Burnout Recovery
The podcast for slightly dented medics, execs and professionals seeking massive success, strong leadership and fulfilment. Weekly tips and techniques for high-achieving Type A professionals to beat burnout and restore outstanding leadership, performance and ease at work. Podcast hosted by Master Burnout Coach Dex Randall.
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Burnout Recovery
Ep#162 Powertool #7 Better Relationships
Relationships are meant to be joyful, sustaining, warm and nourishing!
Yet one of the deepest blights of burnout is its dampening effect on relationships, as you suffer anxiety, fear and loss of trust in yourself and other humans. So here are some high quality practices to help you improve the quality and depth of relationships, so you can relax and enjoy them more.
Show Notes:
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[00:00:00] Hi everyone, my name's Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout to Leadership podcast, where I teach professional men to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work.
[00:00:22] Hello my friends this is Dex once again and for your delight on this week's episode we've got Burnout Recovery Power Tool number seven from a series of ten on building better relationships. Because who doesn't want that? It's really a super important topic and there is so much to gain from forging stronger relationship habits and feeling more enriched by our connections with people.
[00:00:51] And I would venture to say that all people in burnout experience relationship challenges. So if that's you, you're not alone. I think social shutdown is really one of the hallmarks of burnout. When burnout gives rise to this distorted and negative view of our own value, we do tend to lose this tender appreciation of ourselves and others. Combined with all the other negative afflictions of burnout, we start to sense that people are our biggest threat. And that's when we start to put up walls, isn't it? To fend off the imminent danger of judgment, conflict, rejection, loss of status, and humiliation that endangers our daily experience.
[00:01:41] In short, we lose empathy and become irritable and cranky. To be honest, that is a reasonable and adaptive response to the chronic stress we experience. And you may notice that's also a symptom of really the vaster landscape of professional culture. Because so many of us are under so much stress.
[00:02:07] And to understand why this is happening, I think we need look no further than our amygdala. In burnout, our days are woven through with a thread of constantly peaking anxiety, fear, stress, dread. And that leaves our sympathetic nervous system activated much of the time. And this activation promotes our defence strategies over social connection.
[00:02:36] That's what it's supposed to do, right? So It downregulates our empathy, our ability to communicate, and our focus on people. Until we've slayed the dragon, obviously, and our nervous system resets back into rest and repair state, which restarts our social and emotional skills. So, if your amygdala is on fire every day, your relationships will suffer.
[00:03:06] But okay, today we're going to look at how to improve relationships in and out of work on the basis that all relationships tend to suffer when we're in burnout, which puts further stress on our ability to cope. Because, of course, we're social animals. Physiologically, we need human connection to survive and thrive.
[00:03:28] Did you know, for example, that research shows that married people statistically live 10 years longer than unmarried people. So, put it the other way around, loneliness takes 10 years off your life expectancy. And interestingly, men are more dependent on this union than women. And over 50 years old, women are more likely to be the initiator of divorce than men.
[00:03:54] But if you think about connection in evolutionary terms, belonging to the herd and to a partnership are of course critical to survival. But also think about yourself. Think about yourself as an infant when your dependency on your parents was complete.
[00:04:16] Not just your physical survival, but also your brain and social development depended on healthy, nurturing attachment. The two primary non negotiable needs at that time are attachment and authenticity. They were in conflict then, and probably still are now, with the tension ramped up by perceived adversity or hostility at work.
[00:04:43] So now, in burnout, if you're anxious, and your amygdala is activated, you're going to lack what Stephen Porges, the renowned trauma expert and author of the polyvagal theory, describes as a neuroception of safety. You're not going to feel safe around people and sadly this is normal in burnout. It happens of course at a subconscious level so you won't be able to control it.
[00:05:12] So one of the most basic remedies for our relational woes begins with feeling safe. With restoring our autonomic nervous system, or ANS, to the balance of parasympathetic state, where this critical ability to be in relationship with others becomes available again.
[00:05:34] I'm talking about all this so that you can understand this pattern of burnout and see that really, you're not truly to blame if this describes your situation. You're not really to blame for loss of empathy, patience, listening skills and/or a desire to relate to your people. The situation can, however, be resolved once you learn how to restore your sense of safety.
[00:06:02] And naturally, you can take responsibility for the solution, without beating yourself up about the problem. Many of the woes of burnout are, in fact, involuntary, but with wisdom and good heart we can still return to our better nature and be who we want to be in this world, thus minimizing our part in the disruption of warm relations with our colleagues, family and friends.
[00:06:32] And when you take this course of action the first and biggest beneficiary is you, and your well being, and your emotional stability, and your feeling of safety. Because in burnout, aren't you feeling unsupported? Undervalued?
[00:06:51] I will point out that, there's a lot in this relationship side of coaching. So if you visit the Power Tools page for this episode, which you'll see in the show notes, you're going to see amongst the supplementary podcast episodes, episode number 92, which is how to create safety with your magical vagus nerve.
[00:07:13] So this is what teaches you how to reset your ANS into a parasympathetical rest and repair state quickly. You can do this real time when you're in moments of stress, even at work. And spoiler alert, one way to do that is to take really long, slow, deep breaths with a slower out breath than in breath because that's what signals to your ANS
[00:07:40] that danger has passed. I will digress for a moment also to mention that the set of supplementary podcast episodes in the Power Tools page is gold for helping you resolve a whole host of your relationship bugbears. I do recommend that you browse through it and pick the ones that resonate with you, that you need to hear and then listen for the exercises, hand picked because they actually work
[00:08:09] to uplift the quality of your relationships. I don't like to waste a lot of time and energy here. Of course, almost all coaching is about relationships in the end, since at least 70 percent of all problems are communication problems. So there's far too much ground to possibly cover in this one Power Tool episode alone.
[00:08:34] But listen also to next week's episode, Power Tool number eight, on well being, and I'll talk more about creating psychological safety. Before we move away from safety, if you want to check in on yourself and how things are sitting with you, ask yourself this question. When you were a child, who was the adult you could go to, without fear, to tell anything to, knowing that you would always be well received?
[00:09:03] If you can't come up with one, as I myself and so many in burnout cannot, then as a child you probably couldn't feel safe to simply be you. And that may well be contributing to your discomfort and possibly even to your burnout as an adult. It might have eroded some of your ability to trust humans. So really that's the interpersonal effect of burnout.
[00:09:31] But let's look at a few more ideas about relationships. Because interestingly in the coaching style that I practice, which is based on cognitive behavior therapy, the assertion is that what other people do doesn't directly influence how we feel. First of all, we have to have a thought about what they did, a judgment, an opinion about what they did.
[00:09:59] And the thought we have is what gives rise to a feeling inside us. So to use a kind of daft example, if someone kills my dog, well if they ran him over, I'd be mad. But if it was the vet euthanizing my dog, I would think such thoughts that I would feel relief. And if that's true, which of course I would invite you to consider for yourself, then in our relationship with a person, the person doesn't directly influence our feelings .
[00:10:33] You follow? Only our thoughts about the person create our feelings. If thoughts always create our feelings, then it's not the person that evokes love. or hate, it's our thoughts about them that evoke the love and evoke the hate.
[00:10:50] So if you believe that as I do, that would mean that a relationship is really comprised of our collection of thoughts about the person. We feel love or hate when we see them not based on what they do, but on how we think about or judge what they do. Partner puts dirty dishes in the sink. I can feel grateful or resentful, depending on my interpretation of that.
[00:11:19] Colleague hands over a task to me at work. I can feel delighted or horrified. It's really about my own beliefs, my opinions, my values. So let's say you believe that's true.
[00:11:33] What that would really mean is, I'm creating my own joy or suffering with how I think about each person and what they're doing. Take my relationship with you, my dear listener. I believe in you, sight unseen, always. I believe you have a good heart and are doing your best, even though under duress, burnout might divert the course of that.
[00:12:00] And I challenge you to shake my belief. Give it a try. I don't think you can. So really, if I was coaching you, if you'd done something that you felt reflected badly on you, something you regretted, something that brought up shame in you perhaps, I would see that behaviour or that action through a different lens.
[00:12:23] A lens where unhelpful behaviour is caused by suffering, and I would still find you essentially good and worthy. And if you did come and coach with me, I would teach you skills that render other people's behavior much less important to you, that you would begin to take what other people were doing and saying and thinking much less personally.
[00:12:51] I would help you love yourself more, creating comfort and ease inside of you, so you could let other people be themselves without taking any offense. Water off a duck's back. And this really is, when you get the hang of it, it's a much easier way to live. Life doesn't feel so threatening, not so much wear and tear.
[00:13:15] Because after all, if we look at somebody's behavior or actions or speech and we don't like it. Do we really know why they're doing it? Can we really see into that person's heart, into their history, into their culture and upbringing? Or do we just know that if we did that thing we'd be dirty on ourselves?
[00:13:37] And we would ascribe meaning to them doing it based on that, based on how we think, based on how we were brought up. Because judgment really, and self judgment too, are the cause of so much needless pain and conflict in this world. If we weren't dualistic, if we didn't need to judge everything as right or wrong, good or bad, how different our lives would be.
[00:14:03] Because in dualism lies our set of expectations of how a good human, us primarily, should behave. And of course, by extension, how other people should behave. We learn what a good human is as we grow up. And we cement this in as a belief system, a model for the behaviour that people should exhibit to be acceptable.
[00:14:28] But every other person on the planet has grown up with a different belief system that they too believe is absolute. One person's Muslim, another is Jewish. Who's right? All of us. And none of us, we're right for ourselves. The only difficulty is when we project that rightness out and expect other people to comply as well.
[00:14:52] Because really, expecting others to conform to our beliefs is just sowing the seeds of endless conflict. And of course, if that's what we're doing, our egos are the mechanism for our need to be right and make others wrong. Ego loves burnout because of the feuds that ferment, because of the resentment, the irritation, impatience.
[00:15:19] Burnout, as I'm sure you've experienced, does give rise to a lot of animosity, a lot of fight comes up in us. And in burnout then, we're already hiding in the bunker, armed to the teeth, interpreting so much that happens as threatening. In the bunker, what we're trying to do is shut out the bad. But what we end up doing is shutting out the good too.
[00:15:45] We become insensate to the warmth of others. We stop receiving. Our egos, the need to be right, the need for control are all asserted very strongly. You might have experienced how little this supports healthy, nourishing relationships. It might have leaked into your personal relationships, your kids, your partner, your friends, such that giving and receiving love and care has been lost.
[00:16:15] Such is the devastation wreaked by stress, anxiety and burnout. Of course, I always bring you the good news, it can be reversed. And a lot more simply and quickly than you probably think. One of the, I think, greatest delights of coaching my clients when they're going through recovery is the restoration of harmony for them in their important relationships.
[00:16:41] Because that's truly what matters in the end, isn't it? It's relationships, it's our people. That's what we're going to think about on our deathbed. Not, did I work hard enough? Or did I overcome these problems and challenges at work? We're going to wonder if we loved one another. So I think in terms of relationships then, there is a bit to learn.
[00:16:59] Too much to cover today, as I've said. But in coaching, I do teach a whole range of skills that support my clients to depersonalise things people say and do, to let go of their need to be right, and the fear of judgement, and to re engage with their sense of possibility, the sense of basic goodness of life, of the world, of themselves and their people.
[00:17:27] And to witness the universal suffering playing out in themselves and in other people as unhelpful behaviours and to feel curiosity and compassion about that. Letting go of the need to be right, to retaliate, to self protect. Really, I think most of the recovery from burnout is a big de armoring process and putting down fear and distrust allows each of us to reopen to the wonder, the generosity, the courageous spirit of both ourselves and other people and even our situation.
[00:18:05] And once that little space starts to open up and my clients begin to sense the good, the possibility in themselves and others; Start to get that energy and sense of humor back a little bit. Then, when I'm coaching, we go on to tackle some of the further survival skills of the adult world at work.
[00:18:27] Such as overcoming imposter syndrome, people pleasing, fear of judgment, saying no, setting boundaries. Learning these new self supporting and powerful skills in these areas really is a simple step by step process once you get started. They're simple investments in self belief that pay enormous dividends in us right sizing ourselves in the world and presenting in a calmly assertive way, that honours who we are and what we need, without detracting from anyone else.
[00:19:07] So that is a skill and we do need to relearn it or learn it freshly as adults, if we're experiencing burnout. And as I mentioned a minute ago, there are additional podcast episodes to learn each of these skills sprinkled throughout the Power Tools series on the podcast. It's all available to you for free.
[00:19:28] Go nuts. And some of those tools are in this episode's Power Tools page, which I would encourage you to sign up for. And they form a great start to creating better, more empowering and easeful relationships with humans. Because relationships are really there to be enjoyed and to be supportive.
[00:19:47] That's their fundamental purpose. And I personally have used quite a lot of these skills to my great benefit. And my clients tend to attest to the life changing potential of releasing our old relationship habits and misguided understandings and releasing a new stream of more positive and helpful energy to generate the kind of relationships that they want.
[00:20:15] I also, by the way, will put a couple of books in there that you might find useful, including one on marriage because a lot of people in burnout have marriage challenges going on in the background. I'm also going to include a sheet of exercises on how you can support better relationships. Specifically at work, with your boss, your team, and your leadership, etc.
[00:20:38] And those include listening skills, emotional intelligence, managing stress and strong emotions at work, managing expectations, trust building, non verbal communication, and also dealing with conflict. I really do hope something here and in all the resources I've offered is useful to you. And I beg you to start reversing your burnout and take care of your tender heart that I know must be so bruised under chronic stress and anxiety.
[00:21:09] Learning to let go, even though you've been afraid, it's such a gift. It seems hard to do, but again, once you get started, it snowballs. And the foundation for all relationship work, as I mentioned, when you're in burnout or not even in burnout, is developing enough sense of personal safety to be willing to uncurl and become newly curious about your world.
[00:21:34] That's step one, to come out of the red zone so you've got the energy and resources to recover. If you would like help overcoming people problems and the other miseries and stresses of burnout, do come and talk to me, it's free. Let's make a plan for you to recover quickly and sustainably, get back to your best performance, leadership, success, and most of all enjoyment inside work and out.
[00:22:03] You can book an appointment at DexRandall. com. If you have enjoyed today's show, I would love you to share it with your mates. This is how we can reach out to help more people who suffer in burnout. Also, my friend, I really would appreciate if you can rate and review the podcast. Thank you for listening.
[00:22:23] Don't forget to come back for next week's episode, Power Tool number eight on creating more wellbeing.
