Pay attention to the personal and organizational factors that erode well-being, drive burnout, and make strategic changes to nourish yourself and your team.

“I’ve finally found my passion!” Not every day, my patients walk into my office smiling, but it’s delightful when it happens. I’d been working with this guy for a while, focusing on mindful self-awareness and kicking his people-pleasing habit. I never intended to help him find his passion, but it happened when he began paying attention to what was genuinely fulfilling. 

Addressing burnout requires that we toggle between the personal and the organizational. Paying attention to what is fulfilling and deeply meaningful to you and me while at the same time working to address barriers to equitable distribution of workload, leadership practices that erode trust, and challenges that interfere with building community at the team level. 

The way we’re working isn’t working. So how do we step out of the frame and change how we work to create a system nourishing for us and everyone in our healthcare organizations?

Tune in to learn: 

• What simple changes will help you realign with your passion for medicine
• What questions to ask to transform your experience as a healer
• How to help your team reconnect with passion every day

Bio: Adele Wang is an integrative health provider who also mentors professional people struggling with anxiety and physical manifestations of stress. In her current practice, she focuses on helping healthcare providers realign themselves with their passions in life and medicine. Adele is also the host of the All Things Human podcast.

Earn employees' trust by giving them a life-giving workplace.

I’d been waiting to catch the attention of my chief of staff all morning. I finally had her on my screen. With my headphones on, I didn’t notice the office door creak open until a glitter-encrusted wand was thrust in my face. I was mortified, but she responded graciously, “I have kids too.” 

COVID reminded us of our humanity and removed the work-life separation so many of us were used to. So, let’s use that lesson to reshape how we think about healthcare to create life-giving work and resilient workplaces for frontline employees and leaders in healthcare.

I sat down with Dr. Mayan Bomsztyk and asked her to share her thoughts on building trust between executives and frontline clinicians and improving employees' happiness in healthcare workplaces. Her big takeaway, learn the proper lessons from COVID to reconnect with the big picture and reprioritize what is fulfilling about working in healthcare for your frontline. 

While she no longer supervises frontline staff, she is still constantly thinking about the needs of her frontline staff. She shared how she approaches frontline concerns at the executive level.

Here are some of her recommendations:

1.    Rebalance work duties so employees can thrive.

2.    Make allowances for humanity at work.

3.    Consider the big picture when looking at metrics.

4.    Go the extra mile to re-engage your people and promote change.

**This is a replay of Menders episode 1, originall  published in April of 2022.

Bio: Dr. Mayan Bomsztyk is an internal medicine physician at an executive leadership level in the public sector.

If you’re a woman in leadership struggling to prioritize yourself, try Intuitive Eating as a first step to honoring yourself. 

You can't be the woman in leadership your people need you to be without prioritizing self-care.

One of the things that women leaders mention is the difficulty they have prioritizing taking time for themselves, especially when that is not being encouraged in their work environment. Leaders (especially women) feel time pressured as they balance the many needs of everybody else: their organization, employees, and family. In this busy context, self-care can feel unimportant. 

Victoria and I discussed how the difficulty prioritizing self-care applies to women's relationships with food and their bodies. 

You can learn to nourish yourself and your body as you care for yourself, both as, just as humans, as women, as women in leadership, or just as women in healthcare.

Prioritizing yourself can feel selfish, so you may sometimes feel guilty for making yourself a priority. But as Victoria points out, this all-or-nothing mindset of self-denial and service to others is exhausting and problematic. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle.

Listen to learn: 

-       The fundamentals of the intuitive eating framework

-       How intuitive eating relates to self-care principles 

-       Why diet culture is so harmful to women and the health of the body

-       How to prioritize time for yourself when you are incredibly busy

-       Why prioritizing pleasure is healthy for the body 

-       How self-awareness will reduce your risk of burnout 

Watch a clip on YouTube

Read more on my blog

Bio: Victoria Yates is a registered nurse, and an intuitive eating coach focused on helping women with issues surrounding food and their bodies. Victoria cares about helping women to care for and nourish themselves and develop more calm confidence with who they are and their approach to caring for themselves and their bodies. You can find her at victoria-yates.com.