Season 4 Premiere: Triumph, Turmoil, and Transformation - The Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast

Season 4 Premiere: Triumph, Turmoil, and Transformation – The Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast

Welcome to the first episode of Season 4 of the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast.

Burnout is a major challenge facing allied health professionals. So in this episode, Jo shares her personal story about why she is so passionate about this topic, the very public moment she realised that she was not living in integrity, her experience of realising she was burnout and depressed and the changes she has since made in her business and her life.

This season the conversations about burnout are very real, open and honest. And while the conversations are very heavy, you will also be inspired to determine how you as a practitioner and the profession as a whole can thrive despite the challenges we face on a daily basis.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

If you know you need more support, please visit my website at https://jomuirhead.com

Finally, if you loved this episode, please make sure you subscribe and leave us a review.

Transcript

Welcome to the very first episode of Season Four of the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast.

This episode has been really hard for me to record, but here we are. I’m ready to go. I’m gonna share with you. So let’s get on with it. So before we get started, I really want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that I find myself talking to you from today, here in the Blue Mountains of Australia. The land of the Darug people. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging. And I wanna pay my respects to all Aboriginal Torres Strait Islanders and First Nations people who may be listening or watching this podcast today or anytime into the future. Thank you so much for the gift that you have given us with the land that you allow us to live on.

Now back to season four of the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast. Today’s episode, I’m gonna explain to you how we got here or how I got here. So there’s been a bit of a change in my life and this kind of all started back in 2020, which was the year of Covid and cancer for me. So the world was dealing with Covid, my husband was dealing with cancer. And then on the 14th of February, 2020, I was diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer. So there’s a lot of information around about that. But needless to say it was a horrible time. I’m just gonna put that there’s a whole vlog series I’ve done that is called Breast Cancer And Me. I don’t have any evidence of cancer now. My husband’s first cancer’s gone. We have another cancer to contend with. It’s okay. It’s not gonna kill him many times soon, but it’s been a really, really big, difficult, awkward, horrible thing to deal with.

But during that time of cancer and Covid, I had the opportunity to witness the world while I was going through my own treatment. I saw what was expected of health professionals. I saw how we just dug deep and how we just got on and wanted to help everybody and how our community really did have these incredible expectations of us that we would know what to do. But yet, every single one of us as a health professional was going, what the hell? What on earth? We were trying to serve clients wearing masks in periods of lockdown while trying to figure out how we don’t get killed ourselves. How do we keep our family and our children safe? And I watched you all do that, and I watched the world open up to that.

And this podcast season is all about burnout and burnout, recovery and my sabbatical. And I’ve got some incredible people who have shared, wow, have they shared the most personally vulnerable stories all in an effort to help us progress this conversation around burnout. Because what we’ve been doing isn’t working. And as you will learn as these episodes come to air, blaming the victims is not sustainable. And I say that with quite deliberately. We all have a part to play in keeping ourselves healthy enough to do this work. So I wanna explain to you where this has come from for me today, and give you some context and some understanding about how I arrived at the need and the desire to finance this project ’cause you’ll understand why it is now a personal financing and help you understand why you need to take notice of every single one of these episodes.

Now, there will be times in these episodes where you will feel uncomfortable. There will be discussions around self-harm, there will be discussions around Covid. There will be discussions around mental health. So in full disclosure, I need you to practise the discernment that you practise every time you meet a client listening to these podcast episodes. So in this podcast episode, I lightly touch on my own desires to end my life. But it’s a very, very short conversation because it was a very, very short thing that went on in my life. But it’s very real.

So this is now being recorded in September of 2024. So on the cast my mind back to the middle of 2023, and I was still feeling so unwell. So the outcome of cancer treatment for me means that I’m cancer free, but I am left trying to heal from cancer treatment. And I have been living with uncontrolled treatment resistant chronic migraine of up to 19 migraine episodes a month since treatment. It actually started when I had an allergic reaction to one of the cancer drugs and it’s tripped me into this migraine experience. I had all sorts of shame about this. I’ve only just started talking about it because I was very, very open about my cancer experience. Very vulnerable and very raw about that because I really wanted to create an environment where people could learn from my experience. I had learned so much about cancer and how to get well after cancer from listening to women who had gone before me. I wanted to contribute to that conversation that if you haven’t noticed already, contribution is a huge value of mine. So I had all this shame tied up in I should be better. Nobody wants to hear about this anymore. People that aren’t gonna wanna know you if they know that there’s another sickness or thing that you’re dealing with. And it’s become very clear that I can’t live the life of integrity that’s important to me if I don’t actually share this.

So I got to September of 2023 and I had been running at the Future Proofing Health Professional Symposium. Very, very awesome symposium. It went for 10 days straight and I turned up every day, even on the days I didn’t have to, but I turned up, I wanted to make sure that it went really well. And it’s an outstanding event. We are not doing it this year because you’ll learn why in a minute. But my plan and my hope is to be well enough to be able to have that come again ’cause that is just a fantastic learning resource. So I got to day 10 and I had an extremely awful migraine. No. Sherlock, really <laugh>. And I was doing the closeout. And I had prepared this incredible presentation, which I’m actually gonna share in our next episode here on the podcast. And I got to slide 35. Slide 35. And then I was in complete shock because I realised that in that moment I was lacking in integrity. I had this moment. So what is integrity? ’cause It’s one of those words that we hear a lot, right? And if you like me, you hear it in corporate statements and you go, this organisation is anything but what integrity stands for. So my definition is integrity is the state of being whole and undivided. The way I behave as a person of integrity is that what I say matches what I do. So you can imagine me presenting at this symposium online, internationally, where people had paid to come. And me having this moment where I recognised that my integrity had been compromised, it was very noticeable, <laugh>. And I thank my dear colleague Dr. Bee Lim, who has recently let me know that she could tell that something had just happened. I rushed through the end of the presentation. I wasn’t fully engaged ’cause I had had this almost visceral reaction going, oh my goodness, I am living in a way that I am asking people not to live anymore. And it was at that moment that I knew I needed to stop working. Now I’ve actually been the person who hasn’t been great with integrity before, back in 2007, I had a very public, very uncomfortable fall from grace if you so to speak. We don’t need to go into those details today. But it was painful, it was public and it has taken me a long time to recover from that humiliation. But during that initial recovery from that incident that occurred back in 2007, I wanted to recreate myself. My post traumatic growth was going to become and learn how to become a person of integrity. Because that matters to me. Because the issues that I saw, the hurt that I was a part of, the difficulties that it created for me, my son and my family, I didn’t wanna ever put anyone through that again. And my commitment to my own integrity is a reason why many of you stick around because I call it black and white. Even though we live in shades of grey, you will see me do the things that I ask people to do or I suggest people do. It is a deeply rooted part of me and I never want it to go away.

So let’s go back to September 23 when I had been having this incredible symposium, the way it was put together, the contributors were amazing. Cafe conversations were incredible. Shout out to Lisa Duaz and Cindy Doyle again for their assistance with that. It just showed me that there is a new way to do online learning. And I had cracked the code on that. That was cool. And I got to this point in this presentation that I was delivering and I hadn’t quite finished. And I actually went, oh my word, the only thing I need to focus on right now is getting healthy. It was like a bolt of lightning. If I have a Christian faith, for those of you who know, it really did feel like it was an unction from the Holy Spirit. I’m just like, whoa. Also frequent, episodic, debilitating migraine means that I become unreliable. And I didn’t want people to be connected to me out of a need to be sympathetic or have some strange loyalty to me. But when you are unreliable and inconsistent, it’s not a great way to run a business.

I was having to face the fact that I may not be able to meet my financial obligations because I had taken myself out of all clinical coaching, basically anything that I could do to generate money in the business, all of my available energy was going to serve the people in my work, my husband, my son, my family and my friends were getting my leftovers. So all my available energy was going into my work. And everyone that I said mattered the most was getting my leftovers. So October, 2023, my neurologist was concerned. She had been asking me to stop work all year, and she started investigating other serious health conditions. I didn’t like the sound of these other conditions and I didn’t like what they would mean for me if they actually ended up being true. Now they haven’t, yay, so we’re not gonna go into that now.

So at this point in time, my neurologist was actually saying, Jo, I think you’re incredibly burnt out by all the treatment that you’ve had. Now, I resisted this conversation because in all the research that I had done back from 1972 when burnout was first talked about (and yes people, it’s been around for as long as I’ve been alive). I was like, no, no, no, no. Burnout is about a relationship you have with your work. And burnout is a work orientated difficulty. And she looked at me and she went, do you really think that’s true in this day and age? And of course I argued with her ’cause I like to be right, she likes to be right. And we just agreed to disagree. But I’m wrong. Work since Covid and possibly before for health professionals is all invasive. It is all encompassing. It is everywhere, which is why now in Australia we have laws that say an employer cannot expect an employee to respond to an email outside of normal working hours. We have laws. If you are doing that as an employer in Australia, you can receive fines in relation to both industrial relations and work health and safety legislation. Two lots of legislation, which means two regulatory authorities, which means you’re probably gonna get fined more than once.

But I haven’t been working. So how can I be burnt out? And it’s because my treatment became my work.

So anything that starts to feel like I’m pushing mud up a hill, <laugh>, I’ve toned down my language there for those with little ones in the car. Anything that makes me feel like I am on a hamster wheel. Anything that leads me to a place of feeling hopeless and like nothing can change, I have learned, is a very strong indicator of burnout for me. Now, they’re not gonna be the same for everyone as we’re gonna listen to in this entire season. And it was recently described to me like this, burnout will affect you at work, but it affects your whole life. And somebody beautifully shared this illustration with me. I was drowning. My head would frequently slip under the water, but I was pushing all the other people around me up so they could breathe. If there is a child in a body of water and they get scared, you become the thing that they climb onto or they often push your head underwater. Have you ever noticed that? Which means I have stopped breathing.

So this led me to start to consider taking a sabbatical. Now, I’ve also had the joy of working on Yolanda Harper’s book about sabbatical. And she is one of the guests in this season. So it helped me to go, this is normal, this is okay. This is an appropriate response to this hideous situation I find myself. So I set about getting my business ready to start my sabbatical, which was gonna be three months on the 1st of December, 2023. 4 days before the 1st of December, 2023, my business manager unexpectedly quit. And that was hard. But then my beautiful husband stepped in and he said, whatever we need to do. So I chose to keep my business going because I wanted to get to the end point of whatever’s going on for me and have a choice. Freedom is another huge value of mine. And freedom to me is having the freedom to choose. I was also very conscious of the consultants that I had in my business, of the clients that we were serving and the customers we were supporting. But I just knew that there wasn’t enough of me to give. Now my Purple Co team were exceptional through this time, but they all helped me to take this three months off. There were always questions I needed to answer, but I wasn’t in the thick of things every day in and day out. And that started in December. December, I felt amazing. I knew I would, it’s like going on vacation, but by February I was terribly depressed.

Side note, this is why work is so important for us in recovery because it helps us with structure, it helps us get out of bed and it helps us with a sense of meaning and purpose. But I do think people like myself, rehabilitation consultants, have become too preachy about work, being good for our health and work stopped being good for my health, but not work the way I was relating to work. So me being depressed, me hoping Jesus would take me home on a daily basis, started to make me concerned about my ability to leave my business, care for my consultants, care for the clients. So I resolved that that part of the business needed to go. It was the most financially draining. It required a lot of labour. And there were lots of infrastructure costs that were associated with the private practice or individual client part of my business.

So very randomly, the day after my business management manager quit, someone reached out to me. She’s a beautiful woman. She didn’t know this had gone on and say, Jo, I’m really concerned about you sending us all this extra work and what’s going on? How can I help you? And that conversation resulted in Theresa Tran of Skilled Health acquiring the individual rehabilitation part of Purple Co. Hence why I don’t have a private practice that financially supports this podcast anymore. So we’ve been working together on the transition since March this year, and it’s gone so well. I cannot thank Theresa and her team enough for looking after our clients, for looking after my customers, and for looking after my consultants. She took them all. That’s huge. And I get to keep my fingers in the pie a little bit offering some strategic advice every so often, which I enjoy.

So here we are now in September and I’ve been doing these podcast episodes for season four now for some months. And the guests are patiently waiting for their episodes to go to air. But this is what pacing looks like for me. I’ve done what I can when I can because I refuse these days to turn up when I have a migraine because I have pushed through those things and that does not serve me well. It also doesn’t allow me to practise integrity. If I am that unwell, I should not be doing the things. So this is how I am learning now to live my values. And this all started for me looking at that slide in that presentation, which I’ll share with you next week that undid me.

Now, for those of you who might be interested, the amount of migraine actually hasn’t changed in any of this time, but my ability to cope with myself has changed. It has improved.

So this season is turning out to be quite different to what I expected. These guests and conversations are very real, very honest and very open. And I have resisted churning out season four as I record, which is what I’ve done in the past. Because much of what you are going to hear is gonna make you think you’re gonna be affirmed. It’s gonna help you understand that what you’re experiencing is normal. Your heart is going to break, you will be triggered, but you will be inspired to figure out how we collectively keep ourselves fit for the future of health.

Because the work we have been doing as health professionals has been harming us, has the potential to harm us. And my commitment is let’s figure out a way that you can do this work that nurtures and nourishes you. That doesn’t mean getting rid of all the things we don’t wanna do because that’s impossible, but where there are ways that we can actually build, rebuild relationships with our work that serves us, doesn’t harm us. So if we are going to provide the kind of care that people who need us actually need, then we’ve gotta change the conversation we are having about burnout and self-care. And this is exactly what season four will bring you. So if you’re not already there, please come and join me over in the Future Proofing Health Professionals Facebook group. It’s a free group because that is where the conversations about this podcast are going to happen. Or if you like most people on Facebook, you don’t wanna contribute, you are going to be able to watch and learn. But I do ask that you contribute because I actually enjoy the interactions.

So now that I don’t have three quarters <laugh> of my business available to fund this podcast, you are most welcome to become a podcast sponsor. You can do that as simply as just buying me a coffee. And we’ll put the links for you to learn about podcast sponsorship or buy me a coffee in the show notes here. All of the information is available online.

So dear listener, as I bring this episode to a close, I am curious to know from you, what do you think needs to change to enable health professionals to do their work in a way that does not harm them? Looking forward to progressing that conversation over in the Future Proofing Health Professionals Facebook group. So that’s episode one done. Looking forward to you tuning into the next episode where I’m actually gonna take you through the fit for purpose, the fit for the future presentation that undid me back in the 2023 Symposium. So until I see you on the podcast or on YouTube or somewhere else, go be your flawsome self.