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After the nurse checked Kandi Wiens’ blood pressure for a fourth time on a routine medical check-up in 2011, the doctor asked the management consultant, “What’s going on? How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine,” she replied. But the doctor shook her head, declared “you are not fine,” and ordered Ms. Wiens to go home and stay in bed for three days so her sky-high blood pressure might come down.
Ms. Wiens’ reaction may be familiar to executives and busy professionals. Her first thought: “I can’t call in sick – I have a leadership development program to run next week!” The second thought: “Thank God. I finally have a legitimate excuse to sleep.” Her third thought: “She’s absolutely right. I am not fine.”
As Ms. Wiens faced up to her burnout, she realized it wasn’t just about the pace and workload but more importantly the fact she was constantly chasing other people’s goals rather than her own. “I dissolved into tears when I finally admitted to myself that I felt deeply disconnected from my true purpose – and worse yet, that I had been so busy overachieving and pushing myself and people pleasing that I wasn’t even sure what that was,” she writes in Burnout Immunity.
She decided to study leaders under dangerous levels of stress – seven or higher on a 10-point scale – and to her surprise found many had managed to avoid burnout. “No matter what role or industry they were in, no matter their level of seniority, no matter how they’d been raised or by whom, the one thing those with burnout immunity shared was a high degree of emotional intelligence,” she notes.
That may not be an obvious connection. But EI tends to have four components: self awareness, self management, social awareness and relationship management. Those skills, when highly developed, gave the executives superior coping abilities, which helped them successfully manage stress and immunize them against burnout. “That experience clarified for me a key fact: No one is immune to stress, but everyone can acquire burnout immunity,” she says, because EI is a skill we can develop.
At the University of Pennsylvania, where she later obtained her doctorate in organizational learning, she found a method for regulating her stress response that she now regularly uses: Clinical psychologist Howard Stevenson’s CLCBE Method, which stands for calculate, locate, communicate, breathe and exhale. Here’s how to apply it:
- Calculate: On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being “worst possible” stress, what is your level? If it’s eight or higher, your brain has been hijacked by the acute threat. Your moods and emotional reactions are out of whack.
- Locate: Pinpoint where you feel the stress in your body. The more specific, the better.
- Communicate: Identify what you are saying to yourself in this high-stress moment. If it’s negative self-talk, that will make the stress worse. Positive self-talk can help you reach a state of calm more quickly.
- Breathe: Inhale slowly for a count of four.
- Exhale out slowly for a count of seven.
The method is aimed to reduce stress quickly, ideally within 60 seconds. As she increased her awareness skills, Ms. Wiens, now an executive coach, found that for low levels of stress, she could regulate herself and return to thinking clearly with just the deep breathing. But for higher levels, the full five steps were needed to keep calm and maintain a professional demeanour.
Beyond that tactic, you will need deeper emotional intelligence strategies to stay in control. Here are three she distilled from the experiences of the executives she studied:
- People with burnout immunity view stressors as problems that can be solved: They feel they have at least some sense of control over the situation. And they surround themselves with other problem-solvers. That prevents the amygdala, your brain’s major processing centre for emotions, from being hijacked by perceived danger and throwing you into emotional uproar. When you’re triggered, she suggests putting some distance between you and the stressor through deep breathing, going for a walk or calling a friend. Don’t isolate; reach out for support. Check if the stressor is in your control, even a tiny bit.
- People with burnout immunity proactively manage their emotional investment in work: “Whether you’re deeply dissatisfied at work or you love your job and you’re happily giving it your all, a lack of boundaries between work life and personal life can result in the emotional exhaustion and energy depletion that’s characteristic of burnout,” she advises. Enact firm boundaries around work, blocking off times when you are unavailable. Avoid people pleasing – a job she notes “with no quitting time and no end date” – and limit your interactions with co-workers who are energy vampires or have a negative attitude toward work.
- People with burnout immunity practise adaptive emotional regulation: This refers to a grab bag of responses to stress such as problem-solving, planning, acceptance, seeking help, reframing stressful events as benign or even beneficial and self-compassion. For this, you must maintain awareness of your emotions in the midst of stressful experiences and be alert to when you are approaching your tipping point. You must identify what can return you to a better emotional state. It also helps to understand what triggers your emotional reaction to stress and the underlying reasons why you have been stimulated.
Burnout is common these days. You need to be aware of the danger and deal with stress effectively or you may, to your surprise and chagrin, find yourself some day ordered to convalescence from burnout.
Cannonballs
- Gloria Mark, the University of California at Irvine computer science professor known for studies on the workplace, says companies must understand that ignoring personal life and well-being of employees is a mistake they can no longer afford to make. In a hybrid era, it’s vital to give people power to define the borders between work and personal life. A workplace with a positive sense of well-being, she says, is a productive one.
- A study by Ty Wiggins and Rebecca Davies of Toronto-based Russell Reynolds Associates found new CEOs, on average, took 2.8 months to make the first change in their leadership team and 9.2 months to get all the right people in place. CEOs chosen internally reached actionable judgments on the team faster than those selected from outside; indeed, they often considered the date of their appointment – usually three months before taking office – as their first day, while external successors saw it as the actual initial day in the role.
- “The truth shrinks as the crowd grows,” postulates Ottawa thought leader Shane Parrish. In a large meeting at work, people hold back their honest opinions. Smaller groups are more likely to find truth than larger ones.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.