I think the easiest way to talk about it is burnout is unmanaged chronic stress. The American Medical Association, their description is it’s a stress reaction, and it causes emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, so you kind of get a little bit more cynical about your work and with your coworkers, and then decreased personal achievement.

I think the best way to describe it, though, is an analogy. I never liked the word burnout when I first started working in this industry. But if you think of a candle, it’s lit, it’s flickering, you get out of bed, you’re excited, you’re giving light to others. Eventually, burnout, the way a candle gets snuffed, that’s kind of how burnout is. You start to feel less and less joy. You maybe aren’t having as much fun at work. You’re maybe not communicating as much, and your candle just gets dimmed.

Because usually burnout is not caused by just being too tired or having too much on your plate. It’s just that you’re not managing the stress efficiently and your candle gets burned out.

Whenever I worked with somebody, that’s the number one thing I would say: have you talked to your primary care provider? Because it is very important to identify whether it is burnout or depression. They carry some similar symptoms. Emotional exhaustion, sometimes there’s isolation. But they come from two different things. Burnout just comes from unmanaged stress, where depression can come from a stress incident, but it can also come from an unidentified stressor. And it’s very important to identify if it is depression so you can get treated effectively.

I think some colleagues would probably recognize that you’re not shutting work off, or you’re just go, go, go, go and never truly shutting work off. I think my husband would have said to me, I would get home and I would eat supper quickly, I would be back on my computer, and then I’d be awake and not be able to sleep.

I noticed in myself even just the way I was communicating. I was not as patient, I was more snappy. But I do think the emotional exhaustion, if you would ask a colleague, they’d probably start to see you just looking drained and feeling drained. Your cup is empty.

People sometimes get heart palpitations. I know that I did. People will not be able to focus as much. They feel like they have brain fog, or they don’t have clarity around things. Your body starts to send signals. You just get run down. Sometimes your hair falls out. Just lots of different physical symptoms.

Obviously, being a high performer, there’s a lot of great things that come out of being a high performer. What’s wrong with it is when you get to the point of emotional exhaustion, you’re eventually going to start depersonalizing from your work and not finding the value in the work that you do, and that just zaps your joy.

But then it also can impact your health. There’s all kinds of health issues that are related to burnout: high blood pressure, heart disease. But it also impacts your performance. Even though you think you’re a high performer, it impacts. There’s greater risk for errors. You’re not being near as efficient. Sometimes you become cynical with your team. And so we feel like we’re doing our very best, but it really does have the negative consequences.

Compassion fatigue is when we as caregivers are very high in empathy, and it’s a very rewarding career. However, compassion fatigue is when you start to absorb the emotional trauma or the pain that others are going through. We saw a lot of it during COVID. You just start to take all of that on yourself and have a hard time separating it. Then eventually it causes emotional exhaustion, it causes you to depersonalize.

It’s different than burnout. People that experience burnout may have some compassion fatigue, but not everybody that has compassion fatigue is completely burned out. It could be a one-time situation at work that you’re just really feeling, and maybe need to talk to somebody about that compassion fatigue or that incident, that trauma.

If you’re in healthcare, there is something called the Mini Z assessment. It’s a free online tool. It has some specific healthcare questions, and that’s on the American Medical Association website. But if you’re in another industry, just asking yourself some questions.

Am I exhausted when I get up after I’ve had a restful night of sleep? Am I being more cynical at work? Am I finding joy in my work and fulfillment? Am I shutting work off, or do I keep having work go through my mind day in, day out? Am I setting unrealistic expectations on myself? So kind of having a few checkpoints.

But then also try to find a mentor or a coach or someone who can help you look from an unbiased standpoint and ask you some of those same questions. That can be helpful.

Back in 2019, I was working in the talent and development space, and honestly, we were going through a lot of reorganization, which all companies do. A little downsizing, not backfilling positions. I found myself more stressed than normal. I’d also lost my mom about six months prior to that, very suddenly. I had a son in college. Other things in life going on.

And I kind of thrive on stress. I like to be busy. When I’m not busy, I get a little anxious. But this was different. I started to become more cynical. I was emotionally exhausted. I just couldn’t find joy in my work.

And I went to my doctor. I knew she was going to say it’s stress, and she did. But she said, “Your blood pressure is through the roof.” I’d kind of always joke that I have a little blood pressure, I can have a margarita and salt my chips. But she’s like, “It’s dangerously high.”

And so I stepped back, and I really looked at what was going on. I had lost some close friends, and I’m like, I need to do something. This was definitely burnout. I needed to look at what was going wrong. I think the best way to describe it was I just didn’t feel like myself. I wasn’t showing up at home how I wanted to be, or at work.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But the problem with it is it’s not going to fix the ultimate problem. You can go away to Aruba for a week, but if you come back to the same inefficient practice or the same struggles, it’s not going to be different.

So I always recommend, really do some of that self-care, but you can’t yoga your way out of burnout. You have to really identify, what are those cogs in my wheel, the pebbles that are causing me not to be able to shut off work or to get out of work on time.

I think the biggest thing is to identify what are your biggest obstacles right now and come up with a few strategies to help you. One thing I saw a lot is people could not shut work off, that work-life transition. “I feel like I’m not effective at home with my kids or with my family, and when I’m at work, I’m thinking about my family.” Teaching people how to come up with a few strategies to be able to separate the two, having a work-home transition plan.

But they don’t need to be big sweeping strategies. They’re things like taking some deep breathing, taking micro breaks throughout the day, some pauses. Sometimes we think we have to have this big laundry list of how to change things.

Burnout often comes from inefficient practices. You’re just not using technology adequately. With AI, there’s a lot of great tools that can help with burnout, help you become more efficient. It’s really identifying where’s your biggest pain point and then try to come up with a few strategies that can help.

I think it’s hard for people that work from home, especially because your home and your office are the same. One of the systems that has worked for people that work outside of the home is, what is your work-life transition? When you’re leaving work and you’re coming home. Some strategies I’ve heard: “When I take my badge off, when I get home, I’m going to go into mom mode. That’s my signal, when I get into the garage.”

But when you’re working from home, you have to have those same strategies. “Okay, I’m shutting my office door. I’m done. I’m done for the day.” And be good with that. And then find people to support you, whether that’s your spouse or partner or somebody to support you in those efforts.

I heard this from another physician who has really made some good strides in their own personal well-being: you have to have a no buddy. It’s someone that’s going to tell you that you’re overcommitted, and they’re going to hold your hand down when you volunteer to do this again. “I’m going to take on another project.” So find someone who’s going to be your support mechanism.

And then the last thing I would say is, I think it’s Lou Holtz, use the WIN. What’s important now? When it’s seven o’clock at night and your brain is like, “I want to go make some content, I want to do this, I want to do that,” what’s important right now? “I want to spend time with my kids. I want to get my kids to bed.”

Because everybody’s wired differently. Some people can work 60, 70 hours a week and be fine and not have burnout, where other people are going to get burned out sooner. So you have to have some things that are going to work for you. But you also need a support system.

I always tell people to really think about some simplification questions. What can I delegate? What do I need to let go of? I think as leaders, and high performers too, it’s hard to give things up, but we have to reframe it in our brain. Delegation is not dumping. It’s actually developing people that report to you. So what can you delegate?

Through talking to people, you start to uncover little things that they’re doing, and just question them. “Why do you feel you need to do that? Is there someone else who could do that?” A lot of times we forget about our teams and how they want to grow.

What I would ask them back is, what does done right look like? Because sometimes that’s a certain standard. Sometimes when we’re so close to it, we don’t really see how much maybe we’re wasting time. I’ve done the same thing. I’ve been getting ready to do a PowerPoint, and I’ll go over and over and over. And what if I miss one slide? People aren’t going to know. So we’re our own worst enemy.

We have to just step back and say, what do you mean by that? Or I’ll hear people say, “Well, I feel bad about...” Why do you feel bad? Where’s that coming from?

I would say to really look at your workload and try to strategically look at, what are your goals? But then figure out, how can you delegate, and how can you set a plan that’s focused? We often have way too much on our plans. I’m really big into 90-day plans. I had a leader that introduced me to that years ago. Build 90-day plans and be focused, but then look at your teams. Where are their strengths? Are you delegating?

Again, having a stop doing list. There are so many things in businesses that we just continually do over and over and over. We don’t really think about, does this need to be done? Is it being done effectively? You don’t maybe need to cut everything out, but should we look at doing it differently?

I think it’s probably the same burnout with a different name. We call it cognitive overload sometimes in healthcare. You go from one task to one task, and if you don’t take a break and just have that downtime with your brain.

And again, it doesn’t need to be a long break. They’re talking micro breaks, deep breathing, go get some sunlight for two to three minutes. But we have to shut off our brain. I think it was Anne Lamott that said everything works if you unplug it for a while. It’s the same thing with our brains.

Yes, 100%. I think they do, because if you think about it, it’s like healthcare, where you’re talking about a life, and it’s your kids. And so it is hard to take time for yourself. It’s hard to say, “Okay, mom’s going to step away for half an hour and go for a run.”

I see this when I do coaching with people that are burned out that aren’t stay-at-home moms, but I see it with stay-at-home moms too. We have to be able to disconnect from our kids, because then we’re going to come back and we’re going to be refreshed. We’re going to be better parents.

There’s distracted driving, there’s distracted parenting, there’s distracted healthcare, because we’re just so distracted today. Staying at home with kids can be really hard. And so not feeling bad about stepping away and taking care of yourself.

I think leaders can play a really big part in that if you’re closest to them. I always tell leaders to check in on people, but not just, “Hey, how are you doing?” And they’re like, “Oh, fine.” Try to read them and say, “You’re saying you’re fine, but I’m noticing that you look like you’re just really run down, or you seem a little bit more irritable. Help me understand. Is there anything I can do for you? Can I provide you any resources?”

But don’t just ask, “How are you doing?” Because we all say “fine.” Or, I hate the word busy, “Oh, I’m so busy.” So, what can I help with? Is there a resource you need? Really do some intentional check-ins with people. Leaders play a huge part, but just digging deeper, asking a few deeper questions can be helpful.

The Workforce Institute just had a study that 69% of employees look to their leader, same as their partner, for their mental health, more than their doctor or their therapist. So leaders really, they don’t have to fix the burnout. It’s really about asking the right questions and making sure that your teams have the resources they need. Because one of the big areas of burnout is people have an inefficient practice. They can help them: “What are your hurdles? What are your obstacles?”

The Stanford wellness model, they look at three things. A culture of well-being, so that’s leaders demonstrating their own well-being. That’s a huge thing, if a leader can show their teams that they’re working on their own well-being. The second thing is efficiency of practice. What are the things that are slowing down our work? What are the administrative burdens that maybe we can either stop doing or try to improve on?

And then the last thing is personal resilience. A leader can do all they want, they can try to help, but at the end of the day, people have to be engaged and want the help as well. So they have to take that personal accountability too.

I had a leader tell me that they find peace and contentment in working on Saturday mornings. They would send all their emails on Saturday because it worked for them. Their kids were older, so they weren’t going to soccer games. So they would be sending out all these emails to their team. And she found out that their team was just stressed out on Mondays.

She realized that even though that worked for her, she was stressing her team out. So she decided to schedule all her emails to go out on Mondays so her team wouldn’t get them over the weekend, even though she had told them, “You don’t need to respond if I email you over the weekend.” It is really just about modeling behavior.

Also, one of the physician leaders that I work with decided she was going to set a personal policy, we call it, or a boundary, that she wasn’t going to answer her text messages after seven. The great thing, though, is she told the rest of the team so we could help support her. Because sometimes you can set a boundary or a personal policy, but if you don’t tell anybody about it, they can’t support you. They’re going to continue to send you messages. As leaders, we just need to be able to set some policies and then ask other people to help us in that support.

I will say burnout is definitely an organizational issue, with a caveat. An organization can help you become more efficient, change processes. They can model the best behavior. But if you’re not willing to take accountability for your own personal resilience and set some boundaries, really have some good personal policies of, “I’m going to shut my work off at a certain time. I am going to get eight hours of sleep.” Sleep’s one of the best things you can do. The easiest thing to do is to just get more sleep.

And so it is definitely on the organization to look at inefficient processes, have a stop doing list. Do we still need this report that no one’s looking at? What are the things that are slowing down our work? But we also have to have personal accountability, or we’re not going to really start to feel better and find that personal fulfillment and joy in our work.

I think what I’d want them to do would be to intentionally do some rounding and check in on your team and really make sure they’re doing okay. And then kind of assess that.

If you’re a leader and you have a small team, I’d want you to look at yourself. What are you doing? How are you modeling well-being? How are you showing up for work? And you can really have your team identify, what are our top five biggest obstacles as a team? Start small and identify a couple areas that you want to look at and improve, and then kind of build from there.

Team building, I think, is so effective. But you have to set some goals of, what do we want to get out of this team building? Where leaders sometimes get it wrong is they think that by bringing everybody together, it’s going to fix it. And it’s not going to fix it if it’s two people. So I always try to start with a needs assessment. What’s really going on? And let’s address what’s happening there first.

I think it’s good for them to talk. I also think it’s good for you, as the leader, to talk separately and have a growth plan for both of them so that you can check in. Again, it’s the follow-up. I always feel like training is not a one-time event. You can go to any kind of training and be so excited, or you can bring your two people together and think it’s going to be fixed. But if they walk away and no one ever follows up.

So as a leader, it’s very important to follow up, continue to coach them. “Okay, you guys met. What’s going on?” And if it’s still not going well, coach them. Help them learn how to have conversations with each other. Lots of people are not equipped to have a good crucial conversation, and they don’t realize that if they have that, their relationship might grow with that person. As a leader, you need to coach your team as well.

Emotional intelligence, I guess the descriptor is it’s a set of emotional and social skills. It helps us perceive and express ourselves better. It helps us with relationships. It helps us cope with challenges. And it can really help your overall well-being. It helps with handling stress.

The easiest way to describe it, for me, is if you learn about your emotions, you become a strategic responder instead of reacting to your emotions. Emotional intelligence is just really identifying how your emotions are impacting you and then coming up with some strategies to effectively use those emotions to help facilitate your performance instead of impair your performance.

Let’s say it’s Tuesday morning and you’ve been up all night with a sick child. You’re running late. You’re dropping your kids off at school and one of them’s having a meltdown, and you know you have this very important meeting when you get to work. So you walk into the meeting five minutes late. Your team is discussing something, and you really want to jump in and say what you think, but you just got there, so you missed out.

Someone with emotional intelligence, before they get into the meeting, they’re going to take a deep breath and pause and ask themselves, what do I want out of this meeting? Get themselves in the right space, walk in. They’re going to read the room, see what’s going on since they came in a little bit late, and they’re going to be able to pause and say the right thing at the right time. They’re going to ask the good questions.

They’re not just going to react and let all those emotions that have fueled their morning so far come in. They’re going to be able to really respond effectively.

I can use myself as an example. On the EQ assessment that I use, my strengths are emotional self-awareness, emotional expression and assertiveness. Going back to what I said about my dad, I tend to talk before I think sometimes. The areas I struggle in are impulse control and reality testing.

So sometimes I’ll get super excited about something and I’ll barge into my leader’s office: “Oh, I’ve got this great idea.” And they’re just sitting and reflecting. And so I’m not being effective. Or somebody might say something in a meeting, and for me, I want to quickly react and answer or speak up. Someone with emotional intelligence is going to sit back and be more receptive, listen to others, ask more questions.

IQ is our intellectual quotient, and that’s usually fixed between 17 and 20. We’re not going to change that a lot as we grow as an adult. EQ, your emotional quotient, can be developed all the way up until your retirement years.

So that’s the big difference. Your IQ is fixed. Your EQ is going to show you, how do you show up in a meeting? How do you respond effectively? It’s really going to help you manage your thoughts and emotions so that you’re more effective.

It’s an assessment by Multi-Health Systems. It’s one of the first EQ assessments that was a scientific assessment. I have to go through a regular certification to administer it. It has five composites. To be honest, it seemed a little overwhelming when I first learned about it, but it gets very granular, so you know where you can improve.

The first one is self-perception. That’s all about your inner self: your self-regard, your goal setting, your emotional self-awareness. The second is emotional expression. How do you express yourself emotionally, verbally and nonverbally, assertiveness, and then independence. The third is interpersonal. We look at interpersonal relationships. Do you have relationships that are built on trust? Empathy and social responsibility.

The fourth one is decision making. This is where I was talking about impulse control. We talk about problem solving and reality testing, looking at things from an unbiased standpoint. And the last one is stress tolerance. That has flexibility. How flexible are you when things get thrown at you? Do you have good stress coping mechanisms, stress tolerance, and then optimism.

So those 15 areas. What I love about it is, instead of just telling you to work on your emotional self-awareness, it’s going to pinpoint where in that area you need to focus, and you can come up with a few strategies.

I would probably say reality testing. Reality testing is that you look at things in an unbiased manner. We’re really quick sometimes to think, “Oh, that person did this for this reason.” I always say to people, stop and ask, could the opposite be true?

If you approach it with positive intent and you really think about the reality, what’s going on, looking at the facts. If you think of crucial conversations, the best thing to do is focus on the facts, not necessarily the person. So many of the skills are really important, but I think if you can master reality testing and really get good at being objective instead of telling yourself stories, that can be really effective.

Emotional self-awareness is kind of the buzzword, but that’s one element of EQ. As I mentioned, that’s in the self-perception category. That’s that you’re aware of your emotions and how they come across to others, and you’re able to read the room. But then there’s all these other elements with EQ that also can help you be more effective.

Stress tolerance is good if you know where the stress is coming from. So again, it ties to emotional self-awareness. In the EQ assessment, what I look at a lot is not necessarily your numbers, but where are you out of balance? If your emotional self-awareness is low and your stress tolerance is high, you may just power through. You’re not really saying, “Okay, I need to deal with this frustration.” You’re just, “I’m going to power through.”

The other thing is high performers may have high stress tolerance, but their team may not have the same stress tolerance. Maybe they’re not handling their team well. Maybe they have low interpersonal relationships, high stress tolerance. It’s like, is there a reason for that? Let’s talk a little bit more about that. Maybe your team is not keeping up with your pace. Do you need to slow down and ask more questions?

In healthcare, people are very empathetic, so empathy is high on the charts. One of the things that you find is people that have really high empathy, and if they have a lower self-regard, they’re more susceptible to burnout, because they give, give, give, and they don’t have any self-compassion left for their bucket.

100%. EQ is not just going to fix everything, because burnout is not just one thing. It’s multifaceted. It comes from the culture of the organization you work in. It comes from efficiency of practice, if you’re not being efficient. But it does help to have high EQ. There’s a correlation with high EQ and less burnout.

You still can get burned out if you have high EQ, but you’re probably less apt to, and you’re going to recognize it sooner. Burnout’s on a continuum. So somebody with high EQ is probably going to say, “Okay, I know that I’m not reacting appropriately,” and they’re going to seek out help.

I think it is because, if you think of AI, EQ is the human connection element. We can become more efficient with AI. CEOs are responsible for making sure they’re having the best resources, making sure that they’re sustaining profitability, and AI is going to help with some of those things.

But the human element is going to be so important in any industry, not just in healthcare. Being able to connect with people, as an employee, that’s going to be an asset that you can have that others may not have if you don’t develop it.

EQ has been around since the 1900s. The last five or ten years, I’ve gotten really excited about EQ. But if you look at how far it dates back, it’s from the 1900s. It had another kind of wave in 1995. Daniel Goleman wrote a book. So it’s not new.

I think people are talking more about it because they’re seeing that if you develop your EQ, it’s more effective. And then also with the technology, the rapid change in our industries. Emotional intelligence is completely different. It is really you, personally. How are you showing up? How are you letting your emotions impair or facilitate your performance?

One of the things that I think is a little different with DiSC or Myers-Briggs and EQ is they’re very descriptive of who you are. I know I’m fast paced. I know that I’m very much interpersonal. I’m an iD on the DiSC. EQ is very prescriptive. It’s going to say, “Okay, Marla, these are your areas where you’re good with your emotional intelligence, and these are areas where you really tend to struggle,” and it’s going to show you how to balance those out.

But at the end, it’s not a blood test. All of these are tools in your toolbox. I think having them is great, but then working with somebody to help you strategically say, okay, what should I be focusing on? And then not try to focus on too many things at once.

I’m a big believer in, let’s look at one thing and let’s work on this for three months and see, is it helping you perform? Or did you not see a change? Well, then let’s think of something else, and let’s think about what’s going to help you, what’s going to serve you.

A coach really is about helping someone move forward, setting some specific strategies. Therapy really is about digging into maybe some of those childhood wounds or traumas, or maybe something specifically going on now that’s a little deeper. And if you’re a trained coach, you’re going to identify it and really recommend.

The very first question I ever ask is, have you talked to your primary care provider? Because it could be an underlying condition, and somebody might need some therapy. I have people that are doing therapy and coaching at the same time. You’re looking at two different ways of healing.

In coaching, it’s more strategic. These are some goals, and that forward thinking. Therapy really is doing more of a deeper healing through self-reflection. They both use self-reflection, but just different strategies. And they’re trained differently. Therapists have a completely different training.

What I always do is I offer a discovery call, a 15 minute call, and just kind of talk through and get to know people. Because I do think that’s really important, whether it’s a therapist or a coach, that you connect with somebody and you feel like you could talk to that person, open up.

But a coach really is a strategic partner. So I would look for somebody that, if you have a certain area in your life, if you’re looking for physical health, find a coach that’s going to help with that. If you are struggling with well-being, shutting things off, try to find someone who has worked with other individuals.

I’m a master certified physician coach, and I’ve learned about well-being in that. I work with executives. I work with really anybody that wants to set goals, whether it’s improvement in your work. But then I also focus a lot on well-being and really that burnout space as well.

I’d really want to work with any team or individual that is interested in really working with their teams on personal resilience, building that well-being program. Also, if you have a team that maybe is struggling with communication, or leaders that need to grow and develop in EQ, emotional intelligence. I do a lot of emotional intelligence as a group. You can put your group through emotional intelligence training and then do individual coaching and set some goals.

So I’m hoping to work more with organizations that really want to focus in on emotional intelligence. And then coaching individually. I love to coach. I love to work with people individually that have specific areas they want to focus on, whether it be they want to grow as a leader, they want to become better at delegating, they want to grow their emotional intelligence.

I work with both. I’ve developed a lot of well-being programs, anything from six-month programs to doing group coaching. But I also do individual coaching as well.