From Burnout to Renewal: A Clinical Psychologist’s Story of Self-Care and Scaling Back for a Better Life – with Dr Natalie Green – The Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast

There is no doubt that burnout is prevalent in the allied health professional field. Some may try to ‘blame’ allied health professionals who experience it for not looking after themselves properly. However, this perspective fails to recognise the impact of the systems we work in on our mental health and our lives.

In this episode, Jo is joined by Dr Natalie Green to discuss Natalie’s repeated experiences with burnout and the steps that the profession and society need to take as a whole if we are to create safe and healthy spaces that enable people not just to survive but thrive.

In this episode, Jo and Natalie discuss:

• Some of the times in Natalie’s life when burnout was prevalent and the steps she took to overcome it
• The behaviour patterns that Natalie now recognises that contributed to her burnout cycle
• The importance of talking about our experiences with burnout
• How the systems we work in are perpetuating our illness and burnout
• Why the profession needs to have more conversations about money and making sure that allied health professionals look after themselves, and
• The advice Natalie would give newly qualified allied health professionals.

About Dr Natalie Green: Dr Nat Green is a Trauma Breakthrough Coach, Author and Podcast host with a background in Clinical and Health Psychology. Dr. Nat is passionate about transforming lives and revolutionising the trauma landscape.

With over 34 years of working in trauma, and having experienced her own trauma firsthand, Dr Nat is a trailblazer, authored a book ‘Key to Freedom- The 7-Step Model to Triumph Over Trauma’, has chapters in multi-author International Bestselling books Changemakers (Volume 4) and Empowered Women Empower Women and is Founder of the ABS Method™ which accelerates trauma healing and transformation into post-traumatic growth.

She is a nominee in the 2024 Women Who Podcast Awards in the USA and received an Award at the Therapists Rising Industry Awards in 2023.

When she isn’t writing, podcasting or changing lives Dr Nat enjoys coffee by the beach and travel. She lives on the NSW Mid North Coast with her husband and two kids.

You can find Natalie at her website here or you can email her at drnat@drnataliegreen.com.au. Natalie is also on Facebook and Instagram.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Future Proofing Health Professional Facebook group 

 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

Jo:
Welcome back, health professionals to the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast. We are well into season four, and today’s guest is somebody I’ve known for 17 years. We discovered when I was recently on her podcast, and this conversation could go in a million different directions, but just as a warning, there will be swearing. So if you’re gonna be easily offended by that, probably don’t listen to this podcast. You’ve got little people with you who are in the car, warn them. Maybe they could count all the words. Maybe we could end up with a swear jar. What do you think, Nat? We could have a swear jar. Maybe that’s where I can raise sponsorship for the podcast <laugh>.

But before we get too invested in our conversation, I just wanna acknowledge the Darug people of the land that I find myself in today. I’m in the Lower Blue Mountains. I give thanks and honour the elders past, present, and emerging. And I wanna thank the Darug people for taking such great care of this land and allowing me the opportunity to live here today.

So, burnout, Dr. Nat Green, that’s what this whole episode is about. Well, this whole series is about this time, but before we get stuck into your incredible burnout story, tell us who you are and what you’re doing, and maybe a little bit about where you’ve come from.

Natalie:
Thank you so much, Jo, for having me on your podcast. I always love our chats and I feel very privileged and honored to be here. And yes, as you said, burnout is my forte these days. <Laugh>. Oh yeah, I have a background in clinical and health psychology. I’ve been around the block a while, about 34 years professionally. And I also have a master’s in rehab counselling. So I think you and I connected initially through the rehab counselling field, <laugh>, and I’ve had a very varied work history working in jails, in community health and occupational rehab. Lots of different variety of things. And then I spent a year at Port Arthur after the massacre, which I haven’t talked about hugely, but here I am today, an open book. So we thought we’d mention that as well, because that most likely did contribute to some burnout. And then I worked in a pain clinic in Sydney, and then I really got into private practice and worked for myself for a very long time until I walked away in 2014, and then have done consulting and coaching work ever since. But right now I’m not working at all.
That’s me in a nutshell.

Jo:
I had totally missed the Port Arthur connection. So for our listeners particularly our international listeners, Port Arthur was a mass shooting event here in Tasmania. It was the event that caused our Federal Government to go, let’s go and buy back all the guns. And it’s one of the reasons why we feel a lot calmer and safer in our communities because we just don’t have the prevalence of guns as in other parts of the world. Doesn’t mean we don’t have gun violence though. But that was an absolutely shocking time for our country. And knowing that you were there now makes me go, oh, some pieces are now fitting together, but we’ll get to that. I think one of the things I wanna also draw out for you is that you had quite a large staff in your private practice, I mean, you’re in regional New South Wales. It’s not like you’re in a big city. And at one stage you had quite a few staff members and I remember the time that we were talking and you went, I am done managing people. That was quite a significant conversation for us, wasn’t it? Can you remember that time?
Natalie:
I’m pretty sure I can recall that. Jo <laugh>. Yes.I had about 25 staff, which across various regional towns in New South Wales was a lot at the time. There was no telehealth, it wasn’t online, so you didn’t have a team like that. It was a number of psychologists and admin staff, and there were a lot of people to manage. Lots of different personalities and lots of amazing gifted team members. They were lovely people, but looking back, I was exhausted and I just thought, oh, I can’t do people anymore. Clue number one, perhaps

Jo:
<Laugh> The psychologist says I can’t do people anymore. <Laugh>. Yeah

Natalie:
I’m all peopled out.
Jo:
<Laugh>. Yes, it’s not a fun place for me. So I’ve asked you to prepare for this podcast today. Otherwise we would be here for six hours. Just because we can chat. So do you wanna share a time when burnout was really prevalent to you? Like you kind of knew, oh crap, I am here again. And have you taken or did you take specific steps to overcome it?

Natalie:
Right. Great Jo. Now I am so glad that you used the word again <laugh> because I appear to be a very slow learner. I could honestly say I have, with the benefit of hindsight, I’ve been been burnt out a number of times. I think we’ll go back to working in OC Rehab and I was in regional New South Wales, and I’m someone who gives everything 500%. I don’t just half-do a job. So I was working crazy hours, like 50-hour weeks, 60-hour weeks when I worked for other people. That’s just what I did and who I was. And that’s a pattern that definitely has continued throughout every workplace I’ve ever been in. Note to self: that needs to change. So working ridiculous hours. Self-sacrificing is probably one of my underlying behavioural patterns that I learned very well. I had a good teacher with that one from my mum and really worked that well. My clients really matter. I love my clients. I really wanted to make a difference. So that is what I gave a hundred percent, 500% to really, and I was the OC rehab travelling all over the place and not stopping. And I didn’t have a partner or a family, so work was everything to me and I threw myself in and that. So that was the first one. And then working at Port Arthur, as I mentioned, they were 16-hour days, seven days a week. And I don’t say that for anyone to feel sorry for me or anything. Again, it was the most amazing privileged experience. And I say privileged, it was a horrendous time. But those amazing people let me into their world accepted me and I just wanted to help them and they were hurting. So I just knew that I could help and I wanted to make a difference.

So it was after that when I came home and life was pretty boring. It was like, I’ve been so switched on 16 hour days, seven days a week, no break, keep going, keep going, keep going. And then it was like I have to go back to just seeing, and I mean this respectfully, just seeing a client who had a sore arm. And that was very important for that client. And I needed to be there to help them ’cause that was my job. But it didn’t feel fulfilling. I started to think, oh, this is a bit boring and I just felt dissatisfied and, and started to get what I now know are those signs of burnout. And I actually recall sticking my hand up and saying, oh, I think I need to see someone. Mistake number two.

And I’m not saying it’s a mistake to ask for help, and I’ll definitely talk more about that down the track, but at that point it was like, oh, oh, I felt weak. I should be able to cope. What’s going on? And I look back and I think not once was I offered a debrief ever after a year of that work, I look back now and think, oh my God, what were they thinking? What was I thinking not to ask? But asking to me equated to weakness. And I just thought, no, no, keep going, keep going. And in the end, I thought, oh no, I’m feeling like something’s wrong. And they begrudgingly and I mean, begrudgingly offered, oh, okay, you can have one session.

Jo:
Excellent.

Natalie:
That was good, wasn’t it? Nice <laugh>. So I had my one session and I got to pick who it was. And it wasn’t a psychologist, it was a guy who was actually a pastor at a church down in Nowra. And he’d been at Port Arthur in the early days. And I knew that he got it and I connected with him and I really liked him. So I went down and I had my one session drove all that way. And it was brilliant because he knew what I was talking about. He got me. And he just said, nah, this is normal. Of course you feel like this, you gotta give yourself a bit of time to just come back, do the things you need to do. And if that’s not working, then you know, maybe get out and do something else. Sure. Okay. So it normalised it for me.

And I thought, oh, okay. So I didn’t deal with anything. I was, okay, I’m normal. That’s good. And move forward and do the next thing. And again, went into my normal patterns. Busy, busy, busy wearing busyness as a badge of honour. And I did that really all my working life. I kept going. I was really busy working crazy hours in my private practice. I had moments where I would just ignore my own needs, and start to get frustrated at some of my staff because they were going off sick and, and needing mental health days. And it started to get a bit frustrating and I thought, well, that’s not good. So I restructured my business so many times, it was ridiculous. And then I probably hit my greatest moment of getting a message and still not hearing <laugh> My 4 x 2 moment. It took me going to hospital and having a surgery. The surgery didn’t go well. I ended up with the golden staph infection, and was in and outta hospital. Four surgeries, eight months almost died.

And my looking back now should have been sitting in bed on my laptop, almost dying. Having a nurse come to me going, what the hell are you doing? Get off your laptop. Put it away. Your world doesn’t revolve around work.

Jo:
<Laugh> What did she dare say? <laugh>. You just don’t understand. You obviously don’t know how to work hard.

Natalie:
Exactly. Oh dear. Says I to nurses who we know work hard.

Jo:
I know. That’s why II’m laughing too, because we know that nurses work extremely hard and suffer with the same types of issues that we are suffering with. Yet my automatic judgment there was also to tell her, what do you mean I can’t work? Stop it. You know, I’ve gotta get better. I need to work <laugh>.

Natalie:
I have to pay my staff, I have to do this. It can’t go without me. And you get the picture. And that forced me into having a little bit of time off, but not much ’cause I kept going and kept going. And I look back now and thought, my gosh, there were so many signs of burnout, my autoimmune disorder that also came with, that should have been another indicator now that I have the knowledge that I have now, that that was my body’s way of trying to give me a message that you are not listening. I’ve tried to kill you. You didn’t listen. You didn’t take my messages on board. I’m gonna make you feel this somehow. So that was another wake-up call. And you know, I could go on, there are so many episodes of burnout and that doesn’t touch on when I finally got the message two years ago <laugh>.

Jo:
There’s a lot I want to talk about there. So number one, going back to the vicarious trauma that would’ve been experienced in Port Arthur, like this was back in 2004. So we’ve learned a lot more about trauma since then.

Natalie:
Oh, 1996. It’s hard to realise that that much time has passed.

Jo:
Oh, crap. Yes. Sorry. And the nation still feels that any who but the response from your employer at that time. Just like, what do you mean you need help? So I had a similar experience. I was the manager of a national service provider, and I went to one of the managing directors at the time and said, hey, we’ve just put two psychologists into a hotel that had a very public celebrity suicide in it.

Natalie:
Oh, right.

Jo:
Yes. So you’ve worked out what that is, <laugh>. And we got the contract to send somebody in to debrief all the staff. So it was very, very high profile. It was lots of the media, it was very messy when the person found the celebrity who had chosen to do that. And she came to me after being in there a week and she goes, I’m exhausted. I feel sick. The other guy had already started absconding, so I wasn’t even aware that they were struggling. So I went to the managing director and said, we need to get these people some support. And his response was, isn’t this what they’re trained to do? Why do they need extra support? And I was so taken aback by that. Now, looking back, I wish I’d gone, excuse me, what about the health and safety of your employees, which are my employees?
But I was so stunned that I actually helped them find support outside of the workplace because I could see how much they were hurting. But isn’t that interesting? And I wonder how many people listening who are owners or managers or have startups of their own kind. And because we’re so in it all the time, and as you’ve heard Natalie’s story progress, her adrenaline went up. And we can all see now that the reason why she got bored when she came back from Port Arthur was ’cause she wasn’t living on adrenaline and cortisol anymore. So her body felt numb. And she equated that to boredom. But how many of us are saying to our staff members, suck it up, princess. Or we might not even be saying that with our language, but our behaviour, and that’s one of the things I really wanna help people understand, is we can no longer ignore anyone’s cry for help.

Natalie:
Absolutely. And, that’s back in 1996, and I worked with an occupational rehab provider company that helped people who had workplace injuries to get back to work. And thankfully the landscape’s definitely changed and more accepting and more understanding of burnout. But all those things, I know for many of your listeners are our age, Jo, they have a history of working really hard, giving it their all and seeing clients that have had lots of trauma, lots of significant workplace injuries, all those sorts of things. And when we hear stories constantly, no matter what self-care practices we have in place, how great. Which I thought I was and I did get really good at compartmentalising things. That was my big strategy and having black humour, a really bad sense of humour. That is what in our profession gets us through and helps us to cope.

And I do a lot of work with emergency services personnel, particularly police officers. And I would hear the graphic details of their stories. I would work with victims of crime who’d had people in their lives murdered. And I would have to sit there and go through coroner’s reports and things like that. So no matter what I did, I coped very, very well for a long time. However, my body retained all that vicarious trauma in my nervous system. And there was no way of me understanding and knowing how to let that out at the time. And that’s only recently that I’ve actually worked that one out. So again, I did say I’m a slow learner but I have learned and I’m learning.

Jo:
Yeah. And I think the key here is, or a key for our listeners, is burnout’s not inevitable, but it’s highly likely, and any health professional will say early intervention is the best intervention <laugh>, except like you, I went, oh, funny lump on my breast. Let’s ignore that for two years until I had a situation where I was like, I don’t think I can ignore that anymore. But like you, I had the autoimmune disease first, and then I had a cancer diagnosis and then that obviously wasn’t enough. So now I’ve got a chronic neurological condition. It’s like, whoa, hang on a minute. Am I just weak?

Natalie:
And that comes in a lot. And this stuff isn’t talked about and I’m so excited that you are talking about this and that you’re okay about me sharing this message because I’m not the sort of person that can sit back and be silent. It’s got me in a trickle number of times. That’s why I worked for myself for so long, because I would see injustices or social injustice and I’d speak up. So unless we have these conversations, nothing changes. We continue to destroy our professionals in the allied health profession fields. We need to talk about it.

Jo:
We really do. And this season of the podcast, we can talk about your individual experience a lot. We can talk about my individual experience a lot. We can victim blame in some. It’s like if you just got better at resilience, you wouldn’t burn out. If you just went and did this training, you wouldn’t burn out. If you just addressed this self-sacrificing need that you have, then you wouldn’t burn out. You can’t put a healthy person back into a very unhealthy work environment and think that it’s not gonna to affect them. And we listen to horrible stories every day. It doesn’t matter if you’re a physiotherapist or an occupational therapist or a death. Regardless, people just have horrible stories. It doesn’t have to be a Port Arthur massacre for it to be a horrible story. I have seen seven people today who have all had excruciating back pain from an injury they didn’t cause. Like that stuff starts and nothing I am doing is helping. And I think for me, my burnout was a lot around, I am not seeing any change. I can do all this in great individual work, but the systems I found myself in, or the systems I needed to be accountable to, I felt them injurious., I still find them injurious.

Natalie:
I’m so glad you said that, Jo, because I’ve just actually written a chapter in a book and that’s exactly what I’m talking about. The fact that the system is perpetuating our illness, it really is.

Jo:
In Australia right now, I find this abhorrent, but somebody put it into words yesterday in Australia right now we have the business of disability. It is called the NDIS, but it is the business of disability and it serves no one particularly the people who need the services. But it just got me thinking about the business of mental health. And I think we all have this problem where it’s like, we don’t like talking about money. We don’t like asking for money because receiving money on the end of somebody’s traumatic experience or negative health event feels icky. It feels horrible. So I know that you’re a great over-functioner.

Natalie:
<Laugh>. We are.

Jo:
And you and I, we worked on our money mindset for a really long time together, right? We went and sat at the feet of somebody who was great at it, but not a particularly nice person. We did <laugh>, but we really worked on our money mindset. But do you think that there is some inherent thing about being a health professional that still makes that quite, or you’re nodding your head that still makes that awkward that there has to be an exchange, ’cause you know, we need to feed our kids, right?

Natalie:
Absolutely.
Jo:

Yeah. Those values conflict.
Natalie:
I totally agree that most health professionals, let’s be honest, we get into the business of whatever it is, whether it’s physio, OT, speech, rehab, counselling, or psychology, it doesn’t matter what it is, we get into our roles and our professions to help people. And unfortunately, society has set us up really with these beliefs as well that are very much perpetuated that you are there to help people to make a difference. And the type of personalities often really attracted to our industry have this underlying deep seated belief of, you can’t take people’s money while you do that. So I do think that we’re slowly starting to shift that as well. And as you know, I’ve done a lot of money breakthrough coaching work, and I do very firmly now say to people that the more money we can make, the more people we can help and the greater impact we can have.

And we need to hear that and know that it’s okay. We have families to feed as well. We’re not doing the wrong thing. I think that makes us better at our job because we value it more. Because if someone’s paying well for a service, then we will overdeliver because that’s what we do. We wanna give them the best that we possibly can. And that can often work hand in hand in validating things for us as health professionals, that we have the right to charge what we are worth because we are changing our clients’ lives.

Jo:
We certainly do,and to put it into a very simplistic context, if the listeners visualise Maslow’s hierarchy <laugh>, if we don’t have our finances sorted, it’s a foundational thing. It’s right at the bottom. We need to feel safe and money helps us feel safe because we work and live in capitalist societies. And you can choose to remove yourself from that. But you are probably gonna not listen to this podcast ever <laugh>. So I think the purpose of this conversation, or the point of this conversation, is to help us all understand that even people with 30-plus years of experience who have grown up in these systems, we just wanna normalise that this stuff’s hard. We’ve got personal personality factors at play. Doesn’t mean you’re bad, doesn’t mean you are evil, doesn’t mean you are broken. But we’ve got systemic issues at play. Know some of them are bad, some of them are broken, but they’re made up of people. We don’t live in an environment where we’ve got unlimited resources. Like here in here in Australia, we have the cost of living in Sydney <laugh>.

Natalie:
Yeah. And in and in some regional areas.

Jo:
Exactly.

Natalie:
Trying living on the North Coast <laugh>.

Jo:
Your fuel prices.

Natalie:
Oh, I know.

Jo:
Oh my God, can we get jerrycans the next time we have to drive through Port Macquarie? Anyway, as a side note, these are the realities of the situation. Merchant bankers and cryptocurrency traders are not having these conversations. You know, social media influencers taking up all the space in Canga in Bali are not having these conversations. It’s the health professionals who are dedicated to their work because they see hurting humanity who need to have these conversations.

Natalie:
And I think that as a profession, we really need to do some work around those beliefs that it is okay to make money. It’s okay to have money, as I said. It’s not that we are greedy and we don’t have to be millionaires, I’m not talking about that. I’m saying, that we have to charge adequately for our services so we can have a greater impact. And the ripple effect can go from that.

Jo:
And we also need to be able to afford the things that help us take care of ourselves. So I give a really cool example here, and I would love for you to be thinking, Natalie, of what your equivalent of this would be. So I see a massage therapist every two weeks. I love her dearly. She has this amazing ability to read my body with her hands. I don’t have to say anything, but she finds the sore spots. And we were just chatting one day when my face was in that massage bed hole. And she goes, oh, my massage therapist said, and I stopped. ’cause I’d never thought a massage therapist needing a massage therapist. And I said, hang on a minute, what does your massage therapist do with you? And it’s all about hands and forearms and shoulders. And I went, of course. She goes, Jo, I wouldn’t be able to keep doing this if this wasn’t a part of my work, this is not negotiable for me. If you wanna keep seeing me, I need to keep doing this. And I heard that and I went, oh my God, what if I had set myself up differently in my career to begin with? We didn’t know back then. I’m being compassionate here, but what do you think a mental health professional’s equivalent could be of the massage therapist getting massages?

Natalie:
Oh, yes. Again, I’m not gonna say a psychologist.

Jo:
<Laugh>

Natalie:
No disrespect to other fellow psychologists. But I think for me, in what I’ve learned, again, in retrospect, after getting to the point where I was so broken that I had to stop working altogether, I’ve always been one for professional development and things like that, but the most valuable person or profession for me has been a mentor / coach. Whether that’s a business coach, whatever, it doesn’t matter. But the most significant turning point for me was when my coach last year said to me, can I swear, Jo?

Jo:
Yep, we already warned everyone. <Laugh>.

Natalie:
We were refer to her as having a fluffy sledgehammer. Well, I needed a sledgehammer because the four-by-twos that had hit me in the past I wasn’t listening to. And she said, for f*cks sake, Nat, will you do something about your self-sacrificing pattern?

Jo:
Wow. That would’ve been hard to hear in the moment.

Natalie:
Absolutely. Did I get cranky? Yes. Absolutely. I thought, how dare you. But I thought her role and what I pay her the big dollars for is to call me out and to help me be a better version of myself. So yes, I’ve felt broken. I’ve been referred to psychologists. That was a disaster because they let me down. They completely shattered my trust. And don’t even go there. That’s another whole podcast episode being let down by your own professionals. Like, hang on, I need someone who gets it. And interestingly, the person I’ve chosen as my mentor/ coach, whatever you wanna call it, is someone who has also experienced significant burnout, openly talks about her head-in-the-bucket moment of realising something had to change and she’s done something and she’s a few steps ahead of me. Or more than a few steps ahead of me. But I respect her enough to go, thank you. I’ve done all this work over the years. All the professional development, all the breakthrough, all the stuff and things and everything we think we need to do. But I’d missed this. And I then went, I didn’t ask her to do it. I found my own way. And I had the big breakthrough session, which totally changed everything. And I feel like the best way to describe it is it’s changed my DNA. I could finally get to the core of why I did what I did. And it was an intergenerational trauma thing that I never would’ve seen in a million years.

Jo:
Wow. Now everybody’s on edge going, tell us more, Nat, what is this thing? Does it have a name? Is it a technique?

Natalie:
Yeah. It’s a process that I learned. It’s actually a type of NLP and I know you’ve done a bit of that.

Jo:
We don’t hate NLP on this podcast. We hate people who use it for bad things.
,
Natalie:
Yes. <Laugh> I would never use it for bad things. So of course I developed up my model because I had to do it my way. <Laugh>. I needed to still have control. So I found the person that I wanted and I said, here’s my script, here’s my process. Can you do that on me? Because I trusted her enough and she did. And I knew it was going to work. So it was more releasing, going through negative emotions of anger sadness, hurt, shame, power, guilt, all the things. And I kept having these things released and going I still feel like there’s something there. And then the very end, I knew there was something, but I couldn’t articulate what it was. I dunno how much detail you want me to go into, but I now know why I couldn’t articulate it. But I loved. It was done in one session. Wow. It was a very long exhausting session. So it was like our breakthrough sessions that we do in NLP but modified to be more holistic based on all the years of experience I’ve had and my research and my own. I need to test it on me as well as my other clients. So I knew that I had something there that was going to work. So I did that, got to the bottom thing. It’s like a timeline therapy but modified my way. And then she got to the thing and the very last one, and it was around the guilt and shame. And she said, and you know, go back to the place. And I’m like, I can’t see anything. It’s dark, it’s black. She said, do you think? And I go, here we go, <laugh>, Do you think you could be in utero? Oh, for goodness sake. Oh. I said, don’t be ridiculous. Just try that out for me. Then I said, just to humor you. We were doing it on Zoom, so it doesn’t have to be in person was on Zoom. And it felt more comfortable to me doing it on Zoom. I have my own space and I could be me. And there it was. My mom and I don’t mind sharing this. She’s not alive to hear it. And I don’t think the people that we know are gonna listen to this. So it’s okay. My mum was pregnant with me. I was born in the May and this was in the January of the year I was born. And her sister was the very first Australian radiographer to go overseas. She worked in England and I’ve since in the last couple of years, found letters that she’d written to my mom about how exciting it was that she was gonna have a baby and she couldn’t wait to come back and meet her niece or nephew. And she was killed in a car accident on the 20th of January, 1969. And so that was only a few months before I was born. And I always knew. My middle name is named after her. And I’d always felt a deep connection. Of course, I never met her and I never understood why. So I now know that I was in utero and she had to do the ultimate self-sacrifice. She had to focus on me. And never deal with her grief and her trauma of losing her sister. And I thought, oh my God. It finally made sense. And that to me changed everything. It finally made sense. I knew where this deep stuff had come from. I could put it into perspective and I could release it. And I was like, oh, I honestly feel like my DNA has changed.

Jo:
Wow. Outstanding.

Natalie:
I don’t know. I can’t describe it. And the reason I now know was that I could never put words. I knew there was something, but I didn’t know what it was ’cause I was in utero. I didn’t have words.

Jo:
Exactly. I’m just thinking. You didn’t have any real other ways of communicating what was going on. You couldn’t.

Natalie:
No. So I dunno whether that <laugh> is what your listeners wanted to hear. And it sounds really weird, but it changed everything. It gave me an understanding of why I do what I do. I’m definitely not blaming my mum. I think, oh my God, I can’t believe she went through this. And interestingly, my mom also died on the 20th of January, 25 years later to the day after. Like that’s not a coincidence either. Is it? <Laugh>

Jo:
Yeah. We could get into the spooky story of parents dying, coincidentally. But we won’t do that now. What I appreciate about you sharing that, Nat, is I think that there’s this tendency amongst health professionals to kind of go, burnout is inevitable. I’ll just keep going until I can’t go anymore. And that this might not even be verbalised or conscious. I’ll just keep going until I can’t go anymore. I’ll just keep going until I can’t go anymore. But what I want you to take away from this is, there are always ways we can get help. If Nat’s story hasn’t shown you anything other than this, then please go back and listen to it again. Which is, she’s been committed to investigating the way for her so that she can live peacefully and learn how to just be in this world without it taking such a toll. So that’s the story I’m hearing here. And from 1994 until 2024, like we’ve learned a lot. You’ve learned a lot, you’ve experienced a lot. What would you say to a newly graduated health professional who’s maybe in the first two years of their career, what are three key things that they could be doing to learn from you to help them navigate their career in a healthy way?

Natalie:
Oh, great question.

Jo:
Yeah. And you weren’t prepared for that one?

Natalie:
No, <laugh>. I would think the very first thing is I would honestly get a coach or a mentor from the beginning. Absolutely.

Jo:
Regardless of whether you’re in private practice or not.

Natalie:
Oh, no. Because, at the beginning, I certainly didn’t need a psychologist. There was nothing wrong with me. I wasn’t broken and that’s sort of what we think. And yes, have peer supervision. Absolutely. Do your self-care activities. For me it’s as you know, having a coffee by the beach. And when I don’t do that, I’m completely outta balance and outta whack. And you know, interestingly, I haven’t done that lately. I’m thinking, oh, why was I really tired yesterday? ’cause I haven’t done what I need to do to replenish myself. So find your thing, whether it’s a walk in nature, going to the gym, whatever it is, do that regularly. Make time for that. So having a coach or a mentor, because I think that’s essential because they will ask us the challenging questions.

Jo:
And they give us perspective as well. You gave a great story about how your coach finally got you to address the thing. I had a very similar experience which might have even been last year where I went to my coach and went, hey, if I start talking about my migraines having gone for 10 days, can you tell me that it’s okay to stop working? She told me no. She said, I actually don’t want you coming if you’ve got a migraine at all. I actually don’t think that’s what you should be doing. So I went to her for help to grow my business. And what she actually ended up helping me do was step away from work completely. Now not everybody needs to step away from work. The absence of work is not the answer here. It’s what Nat and I have needed because we didn’t take notice. And our bodies are going, how much louder do I need to scream for you to start taking notes? So please don’t hear that the absence of work is the antidote to burnout. It’s actually not.

Natalie:
No, that’s, that’s us longer term older people who were slow learners And couldn’t read our bodies. So find another practice that helps you get in tune with yourself internally would be my other major advice because I blocked that out. It was too painful. It was too, oh my God. Then I’ll have to listen and I’ll have to stop and I don’t have time to stop because I gotta keep going, keep going. And if I had been more attuned to me and had a greater relationship with my three brains, my head brain, my heart brain, and my gut brain, I would be in a very different position right now. Doesn’t mean it can’t be undone, it doesn’t mean that I don’t live a much better way now in hindsight. But for your young new therapists coming into those things while you can, you don’t wanna get to the point where you and I are living with chronic autoimmune disorders, chronic pain conditions, and with your migraines, my complex regional pain syndrome, all of those things. And when I think how many health professionals is a whole other area of research are carrying autoimmune disorders, complex pain syndromes. It’s not that we haven’t got strategies in place to manage hearing our client’s stories, because I do think we do that fairly well. It’s just that if we don’t find a practice, whether that’s mindfulness, yoga, whatever, none of that ever worked for me because my brain never switches off. For me, it’s been in the last year where I found a practice called TRE. Which is trauma and tension release exercises, which helps those things that are stuck in your nervous system release, however you feel your body wants to let them release. So that’s been around a long time, but for me it’s a newer practice and it’s been brilliant in slowly at my pace letting go of the other my client’s stories. Really what they are that was stuck in there that I thought I’d got rid of. But we know as Bessel van der Kolk tells us, that the body keeps the score.

Jo:
Yes, he does. Thank you for that <laugh>. And thanks to Bessel, because you’ve given us some legitimacy to what we’re feeling rather than our own internal self-talk, which tells us that we are weak and incapacitated and I don’t need any more help feeling weak. I’m already feeling that I need to grab a hold of my inner strength. And I think that a lot of health professionals just don’t realise how strong we are. If you ever talk to a non-health professional about the work you do, one of the first things that they will tell you is, God, that work sounds hard. And we brush it off.

Natalie:
Exactly.

Jo:
We brush it off, I think building bridges sounds hard.

Natalie:
<Laugh>. But it’s true. It’s true. We minimise it. What other people look at us and are in awe of, we just go, that’s just who we are. That’s what we do. And we minimise it. So maybe that’s the other tip. Stop minimising what you do.

Jo:
Yes.

Natalie:
Stop minimising the impact you have in the world.

Jo:
Absolutely.

Natalie:
People are always watching, people are always observing and we lead by example. Maybe not so well at times.

Jo:
Yeah. Okay. That, I’m gonna leave it there because I think that’s incredibly powerful now. People are always watching and the community at large looks to health professionals specifically around how do we address mental health? How do we address physical health? And if we can’t lead them by being better examples or willing to acknowledge when, hey, with the knowledge we have today, this is what I would do differently. Which is what this conversation has ended up being about. So thank you Nat.

Natalie:
Oh, thank you, Jo. This is the conversation we need to have.

Jo:
Absolutely. That’s why I’m doing it. <Laugh>

Natalie:
People are leaving. There’s a mass exodus.

Jo:
Yeah. We haven’t got the talent in Australia to fill all vacancies and we wonder why we’ve got excruciatingly long wait lists. People are leaving the profession. We don’t have enough people graduating. I’m trying to get some universities to talk to me about this, but nobody has said yes yet.

So you’ve mentioned coffee by the beach. So now I’m gonna take us back to this happy subject the next time we get to see each other, which hopefully won’t be in 10 years time. And we’re going to the cafe, probably the one that we found on that beach that day. We worked together.

Natalie:
Sandbox Cafe at Phoenix.

Jo:
We’ll go back to Sandbox. So what am I ordering for you, Nat?

Natalie:
We’re ordering me, in a mug, a long black. With cream on the side.

Jo:
Alright. I can do that. A long black with cream on the side. I love it. And they do put coffee there and the puppies are allowed. So I guess we bring the puppies too.

Natalie:
That’s the best thing, isn’t it? We can bring our puppies.

Jo:
Yeah. <Laugh>. So Nat, I am conscious that you are not working at the moment, so I don’t want to drive thousands of people to an email list where they’re not gonna be able to access you. But where would you like people to learn more about you? Do you want to direct them to your podcast? What do you wanna do? How do you wanna make that work?

Natalie:
Yeah, you will find me on the Growing Tall Poppies podcast and there’s a really good episode, episode four that I did with the wonderful Jo Muirhead, which I would suggest everyone goes and listens to <laugh>.

And I’m actually in the process of giving my website a revamp because I’m not working, but as you know, I loved how when we talked that you said to me, I’m on sabbatical and I went, that’s it. I’m on sabbatical, which means I can still study and research.

Jo:
That’s why I’ve called it sabbatical. Cause being told that I can’t work made me feel less than, which I didn’t wanna do.

Natalie:
Same.

Jo:
Which is why the antidote to burnout is not not working.

Natalie:
Yes. So for me it’s been around being creative. So I’m developing my website at www.drnataliegreen.com au. And I’m coming up with some really exciting things around trauma archetypes. So there’ll be a quiz on there soon, which is a bit of fun. And it will help us understand what is happening to us and where we resonate with our experience of trauma. And I’m not talking, it has to be major trauma. It can be burnout, exhaustion, all of that leads to trauma. Being alive, as we talked about recently, being alive in 2020 during Covid was traumatic and it changed our nervous systems.

Jo:
Yep, absolutely. And we’re still seeing the outcomes of that now. We’re just starting to see the outcomes of that now. Now this has been a wonderful conversation and I’m sure the listeners are going to wanna put on repeat. I think we did pretty well curtailing our language by the way as well.

Natalie:
We did. I only used one and I thought I did ask permission.

Jo:
<Laugh> I think I possibly did it more than you. Anyway, I’m gonna sign off now. This is Jo Muirhead who has been with the fabulous Dr. Natalie Green today, and this is the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast. My challenge to you, dear listener today is I want you to go and think about these three things. Who can you bring into your world as a coach/mentor who gives you perspective on your personhood in your career? Who is that person that you are going to really learn to trust? What is a self-care activity that is going to ground you? For Nat, it’s going to the beach and having a coffee. For me, it’s walking around barefoot. What is something that you are going to return to time and time again and where are you gonna go and get your peer consultation or peer supervision from? You need to get that organised. Regardless of whether you’re a physical therapist, an occupational therapist, we all need this. If we are going to stay fit for purpose, to fulfil the passion and the dream that we had on our first day of university, which was I wanna help people. So until next episode, I’m Jo Muirhead. I’m looking forward to connecting with you all. Go forth, be awesome and I’ll be back soon.