Burnout and Beyond: The Power of Creative Wellness with Lexi Reid

🌟 Feeling the burnout in STEM? 🧠 Join me, Ed Drozda, as I chat with Lexi Reid, a former research scientist turned creative wellness coach. Discover how she helps women in STEM manage stress through creativity. 🎨✨ Listen now at The Water Trough! #STEM #Burnout #Creativity 

Transcript

Ed Drozda 0:10

Welcome to The Water Trough, where we can't make you drink, but we will make you think. My name is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and I'm really excited you chose to join me here as we discuss topics that are important for small business folks just like you. If you're looking for ideas, inspiration, and possibility, you've come to the right place. Join us as we take steps to help you create the healthy business that you've always wanted. Welcome back to The Water Trough folks. My name is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and today I'm joined by Lexi Reed. Lexi is a creative wellness coach for women in STEM and the founder of Mind Art Wellness. She's a former research scientist and quality assurance and regulatory affairs specialist in medical device development. After years in high responsibility work, she became interested in what happens when high performers look fine on the outside, but feel stretched thin on the inside. Lexi now works at the intersection of science, creativity, and stress management, supporting smart driven women in STEM who are nearing burnout. Her approach isn't about adding more to the to-do list. It's about using simple, practical, creative practices to help regulate stress, regain clarity, and make decisions from a steadier place. In this conversation, we'll explore the hidden cost of always being reliable, why creativity can shift the way we think and feel even when nothing else changes, and what a realistic reset can look like when life is busy. Lexi, welcome.

Lexi Reid 1:58

Thank you Ed, I'm happy to be here.

Ed Drozda 2:00

It's a pleasure to have you here. How many people don't feel overwhelmed or burned out? Seems like you found the right space to work.

Lexi Reid 2:11

It's sort of like the funeral homes, there's always business, right?

Ed Drozda 2:16

Well said. Yes.

Lexi Reid 2:20

So stress and burnout seems to just be part and parcel of the working life, and it's a shame that that's kind of the way it goes. As you mentioned, I worked with women in STEM, so that's science, technology, engineering, and math, that is my background. I started in academia, I went to not-for-profit, I went to the federal government, I went to corporate, and now I'm on this entrepreneurial journey. So I've seen the stress that women in STEM face in a lot of different workplace environments.

Ed Drozda 2:51

Did you exhibit this level of stress along the way?

Lexi Reid 2:56

Definitely. I didn't really know what burnout was when I was undergoing it. Often they say when you're inside the jar you can't read the label. Until you're out of the jar and go, oh yeah, that was burnout. And writ large. Another analogy is the slow boil. You're the frog and the water's being cranked up and then suddenly you can't handle it. For me, that tipping point happened during the pandemic. Like many people I was working from home. I was juggling being a mom; my son had just started high school; my daughter just started middle school. Trying to help them navigate new schools remotely, and I was working in medical devices and my company had just landed a very large contract from the Canadian government to work on emergency ventilators. As you may remember, in the beginning of the pandemic there were no vaccines available, and so we thought this was quite literally life or death to get these machines in the hands of the Canadian people, to assist with the pandemic. I was working from home 24/7 as I was in quality and regulatory. It was our job to basically be both the lawyers and the police, to make sure that the engineers were building everything to spec and that these were safe to use. We were the last line of defense before they went out to the public and we had such a time crunch. We were working all the time. My husband returned home before I did, and he took our main floor office so I ended up with a small folding table and a chair in the bedroom, literally working in my bedroom trying to do all this. There was no literal separation between work life, home life, and sleep life, 'cause I'd go to bed with my computer right there. I could wake up and do emails. I could stay up late and do emails. The stress never let go, and that's what led to my burnout. I was in a permanent stress cycle and stress is good for the body if you process it, right? And you come out the other side. But if you keep the cortisol levels flooding all the time, yeah it starts taking a toll.

Ed Drozda 5:03

You said you didn't realize at the time that it was burnout. What was the straw that broke the camel's back for you?

Lexi Reid 5:11

It's interesting, and this is what led me down the path to doing the creative wellness coaching. I used to use art as my outlet. That was my stress relievers. I'd go into my studio, I would make something, I'd come out feeling 10 times better. And what happened for me is I got so blocked creatively that I'd go in and I'd just stare at these art supplies and I couldn't even let myself make something. And I thought, this isn't right. It's one thing to be stressed at work, but now I can't even tap into my creativity. It's funny, I was on like endless Zoom calls and I was never a big doodler. For me it was a bit of artistic snobbery. I thought why waste time doodling, just go make a painting, go make something. But I just started drawing lines, and as I was doing it my breathing relaxed and I almost started breathing in time with my pen. I could feel my shoulders drop and I thought, this is interesting, being a scientist, this is some data. So I started actually researching into art therapy and that led me to researching creativity coaching. Coming from medical devices, there's the big difference between a wellness device, and a device that is meant to treat or diagnose you. I wanted to do creativity as a proactive, healthy choice, taking these creative approaches rather than taking a therapeutic approach and trying to deal with trauma. With coaching you're focused on a goal. You're working on the present, you're working towards the future. With therapy you're often looking at the past. So I started experimenting with myself first and finding these small creative exercises that kind of unleashed a lot of pent up creativity. That was the bottleneck that I needed to open and that let me back to my creativity, just these simple, small, little exercises. And that's what led me to trying different pilots with a group of women and sort of building that coaching practice with them.

Ed Drozda 7:02

How were you received when you first went out there offering this service, this journey, if you will, for people who were experiencing burnout? Maybe they didn't know it either. How was it received by these folks?

Lexi Reid 7:17

It's interesting. I worked with a group of women in all different stages of their careers. Masters students who are looking to apply to med school, PhD students, new professors, and women who are mid-career and going, is this all there is, do I wanna keep doing this? To those that were starting up their own businesses and had worked both in academia and corporate life, and this was their next career path. They had some commonalities with their stresses, but also differences, right? Where they were on their particular life journey. And one big commonality- I followed up with each of them after they'd gone through the coaching and said where were you before the coaching? Where were you after? What was the biggest block to doing the coaching? It all came down to the perceived lack of time. Oh, is this just one more thing to add to my plate? But they felt so stuck. They're like, I just need a lifeline. I need to try something. I've tried everything else and nothing is working and so why not try creativity? Others are like, I used to be creative and I miss it and I wanna get back to it. So I had those that never thought of themselves as creative and those that had put it away and wanted to come back to it. And yet both camps basically came back saying, I gained all this time back 'cause I learned to prioritize things that meant something to me and find other ways of giving up what I didn't want. So even though they took on something extra, it bought them more time because they got to reflect on what was truly important to them.

Ed Drozda 8:43

That must have been incredibly transformative for these people as it was for you.

Lexi Reid 8:48

It was, it was quite amazing. They all said it in different ways, but you could tell that this was a huge impact on how not only they dealt with their work stresses, but also family dynamics, setting boundaries, personal boundaries, boundaries in relationships. Learning to say no, giving yourself permission to say no, 'cause quite often as women we're caregivers. In the workplace we tend to end up volunteering to help on committees, and once you open the door to volunteer for one committee, they assume you'll say yes to all the committees, certainly from my experience. So the biggest thing was evaluating where they wanted to spend time. Time is a finite resource. Yeah, it was extremely transformative and valuable to them, and to myself as well.

Ed Drozda 9:37

I think it's fair to say people can be easily seduced into the space because they feel it's important to not only be committed to what they're doing and for whom they're doing it, but that it's expected of them. It's easy to fall into that place where, well as you said, one committee, well yes, if you ask me about another I should do that too, and so on. So what is the difference between being committed, a positive thing, but being overextended?

Lexi Reid 10:12

Yeah, I would say it all comes down to intention. It's funny, it's one of those things when they say follow your passion. That sounds very glib. It's very easy to say that. But there is something to be said for the flow state where you're on the edge of challenging yourself, but you are confident in your expertise, right? So you can put that effort into it and it doesn't feel like a ton of effort. Yes there's still some unknowns, but when you're in that state you can work very efficiently and it doesn't feel hard, right? Whereas I think a lot of times when you start overextending, you're pushing. You're pushing yourself, you're pushing the limit, you're pushing timeframes. Just one more thing, one more thing, and then I'll let myself rest. You don't give yourself that necessary downtime because you justify you'll get it later, but later never comes because there's always something next to do. So there is that choice of intention of balancing the flow state with the rest state, but you also have to be able to step outside of yourself to say okay, am I just pushing through because I want to or because I think I should do? And it's the shoulds that'll trip you up for sure.

Ed Drozda 11:30

If we're able to let go of all the extrinsic factors and look at our intrinsic intention, then I would say we're in a good place. But how many of us can really do that? You know, ignore the extrinsic factors and really focus on our intrinsic intention?

Lexi Reid 11:53

It's hard. It's hard developing self-awareness. So often we cruise on autopilot. We can drive to work and not remember how we got there. We can pick up the kids from school and carry on a conversation while we're thinking about what we're making for dinner that night, and then suddenly you realize your kids have been talking to you and you haven't heard anything, or same thing with your spouse. How was your day, honey? And then you zone out and suddenly you're like oh, what happened? We don't pay attention to our own thoughts half the time, let alone what people are saying to us. And we're so busy on completing our checklist of tasks or thinking of the next task, it's really hard to step back and be that third party observer of yourself, let alone of other people. If you can master your own thoughts, that's huge, let alone trying to figure out what other people are doing and acting. But, it's how you monitor your own thoughts that brings that sense of intention, because you have to actually make a decision. You have to go, is this what I want to do right now? And why am I doing this? I think that's the thing, if you take a pause, even a two second pause and go, why am I doing this, even just taking that little moment makes a big reason and going oh, I'm doing this because, and then if you're happy with that reason carry on. If you're like oh, I don't really know why I'm doing this then maybe that's a reason to pause a little bit longer and think about it.

Ed Drozda 13:22

Being able to develop that self-awareness to be able to identify your legitimate intention regardless of what's going on, that sounds like step one, in this process.

Lexi Reid 13:35

And it's definitely something that I work on with the creative exercises that we do. The reason that they are quite often so effective is because you're tapping into a different part of your brain. Like journaling is super effective, but not everybody wants to write words. Whereas if you can quickly, you know, we're talking level of Pictionary™, like stick figures, hangman, but they're personal symbols. They symbolize a lot to that person. I led a group of coaches through a live exercise last week. The exercise is called Building Boundaries Not Walls. The idea is that you take a blank piece of paper and you put yourself in the center of that page, and then you have the things that light you up, give you energy, that you want to protect, that you want more of, and you draw that closest to you. Then you draw a boundary surrounding that. That boundary could be a forest field, it could be an energy shield, it could be a garden with a picket fence in a gate. It could be a cell with a semi-permeable membrane. Things that come and go outside the cell. Then you put everything outside of that barrier that you want less of in your life, that is toxic, that you are trying to shield yourself from. Then we compared drawings and I got people to talk through what was important to them, how did they represent it, and what was interesting is a lot of the people initially had very strong pushback. They said oh, this is bringing up triggering feelings from elementary school when I was told I was coloring wrong, and then I just stopped doing art 'cause I just couldn't get past that. And it's interesting how much childhood affects us as adults, without even thinking about it until suddenly it's called into focus. But once they let themselves just try the exercise it was like suddenly that bottleneck opened up. All these thoughts and feelings started coming out. One person's like, I couldn't draw fast enough to keep up with the things that were coming out for me. She's like, I'd never done anything like this, and I'm gonna try this with my clients. 'Cause that was part of the exercise, try it for yourself as a coach and then see how you can use it with your clients. A lot of them were like, I never would've thought of doing this, and it seems so simple. And I was like, yeah that's the beauty of it. You don't have to be an artist to tap into drawing simply. We could all draw a stick figure. It's not hard. We think we can't and we don't, 'cause we don't like to fail.

Ed Drozda 16:03

I can imagine there are some people who would just simply push back saying, "I'm not an artist".

Lexi Reid 16:09

Well, and often I talk to very technical sorts. I'm like, do you know what mind mapping is? Do you know what an infographic is? They're like, yeah. I'm like, just think of drawing infographics, and somehow labeling it different made it okay. And they're like oh yeah, I can do that. I'm like, that's all we're doing is just putting it into visual symbols. And that sort of unlocks something in a different part of our brain than having to form it into words. Not to say that you can't write words next to it as well. They go back and forth. A lot of the women I followed up with after the coaching sessions went back and looked at some of the works and they could see exactly how far they'd come from when they'd made it, but also they could snap into what they were feeling and thinking when they drew it. So it's a time snapshot of what you're thinking and feeling at the time, but then you can also reflect on it. And one of the questions I ask after an exercise being completed is, what's missing from this picture? What do you wish you added? What do you wish you could take out? So that adds that level of analysis as well. You flip between intuition and analysis, which again makes it very powerful, that self-reflection, self-awareness.

Ed Drozda 17:21

Introducing a challenge to someone that is outside of their comfort zone or outside of their routine anyway, would you say that disruption leads to that release?

Lexi Reid 17:37

Well, it's interesting 'cause again, I work with women who are very detail focused and when I first gave 'em the instructions, they're like I don't wanna do this wrong. I wanna do it right. And I'm like, oh, I like, okay, alright, okay. All right. And I was like, well these are guidelines. They're meant to get your wheels and your brain turning. There's no right, there's no wrong. It's whatever means something to you. And I had a engineer in one of my group sessions and she'd she'd done quote the exercises correctly up until then. And then we got to one where you were supposed to draw a lighthouse on the shore and a boat. And it was like what are you gonna bring in the boat to get where you want to go for the lighthouse and what's illuminating you on the way? And she's like I didn't draw a boat. I drew a bridge. I hate boats. I don't wanna go in the water. And I was so proud of her for deciding to not follow the instructions. And she totally explained why she drew a bridge and how that meant something to her. And she was an engineer and she wanted to draw, you know the civil engineers and the metal rings and why. She just told us all this stuff. And I was so happy that she got over the need to do it correctly, the need to do it right. And she did something that was extremely personal to her and shared why. That was one of those poster child moments for me, where it's like this is why I'm a coach. Just for these little aha moments.

Ed Drozda 19:07

Because it's not about following directions, it's not about being right or wrong, it's about finding comfort in the space so that you can open up. To achieve.

Lexi Reid 19:19

Exactly. And get a different perspective. A lot of the reasons we do these exercises is, it's a different way of looking at the same problem. Whether you draw a bridge, whether you draw a boat, it's what's in your way? What do you wanna get past to get to where you want to be?

Ed Drozda 19:36

I think your approach is fantastic. And I would think that working with high performing individuals who are in a stressed state, whether they're burned out or not is not important. They're still at a high level of stress because of their nature. Right? High performer means you've gotta be on your game. Starting from that space is really challenging, but when somebody's on such a level of high alert, it would seem like even the smallest little accomplishment would have a massive effect on them.

Lexi Reid 20:13

I think also just getting that sense of taking time to make something that isn't perfect. That is another part of why this coaching works so well is a lot of these areas, they feel like it demands perfectionism from them. It's the I need to draft the perfect proposal, whether it's for a grant, whether it's for a client, and I'm gonna second guess everything I'm putting down because I don't know if I feel good enough. I don't know if I am doing it correctly. And again, taking some of that pressure off and say just put something down that means something to you. It doesn't have to be pretty. I think that's the biggest permission slip. Just do it. Just draw something. It doesn't have to be anything special. It's just another way of getting something out of your brain and making the intangible, tangible. Which again gives you that sense of putting feelings on paper. And then you can look at them and go oh, I didn't realize. It brings up that awareness again. It's another tool in the toolkit. Some people find meditation very effective, others this is a nice way of channeling something between the brain and the hand. There's also a lot of neuroscience that supports these motions are beneficial as well. So let alone the meaning that's transcribed, just the actual act of drawing is actually quite relaxing in itself. With coaching there is also that accountability and that's a lot of the things that women said to me as well. It's the, I don't know if I would've spent this much time on myself had I not known I'd be talking to you about it next week. There's that sense of storytelling, and I want to share this, but I need to take time to make it, to share it. So there is definitely some benefit to accountability as well. And it makes you carve out time for yourself, which normally you would've pushed aside. You would've prioritized others' needs in front of your own. But having that checkpoint with somebody who's gonna be asking you questions, asking what you're thinking, asking how it went this week? There's a huge benefit in just being asked about what were you thinking? What would you like to do differently?

Ed Drozda 22:30

I have a question for you about the appearance of the symptoms of burnout. How has it changed over the course of time, during the course of your tenure, both in your own experience and now as a coach working with people in this capacity?

Lexi Reid 22:45

The challenge with burnout is it's built of patterns, and if you don't change your patterns, it's like anything. You can go on a healthy diet and eat salads every day, but as soon as you let the you know, slippery slope of oh, I'll just have this Dorito. Oh, it's a cheat day. It's the next cheat day. It's the, and suddenly you're like oh, I'm not eating salads anymore. I've gone back to eating junk food. What happened? Burnout's a bit like that as well. It's the oh, I can do one more thing. Oh, I can stay up late to do that. Oh, I can get up early to do that. Oh, I can, it's death of a thousand cuts so you have to be somewhat semi vigilant, and again it comes back to self-awareness of am I slipping back into bad patterns that lead me to burnout? It's like any other addiction. There is recovery. Once you've hit burnout you're always recovering from burnout. Right, right, right. So it's, it's changing those patterns or at least being vigilant about when you start slipping into old patterns. It does take focus and energy and will like anything else. But I think once you've come through burnout, then you start recognizing the symptoms, and they're not the same for everyone. Some people go through complete numbness, others get very angry, very short tempered. Often you go through all the stages. So it's recognizing what burnout means for you as well.

Ed Drozda 24:20

Mm-hmm. Over the course of time has the appearance of burnout changed? Does it look the same as it did 10, 15 years ago?

Lexi Reid 24:30

Well it's funny, when I started researching burnout, as a term it wasn't really used a whole lot. It wasn't quote, recognized. Right? Didn't have a label. Yeah, it didn't have a label, and then suddenly somebody, I am not sure who actually came up, there's conflicting things where it talks about burnout. But it came down to a lot of therapists actually who were quote, burned out after working with patients because they took on all of their patients stresses internally and basically they were walking around carrying everybody else's stress. And we certainly saw it during the pandemic with first responders. Again, they never got to relax. I think burnout has been there, but we haven't given it the level, it's probably much like a ADHD and autism. It's a spectrum. It's something that's there and pervasive, but until you actually quantify it and look at it, yeah, it's very amorphous I would say.

Ed Drozda 25:32

As you said, everybody will have their own manifestations. It's not really fair to say you'll do this or you will do that. Everybody can show it in a different way.

Lexi Reid 25:43

Exactly. Some people withdraw, some people lash out, some people do all of the above, so...

Ed Drozda 25:49

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, chaotic if you will.

Lexi Reid 25:55

It is. But everyone agrees they don't wanna go through it again.

Ed Drozda 26:00

Fair enough. So Lexi, our time has come to an end, and before we part company, is there anything you'd like to leave us with?

Lexi Reid 26:10

Oh, definitely. If anyone's intrigued, I would say come visit my website. I have a free five day challenge where you can get an email taster each day of a different creative exercise, and can try it for yourself. You can do the exercise and see what comes up for you. And shoot me an email. I'd love to hear how it went for you.

Ed Drozda 26:31

Fantastic. Lexi, it's been a pleasure chatting with you today and I really appreciate the things that you brought to our attention. I think it's fascinating how you transitioned. Necessity is the mother of invention, having lived through it yourself, you came out the other side and said hey, I'll give back, which I think is fantastic. I love it. Thank you so much for everything.

Lexi Reid 26:52

Oh, thank you for having me and letting me share a bit of my story. It's been a pleasure.

Ed Drozda 26:56

I appreciate that. Folks, this is Ed Drozda The Small Business Doctor, and here at the Water Trough, I wanna wish you a healthy business.