Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and
Speaker 2: Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio. Okay, so, a little over
Speaker 2: a decade ago, Candy Ween found herself at her doctor's
Speaker 2: office for what she thought was a routine checkup. But
Speaker 2: routine it was not. Her blood pressure clocked in at
Speaker 2: two hundred over one ten. It's what's referred to as
Speaker 2: hypertensive emergency and leaving it untreated, Carol, can lead to
Speaker 2: a stroke, heart attack, organ failure, and even death.
Speaker 3: It's unbelievable. She was ordered immediately to go on bed
Speaker 3: rest for three days, start xanax and blood pressure medication.
Speaker 1: Given that she had a.
Speaker 3: Lot of work to do, she was reluctant to go home,
Speaker 3: and that she found was the issue. It was the
Speaker 3: beginning of understanding what would become an incredibly important chapter
Speaker 3: in her life. And I have to say, getting ready
Speaker 3: for this, this book, we've been kind of passing it
Speaker 3: around to colleagues and just talking about it and stress
Speaker 3: and kind of managing work.
Speaker 2: Well, we got doctor Candy Ween's with us right now.
Speaker 2: Senior fellow and director at the Master's in medical Education
Speaker 2: program at the University of Pennsylvania. She spent many years
Speaker 2: since then researching burnout and stress resilience. Doctor Ween's welcome.
Speaker 2: Before we get to that doctor's appointment that was so pivotal,
Speaker 2: pivotal in your life, take us earlier to your childhood,
Speaker 2: because you've got a really interesting story and it's certainly
Speaker 2: related to your book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you, and thanks for having me on. Yes,
Speaker 1: So my story is maybe perhaps unique to everyone else's story,
Speaker 1: but we all have a story about our childhood and
Speaker 1: the ways in which we learned how to deal with
Speaker 1: stress and the ways that we learned how to cope
Speaker 1: and potentially what might make us vulnerable today. So in
Speaker 1: my case, I was raised on an Indian reservation by
Speaker 1: a single mom. My parents divorced when I was five.
Speaker 1: I had a number of adverse childhood events when I
Speaker 1: was younger, which contributed to some of the things that
Speaker 1: I experienced. But one of the things that is really
Speaker 1: foundational to my pattern of coping with stress is that
Speaker 1: I grew up very much as an insecure overachiever. Insecure
Speaker 1: meaning that because we lived on welfare and Medicaid and
Speaker 1: food stamps and often suffered from food insecurity. I was very,
Speaker 1: very insecure about my future, my financial future, and I
Speaker 1: was aware enough to know that if I needed to
Speaker 1: work hard to break the cycle of poverty in my family.
Speaker 1: And so I knew that I wanted to go to college.
Speaker 1: I was quite motivated intellectually to want to learn, but
Speaker 1: I wasn't in the right circumstances. Long story short, I
Speaker 1: moved in with my dad when I was twelve, and
Speaker 1: the conditions changed. I went from getting almost absent school
Speaker 1: because I wasn't in the right environment to getting straight
Speaker 1: a's living with my dad, and so that started another
Speaker 1: pattern for me, which was this need for external validation.
Speaker 1: I really I thrived getting recognition for the hard work
Speaker 1: that I was doing. I learned that the harder I worked,
Speaker 1: the more I got recognized for my work, and that
Speaker 1: set me on a path to potentially overachieve my way
Speaker 1: through things, including having three jobs in college while I
Speaker 1: was going to school full time paying for it myself.
Speaker 1: All of that set into motion this pattern of overworking
Speaker 1: and trying to protect myself from going back to the
Speaker 1: life that I once lived when I was younger. So
Speaker 1: that's all of what kind of contributed to this workaholic
Speaker 1: kind of approach that I had to work. And then
Speaker 1: when I had that life threatening health crisis that woke
Speaker 1: me up in twenty eleven, that was really the result
Speaker 1: of me working on overdrive almost all the time. For me,
Speaker 1: and I hear from many of the people that I
Speaker 1: interviewed today, burnout was the baseline. We didn't use the
Speaker 1: word burnout a whole lot back in the nineties and
Speaker 1: early two thousands, but I think that's what I was experiencing.
Speaker 1: I just wasn't aware exactly what it was and what
Speaker 1: it was doing to me.
Speaker 3: You know, It's interesting. We live in a culture and
Speaker 3: I feel like I grew up in a family where
Speaker 3: it was like, yeah, work hard, that's what it's supposed
Speaker 3: to be at You're a workaholic. It's a good thing, Like.
Speaker 2: Like that was a thing until like a few years ago.
Speaker 3: Well that's a really good point, right, And I do
Speaker 3: wonder you know, we thought with COVID that maybe we
Speaker 3: were thinking balance, Yeah, look at what we can do.
Speaker 3: We can actually have a better life. I want to
Speaker 3: get to what you know, part of your title is
Speaker 3: about emotional intelligence and helping us out when it comes
Speaker 3: to being burned out. What exactly is emotional intelligence?
Speaker 1: Yeah, emotional intelligence is a set of competencies that have
Speaker 1: to do with our awareness of ourselves, mostly our emotional
Speaker 1: self awareness, but includes other awareness aspects, the ability to
Speaker 1: regulate or manage ourselves, our behaviors, our thoughts, our emotions,
Speaker 1: as well as our ability to understand the social environment
Speaker 1: that we work in. Like so, for example, understanding the
Speaker 1: politics of the team that I might be working on
Speaker 1: or within my organization. But it's also being able to
Speaker 1: work very effectively in that social or in that political environment.
Speaker 1: So it's self awareness, self management, and then social awareness
Speaker 1: and relationship management.
Speaker 2: What about the idea of I don't know, perfection being
Speaker 2: the enemy of good, Like the idea that when something
Speaker 2: is done, it's done. And I think that that's what
Speaker 2: a lot of people struggle with at the workplace. I
Speaker 2: think is and it really can burn people out because
Speaker 2: it takes so much time and energy. Is these incremental
Speaker 2: changes that are not that important to a certain project
Speaker 2: that people are working on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so perfectionism is one of the traps that I
Speaker 1: write about. I write about a number of self inflicted
Speaker 1: stress traps also known as thinking traps or in the sciences,
Speaker 1: we call them cognitive distortions. It's meaning that we think
Speaker 1: about something that causes us to overwork or causes us
Speaker 1: to put more effort into something than we need to.
Speaker 1: Perfectionism is one, Imposter syndrome is another. Having overly high
Speaker 1: expectations of ourselves, having overly expectations of other people, even
Speaker 1: being overly engaged in our work. All of these things
Speaker 1: are stories or assumptions that we operate under and that
Speaker 1: cause us to feel more stress or amplify the stress
Speaker 1: that is caused by whatever we're experiencing and sets us
Speaker 1: up to be prone for burnout.
Speaker 3: What's the balance, though, because man, you're going to have
Speaker 3: First of all, media is a stressful industry. The clock
Speaker 3: is ticking, You got to hit deadlines. It's just the
Speaker 3: way it is. Stuff is thrown at you last minute,
Speaker 3: or news develops, and you just got to kind of
Speaker 3: roll with it. I would say that there's a fair
Speaker 3: amount of us who kind of thrive on that, and
Speaker 3: that's part of the fun of the industry. Having said that,
Speaker 3: what's the balance between a stressful situation that leads to
Speaker 3: burnout to Yeah, you're going to have days where you're
Speaker 3: stressed and that's just part of a job and a
Speaker 3: work life. So how do you kind of get your
Speaker 3: head around what's good and what's bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, in professions like yours, where you have
Speaker 1: pretty much high intensity almost all the time and a
Speaker 1: lot of things coming at you unexpectedly, that those type
Speaker 1: of jobs do require quite a bit of recovery time.
Speaker 1: Recovery in the form of sometimes it's micro recovery, so
Speaker 1: shorter breaks throughout the day, reconnecting with your family or friends,
Speaker 1: even for a couple of minutes, if you can, going outside,
Speaker 1: whatever it is for you that helps to renew your
Speaker 1: energy levels and your spirit. For other people, it's taking
Speaker 1: extended periods of time. So if you think about recovery, though,
Speaker 1: one of the things I encourage people to focus on
Speaker 1: is when you're recovering, watch what you're doing to comfort
Speaker 1: yourself versus really renew yourself. Comfort yourself as in like
Speaker 1: you know, binging on some program or eating junk food,
Speaker 1: or doing something that feels good in a moment but
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily really renew your energy levels, like a good
Speaker 1: night's sleep with an hour or two of deep sleep.
Speaker 3: So you know, I recently said to somebody, I feel
Speaker 3: like I walk in the door and I'm always behind,
Speaker 3: and they're like, that's a good thing. They mean to
Speaker 3: get lot going on. Having said that, I do think
Speaker 3: about leadership and all of this and how a leader
Speaker 3: needs to look at Yeah, hey, gang, we're going to
Speaker 3: have a tough week. We just need all hands on deck,
Speaker 3: if you will, Versus wait a minute, this is too
Speaker 3: much for my team and they're going to break. So
Speaker 3: advice to leaders are what they need to know. We
Speaker 3: have about a minute or so left.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I call it the sweet spot of stress. We
Speaker 1: all need to know what our personal sweet spot of
Speaker 1: stress is. And for a leader recognized for the team,
Speaker 1: how much can we push the team to really perform
Speaker 1: under intense conditions without them slipping over into the distress
Speaker 1: zone where it's going to negatively affect their performance. So
Speaker 1: it means tuning into your employees having open conversations around
Speaker 1: stress levels are going to escalate in these high intensity periods,
Speaker 1: and we're going to take recovery breaks together. We're going
Speaker 1: to do things to support each other so that we
Speaker 1: don't all slip into distress at the same time and
Speaker 1: potentially burn out.
Speaker 2: Hey, doctor, weens, we do have time for one more question. Now,
Speaker 2: what's your strategy, I mean, what do you do? How
Speaker 2: are you going to you know, decompress after the work
Speaker 2: day this weekend.
Speaker 1: Oh that's a great question. Yeah. So I haven't seen
Speaker 1: my son for a couple of days. He's been busy
Speaker 1: with soccer in school, and even though I've had a
Speaker 1: lot going on, I am just so excited to see
Speaker 1: him and hug him. Honestly, like that's one of the
Speaker 1: things that renews my spirit. And just being able to
Speaker 1: look him in the eye and hear about his week.
Speaker 1: That to me reminds me of why I do the
Speaker 1: work that I do and helps me just really renew
Speaker 1: my spirit.
Speaker 3: Tim and I were just talking and we said, that's
Speaker 3: the one thing like in the middle of the day
Speaker 3: off like all of a sudden, you know, your kid calls,
Speaker 3: or there's pictures or something you look at, like it
Speaker 3: really kind of recharges you in a big way.
Speaker 2: Nice reminder of like really important stuff out there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, you gave us some great respective.
Speaker 3: You gave us some great things to think about as
Speaker 3: we go into the weekend. Doctor Wiens, thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Doctor Candy Weens, Senior Fellow and director of the Masters
Speaker 3: in Medical Education program at the University of Pennsylvania, joining
Speaker 3: us there from Philadelphia. Her new book it is called
Speaker 3: Burnout Immunity. How emotional intelligence can help you build, resilient
Speaker 3: and heal your relationship with work.