Have you ever finished a workday and been completely wiped from caring for your team? Embark on a journey with us as we uncover how burnout's tendrils extend beyond personal trials and entangle the very fabric of our work culture. We lay bare the ethical dimensions of self-care in leadership, and invite a reflection of the mindsets that may be trapping you in stress and guilt.
Are you tired of being exhausted?
If you are ready to make real changes so you can build a healthier space for yourself as a leader, you should give this episode a listen.
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Have you ever finished a workday and been completely wiped from caring for your team? Embark on a journey with us as we uncover how burnout's tendrils extend beyond personal trials and entangle the very fabric of our work culture. We lay bare the ethical dimensions of self-care in leadership, and invite a reflection of the mindsets that may be trapping you in stress and guilt.
Are you tired of being exhausted?
If you are ready to make real changes so you can build a healthier space for yourself as a leader, you should give this episode a listen.
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Speaker 1:
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.
Speaker 2:
Hello and welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink. Today we're going to be talking about self-care, especially in a leadership role, and if you just thought to yourself, I'm so tired of hearing about self-care, you're not alone. It is a very popular topic. Lots of people do really great work to address it, and we're going to approach it today from more of an ethical lens, from a systemic lens and from a mindset lens. So if those are maybe things you haven't considered as much with self-care before, I invite you to join this conversation, as it should be a little bit different from what you may have thought of before. So let's start with our story. Ai writes in.
Speaker 2:
Now I'm in a supervisory position in a larger company and I am burnt out. I work really hard to support my team and really try to make sure that they are doing well. Overall, they seem to be okay, so I should be happy about that, but the truth is I am just exhausted at the end of every day. I feel like if I don't put in my all for the team, I'm letting them down, but I have nothing left for myself when I go home. I'm starting to get resentful of my job and team, which just makes this harder and harder If I'm wondering if I'm not cut out to be a leader, as maybe I'd be less stressed in another role if I wasn't taking care of people, but I do like my team and I'd prefer not to leave. If I can figure this out, what can I do? So thank you for sharing your situation, ai, and I can very much empathize. I have been there myself, feeling that deep care for my team, like I do anything to help them, and also having absolutely nothing left at the end of the day, just really emotional, really exhausted. That way, and as we've talked on the show before, leadership should be an intentional choice that you're making every day, and to make that when you are feeling so run down, so exhausted, so done, that's a really hard choice to make. So I really appreciate you writing in and it does sound like you are trying to solve this. You've taken steps, you're reaching out to look for ideas, and that is an intentional decision. So let's start by looking at what's happening here and see if we can untangle some of the factors that are probably at work. And, as we so often do, we are going to start by looking at this from a systemic perspective.
Speaker 2:
Society in general, has labeled self-care as an individual issue. If you are stressed, you go for your run, you do your yoga, you have your bath, you do some journaling. These are the classic ways, and if you're tired of hearing about self-care, you might have heard of this a lot, but we talk about these activities that we do that should calm us down, make us happier and healthier. Therefore, we can continue on, and I do believe truly that every person is always responsible for how they show up, what they decide to do, and so there is a responsibility for self-care that rests with the individual, but it's not solely an individualistic issue, and I really want people to keep that in mind Because, I mean honestly, this plays with the heart of one of the reasons I'm so passionate.
Speaker 2:
In my work with All Thrive, I focus on transforming culture in order to support employees' mental health, and what that means is we talk about mental health, we talk about self-care as a solo thing, and people are going into work where their bosses are yelling at them, they can see their peers gossiping, they have way too high a workload, they're not compensated or appreciated properly for what they're doing, they're in awkward staff meetings where no one talks because it doesn't feel safe. There's no one who's clear on what their roles are, but they're somehow still held accountable to things they didn't even know were in their job description. There's so many factors at a workplace that are, I want to say, solvable, that can be improved, that are really systemic issues, but of course, they have a huge impact on people's mental health. How can you go through that whole day I just described and not feel like you need to do a lot of work and put in a lot of time to be mentally healthy, cared for, self-cared for again? How is that possible? So, when we talk about self-care, when we talk about any of this burden that we put on ourselves and our staff teams is, we need to make sure that we're actually creating a space where people can care for themselves, where, yes, work might have some stress, you might want some time to relax at home, but it doesn't mean that people should be this burnt out when they go home at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:
And we've talked before about how you can fix systems, you can shift systems to be more effective. So, ai, you can think of some of the systemic challenges that you're seeing in the workplace you are talking about. You know, supporting your team and putting in your all. Is that easy to do currently in your role? Why, or why not? Do you have the time you need to adequately train and support your staff? Do you have resources that you can give them that they can do their job sufficiently? Do you have enough staff that you are not needing to jump in and do some of their work just to get it done because there's not enough bodies to go around? And are you having to protect them, maybe from poor decisions from leadership who are above you? If you answered any of those questions in the negative, or that there is a challenge there, you might want to look at that piece first, and then you might want to look at those systemic factors that are influencing why you might need to care for yourself so much when you go home.
Speaker 2:
At the end of the day, as you are in this middle management position you're supervising in a larger organization. You might not have the power to just snap your fingers and change this. That you are now able to change staffing numbers or how much you compensate people All of those factors might be out of your reach, but now that you're aware of it, you can maybe advocate to a supervisor that is supportive of you. If you could gather with other peers of a similar management level to you and go together to advocate for something. Is there some part of your role that you could leverage or shift that is in your power? That would help with some of these other issues. I'm not saying this is necessarily easy. We could do a whole episode in the future about how to get your needs met when you do have less power in a situation. But even starting to contemplate okay, what impact could I have on a system that would shift, how much energy, how much time and effort I need to be putting into these things to make my life easier so self-care isn't needed so badly for that.
Speaker 2:
If you're higher up in the organization, the top of an organization, and you notice that your staff seem to be struggling with self-care, that people are really stressed, I'm going to put a little bit of this burden on you and say that you really really need to look at your systems, because the reality is, if you have poor systems that you, as a higher level leader, are able to change and are not changing, you're going to lose good staff to either medical leave, to burn out, they're gonna quit, they're not gonna wanna stay in the role. So that's your choice. If you are that top level leader who's seeing this stress, you have the ability to change it. So start looking at your systems that you are responsible for. Going more to the individual side, we've talked about this systemic piece and the reality is, like I said, there is still a responsibility of us all for how we care for ourselves, how we show up, how we are mentally healthy. And the piece I wanna address here that's maybe a little bit different again is actually just talking about our mindset as we go into this. You can find other resources about activities, about how to approach them, but our mindset really impacts us so much more than what activities we maybe choose to do or don't end up doing or feel bad about, and a lot of this is based on the right use of power by Dr Cedar Barstow. I've referenced it a lot in this show before and what I'm gonna do is actually I'm just gonna read out a couple statements about your beliefs in self-care. So, if you want, you can close your eyes or just give yourself a moment to reflect and see if any of these feel like truthful to you, like they're real to you.
Speaker 2:
I don't have time to exercise, eat healthy, whatever that is. Someone in my life needs me to do this. I have to put other people ahead of myself. If I take time off right now, I can't imagine how much work I'll have to do when I get back. I feel ashamed to be so needy. I feel other people's pain so much that I get overwhelmed and feel hopeless myself. My needs are smaller than others, so I shouldn't be worrying about them. I have great support, so I shouldn't be having these problems. I have a strong ethic of service. When I get exhausted, I feel worse. Knowing that I haven't been taking care of myself properly. I feel like I need to conceal how badly I'm doing or that I need support. If I just had blank, I would be able to do self-care Now.
Speaker 2:
I suspect there were probably a couple of those beliefs that resonated with you. Maybe you felt they are true for you, and I'm just gonna ask if you are believing them, in whatever amount, whatever capacity do you think they might be affecting how effective your self-care is? How are they impacting you taking time for yourself or what that time feels like when you take it and I'm not just saying you should be able to turn off these mentalities and just move away from them. But again, this awareness can create such a shift, cause a lot of people spend time doing self-care activities and being upset at themselves for taking that time to do self-care, or feeling guilty that they're not doing something else. We're taught as a society right, your worth is based on what you can provide, right, the effort you put in the output you create, and so self-care can sometimes feel anathema to that, that we don't value it. In the same way, we feel guilty about it. And how else could you potentially frame your mindset if you're feeling guilty, if you're mad at yourself for not doing self-care, what is that doing to actually being able to mentally be healthier and take care of yourself? Think of some different ways that you could approach this. Maybe there's a different mindset you could add to this that would also support that and to lead into that.
Speaker 2:
I'm gonna bring up one final piece, and this is really the lynchpin or the core idea I wanna think about in terms of leadership and self-care, and that's how critical it is as a leader to care for yourself properly, often tend to do the opposite right. The more we lead. The more we give of ourselves, the more we have to be the one making that sacrifice, play and be the martyr. Kinda needs to be the opposite, because for a leader, self-care is an ethical issue. Gonna say that again. It was so impactful when I first heard this. To a leader, self-care is an ethical issue. You are not being ethical in your leadership if you are not caring for yourself enough to be regulated and healthy and able to properly, fully, supportively lead people. And you can think about this as if you are trying to be responsible right To meet your staff or their. If you've listened to this show, we've talked a lot about different ways to be responsible as a leader.
Speaker 2:
How much harder is it to do that when you are stressed yourself or exhausted or overwhelmed. Sure, you can tell yourself oh, I had my stress early. Well, no one ever knows when I'm stressed, totally fine, my staff team thinks I'm fine. First of all, I suspect that people have an idea right. There's little things that slip through, even when we think we're doing a really good job of hiding it, and just beyond that. Even if you're not hiding it, even if you are the perfect person and you're somehow able to display this.
Speaker 2:
It takes so much more energy to be honest, to be a really good leader and to put in this effort. And to do that you need to get that energy from somewhere. You can't be burnt out and still expecting to do that. It takes extra energy to notice that a staff isn't responding the best to your method of communication and be able to make that shift to a style of communication that's maybe not as natural for you. It takes extra energy to notice that something is not quite working right and be able to make a dynamic change and shift things, even if small ways, to something that would work better.
Speaker 2:
All of these pieces even looking at problems and seeing them as gray instead of black and white, and having different solutions, opening up discussion with your staff team about different ways to approach things that takes more energy than just falling into habit, going along with what's always been done and getting through it, which is what happens when we're not caring for ourselves. We don't have that extra capacity. We rely on habit, we get through it and we might do okay, but I would say that is not ethical leadership. That's basic trying to manage people and what we're really working towards here is trying to be the best, the most ethical leaders that we can. With that all said, maybe a bit of a heavy burden in some ways, but also maybe some relaxation in others.
Speaker 2:
Self-care is a big topic and, as leaders, I really appreciate that you have listened to this and considered where you might be serving yourself, where you might not be serving yourself, what some bigger pieces that are at play in your life that are affecting this are. Ai especially. Thank you to you for bringing this forward to us, because it is a really important topic and I really honor that. You are putting in the effort to try to hold and hang in there, to be a good leader and to decrease that stress so you can continue to be a good leader and not just burn out or bring any of these other challenges to your team. As usual, I will be following up with you and I look very much forward to that conversation.
Speaker 2:
If you have a question, a thought, a comment that you want to add to the show, I would love to hear it. You can find the link for that in the description below, and if you want to join us live so you can comment and ask your questions, we would love to have you. The link for that is in the description below. I want to thank you so much for being here today because once again, this is another way that you can decide to intentionally be a great leader. Every day is doing the work, learning with us and ultimately leveling up your leadership. Thanks so much for watching and have a great week.
Speaker 1:
We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.