The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #285 - Dr. Kandi Wiens

Kandi Wiens, EdD is the Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Master’s in Medical Education Program and the Penn Health Professions Education Certificate Program. As a sought-after international speaker, Dr. Wiens is co-founder and chief research officer of Big Sky Leadership Labs, where she leads and conducts evidence-based research on executive performance, emotional intelligence, burnout, and resilience. Her work has been prominently featured in the Harvard Business Review and in several Harvard Business Review Press books.
A Senior Fellow at Penn, Dr. Wiens is Academic Director of the PennCLO Master’s Program and teaches various graduate-level and executive-format courses. She has designed and delivered over 2,000 leadership development programs focused on helping leaders build and leverage their emotional and social intelligence to amplify their positive impact and protect themselves from burnout.
Dr. Wiens holds a doctorate from the Penn Chief Learning Officer executive doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania, an M.B.A. from the University of Oregon, and a B.S. in business administration from Montana State University.
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TRANSCRIPT
(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)
Melanie Avalon
friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I'm about to have. I loved this book so much. Reading it was actually so, so fun and enlightening for me. And the topic, well backstory on today's conversation, I get pitches a lot for the show and sometimes I see a title of a book and I just know that I've got to read it and explore this work. And so when I was introduced to Candy Weans for her book, Burnout Immunity, how emotional intelligence can help you build resilience and heal your relationship with work. I immediately was intrigued. Listeners are probably figured this out by now, but I sort of identify as a workaholic. I love what I do. Literally you have to pay me not to work. That's how much I just adore doing what I do. And also at the same time in the past, I definitely had a moment that I would qualify as burnout. I definitely hit a wall. I kept going through it and I kept working. Like I never stopped working, but I definitely had a really intense moment with that. And since then I have resolved not to let that happen again. And I've taken my own personal steps to do that. Reading this book though really opened my eyes to so many things. One, what actually causes burnout and it may or may not be what you think. She talks about the surprising epiphany she had about one characteristic that connects a lot of people who seem to be immune to burnout. And then in the book, Candy goes into so many things, the role of how stress actually works in the body and attributes to burnout, the different responses we can have to stress, things like mindset and thinking traps, and a lot about the actual workplace and the employer-employee relationship. And that's just skimming the surface. So I had the time of my life reading this book. I can't wait to ask Candy some of my questions and share this all with you guys. So Candy, thank you so much for being here.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
Thank you, Melanie. I'm really excited to be here with you too. And to hear a little bit more about your burnout story and see if there's some tips and strategies from the book that we can maybe help you and help some of your listeners with as well.
Melanie Avalon
It was the work and I had health issues at the same time, but the literally like the low point, I literally was, I mean, I had anemia and was hospitalized, but I was just, it was literally like the definition of burnout. And ever since that happened, I've been so, and something you talk about in the book actually is like the role of self-care and personal boundaries. And I am so intense about that now. It is crazy, but I still love work. And I still like, I literally could work 24 seven. So I have a lot of questions about that, but I'll let listeners know a little bit about your bio. So you are the director of the University of Pennsylvania's Master's in Medical Education Program and the Penn Health Professionals Education Certificate Program. You're a senior fellow at Penn, you're academic director of the PennClo Master's Program. You have a doctorate from the Penn Chief Learning Officer, Executive Doctoral Program at the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from the University of Oregon, and a BS in Business Administration from Montana State University. So in the book, the beginning of the book does open with your personal story. So I mentioned briefly that I had my own burnout moment, but could you tell listeners a little bit about your journey and what led you, A, the burnout experience you had, the epiphany that you had, and what led you to find your way out of it and be doing what you're doing today?
Dr. Kandi Wiens
I can totally relate to a lot of what you said about your story, Melanie, in that, you know, you're workaholic. Something to me like the way I heard you describe what your experience with work was that you're very engaged in your work and you still are very engaged in your work. And that was my case as well. And that's one of the interesting things I've learned to be true about burnout is that it doesn't just happen to people who have the bad kind of stress at work. It also includes those of us who have a lot of really good stress at work, but we don't know how to turn it off. We haven't yet learned how to turn it off. My burnout experience started, I mean, it probably started way before 2011, but I didn't have my big life for any wake-up call until 2011. Up until then, I was going along grinding it out and hustling my way through management consulting, getting promoted every couple of years. And like I said, very much loved my work and my clients and my colleagues. And so I threw myself in to work and at the same time had three little boys all under the age of four. So they are still very close in age. And so I was busy, not just busy, but I was living the kind of lifestyle that I wanted. A lot of us pursue some vision of success that we have for ourselves. And that was me. I thought being a working mom, traveling, I could do it all, have it all. And I did. I felt like I had it all. But my world really came crashing down in 2011 when I went into my primary care physician just for normal annual physical exam. It was one of those where you go in to your doctor and you think, okay, I'll be in here for about 20 minutes. I'll be able to get home for lunch, pick up my calls. My doctor will give me an A plus and say, see you back here next year. That was not the case for me at all. What happened was they took me back to the exam room. I sat there, the nurse practitioner did my vitals on me where they check your blood pressure and your heart rate and all that. And she checked my blood pressure two, three, fourth time and didn't say anything at all. And I should've known, like I should have started to clue into the fact that something might not be right with my blood pressure, but I didn't think about it because my mind was actually really on work that morning. Before the doctor's appointment, I had sent the three boys off to school on the bus and I rushed over to my doctor's appointment. And sitting there at the doctor, even while she was checking my blood pressure, I was thinking about work and all the things I had to do that day before the kids got home. So anyway, so the nurse walked down to the exam room and said, just wait right there. I'll be right back. And I did what a lot of people have told me that they do. Every time I tell this story, people say that I would have done the same thing. But instead of thinking about my blood pressure, I went back to looking at my phone and scrolling through my emails, responding to emails and texts. And it was only about a minute and a half or so before the nurse came back with the doctor.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
And when the doctor walked in with this look on her face, I knew something was off. And the doctor sat down next to me on the exam room table and she held my hand and she said, Candy, are you okay? How are you feeling? And I said, I'm fine. I feel fine. And that was the truth. I actually felt what to me felt like a normal level of stress, the same amount of stress I'd been carrying around for a long time, but nothing struck me as physically feeling a whole lot different than what I had been used to. Then the doctor said, well, I'm going to give you some medication. I don't want you to worry at all. Just lay down and rest. We'll talk here in a few minutes and I'm going to call your husband to have him come and pick you up. And as soon as she said that, that's when I knew something was really wrong. And I almost started having a panic attack at that point, but she had given me some blood pressure reducing medicine and some Xanax, which I never had before. So it really relaxed me. My husband got there and after my blood pressure came down, she told me that my blood pressure was 200 over 110, which at the time I did not know what that meant, but later learned that 200 over 110 is not just a hypertensive emergency, but a pretty critical one that could have sent me to the emergency room then and there. I could have even literally had a stroke or a heart attack or even died right on the spot. which in hindsight just seems so crazy because, like I said, I went in thinking that I was carrying all this stress, I was doing it, I was feeling this normal level of stress, not noticing that it was silently killing me, which is what happens to so many women. Heart disease, not just heart disease, but heart-related problems are one of the, if not the, number one cause of death of women, especially those of us who work in these kinds of jobs and throw ourselves into work. Anyway, to wrap this story up, I just want to share a couple of reflections that I've had since then. And I write about this in the book in more detail, but my first response when the doctor told me that she didn't want me to do anything for at least four or five days, I think it was, she like just told my husband, don't let her do anything, just park her on the couch, no work, no nothing. And my first thought, and I was, I don't have the luxury of taking time off. I've got three little boys to take care of. I've got a big leadership development program next week. I can't just miss work. And so that was my first thought. My second thought though was, oh my God, I mean, finally someone is giving me an excuse to just rest, to just stop for a minute. And then a minute or two later, this third thought all of a sudden hit me that, you know what, she's right. I'm not okay. And it just all of a sudden kind of hit me, you know, this Xanax induced kind of feeling of, wow, I need to take this really seriously based on what my doctor's telling me. That was what led me to my research.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
What started out as like five days hanging out on the couch and just taking care of myself in a way I can't remember ever doing, to be honest, like not even when I was younger, but that turned into me ordering books on Amazon about resilience and stress and burnout wasn't really a thing back then as far as like what we were reading and we weren't hearing a lot about it. But I just started reading as much as I could and practicing a lot of stress management techniques and strategies and practicing mindfulness and putting boundaries on and doing all the things that at the time in 2011, we were told we should try. And that worked for me for a while. But then I started feeling like, all right, I want to take this a step further. I want to really understand how is it that other people can work in very high stress environments, just like the one I was in. And I had done that for years. I'd worked right alongside many other people who were experiencing the exact same stress that I was, same environment, same challenges, same long hours of travel. Yet they weren't burning out and crashing and having blood pressure issues and all of that. And they seem quite effective at work. So I thought, okay, what if I studied this for real? What if I go and I get my doctorate and just start digging into it more? So in 2013, that's what I decided to do. I joined a doctoral program at University of Pennsylvania. And that's where my first study began. So since 2013, I've now studied over 200 people. Actually, I've interviewed over 200 people that I've studied, including the quantitative stuff, over 2000 people, I think it is now. But what I look at in my research and the basis of burnout immunity in my book is I am just fascinated by people who tell me that their stress level is a seven or above on a 10-point scale, meaning they characterize their stress as severe, very severe, or worst possible for at least a six gold standard psychometric instrument that we researchers use for this kind of stuff. These people are not burned out. Now, of course, in every study I do, there are lots of people that are burned out. But in every study I've done, there are always at least a handful of people who are not burned out, but they're still experiencing that extreme level of stress. So then I interview them and I get in really deep into understanding what they're doing, how they're doing it, when they're doing it, why they do it. And I sometimes observe people. So my research includes not just interviews, but also observational techniques. And I've learned a lot. And so what I wanted to do was to take what I'm learning from these people that have what I call burnout immunity, meaning that they have all this stress in their lives, but they're not burned out, or they can at least keep feelings of burnout under control in a healthy way. what are they doing and what can we learn from them so that I can bring it to people like you and to people like me who needed it back in 2011 and to people like your listeners who today are probably struggling with a lot of the same things that you and I still struggle with today.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
So that's a very long version of why and how I got into the research and I'm excited to share some of the tips and strategies with you.
Melanie Avalon
Oh my goodness, I love it. Okay, so much there. Okay, so going back to when you had that moment and the doctor said that you needed to rest for five days and you felt a little bit relieved and did that, I'm really curious. Like I kind of mentioned this in the beginning, but I love work so much and I'm sort of haunted by this idea of productivity. And if somebody told me I had to not do anything for five days, I would have more of the first response you had where I'm like, I can't do that. And I think I would get, like I would get stressed about not doing anything. At the same time, I do feel like it would, maybe if I actually did it, it would help. I guess my question here is people's perspective of if they're enjoying seemingly the work that they're doing and if they would be stressed by not working, does that speak to their level of potential, burnout potential?
Dr. Kandi Wiens
It does. I mean, so people like you and I who get what I call stuck in an over-engagement trap, we get so immersed in our work and we love it so much, it is hard to turn it off, and we see it as actually good stress. One of the things that's happening is we're losing sight of or we may not even notice some of the really subtle things that are going on with us, physical, health-wise, psychologically. We may not even notice that some of our relationships start to get afraid or we tend to have tension or lash out at people. We might not notice that because it happens so gradually. This is the scary thing about burnout, not just my experience, but so many people that I've talked to that have been burned out or recovered from it, they describe it as a very insidious sort of psychological experience where literally, I have not had one person ever tell me that their burnout experience happened because of one thing or one day, one bad day, it gradually, gradually crept up on them to where they didn't even notice that it was just so insidious and invisible. And that happens to people like you and I too. So what I write a lot about is that the first big step there in your podcast today, even the listeners tuning in right now, they're working on their awareness. And so I would imagine even in the 15 minutes or so that we've been recording that your listeners, even hearing my story and your story, Melanie, they're probably in their own way, reflecting on themselves and thinking about their own experience. They might even be noticing as they hear my story about my blood pressure, noticing, I wonder if that's what's been going on with me. I've noticed like my heart races a little more. So people begin to heighten their awareness by hearing other people's stories like yours and mine. They begin to heighten their awareness by reading a book like I've written. They begin to heighten their awareness when they notice things, when they actually do pay attention to the fact that some of their relationships are starting to get a little more afraid or that they might start noticing that they don't have as much interest in doing things that they once loved or spending time with people that they know they love to spend time with, but they're not. They're making choices that in terms of making choices with what to do with their time and where they spend their energy that if they really sat down and made a list of all the things that are most important to them in life, they might find that they would make different choices. So the awareness thing starts to kick in at some point for people. For me, it was like an alarm clock going off. For other people, it's like listening to a podcast like this where they start to heighten their awareness and ask more questions and they start reflecting and paying attention more. But yeah, it all starts with awareness of things like our risk level, awareness of what makes us you more vulnerable to burnout might not make me as vulnerable to burnout. Two very different people put in the same context, same environment.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
They're going to experience it differently. So one person might be more vulnerable. The other might be more protected from burnout. And then creating an awareness too of things that really motivate you and get you excited about your work, but in a healthy way. There's so much more to awareness, including the big one that I write about in my book that I feel like I have to keep going back to is awareness of our triggers. There's so much that each of us can learn about what triggers us, what ticks us off, what really gets under our skin, and not just what is it, but why. Why is that thing or why does that person or why is it that certain times of the day or week or month, I tend to get more triggered more easily. So awareness is just such a huge foundational part of building your burnout immunity.
Melanie Avalon
I do not want to say I love triggers, but I do see them as an opportunity. Anytime I see myself being triggered, it's a really good moment to think, oh, what do I need to work on here? And it's not the other person. There's something in me that I need to address here. So it's kind of like a nice flashing light.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
It is. Yep. And there are exercises that we can do to heighten our awareness of a trigger because there's, it's like a two step process, actually probably three steps, but the work around triggers is number one, noticing when you're triggered and the degree of intensity, how, like what kind of emotional response do you get when you're triggered? Also, how do you feel physically? Like my stomach churns and tumbles when somebody says a certain thing or whatever, but so that's step one is like heightening your awareness of what it is that triggers you and when and all that. But then I think the biggest piece of work that we all can do, and it's like life work. It's not just do it one day and you're all of a sudden you understand and can manage your triggers, but the biggest and hardest piece of work is then really understanding like why is it that that, you know, when, when I get emails between four and five o'clock, like why is it that that really triggers me? I could get the same email at nine o'clock in the morning and it doesn't work or some person saying something, but it's the way they say it that reminds us of an old boss or our college roommate who got on her nerves, whatever it is. Right. There's so much work that we can do to understand our triggers to help us manage them more productively.
Melanie Avalon
I love that so much. Although, so here's a question about the self-awareness. So one of the fascinating stats that you shared in the book, I just thought this was so interesting, was that 95% of people believe they are self-aware, but only 10 to 15% actually are. So what do we do with that information? Do we just have to look for really objective benchmarks like you were mentioning for awareness?
Dr. Kandi Wiens
Yeah, one of the, and that is true. If you look at Tasha, your ex work, she's a researcher out of I believe Stanford, but her work on self awareness is fascinating. And that's, that's exactly right. It's that kind of research bears out that only 10 to 15% of us are really accurately able to assess ourselves. And by that, what I mean by that is accurately able to assess how we really feel about something or, you know, to be able to really accurately label, understand and manage our emotions, and our strengths and our weaknesses and awareness is so much more than just, you know, understanding our emotions. But I was curious about that. So I did my own little mini study. And my research showed that only 19% of the, I think it was 200 people that I looked at, were able to accurately assess. So what do we do about that? If we are one of those people, like, you know, 80 or 90% of us are not very good at self assessment? Well, number one thing we can do is reflection, reflect, think, journal, paying attention to, like, mindfulness is a great way for some people, I'm horrible at practicing mindfulness, I'm like, I don't have the patience for it sometimes. Although I do it in my own way, practice mindfulness while I'm walking or brushing my teeth, and not so much, you know, sitting and meditating. But there are certain practices, including reflective journaling and mindfulness, that can help us hone that skill of self awareness. But we can also really enhance our self awareness by asking other people to hold the mirror up for us. You know, my in my case, I'm sure I wish showing signs of stress and not slowing down that other people saw that I wasn't. But I you know, I didn't care to ask anybody. And, and no one was really saying anything, because they are all so busy and focused on themselves. But if you have a really good friend or partner colleague that you feel comfortable asking, you know, can can I check in with you? Or can you check in with me on my stress level and help me help me accurately assess what's going on with me. So that's the second way. A third way to increase your self awareness is to do exercises like the book is chock full of exercises like the burnout risk assessment. Many of the exercises in there are meant to help you hone your self awareness. So self awareness sometimes needs you need guidance need to give some have someone give you some direction on well, what should I be reflecting on? What kinds of questions should I be asking myself? And that's, that's what I tried to do in the book was offer those kinds of things to people to make it easier to develop our self awareness.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I'll just say it again. There's, I love in the book, there's so many sections where people can really practically implement the different things you're talking about and you give, you know, like lists of things to do and it's so, so helpful. Okay, so a huge, this is a huge question I have. This is probably the biggest question I had walking away from the book, which is, well, first of all, I'd love to hear a little bit more. I bet listeners are very eager to hear what you learned when you started actually studying people and looking at their burnout and, you know, what was common in these people who seemingly had high stress but were not burning out. One of the things you talked about finding was the role of emotional intelligence and high emotional intelligence correlating to high burnout immunity. Well, A, I'd love to hear more just about that concept in general. And then my second question about it is that seems very innate to the person. So it would seem that burnout would depend a lot on the person. And then at the same time, you talk a lot about the role of the workplace and how, you know, it's not you, it's your job. So I'm curious about the role of emotional intelligence and also the role of the job and how those go together.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
Those are two awesome questions. I think your listeners are going to get a lot out of this one. I'm going to take them in reverse order because I think your second question about the role of the person each of us has in our vulnerability to burnout versus the role of the organization. I'll take that first and then I'll explain how emotional intelligence can help us individually. Burnout, it's characterized as a psychological syndrome that is caused by chronic stress at work. That's how the majority of researchers who've been looking at this stuff for 40 or 50 years or so, they all agree that burnout is primarily a psychological syndrome, but it's primarily if not some researchers actually argue that it's only caused by stress at work. I and some of the more contemporary researchers are really pushing that to say, well, actually, so much of our capacity to deal with stress at work, it has to do with how much capacity is drained from us because of the stress we experience outside of work. In other words, our lives are not two separate things, work and home life. It almost doesn't matter, but think of it as when you are feeling burned out, you start to notice that things are getting at a stress level that's just not sustainable and not sustainable to a point where it's affecting your physical, mental, emotional health, relationships and all that, all the other things in your life. Think of it as it is primarily caused by what you're experiencing in the workplace. The volume of work, the deadlines that you have imposed on you, but it's not just that. It's not just workload and deadlines. It's also what's the community like that you work in, the environment, the culture. Do you feel like there's a sense of fairness? Or do you feel like you're fairly paid for the hard work and the talent and the creativity that you bring to your job? It also has a lot to do with your perception of the values that your organization has compared to the values that you personally have. If there's a major mismatch between your organization's values and what you personally value, that's going to cause a lot of stress. Sometimes that's even the worst kind of stress people can feel at work, and that can quickly lead to burnout. Organizations primarily cause it, but what I was fascinated by is that, okay, so if that's what the researchers are saying, that the workplace and the work environment, job demands, that's the thing that causes burnout, then what is that role of the person, the individual, those of us who are in that environment? Why is it that some people don't get burned out? Almost every study, it shows like 40% of the people in this group were burned out and 20% of this group was burned out. Well, what about the other 60% or 80% that are not burned out in that same environment? So it's not always just the environment. What I have to say about it, my research really shows is that it's the interaction between who we are at our core, our personality, our temperament, all of our past life experiences that we bring to our job.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
It's that intersection between who we are as a person and what we want and need out of a job and what we want and need out of a work environment compared to what we're actually getting from that work environment. That's why you see some people burn out and some people not burn out in the exact same work environment. That's the role of the environment causing it. But again, just keep in mind that if you're noticing other people around you not burned out and you might be wondering what's wrong with me? It's not you. It really is not you. It's your job. But more than that, the intersection between your personality and what you want and need out of a job versus what you're actually getting. So what do you do with that? So then this brings us to the whole emotional intelligence. What do you do with that once you start realizing, well, no wonder I'm feeling burned out, but yet for my colleagues around me don't seem to be burned out. They're stressed, but they don't seem to me like they're ready to quit like I am. What you might then be able to do is start to explore how you use your emotional intelligence, which is the foundation of the book. So in the book, I write and dedicate a chapter to what I call the ARMOR framework, A-R-M-O-R. The A stands for awareness. The R stands for regulation. The M is for meaningful connections. The O is for outlook. And then the last R is for what I call the 3-R-X prescription. Let's recover, reconnect, reimagine. But each of those chapters gets into how we use our self-awareness, our ability to regulate our emotions, our thoughts, our behaviors. the M, how we're able to use our connections in a really meaningful way to other people, our connections to our values, our connections to finding meaning in the work that we do. All of those things have to do with our awareness regulation and meaningful connections have a lot to do with emotional self-awareness and emotional self-regulation. But then when we get to the Outlook chapter, the O in the Armor Framework, the Outlook has a lot to do with our mindset. And what I found in my research was that people with burnout immunity tend to, I see them having one if not two of four different vital mindsets, four different ways of looking at the world or four different ways of thinking about challenges and stressors that we can actually practice these mindsets. And even though we might feel like we don't have, for example, an optimistic or positive Outlook mindset, if we're not one of those glasses half full people, we can learn how to become more of an optimist or have more of a positive Outlook. So mindset, and like I said, there are four vital mindsets that I write about. If you read that chapter and you think to yourself, well, I don't have that mindset right now, you can. You can develop it. And so I offer tools and strategies for how to hone and develop these mindsets. And then the last chapter talks about how we use our emotional intelligence, which is our ability to be aware and regulate our emotions, thoughts and behaviors and also regulate our nervous system.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
One of the things I wanna emphasize here too is that each of us has our own very unique nervous system. So Melanie, you and I, again, we can work in the same environment, same stressors, all that. But if my nervous system is stuck in the on position because I've got a lot of home stress, but yours, you're able to regulate your nervous system because you're able to take the time off to recover. You might not get triggered by the same things that I do. So our nervous systems are in different states of regulation. So the final chapter talks a lot about how to regulate and recover your nervous system and get it back to an equilibrium level where you can shift your perspective on what you're experiencing. And then that final chapter also goes into, okay, so you've recovered. Now, how do you reconnect to the things and the people and the experiences in your life that are truly most important? Where maybe because you've been overworking and your workaholic behaviors have really taken hold of you. What happens when we do that, when we throw ourselves so much into work is that we lose our connections with hobbies that we love, spending time with people that we love to spend time with. And so recovering from burnout can be accelerated when we're reconnecting with these people, places and experiences that really fill us with good positive life-giving energy. Finally, once we get to a point of recovering from burnout and reconnecting to what's really truly deeply, deeply important to us, then we can really start re-imagining maybe a different relationship with work, a healthier relationship with work that where you, you might be able to find new boundaries for yourself or new ways of upholding your boundaries, or you might find that the things you started to reconnect to, those old hobbies or those people that you haven't seen for years, you're able to re-imagine what your life is like and you're able to re-imagine how work fits into your life, not the other way around. So that's just a little bit of how we use our emotional intelligence. There's a whole lot more to it, but hopefully that was just enough to get everybody a headstart.
Melanie Avalon
What about entrepreneurs and people who are their own boss? How does that factor in?
Dr. Kandi Wiens
I've actually studied a few entrepreneurs and they're the type of people who can get caught in the over-engagement trap, which is throwing themselves into work. But they willfully and willingly do that because they're building a business and they're pursuing something that they may have been a dream for a very, very long time. So actually, it's interesting with entrepreneurs is that many of them, the type of work even throwing themselves into work and working crazy in long hours and not taking vacations and breaks and all of that, because they find the work so meaningful and so important to them or so important to whatever the product or services that they're about to launch, they may find that that protects them from burnout. And it does, it definitely shows up. But then what happens is people gradually fall into what's called sacrifice syndrome. That's where we start to gradually sacrifice time and energy spent on things we love and people we love, those meaningful connections I talked about. And we just kind of gradually start to turn into someone else. We gradually become someone that we almost don't recognize because we've been grinding and hustling for so long. And like I said, sacrifice syndrome is similar to burnout in that it can be really insidious and it can sneak up on us. Sacrifice syndrome, if you don't catch it and manage it when you need to, that can quickly then turn into burnout.
Melanie Avalon
Does sacrifice syndrome relate at all to empathetic distress that you talk about in the book?
Dr. Kandi Wiens
it could. Empathic distress is an interesting one. No, it's okay. I call it empathetic because it is about empathy. Empathic distress is so interesting, and this is a scary one that really can lead to burnout. Empathic distress happens often with people who are in caring positions or caring professions, I should say. Doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, psychologists, therapists, veterinarians really, really suffer from this. In fact, the rate of suicide amongst veterinarians is shockingly high. Most of us don't know how much risk our veterinarians are at because they're suffering from empathic distress, which is actually different than burnout. Empathic distress is when we care so much for the people or the pets that we're taking care of, our patients, our students, the pets that we're caring for, we care about them and we see their pain and suffering. And by being in very close proximity to other people or other animals' pain and suffering, if you tend to be a naturally empathetic person who feels for other people deeply, that can fairly quickly become dangerous if we're not really paying attention in managing it. It's difficult to manage because what I hear from people who suffer from empathic distress is that they believe that caring even more, putting more effort into caring for other people, they believe that that will actually help them feel better when in reality it is related to sacrifice syndrome because it's taking their attention away and it's causing them to sacrifice care for themselves or empathy for themselves, which is what we call having a lack of self-compassion. So the two definitely are related. I think that's really smart of you to pick up that relationship between, you know, when we make sacrifices, it's often because we're spending too much time caring for other people or animals.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, when I read that part of the book with empathic distress, it really was a light bulb moment for me, because I think I experienced that sometimes. And so reading that, reading that was honestly very, like on a personal level, very, very helpful, especially when you talked about the difference between compassion versus empathy, I think, and basically how to, you know, how you can have compassion, like you've provided a really like practical way to reframe and still engage in that relationship where you're helping another person, but put up these boundaries of sorts so that it's not, you know, draining you as much and creating burnout.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
And it's really hard for people like us who really care about other people and want to help them. You know, I've experienced this as a coach, I'll just give you a really practical example of how I've been able to manage this myself. When I I'm an executive coach, and and so oftentimes, the clients that I work with are experiencing a lot of stress, they come to me because they're burned out, or they're really high risk of burning out. And so when my coaching calls with them, I hear a lot of things that number one, I can relate to, and I I find myself sometimes even getting triggered because I hear their stories and they resonate with me. But then I also find myself falling into empathic distress because I want to help them so much. But what I need to do my way of using my emotional intelligence, my my ability to regulate my emotions, thoughts and behaviors is I need to catch myself even in the moment, even during a coaching conversation, catch myself when I notice that something that a client says is triggering a thought that I have about my own experience. So I'm first becoming aware of Oh, that just reminded me of, you know, by bad boss that I also worked with. But then I'm also able to use that which is a mindfulness practice, to then regulate and tell myself, my I want to keep my attention focused on my client right now. And so I literally have that I change myself talk from being self focused to being more focused on them to listening to what they're saying. But it's also has a lot to do with like you said, putting boundaries around not just the time that we spend with people that that take a lot of emotional energy from us, but also also emotional boundaries. I don't know that we really talk a whole lot. I don't. I don't haven't read a whole lot about just putting up more better and more emotional boundaries with people who take a lot of energy from you.
Melanie Avalon
Like the personal trigger that you experienced, I think you said in the book that one of your biggest triggers is when you see people using their power to take charge of other people or abuse other people. So putting up emotional boundaries, how do we do that without seeming cold, like have everybody win and feel good about it?
Dr. Kandi Wiens
I know it's hard and I can't speak to everybody's specific experience. I can tell you one story that I had where that happened. Again, one of the things that really triggers me when I see someone in a position of power bullying other people or using that power in a way that is hurtful to other people. I was in a client meeting one time, a big board meeting. It was a bunch of executives with the healthcare system and I was at the front of the room presenting. Everybody else, all these other executives, maybe 18 or 20 of them were sitting around a board table. There was one chair at the very end that was empty. I didn't know for sure, but I thought that was probably the CEO's chair. I was told that he might be late. Anyway, I was standing up at the front of the room and I was presenting for about 20 minutes. The whole thing was going really well. People were engaged with me and interacting. In about 20 minutes in, this guy comes in and he's carrying a whole bunch of stuff and he's sweating and he's rushing. You ever have that feeling where someone walks in the room and you can just tell their energy is super negative. It just sucked the air and the positive energy and vibe that was going on in the room at the time. He sat down and threw his stuff down. I kept presenting. I'm doing my thing and about two, three minutes later, he interrupts me and he starts going off. I was shocked. Sometimes now when I tell this story, I still find myself getting worked up because he went on to saying, well, why is she here talking about change management? We don't need change management help and we know what we're doing. Then he started pointing his finger to a couple of his leaders around the table. Did you bring her in here? Pointed at someone else. Did you bring her in here? He was an exact example of something that triggers me, which is using his power to literally finger point someone out and call them. I felt so bad for the leaders around the table that I stood up at the front of the room feeling like this mama bear instinct. It was that level of stress where I wanted to protect these people because they were being unfairly treated and treated very disrespectfully. But what I did instead, to answer your question, how do you do that to where you can handle yourself in a mature way where everybody wins somehow or we can somehow at least bring the tension level down a notch or two? I stood there and I don't remember exactly what I did, but I found a way to bring the meeting to a close really quickly. We were supposed to go for about two hours, but we ended up ending it right then and they're like 25 minutes in. I just said, it sounds like we have a lot to think about, a lot to process. Why don't we go ahead and take a break? I ended the meeting. I stayed as professional as I could. I had the self-talk voice going on in my head saying, don't do or say anything that you're going to regret because I was representing my whole consulting firm up there.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
Just don't do or say anything. Just control, manage your emotions. Just breathe. I focused on my breathing. I practiced this breathing technique that I had recently learned in school. As the meeting ended, the CEO actually came up afterwards and apologized to me. I think he had realized, he fortunately had enough social awareness, enough ability to read the room and pick up on the fact that what he was doing was really stressing everybody else out. He came up and apologized and I was able to manage my stress response in the moment. But boy, it took me a good day or so to get my nervous system back down to an equilibrium. I was keyed up for about a day just thinking about that experience. It is very difficult to manage our triggers, especially when it feels like it's something really threatening.
Melanie Avalon
There's such power in the pause, if you can just take a pause before acting on the trigger. And I feel like so much of the work is just getting to the point where you can implement the pause.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
Here's the thing with the pause, Melanie, let me say something about that, because I really want your listeners to hear, this is what the pause does, and find a way to create a little bit of mantra for yourself, a mantra that says something like, I wanna be intentionally responsive here. I'm gonna pause so I can be intentional and thoughtful about how I wanna respond. So intentionally responsive versus impulsively reacting. It would have been so easy for me in that moment with that CEO to react impulsively, to say something kind of nasty back at him or whatever. That's what we wanna move towards, and pausing, breathing exercises allow us to move from impulsive reactions to intentional responses.
Melanie Avalon
I love that. Yeah, I personally try my hardest to never, especially if I get an email or a message that is upsetting to me, not to answer it in a state of when I'm emotionally upset. So just to wait. I heard on another podcast that the brain takes 72 hours to reset or something. And so if you're making a major decision, especially one based on emotions, you should wait 72 hours and see if you still want to do that. Have you heard that?
Dr. Kandi Wiens
Yes, a 72 hour rule. Oh my gosh, this is like such a big takeaway for listeners. Actually, it's a reminder to myself too, because I just had something happen today that I can feel myself wanting to kind of react emotionally. And I'm a little bit keyed up about it. It's not that big of a deal, but it's making me think that's a good reminder. I should definitely not 72 hour rule. That 72 year old like is sleep on it, maybe talk to my partner about it and maybe journal about it a little bit, but don't do anything until I just let my brain... There's brain science that supports this, by the way. It's not just people reporting that it feels good and it's the right thing to do. There's brain science showing that yes, our brains get to a more equilibrium state when we allow it to rest and getting deep sleep. I'm kind of obsessed right now with tracking my deep sleep at night. I notice on nights when I get... What do you use, by the way? I use the Aura Ring. I love it.
Melanie Avalon
Oh, yeah, I love okay, you're speaking to my audience. We love the wiring around here.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
Oh, good. Oh, I check it. I mean, I've been wearing it for about a year and a half now my partner wears his so we every morning we compare our scores and all that. And for sure, I can tell the difference between my deep sleep and my ability to make good decisions the next day, whether it's, you know, if I don't get enough deep sleep, my decisions are more emotional based.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I'm wearing one right now. We love to wear a ring. Question about men versus women. So like early in the conversation, when you were talking about your blood pressure and everything, you were mentioning, you know, heart disease and women. And we've been talking throughout this about different jobs and roles and positions. And in the book, you also talk about the stress response and how men tend to respond, I think, with like a fight or flight versus women who can have a tend and befriend type response. So I'm curious, men versus women, in the studies you've done in the interviews, do you see a difference in men versus women susceptibility to burnout? Also, how does that manifest practically in the world and jobs and everything?
Dr. Kandi Wiens
a great question and something we should all be thinking about and learning about, you know, as we think about why is it that seems like the men in this environment aren't getting burned out, but more of the women are, or vice versa, right? So a couple of things are going on. It has a lot to do with some natural instincts that we have as men or as women or people who identify as men and people who identify as women, or even binary people too. There's no one-size-fits-all, of course, but what we see and like what happens with us, just what we're naturally born with is women historically, like evolutionary research shows that there's a tendency for women to reach out to other people to practice what's called the tend and befriend, meaning that when they're in really stressful situations, instead of isolating and stuffing their stress and trying to avoid it, women tend to befriend other people, make, in other words, like make friends with other people, even provide caregiving services to other people as a way of relieving their stress. So it's seen as a very healthy stress response. So women, I guess there's a biological reason to some degree of why women tend to be more, I guess, prone to practice the tend and befriend response than men are. But also the other thing is like, if you think about how we're raised culturally, I have three boys, they're, let's see, 18, almost 20 years old and 21 years old. And yeah, they've been raised not just by me and their dad to be more stoic and control their emotions, but I look at them compared to a lot of my friends that have daughters. And I feel like there's a lot that we did differently because we had boys, maybe because that's what we thought we were supposed to do in terms of raising boys. But boys, young men, boys, even older men tend to be more stoic, more reserved with their emotions, tend to stuff their emotions more. I saw a lot of this in my research with men who were burned out. There were a few people, a few men actually, that I was surprised that they were burned out. Because when I interviewed them, they didn't seem burned out. But yet, sure enough, when we did the instrument on them, they are burned out. And the reason I didn't pick up on it in the interview is because they're really good at hiding it. They're really good, the ones I interviewed stuff their stress. And one chief medical officer even told me that he considered himself to be a professional stuffer and ended up with diverticulitis, which is a really horrible intestinal problem. So there are a lot of differences in terms of how men and women learn how to deal with stress. But I would say what's more important for all of us to pay attention to, regardless of how you identify from a gender perspective, is pay attention to what types of people in your early childhood and young adulthood, what types of people did you have around you that were either really good at managing stress,
Dr. Kandi Wiens
or were you surrounded by people who didn't have very good stress management skills? That has a tendency to impact us even more than whether we are identified as a man or a woman. So it's our environment over a prolonged period of time. And the adults in our lives, and the guardians in our lives that can shape us even more so than whether we're man or woman.
Melanie Avalon
To clarify, because you're saying people who identify as men or women, so have they done studies on like the biological male versus women versus identifying and how that correlates?
Dr. Kandi Wiens
great question. I don't know the answer to that. I haven't seen research, but that is, that's actually really fascinating to me and something I would love to dig into a little bit more because yeah, I mean, it goes to helping us understand even more deeply, like what is the role of hormones in our ability to manage stress or to not just manage stress, but to perceive different stressors as either a real threat or a stressor is something that this is just a challenge that I need to work through. How much of that has to do with hormones and hormones that we have naturally versus hormones that we're supplementing, right? I'm sure there's research out there. If not, that's a really interesting call for research in that area.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah it's so interesting and it actually would correlate nicely also to research on a person's biological state and hormones and everything just in general like stress hormones and things like that versus their their mindset you know and how those are related.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, many women describe having lower tolerance to stress around their cycle, their monthly cycle. Or women who are in menopause or perimenopausal experience stress differently than they did before they were in that phase of their life. And so it is, that's a self-awareness thing. It's just another example of just really paying attention to when do you notice your capacity for stress not being as strong as it usually is. When do you notice that you just can't tolerate certain things? So yeah, certainly hormones are one thing that we can pay attention to and start tracking a little bit better.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, or maybe one small thing to end on. One of the really fun takeaways I liked was the section where you're talking about your, I think it was talking about stress perception, but I think it was referencing the work of Kelly McGonigal, who I love her work. And you're talking about how in the short term, how you can immediately reframe stress, like sweaty, like think you can reframe these physical symptoms that could be seen as a negative stress instead as like excitement or getting close to your goal. Like you can do that like in the moment and reframe.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
That's self-regulation. Yeah, that's the ability to regulate our thoughts. Yeah, here's a perfect example of that. So today I'm a public speaker. I can easily get in front of a crowd up on a big stage with lights and cameras and all that, thousands of people. And I don't feel nervous, or at least I don't describe it to myself as nerves. I actually feel more excited and ready to go out and share a message with people that I think is gonna resonate. But if I would have done the exact same thing 10, 12 years ago, I would have almost died up there. I would have frozen. I would have stammered. I would have lost my words. It would have been miserable. It would have been like the end of me. Through practice, and practice not just with speaking, but practice with managing my thoughts, really. The stories I was telling myself about whether or not I was good enough to be in that situation. And just really reframing what I was experiencing, that this wasn't actually something like a big scary grizzly bear that was gonna come out and get me. It wasn't that. It was actually that I was excited. And I was able to turn my thinking into something that then motivated me and provided like a source of energy and motivation to perform better, essentially, when I'm on stage or delivering a keynote. So sometimes we have to, the whole adage or the whole thing about fake it till you make it. Honestly, many types of stressors, that works. I've had so many people tell me that things that are so stressful and were the first few times that they do them, but if they fake it and they just tell themselves, I can do this, I'm gonna do it anyway, even though I'm scared to death, I'm gonna do it anyway, and I'm not gonna die. And then sure enough, after you do it, you realize, oh, I'm not dead, I'm still here. So with that fake it till you make it strategy can not just help us perform and get to a good level of performance that we wanna be at, but can actually help us learn a lot about how to regulate our nervous system when we're in those types of situations.
Melanie Avalon
I love that. I've been using that mantra, honestly, for decades. My go-to mantra, which you mentioned multiple times throughout the book, so I was really happy, is I got this or you got this. Well, this has been absolutely amazing. I think listeners can see now why they need to get this book ASAP. There is so much in here. Even if you don't think you are suffering from burnout, well, A, you might realize that you're on the path there anyways. Regardless, there's so much information in this book that honestly can optimize anybody's life, in my opinion. How can people best get your book, follow your work? All the things.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
Well, first I would say, Millie, thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate, not just, it's not about promoting the book. Really, it is about getting a message out there that I hope will help other people avoid something that I went through, what you went through. And you don't necessarily need the book to practice these things. I just want to point out that you can go to my website, it's candyweans.com, or you're going to post it, link in your show notes. Yeah. Okay, so link will be there. Go to my website and you'll see a whole bunch of free resources. I've written a whole bunch of Harvard Business Review articles, Fast Company, a number of other like Time Magazine and some others, CNBC. You'll see all kinds of free stuff on my website. And then if you want to, of course, dig in more and want to buy the book, it's available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and pretty much anywhere you want to purchase it. The other thing I would just encourage your readers to do is when you check out my website, there's another free resource, which is a burnout risk assessment. It's a quick survey you can take to help you gain awareness of your risk level. Are you at low risk of burning out? And so you should just keep doing and doubling down on the things that are working for you. Or are you at high risk of burning out and you need an offer a number of really specific tips to help yourself recover from what you're experiencing. Or it will tell you if you're moderately at risk and if you're moderately at risk, the type of things that you can do immediately to protect yourself from not becoming high risk. So go ahead and take that burnout risk assessment. Like I said, it's on my website, and that's a free resource.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, and I'm trying to remember because I took it when I first started reading the book and I don't remember what I got, so I'm going to go retake that right after this.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
Yeah, I take it. I mean, I start when I first wrote it. Probably changes too. Oh, it does change. Yeah, it definitely changes based on what you're going through in your life. And really, it's all about assessing how vulnerable you are right now, given what you're experiencing right now. So I just really encourage people to take it, not just once, but a couple of times a year just as a quick check. And especially if you're at high risk, check it again after practicing some of the things you will learn and apply in the book. Take it again in a couple of months and you should see your burnout risk level coming down.
Melanie Avalon
Awesome. Well, we will put links to all of this in the show notes, and again, the show notes will be at MelanieAvalon.com slash burnout. And so the last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and it's just it is because I appreciate mindset so much. So what is something that you're grateful for?
Dr. Kandi Wiens
I am grateful for the opportunity to share what was once a really painful experience for me. And looking back, you know, there were even times when I wrote the book and I thought, I don't know if I can do this. Like I'm recalling so many horrible things about my burnout experience. I don't know if I can do this, but I'm really grateful that I was able to finish that book and to get it out to people that I think need it. And I'm really grateful just that more of us are talking about burnout and making it part of, you know, our normal conversations, just so we can take some of the stigma away for people that are suffering in silence.
Melanie Avalon
Well, thank you honestly so much for doing that. I mean, this was the first time I ever really came across a resource that talks about this and definitely, you know, in this much detail and with this much help. And it's really incredible. I honestly, genuinely enjoyed reading it so much. And I think friends get the book right now. Definitely go to the website, take the quiz, all the things. So thank you so much, Candy. This was amazing. I really appreciate what you're doing. Thank you, Mel.
Dr. Kandi Wiens
me. I appreciate the opportunity. It was fun talking to you too.
Melanie Avalon
Have a good rest of your day. And remember, 72 hours. Yep. Talk to you later. Talk to you later. Bye. Bye.