, 30 hours a week, or even 40 hours a week.
If that's where you're at, what would that look like? What benefits would there be for myself? How could this then make the hours I am at work more productive? Because there isn't a in return, right? Yeah. You did that proposal at 9:30 at night. Got it out the door. Fabulous. But what have you got left in the tank for the next.
There is a cost. We've got to find that and out of focus, energy, productivity in us each week. And we do have to curate that strategically to look after ourselves and have that connection. Right. Enjoy it. Be able to really enjoy the fruits of our labor.
I know so many people, particularly over the pandemic who, because they weren't going on vacation chose to put a pool in their backyards, which is fabulous. But when you're working 60 hours a week, you're not getting in that pool and enjoying yourself. And that's just absolutely sad. Right? Why are we working 60-hour week if you cannot actually enjoy what it is that you've got,
Lara: and we don't even know, I think, some of the things that are taking our intention in different ways, we don't acknowledge them. I, did an interview for somebody for a research study recently and she asked me like, who are the people in my life that I support? And I only talked to the people outside of my nuclear family.
And she was like, you didn't even mention your children. That's like, yeah, because we just take that part for granted. Right? Like it's the idea that all of these pieces of us take our time. And they're all part of what might be making us tired. Right? Like pandemic stuff, you know, supporting kids through the pandemic was like a thing that took a bunch of energy.
So that whole piece of remembering all the parts that are impacting us, not just work and then like, pretending, like it's not all part of the equation. And acknowledging them as part of it. And then the other piece is that, you know, along with hustle harder, is that like, it's more impressive if you did it alone and you didn't need help means that so many people are like reinventing wheels that already exist because they don't want to seem too needy. They don't want to seem to this. Right. Like that's where, taking the shortcuts isn't a bad thing if it just gets you to where you need to be faster. And what are the ways that you can find that. That's when I'm always encouraging people to find the easy, right? Like, you're not cheating. You're finding the more effective, easy, efficient way to get to the next place.
It's what people do when they work with me, right. That you can go and find a lot of the information and the strategies I talk about. But if you want like the fast answers to like, how can I, you know, unclutter things, that’s why people work with coaches? I think it's not trying to do everything by yourself.
Carleen: It's not, and it is examining, you know, I mean, I love that question.
Am I trying to do everything by myself? Right. And you can do that, you know, in your business. Obviously I’m just speaking for myself as a business owner. Yeah. I am doing everything myself. There's only me, but do I need to, right. There are a fantastic way fdto outsource pieces that makes sense again, it's asking yourself in that bucket of productivity that I have, what goes in it and then what is worth outsourcing so that I can keep my bucket in a manageable format so I can enjoy what I'm doing, particularly as an entrepreneur. Right? I mean, it is a huge leap to leave the safety structure of a job, particularly in Canada, because we have so many job protected leaves that also mean we also have health benefits associated with it.
Right. Leaving all that, going out on your own, not having a drug plan or physio or massage therapy, right? It all of a sudden becomes very pressurized. And that's not why most of us get into this. Most of us get into this to serve, to make sure that we are putting something meaningful out into the world that is going to support other people, support other people through many different means.
All of them really important ones, but it can't happen if you're burning the candle at both ends. And it can't happen if you didn't get alone. And I think it's checking into that question is, am I doing it alone? If I'm doing it alone what is holding up my need to do it alone. How am I thinking this? Is it because I don't think I'm enough? Is it because I have got a scarcity mindset?There's only so many dollars to go around, is it because I am a hot mess and I'm not organized enough? A lot of leaders as all entrepreneurs face this too, right? Where it's just quicker. If I do it myself, that's a big one and really holds up this pillar of hard work and how.
And it's like, well, what's the cost? What is the cost of doing it yourself all the time? And I'm not talking dollars, we're also talking about, you know, your productivity, your wellness, your connection, right. If I'm constantly doing all the things myself, I'm certainly not building relationships with new people and that has a cost associated with it.
Lara: Yeah. So I know that you have a tool that can be useful to people. Entrepreneurs, corporate, all the people alike, but a tool that can help them sort of get a sense for where they're at. And so do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Because I know that it's a useful resource, not only in like filling it out, but also getting some of it, advice and tips stuff that you have to say about it , in the after of that.
Carleen: Absolutely. Thank you so much for bringing that up because I've got a working life wellness assessment tool. This is an assessment tool. I didn't build it. It is based on open source psychological work that was done in the Netherlands and Belgium. And so the tool itself there’s a kink. I know you're going to be sharing the link, takes five minutes, five minutes.
It will tell you where your wellness is at. And then following that, if you are finding yourself at risk for burnout you can sign up to be able to understand better what those risks are. So it's a really great risk assessment tool to see whether you're there or not. And I know many people have taken it and used it so far.
And I think for some people that the results are quite surprising because it doesn't take long for us to be hitting that red line. Where what it's trying to highlight is you're pushing yourself beyond the means that you have, whether those are, you know, feeling good about yourself, whether it's a health constraint or whether it's exhaustion, there's always a cost associated with pushing ourselves beyond the limit that we really should be working in. We know what that limit is. We just don't feel like we have a choice, which is why we blow past it. So it's to highlight that, and it gives me an opportunity to step back and to really assess, okay, what's working for me in my working life and what's not, and it can be really hard to see what you can do about the stuff that's not working.
And that's where I would love to be a part of that process. To be able to support it, figuring out how we deal with that list of what's not working.
Lara: That's awesome. I really appreciate you being here and talking with us about this. Are there any final thoughts? Things you want people to know? And remember, as we wrap up, this conversation , I think we all need to spend a little bit more time thinking about... Am I expecting too much of myself? Am I asking myself to do so much hard work all the time that I don't remember to try to enjoy my work and my life. Right. Like that is, it's almost like when we haven't spent time thinking about it, we stop remembering it's a thing we could do. It's just like, we're just trying to get to the other side… And I think it's that whole, you know, I don't want to start a whole other conversation as we're wrapping up, but that whole, you know, people retire and then they like die. Or like, they think that all the fun is going to happen once they retire.
Right? Like once I retire, everything will be good. I just need to get there as opposed to figuring out, like, how can this journey be something I enjoy? So, yeah. Are there any thoughts that you have there as we're wrapping up?
Carleen: Absolutely. And I believe this quotes from Anne Lamont. “What is it you want to do with your one wild and precious life?”
And that's such an important question to ask yourself as a professional, as well as a human. And I think what I can offer is this activity is if you could wave a magic wand, what would your perfect working day look like? When would it start? When would it stop? How would you feel in that working day and you know, we've got a lot of opportunity right now with hybrid work and with working from home as entrepreneurs, you can go for a walk at 2:30 in the afternoon.
If you want to, you do not have to follow the structure of nine to five, which we still have very much culturally embedded. So wave a magic wand. What does your perfect working day look like and how would that perfect working day attempt to do both the things you want to get done and. Because if you're not looking after yourself, no one else was going to do it for you.
Lara: Yes. What a good point to end on. So we are definitely linking up to that assessment tool to Carleen's website, go and check her out, spend a little bit of time asking yourself how you're feeling and how it's all going. And Carleen thank you so much for being
Carleen: here. Thanks for having me, Lara. I really appreciate.