407. Shelli Baltman and Fiona Stevenson on Pandemic Burnout

Hello and welcome to Unleashed, the show that explores how to thrive as an independent professional. I'm your host, Will Bachman, and if you go to umbrex.com and click on the Unleashed tab, you can sign up for the weekly email for this show, and I'll tell you each week about all of the episodes so you don't listen to every single one, just the ones that are interesting to you. I am So excited to be here today with Shelley Baltman and Fiona Stevenson, who are the partners that founded the Idea Suite, one of Canada's top-growing companies. And they have a new company that they are starting, and the website is going live today, uh, and it's called Energy for Growth. Um, they're going to talk about an upcoming free webinar that you are invited to. and talk about burnout. So Shelley and Fiona, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. It's great to be here.

All right. So Shelley, why don't I just turn to you? Tell me about this idea for Energy for Growth. What spurred the idea? What's the kind of thinking behind it? And what service are you offering?

Absolutely. So we've been operating the Idea Suite for 6 years. It's a boutique innovation agency, and we have some of the world's greatest clients. We're very, very fortunate. That we've had access to some amazing client organizations, some of the world's biggest multinationals. And in conversation with those clients, we started to hear a common theme. And that theme was about their people struggling through the pandemic, but struggling in general as we move to a remote working environment. And so we started to do some research and found that 75% of the US population earlier this year was showing signs and symptoms of burnout. And when you look at the research around burnout, it tends to affect achievers. Those of us who are amazing at what we do, we show up on Zoom, we make sure we look the part and we're prepared. But then if we're not looking after our own energy, at some point it takes a toll. And actually, if your best performers burn out, your business performance is the next thing to follow. It's a lead indicator of your business performance. And so we saw this need. of people struggling to have the energy and the interaction and the connection that they had in the real working world in this either remote world or hybrid world. As we move back into the office, remote working is still going to be a reality that we experience. And so Energy for Growth is a response to that. We have been talking about energy, and as an innovation agency, energy is at the core of what we do. Innovation is actually— really difficult. And so we have spent the last 6 years creating really high-performing, energized teams that deliver amazing innovations to the marketplace. And we've codified all of that into a program. So our first offering from Energy for Growth is a 12-week behavior change program to help people reenergize themselves, to help them bring their best selves to work in a professional context, and also to teach them about how to create a virtuous cycle of team energy with mindsets and behaviors and approaches and ways of working that create a virtuous cycle of energy in a team environment.

Okay, fantastic. Fiona, let me turn to you. What do you see as the root causes of burnout? What is burnout? What are the root causes? And maybe we don't need to pack the whole thing into one question. Let me just stop there. So like, what are the causes of burnout? And what do we even mean by burnout?

Interesting. Well, I mean, there's— burnout's not a new phenomenon, right? So I think we've all sort of, you know, been stressed before, kind of teetered on the edge before. But I think really the uncertainty of the past year and the kind of like, you know, the world as we know it completely changed. So much of our life is working and like showing up and seeing our colleagues and all of that. And it completely changed. We were forced to kind of come together, find whole new ways of working. And we were all sort of like, you know, united in this, okay, like we're going to get through this together. And we saw initially, there was this kind of like team rallying, if you will. I mean, for us as business owners, we saw, you know, our business that was thriving. We were on a plane every week, you know, we were all about kind of like workshops, facilitating in person. And suddenly we saw the pandemic happen, everything froze, projects started to get canceled or postponed. And it was like, oh my gosh, will we be able to keep everyone? Where do we go from here? But we did kind of rally as a team. And we said, we have a mission, we want to keep this business alive, we want to keep people employed. And that propped us up for a while. But that only lasts for so long. And I think what we found is, you know, come sort of the summer where people were pushing and pushing and pushing, they maybe took some time off after working kind of straight for 4 months. And then they came back to it. And there was this bit of like, oh, wow, okay, now I've kind of used up the reserves. And there's more expected of me. And wow, I didn't really fully get to recharge as much as I want. And you're waiting for this pandemic to sort of like take a turn, you know, for the positive. And it seems like the light at the end of the tunnel keeps shifting and changing. And so that's where we are sort of now, and Shelley can talk a little bit more about this, but there's kind of like, I didn't really get to fully recharge. I'm still in this. There's no real end in sight. And every time I think I'm moving in one direction, there's these little triggers that tell me, oh, you know, it's not going to be over in 3 months. It's not 6 months, or the world as I knew it might never be the same. And that's bringing up a lot of kind of feelings of grief and loss. And again, more uncertainty.

And I think a lot of people have tried to do, you know, self-care or meditation or taking a little bit of time off, but it doesn't help the way they expect it to. Essentially what's going on is we are missing a lot of the tools that we used to use to recharge our energy and really get back to a place where we can be productive and efficient and kind of make things happen. And the reason that's true is because we've lost the commute to work where we might have got things done or kind of ruminated on a problem. We've lost, you know, our connection with our teammates where you have those casual conversations in the hallway or you get together and kind of talk about some personal stuff before or after the meeting. And we've lost the opportunity for affirmation, praise, you know, all of those little things that really recharge our energy. Zoom conversations tend to be much more transactional and business-focused. And so we really need to take ownership as leaders and team leaders. We need to take ownership of our own energy and we need to take ownership of reinserting in a much more kind of structured way some of those interactions and sources of energy into the way that we work with our teams and our people.

Okay. So do you have a kind of overarching framework of what you know, are the sources or what are the necessary preconditions to have that energy. Uh, I'm thinking about a framework that I found powerful, which was in the book by Daniel Pink called Drive, which I'm sure you've, you've, you've looked at as one of your sources as you go.

Yeah.

And I think if I remember that one correctly, there was 3 circles and, you know, the 3 conditions you need to meet are If I'm remembering it's— and you correct me here— autonomy, purpose, and I think the last one is maybe competence or skill level at what you're doing. And I found that that was a powerful framework to help me understand motivation, where you could be in one job where you could change— you know, for example, for me, when I was at McKinsey, doing relatively similar stuff to what I did as an independent consultant when I left. But when I left, I had much more autonomy. So even though the, you know, the purpose was somewhat similar, like, you know, helping clients succeed, etc., and the skill levels, like it was identical work, I had much more autonomy as an independent consultant than as a firm member. And for me personally, that was very important in my own motivation. So like, do you— are you— do you have some sort of framework that you're working on of sort of what are these preconditions for motivation? You know, something similar to Daniel Pink's, or maybe you've come up with your own approach?

Yeah, and I think they're subtly different. Motivation and energy are subtly different. And so we've done a lot of research. You know, when people talk about energy, they tend to focus on personal energy, and there are lots of different models for that. So there are models, you know, our model looks like this. We talk about connection as one of the first things. So really relating and kind of being with other people. We talk about physical energy. We talk about managing emotions. So when something happens, how do you manage, you know, maybe some of the negativity that you're experiencing in the world today? You know, what do you do with that? We talk about motivation and purpose. So that absolutely factors in. We talk about clarity and focus. So your ability to kind of really focus right down in onto a task at hand, and that is energizing, achieving flow, et cetera, not being distracted. And then the 6th factor of personal energy is contribution. So I don't know about you, obviously we all know giving back is a good thing to do, but actually what it does is energizes us as individuals. So our personal energy framework has those 6 factors, but that's not enough. You know, if you are filling yourself up, but then you go into an environment where you kind of get dampened or things are difficult for you, that's not going to really be helpful. So we have 2 other things that you have to think about. The second one is professional energy. So that's all about how you show up at work, being your authentic self, you know, being open and vulnerable as a leader and really thinking about your personal brand, if you want to call it that in the workplace. place, how you show up, what is your image, how do you make sure you get recognized, et cetera. And then the final factor in energy is team energy. The way that you work with your team and whether that's a client team or your team that you're actually working with as a consultant, that's really, really critical. And so we have 3 foundations of team energy, which are all about, again, meaningful connections, so having personal relationships with your team so you know they're on your side, decide and do, which is the ability to make decisions and make things happen, and positive intent. And that should go without saying. But the foundations of team energy are also about assuming that everyone on your team, even if they do something that you don't align with or agree with, is coming from a good place. They're doing it ultimately for what they feel is a good result. And then we have 6 behaviors that go along with team energy as well. And so they kind of make up our model. of energy. And we do also talk about, and this is a really critical thing, when you talk about energy, sometimes people can go to the very, like, you know, well-being side of the energy equation. But actually, energy is a really critical factor at work. So if you look into some of the research, you'll see that energy is a key element of decision-making. And if you make a whole bunch of decisions all the way throughout the day, by the end of the day, your brain is like a muscle, it's exhausted. And so if you don't have energy, the science shows that you actually make less good decisions. And so if you are out in the world, for example, as a leader, if you get asked to make a decision about a new investment in the afternoon, if you're tired, if you've kind of been at it all day, and you're running from meeting to meeting, you're more likely to make an impulsive decision at the end of the day, which may mean defaulting to the status quo. Or it may mean giving the green light to something that doesn't actually have all those the data there. And so energy in the workplace is critical to making good decisions on a consistent basis. And so if you don't look after your energy and the energy of your team, you will have less success in the business world.

And a lot of this actually comes from the fact that, so, you know, we worked for many years and continue to work as an innovation agency. Our job is often kind of helping companies solve the unsolvable problems or the tricky problems, right? The stuff that they're like, we can't figure this out. Can you help us get there? Or more commonly, we need to launch 10 new products over the next 2 years that are going to deliver $100 million of growth each. Here's the team. Go. And so what we've learned from that experience, from doing hundreds of projects, is yes, there's a design thinking framework. We have our own 6-step proprietary process, which isn't that much different than most of the design thinking frameworks. But process is only 50% of it. So you can't just like kind of take, you know, a process that's proven and then throw a team into it and it's going to spit out amazing results. So we found that really at least 50% of it is the experience, the whole innovation journey that we take that team on. And a lot of that is about really at the beginning asking for, demonstrating, and helping nurture those behaviors and mindsets that build creative energy. Because it is that combination of a winning process and then this great energy that kind of fuels the team, where at the end of it, they're like, wow, Wow, okay, we got, you know, the $100 million ideas we need. They scored exceptionally well. We feel like we really gelled as a team, and we feel like we're ready to go attack the next challenge. And that at the beginning, when we sort of started working with clients and we asked them, what's different about working with us? Or, you know, how do you feel kind of going through the process? And they kept saying to us, you really energized us. You guys bring a lot of energy. It was actually about the energy, which is funny because we thought we were selling kind of, you know, this again, design thinking way of achieving, um, you know, these new brands and new services and things. But actually, we were kind of selling energy, if you will, as well. Um, so that's why this is not really a new idea, but it's something that I think the pandemic has really sparked in us. Like, we have to start talking about this and moving on this more, because teams really needed it before, and it's been kind of the secret sauce always. Um, but now people are, you know, in kind of a lower place than they might have ever been before.

And that does lend itself to the invitation we wanted to extend here to your community, Will. If now is a good time, you know, we are hosting the Banish Burnout Summit on the 5th and 6th of May. It will be free to anyone in the Umbrex community. We'll provide the URL in the notes. It's banishburnoutsummit.com. And that is all focused on how to banish burnout. So all of the different aspects, there's a group of speakers. We are doing a session and Fiona and I will be hosting and emceeing. But you will also see some world-class authors and speakers talking about different ways to think about remote working, remote leadership, culture, how to manage grief, connection through play. So lots of different topics that will really help people to avoid burnout for themselves and their team.

All right, great. Well, and we will include that link in the show notes, listeners. So if you want to Banish Your Burnout, check out that link in the show notes. Sounds like a great session that you've, that you've put together there. You know, your thought, your points around energy are making me think about how I run my own day. I, I don't follow the advice that is sort of typical productivity advice, Which is, oh, you should, you know, identify the most important thing to do in a given day, or like the most— the 3 most important things, then you should do those first in the morning before you do anything else. Like, that's sort of the, you know, advice that you see, which makes a ton of sense. I manage my own day by, you know, making a list of all the stuff I got to do, and I write that by hand every day. And then I really kind of attack different tasks based on almost my energy at that moment. Like, what's my emotional energy right now? I mean, you look at the calendar, it says, okay, well, I have 45 minutes until the next call. You know, which sort of task would take 45 minutes? But it's also what's the emotional energy at that point? Like, oh, that's like, this looks like a task that I don't really want to face right now. I want to do something a bit more mechanical and straightforward and just, you know, update some kind of administrative thing. Or, okay, now I'm fresh, I just got back from a run, I can, I can grab hold of this, this thing I've been dreading and putting off for a while. So like, I'm paying attention to that myself over the course of a day. How do you talk? How do you think about assessing? You talked about you bring a lot of energy, your clients told you that Is it purely subjective, or do you have ways to assess the energy level of an individual or a team? Like you talk about team energy, are there ways that you think about measuring that or assessing it, or some kind of tool to kind of gauge where we're at right now?

Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, we are launching the Energy Index, and we can include the URL, URL to that in the show notes As well, so there isn't a great tool to measure energy. There we were out there in the world and looking for it. There are tools that measure burnout, and there's a lot of academic research on burnout, but there isn't the kind of opposite tool to measure energy. And so we have created that. We are working with a top quantitative research agency to really help develop measures of burnout and energy. Together, the yin and the yang, if you will, so that we can actually create an energy index. And so we will give you the URL to that as soon as it launches so that you can absolutely measure your own energy. And we look at that in several ways. So we look at that in work. Where's your energy in work? Where's your energy in life? Because they obviously impact each other. We also look at it in terms of how is work making you feel and how is your team making you feel. And there are also a few physical manifestations of burnout that we want to track and measure as well. So that is something that is literally in developing. We're kind of doing the iteration at the moment to test and kind of optimize it. So it's a super simple metric that will really be telling and something that you can measure over time. So I do think, and kind of to your point about Finding the time of day that's right for you. There are a few things to that. So the first thing is there are scientifically validated things you can do to improve your energy throughout the day. So whatever level you're at today, you can lift that by putting a few simple habits and tools in place.

Oh, what are some of those?

Well, so for example, and, and this is a basic one, but, um, moving, you know, 15 minutes of mindful cardio exercise, so getting your heart rate elevated each and every day. has a material impact on your energy levels. Another one is connection, for example. So finding ways to— and here's a great little habit I would encourage everyone to adopt. Take 2 minutes a day. And in that 2 minutes, reach out to somebody new. So someone new each and every day and either praise them or thank them for something specific. So praise them for something specific or thank them for something specific. And through that connection and that simple 2-minute action each day, first of all, you feel great because you're the kind of person that sends out praise and gratitude into the world. You then get these amazing responses, and they could be colleagues, clients, you know, saying thank you to a client for something that they did that really mattered to you is hugely impactful in business development. So you get these amazing positive emails back. So you have this double whammy of kind of feeling great And it really does transform your energy on a daily basis. It has a massive impact on your sense of connection, which is critical to personal energy.

And we talk a lot about state management as well.

So, you know, the fact is, like I was saying, I actually had a terrible night's sleep last night. I don't know why, but I was like really struggling with insomnia. And so, you know, I can't sort of use that as an excuse as I go through my 10 hours of meetings today. And so I have to kind of use my body to get me into state a little bit. So I know, you know, it's a little bit cheesy, like you hear about the super superhero poses and things like that. But, you know, before each meeting, I'm just making a point of getting up and whether it's doing some jumping jacks or something to get the blood flowing, using my voice so that I can take my energy level, which might honestly be a 2 out of 10, and at least bring it up to a 5 out of 10. And that's not like a falsity. It's not like, You know, I'm just gonna pretend it's a 5, but it's actually through doing all that movement and stuff. If I actually step back and think, well, I would have said a 2, I'm now feeling like more of a 5 or 6. That's a pretty big shift with 30 seconds of just jumping jacks before a meeting. So there are some little tricks and stuff to hack it, but I think the way you're approaching your to-do list is honestly really, really smart. Because I'm finding these days there are some types of work that I actually find can be very nurturing when I just need to sort of be nurtured, that are very energizing when I kind of want to bring myself up, and then work that can really suck my energy. And so I need to do it when I'm at kind of a 9 or 10. So I think actually being very intentional with your to-do list to say, here it is, you know, what type of task, maybe even bucketing those tasks into kind of the type of energy required and matching that with your state at any point is a quite smart system, Will, that you've got going there. And I think the other thing that obviously I don't know if If you practice zero inboxing in your email system, or you maybe you don't. I really don't. I'm thinking maybe you don't. But you know, one of the issues that with the pandemic in particular is because we are in a remote working circumstance, so most teams are using either Slack or Teams to have those pinging instant messaging going back and forth. You have your emails ping up and notifications. You have social media pinging up and having notifications from that point of view. So one of the biggest energy saps is distraction. And so the concept of blocking time for your deep work and really thinking intentionally about, you know, there are moments in the day when spending an hour on your emails and responding to things is very valuable time spent. And if you can think about when the most productive time for things like emails and responding to people is, you can then keep blocks of your time to focus on the deep work that you need to do, where you can turn off your notifications, turn off your email, turn off— oh no, it's, it's sacrilege to turn off your Teams or your Slack channel, but just give yourself some space to not be distracted. So when you get into a task, it often can take 10 to 20 minutes to kind of get into the task and start to like create the structure and the framework. If you then get pulled out of that task to answer an email or take a phone call, it can take you another 10 to 15 minutes to get back in a second time and remember your train of thought and what you were doing if you're doing deep work. And so that's the other thing that people don't take into account when they're thinking about their energy levels is that if you really focus, And you give yourself some distraction-free time for a limited period of time, so not indefinitely, but a kind of hour chunk or 45-minute chunk, whatever works for you, you can get a lot more done. And then a task can actually take less time than it would if you allowed yourself to be distracted and get pulled down into your email system.

OK. Yeah, no, I was laughing about your point about zero inbox because I have the opposite. I have the opposite approach. I never delete an email. So I think I have 79,687 emails in my inbox right now. But I think that that's because it doesn't go into 6 digits. So I think it's actually 179,000 or 279,000. And yeah, I can't understand the people who spend effort deleting emails. It just seems like busywork. But nevertheless, in terms of some other practical tips, so what, maybe we could go through some of the areas and just share for listeners who, you know, maybe they won't be able to get to the Banish Burnout Summit. Like, what are some of the, the key practical tips that we can implement in the day-to-day? And maybe we just go through like those 6 areas that you talked about. And you mentioned one for connection, You know, I like the idea of just sending someone a nice thank you note. Um, handwritten notes are great. You know, if you have some— one, one tip that I've recommended before is if you have some, uh, nice, uh, customized printed stationery, like already printed and at your desk, and you have some stamps, it just reduces the barrier to sending a handwritten note, which really I think can raise someone's spirits, you know, and they get it and just make someone's day. And you mentioned sort of sending an email or maybe a recommendation on LinkedIn, or maybe if you're a podcast listener, writing a 5-star review of some show on iTunes.

Just make sure to do that for you.

As an example, this is a random example. What would some other ideas be around energy? Maybe you can go through your list.

Yeah. I'm gonna turn it to Shelli in a second because she's got some really good ones. But I think, you know, generally this whole reducing friction thing that you mentioned, like having the paper right there, you know, Shelli will talk about her running shoe example. But in general, you know, if you've read Atomic Habits and this whole idea of, you know, sometimes like setting these massive goals and kind of just like, you know, I want to run a marathon. Okay, what do you do with that? You've got to start small, right, with these tiny habits that over time, all those little 1% habits will lead to exponential change over time. So, you know, part of our program is really— we call it a behavior change program, our signature Energy for Growth program, versus a training program. Because yes, we are giving you content. Yes, we are giving recommended tools. But ultimately, it's about participants really taking ownership for what they need and then identifying as part of it what are those tiny habits that they can really integrate into their lives super easily that will be transformative over time.

And 45% of our daily behaviors are habitual. And if you think about it, you know, you wake up in the morning and you execute a series of routines you probably don't even think about. And that is what we do to preserve our energy. We create a suite of habits that just happen, you know, automatically so that when it comes to a real decision we have to make, we can expend some energy doing that and we actually have energy left over. So the trick with improving your energy is to stack habits and to kind of add to your existing routines and, and, you know, approaches to life. And so we would encourage you to add really little things and connect them to your existing habits. So for example, you know, if you every morning you wake up, you take a shower, and then you go make yourself a cup of coffee, we would encourage you to think about like, before I take my first sip of coffee, I am going to— and then put in whatever new habit you think you want to add to your routine. So that you then get to have the reward of then having your first sip of coffee and incorporating your new habit in there. And so the examples of the habits, so we talked about one for connection, we talked about one for physical energy. In terms of emotional energy and emotional management, you know, I think gratitude is a practice that you hear about all the time. So very well documented, but a lot of people are doing it incorrectly. So I started with gratitude and I was always like, why doesn't gratitude work for me? I don't understand. Like, I do it all the time. I'm grateful for my family. I'm grateful I'm grateful for my child. I'm grateful for my parents. I'm grateful I have a house.

When we started a business, Shelli was like, let's do gratitude emails every morning. But she'd send me the same email every day. Like, I'm grateful for my family, you, our business. Like, I don't need this in my inbox anymore. It's the same thing every day.

And so the evidence shows that if you want, you know, to help you manage your emotions, if you want to have gratitude work for you, what you have to do is you have to be grateful for something specific. That's happened in the last 24 hours, and you have to connect with why you're grateful for it. So not, I'm grateful for my son, which of course I hope most of us as parents are, although when they're schooling at home, I think some of us may feel differently. But you have to be like, I'm grateful that he spontaneously gave me a hug last night, and that made me feel love. So now what you're doing is you're connecting to that feeling of love. And it's helping you to train your brain to focus on the positive because we are 5 times more impacted by negative experiences than we are by positive stuff. So gratitude, the practice of gratitude has actually been shown if you do it every day for 6 months, it can move people from their set point of kind of pessimism up through to an optimistic mindset. It actually changes. Pessimism and optimism have long been thought to be genetic, kind of genetically impactful, I guess, that it's a genetic predisposition to pessimism or optimism. And gratitude has actually been shown to be one of the only things that can actually change your pessimism or optimism set point over time. So that's another great example of a very simple habit. If you haven't seen, there's a 5-minute journal that you can get on Amazon. I use it. I think it's a super easy way to make sure that you build gratitude into your life. And if you do it specifically and kind of really focus on the reasons why, it will have a massive impact on your optimism levels over time.

You know, we've talked about some things you can do that you can add to improve your energy level. I'd like to hear your thoughts also about subtraction, which can be also very powerful. I found in my own life, you know, sometimes subtracting things can help really with your energy. So I stopped reading the news, for example, back in— after January 6th. It was just too stressful for me, and I would get like caught up in these narratives and, and frankly, I'm not going to go and solve and affect the vote in Congress. So getting super wrapped up around whether a given bill is going to pass or some politician is going to resign, it just sucks energy out of my day. And I found just like, stop reading Twitter, stop reading all the news, huge for my peace of mind. And some people might say, oh, well, you know, you're not, you know, being aware of what's going on in the world. I'd say actually it gives you a very distorted view of the world. So you can probably learn a lot more about what's going on in the world by reading a few random articles on Wikipedia than reading the front page of most newspapers. So that's one. And then another one that I've done is cutting out sugar. which just causes peaks and valleys in your energy level over the course of the day. And I found helps me. And then I cut out coffee in the morning most days and shifted to tea for my first— I have coffee later in the day, but then that is a little bit more of a gradual ramp up to my caffeine level. So what are some other things that you've seen or recommend that people think about Eliminating to create space in the day, because you can't just keep adding and adding and adding more practices. Oh, let me do this journal and that journal and this practice and like send this email and send this note to people. Like you can't just keep shoving more stuff into the sock, right?

Yes. And there's a lot of overwhelm that people are dealing with right now. And it is an overwhelm of a list of books to read, the list of podcasts to listen to, the list of like, you know, people to communicate with, like all these things. And you know, you will never get to it all. So there does also need to be some elimination. Shelley and I can definitely talk a lot about this right now because we're in a group of entrepreneurs who are going through— if you've heard of Hard 75 before, or 75 Hard. So 75 Hard, which we did not do, we weren't bold or brave enough for that one, but it's a pretty stringent kind of a regimen for 75 days, which involves— I don't know if there are hard and fast rules, but for most people, it No sugar, no alcohol. Is it like 75 minutes of working out a day? Maybe the same number of minutes of being outside per day. So it's like quite heavy. What we're doing with a group of entrepreneurs who kind of wanted to go through it, but in a little bit of a reduced way, is Medium 50. And it is a combination of adding some habits. So like reading 10 pages of fiction or nonfiction a day, you know, maybe listening to an inspirational podcast. Connecting with someone, going outdoors, usually exercise is something people are adding. And then the taking away, the common ones you're seeing are sugar or taking away like the daily treat, right? Like the daily glass of wine. I think there were a lot of pandemic behaviors that became like just, you know, the drink, the ice cream, like soothe myself. And a lot of people have said, you know, it's not really a treat when you're doing it every day ultimately. So returning to those are my treats for the weekend, but I'm going to take those out of my week, you know, take the 3rd or 4th or 5th coffee out. What are some of the other ones? That we see most commonly?

I think the other thing is to really look at your day and think about the things that suck your time and suck your energy. So, the most obvious one is social media. You know, social media has been proven to cause depression, basically. You know, if we look at social media, a lot of it is designed to show the kind of the highlight reel of someone's life. You know, people don't publish the like day-to-day grind of working every day or doing their laundry. You know, it's not very exciting to put that on social media. So when we're on a social media site, we either see, you know, people's best self, we see ads that tell us we're not good enough and the business we're running isn't big enough or whatever it might be, and we see people's highlight reel and it makes us feel bad about where we're at or the things we're not doing.

And these days we are much more sensitive to those kinds of triggers. And so I think you, with kind of eliminating the news, like especially that kind of like, you know, the Apple News that comes across your screen and it's like you can't control what's there and suddenly that triggers something for you or seeing, you know, a social media post that for some reason upsets you. So it is being more intentional with what you're consuming and kind of, you know, you can go out and find your news, but to just kind of be a recipient of whatever comes to you is difficult. And that's why a lot of what Shelley and I talk about in Personal Energy is around this emotional regulation. Like, how do you help, you know, make yourself resilient, if you will, to some of those triggers and things that happen and try to, you know, recover and bounce back from those more quickly?

Yeah, and it's not a kind of a hard and fast rule for everyone. It's about everybody looking at their day and how they spend their time. And I would suggest people do a little bit of a kind of time audit where they look at, you know, a few days of the work week and kind of look at where they start to lose time, because it does happen. You can lose time in your email. You know, when you get a newsletter, you kind of wander off into that rabbit hole of interesting, interesting material that you might find from one of the newsletters. better to get. And so it's looking at how you spend your time, which parts of the time you spend bring you energy and you see as productive, valuable, and good for you, and which parts of your time do you see as unproductive or kind of wasteful, and thinking about how to cut those out. You know, if, if watching, you know, something on Netflix really brings you energy and recharges you, great, go do it. If you're spending 3 to 4 hours binge-watching your favorite series, that might not be the most productive thing to do, and you might other ways to use that time that could be more productive and more energizing.

And there is something to be said for making that list of what are the, you know, 5-ish things that I want to, you know, subtract or add to my life, doing it with a group of people. So every time we sort of, you know, fall off the wagon a little bit, it's like, oh, I'm back to day one, and someone else in the group might be as well. And there's a bit of like, you know, emotional support in that. We also use an app, like some of us have used— are you using it, Shelley? The, the Done app. So you can actually like put your habits in there and you get that little like tracking of I did them all or I didn't, which kind of motivates you as well and keeps you going.

Fantastic. So for listeners that want to follow up and, you know, either attend the Banish Burnout Summit or visit your website to learn more about your work, Where would you like to point them online?

Absolutely. You can find out about Energy for Growth on energyforgrowth.com, launching today, actually. The Banish Burnout Summit is banishburnoutsummit.com as well. And if you are interested in innovation and design thinking, you can visit our website at theideasuite.com. And we will have all of the details of the Energy Index coming soon to a URL near you, but you'd find those at energyforgrowth.com when they're available.

Great, and that energy for growth—is that the F O R or is that the number four? What's how how do we spell?

We managed to get the F O R with a bit of work, so we're pleased to have the actual word. Okay, great.

So it's energy—the word for F O R growth dot com, energyforgrowth dot com. We'll include those links in the show notes. And Fiona Shelley, thank you so much for joining today.

Thank you, Will. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for giving us the opportunity.

Yes, thank you. This was awesome.

And listeners, if you want to increase your connection energy and send out one of those positive vibes to the universe and would be inclined to give this show a 5-star review on iTunes, it does help people discover the show and just brightens my day. So it could take you 2 minutes and I would greatly appreciate it. So Fiona, Shelley, thanks for joining, and we will include those links in the show notes.