From Symposium to Sabbatical: The Catalyst for Change – The Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast

In this solo episode of the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast, Jo shares what prompted her to take a sabbatical. 

In fact, Jo shares the presentation she was in the midst of giving during the 2023 Future-Proofing Health Professionals Symposium when she realised that she was not living in integrity and that things in her work and life had to change. 

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

Welcome to the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast. I am your host, Jo Muirhead, and today I wanted to refresh our memories or teach you or share with you the presentation and the keynote that I put together for the 2023 International Future Proofing Health Professional Symposium. 

If you remember from last week’s podcast episode, this is the presentation that made me glitch <laugh>, so to speak, and recognise that I was not living with integrity, I was not doing my job, and I was very confronted by that. So I am gonna take us through the presentation today. 

But before I get into my content, I wanna acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Country throughout Australia, particularly the land of the Darug people on which I find myself today. I pay my respects to their elders past, present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and First Nations people who may be listening or watching today.

Okay, so where did this start? So I was the last speaker at the 10 day symposium. It was an outstanding event. I was really excited to be the convener of this event. And the quality of people that we had turning up and the conversations that we were having were just outstanding. This type of peer led peer opportunity to share information with people is where it’s at. So we had this opportunity not only to share information, but also we were challenged to think differently. We were challenged by people all over the world with different voices, different points of view and we’ve heard about some things that really needed our attention. Particularly I remember the discussions that we had about working with our older people, discussions that we’ve had about cultural inclusion and discussions that we had around young people, and the use of digital technology or social spaces online. Some of that stuff still sticks with me today. And because we had this really great thing called the Cafe Conversation, we were able to take what we’d learned in a session and then automatically start applying it to our work and, and what we knew we needed to do differently.

So what are we gonna do? So I was at the end of this presentation and at the end of this symposium going, so what are we gonna do now? Right? We’ve got so many things to think about as health professionals. When we went to health professional school, we thought we had a lot to think about, but I dunno about you. Since I’ve graduated, computers are in my hand. I can work from an office or work from home or work from anywhere that has an internet connection. There are different types of issues being presented now. Mass shootings weren’t necessarily a big deal when I first started my work. We didn’t have the same level of political upheaval as what I feel like people are walking around with these days. So what do we do now that we’ve got this huge long list of to-dos?

So this is probably a big question that we ask every time we consume new information or every time we’re re-listening to information. So we’ve got this huge long list of to-dos that usually make us feel like we don’t wanna try anymore because they become overwhelming. And we can start to feel like nothing we do is ever gonna be enough to bring about the type of change that we wanna see. So then we can shrink back and start feeling powerless. And that’s a horrible place for us to be because as health professionals, we give a new found sense of life to people. We help people find their lives again, take back control of their lives again. So for us to be working in a way that makes us feel small or insignificant or like we’re not part, like nothing we do is ever gonna be good enough is, is actually a really big problem.

So creating a really long to-do list is not the answer. ‘Cause we are then left with feeling like we’re never gonna get it all done. But then maybe there’s some of us who have gone, oh, I can’t wait to get involved in this thing. And that this is me. I wanna become an ally for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people not really understanding what that means. I wanna make sure that everybody feels like they can participate in this. I wanna help everybody have a stage to speak. I wanna make sure that every health professional is providing client-centred, customisable treatment for people. So, but then, I get tired and wonder am I doing the right thing at the right time? What is the genuine use of me, my knowledge and my skills without spreading myself too thin?

We are also extremely good as health professionals at just collecting information. We are very, very good at collecting information. We’re very good at just popping it in our head in the filing system that we have in our head and leaving it there and not doing anything with it, which I get really disappointed about. And part of my biggest frustration is that I’ve been in my career as a rehabilitation counsellor for 30 years. And we are still talking about the biopsychosocial model of rehabilitation as if it is the newest, latest thing which it’s not. It’s been around for longer than I’ve been alive. And it just disappoints me that we’re not progressing some of these conversations and that’s okay ’cause we’re actually really busy doing the do. But I think if we don’t have these conversations and start thinking about the way we do our work and the impact of our work, then we’re gonna continue to experience the extremely high rates of burnout and people leaving the industry rather than just switching jobs or switching careers.

Then there is this whole, I’ll get to it one day approach to personal development, business development, CPD CEUs, which is quite fatalistic. It’s not very mature, I’m just gonna say that. And it just demonstrates the lack of intentional planning and intentional focus many of us are facing because we are just doing the do and we’re just running and running and running and running and running, and then you still haven’t had a chance to go to the toilet because we’re just running. But I wanna change that in this conversation. I am really about changing and giving us an opportunity to think about our behaviour because we know if we keep doing the same things that we’ve been doing, we’re gonna get the same result and we can all go, I’ve heard that so many times, Jo. But the problem is we actually don’t know how to do things any differently.

And we’ve got our safe ways of working, our safe ways of being that may not necessarily be serving us anymore, but they’re safe, they’re known, we don’t have to think about it. They’re in the filing system part of our brain. They’re not in the frontal lobe part of our brain. They’re not adding to the emotional load that we’re already carrying and all already feeling. So I’m hoping that by the end of this session today, this podcast that you’ll have a little bit of to-do ness, like the thing you need to do next, the thing you need to focus on next, the thing that penetrates through all the noise and you go, that’s the thing I wanna focus on for the rest of 2024 and maybe take into 2025. 

So I call this and I wanna start talking about us as health professionals as being fit for the future because the way I used to do my work has changed and the demands on me as a clinician have changed.

And I am watching the demands on other clinicians regardless of discipline change. So we need to start thinking about our evolving identity so that we can continue to meet the needs of those we serve because they’re coming to us with different issues or different ways of expressing issues. One of the most common of these is don’t misunderstand your Google search, Mr. Patient with my eight years of university training, to which many of us as patients will say, please don’t confuse your eight years of generalist training with the specificity of my specific knowledge around my needs. So they’re not conversations that I was having with clients when I first started as a health professional. I was seen as an expert. And I know we’ve talked about there’s been a lot of discussion about power dynamics between health professionals. Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are a lot of clients who don’t enjoy that power dynamic. They want a much more collaborative approach. They want an approach that allows them to feel like they’ve got choice and agency. And while we as health professionals say, this is a good idea, many of us don’t behave like it’s a good idea.

So how do we become fit for this future when the future constantly changes? We dunno what’s gonna be happening from one day to the next. And we’ve had so much social political geopolitical upheaval in the last three years. Cast your minds back to 2020. We have just had so much that we have cared to contend with, but I really don’t think we’ve given ourselves permission to kind of go, wow, what are my needs to make sure that I know what is needed from me to be able to serve the people I am best able to serve?

And one of those things is there is a poor definition of self-care. An incredibly poor definition of self-care being thrown around. It’s been weaponised. I’ve got some great speakers coming on this podcast series. I’ve got two in particular who are gonna be talking about how we can’t blame ourselves as individuals when we keep throwing ourselves back into toxic, unhealthy workplaces or ways of working. But a lot of the self-care that we are talking about is actually just genuine maintenance. It’s like if you were a tradesman, it’d be about keeping your tools clean. And I think we as health professionals might need something more than just keeping our tools clean. We need to actually work out what our tools are. We’ve got that coming up. But also, what level of care do these tools need to allow us to continue to function and provide services to the best of our ability?

So we’d all like to pretend that we can get paid a gazillion dollars for doing nothing, right? We all like those memes. We probably share them with friends, maybe even we share them on our own social media where it’s like, I just want somebody to wake me up with a cup of coffee and $10 million tomorrow just for nothing, just because I woke up today. But let me help you understand what worklessness actually does. Now, this research has been around for over 20 years. This is not new research. But let me help you understand what worklessness does because it could apply to you. It could apply to people in your world. It could apply to your clients. So when we are workless, there is a loss of self-esteem, standing and identity in the community. When we are workless, there’s a halt to material progress, social participation and fulfilment. When we are workless, there is an increased risk of physical and mental impairment. There is a direct correlation between people who are not at work and morbidity. There is a direct correlation between people who are not at work and mortality. People who are not at work are likely to die younger than those people who are at work. Now, that’s a very simplistic overview of all of this information, but that work actually gives us stuff. It actually gives us positive things. It’s actually a helpful thing for us to have in our world.

But there is unhealthy work. And I went to Google and Chat GPT to find out the top five unhealthy things about work. And I’m pretty sure that these are not gonna come across as a surprise. 

So number one is the high levels of stress. Chronic stress is a significant feature of an unhealthy work environment. Now, you might be saying, but I don’t go to a work environment. I’m self-employed, or I work for myself. But if you’re experiencing chronic stress, even as yourself in private practice, you’ve got high levels of stress in an unhealthy work environment. This is excessive workloads, tight deadlines, job insecurity, and a lack of support can contribute to elevated stress levels among employees. So I see a lot of clinicians in private practice who work on their own who often talk about excessive workloads. They talk about incredibly tight deadlines trying to fit clients in. They talk about job insecurity. What if I don’t have clients in the next month and they’re isolated? So is it any wonder that we as a collective are living with levels of stress that we probably haven’t even thought about? Because we perceive ourselves not to be going to work in an organisation where we know that high levels of stress tend to exist in agencies, right?

Number two, poor work life balance. Now, what I’m talking about here is when work demands encroach on personal time and boundaries. Now since Covid and all of us had the opportunity to work from home, a lot of us have gone. I love working from home. I love not having to commute. But what we possibly don’t realise is that work has now seeped its way or bled into every part of our lives. It’s at the dining room table, it’s in the kitchen, it’s in the toilet, it’s when you’re watching your kids play sports. We’ve gotten used to responding to emails and thinking about work or working on projects in the spare five minutes. And we call this flexibility because we are doing it when we can do it, or we’re doing it when we want to do it, but we’re trying to do it in balance with other things. And it never switches off. It never stops. And this inability to switch off from work, they’re poor boundaries and it leads to burnout and it can negatively affect our overall well being. We have legislation in Australia now that makes it illegal for employers to send emails and expect a response from an employee outside of their core working hours because it’s just been misused. And employers or organisations are being built around this incredible sense of urgency that gotta be done tomorrow, which I actually think is a throwback to all the anxiety that we were living with during the times of the lockdowns and Covid.

So, high levels of stress, poor work-life balance. What do you think number three is going to be? Well, it’s a lack of job security. Job insecurity such as the fear of layoffs, unstable employment conditions, not having enough clients coming into your business, not knowing when your highs and your lows are gonna come in your business. All of this can create a constant state of anxiety among employers and the owners of businesses. For those of us who lead organisations or have our own private practice businesses where we’re employing other people, our sense of responsibility around the job security of all the people we look after is huge. I’ve never not had that conversation turn up with a leader in a business. They are worried if I can’t make payroll, Jo, I have to lay people off. I don’t know what I’m gonna do to make payroll this month. Or people will go, I just don’t have enough clients coming to me all the time. I’m probably gonna have to go and get a second job. Those types of fears, this lack of job security increases the bucket of stress that we can cope with at any one time. 

Then we have the unfortunate thing of inadequate workforce support, this is number four. So any unhealthy work environment may lack adequate support systems for employees. So this includes insufficient access to mental health resources, employee assistance programs, safe channels for reporting harassment or discrimination. But it may also mean not being allowed to say, this interaction with this client has really upset me. It may be not having the ability to go, I’m really mad and resentful right now and I need to sort this out. It may all the things that used to kind of get done around the water cooler or the kitchen when we were in workplaces or where you had people kind of half listening into the conversations you were having. You know, I understand, before you all start having a go at me, about confidentiality. But there were ways back in the day where we were more supported just because of the proximity that we had to people. Now that doesn’t mean everybody needs to be sent back to work, although there’s growing research that says that that’s possibly healthy and financially smart. But it does mean we need to start looking at what types of support and how we help people access that support, including ourselves. ’cause what might be supportive for me is not gonna be supportive for you.

And the fifth one is limited opportunities for career growth, particularly with the younger generations coming through today. This is what they’re looking for. They will forego higher salaries to be given job security and opportunities for career growth. I’ve had three conversations with people about that in the last two weeks. So a stagnant work environment with few opportunities for career development, advancement can lead to frustration and then disengagement among employees. So if you’ve got a really flat management structure that’s great for your overhead costs, but it’s terrible for helping your team understand how they can progress in their career. So healthy workplaces typically provide avenues for skill development and career progression. So if you work on your own or if you’re in a business of one or a private practice of one, how are you creating avenues for skills development and career progression? Are you trying to do that? But then at the end of your reporting time, you’re going, oh, I just need my hundred hours of CPD or a thousand hours of CPD, what’s cheap and free and I’ll get it done on the weekend. Again, I think there’s responsibility that we can be taking here, which we can’t do if we’re not feeling great about our work. And especially if we don’t understand that we’re not feeling great because we’ve gotten so used to feeling the way that we feel.

So let me share with you now the types of ill health that I’m actually talking about. When those top five stressors or top five reasons that people are talking about not being healthy at work turn up, well, the first one is stress related disorders. So everyone can get out their DSM Five now and start looking at stress related disorders. We all know that chronic stress is a problem and this can come from excessive workloads or not a big enough workload from tight deadlines from a high pressure atmosphere. And we are talking about things here like anxiety, depression, burnout. And you’ll hear some of the guests in this podcast series talk about the stress related disorders that they ended up with because they didn’t understand this chronic stress that they were under all the time.

And you’ll hear me talk about it quite a lot where I actually say it’s like we’re a frog that’s been put in a cold in cold water, and then gradually the temperature gets turned up and the frog doesn’t realise that it’s boiling to death. It’s a pretty graphic image, but it’s one I can’t get rid of and the one that I see frequently. So we have stress related disorders, then we have physical health issues. So we all know that stress plays a really big role in how we experience pain or insomnia or cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, headaches, sleep disturbances, musculoskeletal disorders, repetitive strain injuries. So it’s not just that the stress is affecting our emotions and affecting our mental acuity, it’s also affecting us physically. And then we can actually lead to more significant mental health problems such as anxiety disorders, depression, post-traumatic stress, post-traumatic stress disorder. If we let the chronic stress go on long enough, it will progress to something else.

Number four, we end up with decreased immune function, making us more prone to sickness. It can weaken our immune system. And then we’ve got employees who are absent or we are absent, we can’t turn up when we need to turn up. And then we had to cancel all our clients for a day. So then we’re freaking out about the revenue for that. But that we’re also freaking out about where am I gonna fit those clients in again? And then we wonder why we are not getting any better. 

And then the fifth one, which is quite frightening, is substance abuse. So we see people talking about coffee. Me, I talk about coffee a lot. Some others are talking about alcohol. They’re talking about other drugs of addiction as a way to cope with stress and anxiety. Or if it’s not a drug, then maybe it’s some other way of getting that adrenaline rush to mask those symptoms of anxiety that we are living with. And substance abuse is a problem. It is a really big problem in our hospitals from the staff. 

So I’ve got a question now. 

Would you be willing to apply for a job where you knew that you had a high percentage of developing heart disease or diabetes or depression or PTSD or an autoimmune condition? I’m thinking not. I’m thinking if that actually went into the position description as the risks involved in this job, we’d even have less people wanting to be health professionals. 

So now I’m gonna talk into something called psychological safety. Psychological safety for those of us as health professionals and those of us who have health professional businesses, those of us who have private practices. 

This has had a lot of attention here in Australia over the past two years. We’ve got a new law that talks about workplaces needing to ensure that they have safe systems of work around psychological safety. And we can’t put the types of risk management measures into place as we could around a slip triple fall. These have different risk measures that we need to put in place here. But one of the things that’s really important for us to understand is that psychological safety is the number one predictor of high performance. So if you actually wanna be a high performer, not just a high achiever, which is a one and done, if you wanna be a high performer, then you need to be developing psychological safety for yourself. If you want a team of high performers, you need to be creating a culture of psychological safety.

So psychological safety includes the absence of interpersonal fear. And there was a study done by a lady called Amy Edmondson in 1999 who actually studied this. So it means that I am not scared to say I’ve got a problem. It means I’m not scared to say, where is the stapler? It means I’m not scared of how my super supervisor or superiors gonna react to me. It means that I’m not scared about how clients are going to treat me because I know someone’s got my back. I just heard a horrible story today about somebody who’d been working with a client who had an insurance company make a decision without acknowledging them. And that’s left the client in a terrible situation. But the client is now being quite inappropriate, aggressive to the point where I’ve suggested that maybe the police need to get involved. So interpersonal fear is about the people we work with, the people we report to, the people who report to us, and also the clients that we work with.

Psychological safety means that we can’t have a heavy workload, including over time that impacts our work-life balance or our perception of what we need to feel balanced, our perception of what we need to be doing outside of work. Psychological safety gets compromised when we have prolonged and repeated exposure to trauma. I had not understood the prolonged and repeated exposure to trauma because I’m not dealing with first responders in the first response to their issue. But I’ve been talking to first responders 20 years down the track and some of the stories I’ve had to hear and that I’ve listened to are awful. But it’s not just first responders. I work with a lot of people who have had catastrophic motor vehicle accidents. Some of those stories are traumatic. Some of the behaviours that were going on that caused those injuries are traumatic. They don’t all have to be about war and torture, but sometimes we’re hearing stories about war and torture. So the prolonged and repeated exposure to trauma or vicarious trauma is a big problem for us.

There’s exposure to occupational violence and aggression. I’ve just given you a story that I heard before I came on this to record this podcast today. Psychological safety is compromised when there is entrenched bullying or harassment within the workplace. If you’re moody or you come in on a Monday and you’re super happy, but by lunchtime you’ve read emails and now you’re grumpy and everyone’s walking around on eggshells. That’s not okay. We need to become better leaders than that. 

But it also means that we have to create work environments that weed out the bullying and harassment while encouraging and building a culture of strong performance. And for a lot of us who haven’t invested in leadership development and training for ourselves, we suck. We suck at this and it becomes overwhelming and it becomes too much. And I’m not calling anyone out here. This is an opportunity for development. And if we are going to create workplaces fit for the future, businesses fit for the future clients that receive services from health professionals who are fit for the future, then these are the things we need to be considering.

Psychological safety becomes compromised when we have an organisational culture where caring for others is prioritised above caring for the carers. And upon retrospect, I think this was one of my problems when I had my business within Purple Co. We were very big on caring for others at all costs. I don’t know how good I was at helping each of my team members feel cared for, but then I also compromised my own care in running that business at times. So when psychological safety becomes compromised, when there is an organisational culture where caring for others is prioritised above caring for the carers. So I had a boss many years ago who said something to me along the lines of, well, they’re a psychologist. Isn’t that what they’re trained to do? And I was horrified. We’d had a psychologist go into a large hotel, smack bang in the center of Sydney where there had been a suicide in that hotel. And she had gone in over a four day period where she was doing debrief meetings with pretty much anybody that was associated with that hotel that had like 300 staff. And she was asking for support and she was asking to have a day off. And she was asking if she could have some EAP. And unfortunately my director’s response to that was, well, isn’t that what she’s trained to do? Why would she need time off? That’s unhelpful. And I’m hoping that that lesson got learned. And I felt really awkward in that situation ’cause I could see how much she was hurting. I could see the damage we were potentially doing to her, but I didn’t know how to resource her any differently.

And psychological safety becomes compromised when there’s poor communication or a lack of appropriate work support systems. Now a system might mean a function. I mean, how many of us get frustrated when our EHR goes down? We can’t use it when we wanna use it or the internet goes down when we can’t use it. But if you’ve got repeated problems with software and repeated problems with technology, then you as a business owner or you as the practitioner probably need to do something about that. But then if you have an organisation where you don’t even feel like it’s safe to go and ask for an updated piece of technology or ask for an updated piece of machinery, then you’ve got even more psychological safety being compromised here right now. So when health professionals don’t feel safe, they will choose behaviours that contribute to making them feel safe. Let me say that again. When health professionals don’t feel safe, they will choose behaviours that contribute to making them feel safe. And often these are met with really difficult consequences. 

So let’s talk about what gets in the way of creating psychological safety. 

Well the first one I’m gonna talk about is the actual health structures in which we find ourselves working. Some of these systems and processes that are bigger than an individual and bigger than a private practice, some of those are quite demeaning. Some of those feel like you’re banging your head against a brick wall. Many of us choose to leave them and not provide services. Those health structures that are always compromised by bureaucracy, not enough resources. If we’re still trying to provide the best of our ability in that environment and we’re compromised all the time, we are going to and we are compromised all the time, we are going to find that our psychological safety is being compromised.

What else gets in the way? Not being able to speak up without fear. I have heard many leaders say they can always come and speak to me, but then they live behind a closed door or they only respond via email. Not being able to have a frank and open discussion with the people you work with makes psychological safety really difficult. Psychological safety gets messed up when there is a poor work life separation and we feel like we’re always working. That was certainly true for me when I was managing a team, doing all the content writing, doing all the operational planning, managing my own caseload, managing my own clients. I was always on. I couldn’t put my phone down without having to scroll through things and work out what I was gonna post next. And it became relentless and I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without feeling like, oh, that’d be a great piece of content. And it’s taken me pretty much most of 2024 to be able to go. Not everything needs to be content because I dunno if it’s strategic and I dunno if it’s gonna speak to my people. So when we have poor work life separation where we feel like we’re always working or we feel the emotional load of our work all the time, then our psychological safety is compromised.

The other thing that gets in the way, which doesn’t get talked about a lot in terms of our psychological safety, is our reputation management. Particularly online. And we live in the day of Google reviews or Yelp reviews. We know that clients or past employees can anonymously put things up on a Google profile that are really unhelpful and quite often inaccurate or just plain untrue lying. So managing our reputations is an incredibly big part of our own psychological safety. People speaking smack about us without even knowing us. We get really caught up in trying to protect our reputation and we can sometimes get so fixated on it that we start legal proceedings and that might be right, but then we’re stuck in this horrendous system of blame and shame and guilt and we need safety mechanisms to help us come out of that. Now I’m not saying that we shouldn’t pursue any people who have wronged us, but I’m just saying trying to do it on our own without somebody to help us with perspective, that’s a really big ask.

Our psychological safety can be compromised when we identify the need for skills other than clinical skills, but we don’t have access to them. So this could be digital literacy, IT literacy, it could be techniques to help people heal. It could be leadership development. It could be how do we market and promote, how do we resell, what are we gonna do to help address the rate of cancellations? And no-shows. These are all skills that are adjacent to clinical skills, but not necessarily our specific clinical skills. But if we don’t feel like we’ve got the knowledge and skills to be able to do our job, we will constantly second guess ourselves and our psychological safety is going to be compromised. 

Unmanageable workloads always compromise our psychological safety. Yes, we can do it for a little while, but unfortunately what I see happen is if you cope with that for a month, you get excited by the revenue that you bring in. So then it becomes your normal. And it shouldn’t be that way.

Poor financial literacy, how many people will set a budget for their business but have no budget for their life? So how do you know what your business needs to do for you? If you don’t understand how money works in private practice or any business enterprise these days, then you’re going to always have this level of am I earning enough? Am I doing enough? And if you don’t know those numbers and you don’t have a mechanism for working towards those numbers, you are always going to feel like you are missing your budget benchmark, but you actually don’t have one. It’s just some nebulous number out there that you haven’t really thought about. When I do this exercise with many of my clients, we’re actually quite surprised at how much they need to live comfortably. And it’s never usually as much as what they think it needs to be. And that includes adding for retirement. 

So what could a way of working that supports our overall health actually look like? Well, this is where I want us to start preparing for the future. So I’m gonna talk about competence, capability, and capacity ’cause we can’t really start with the to-do list. It actually starts with us and learning who we are. So who do we need to be to do what we need to do to have what we want to have? Not what do we wanna have? And then how do I quickly try and get there to the fastest of my ability? And then how am I gonna turn up every day and just grip my teeth and bear it until it gets done? No, no, no, no. We need to flip this conversation on its head. The Gen Xers in the room are gonna struggle with this because we are the productivity experts. We are the ones out there working hard, working hard, working hard, working hard. ‘Cause It’s what we were taught and it’s how we were affirmed. But our hard work has made us unwell and our younger generations coming through are going, I’m not doing what you did. And I really do think that some of our younger generations coming through understand who they are because we’ve given them the psychological safety to be able to explore that so they know who they are and they know what they wanna have. They just haven’t quite worked out what it is that they need to do in between yet. We as older generations, we know what we wanna have and we know what we wanna do. We just haven’t worked out how we need to be to bring those things to fruition. But it starts with us. 

And there’s such a lack of self-awareness by health professionals. Everywhere I go, including myself, that has been the work of 2023 into 2024, is understanding that my stoic health professional face has pushed down who I really am, what I really want, and what I’m prepared to give up to have the types of things in my life that I wanna have. So if this starts with us, we need to rethink what our tools of our trade are. Because like I said earlier, we are engaging in maintenance activities thinking that they’re self-care. And I think it has to be a bigger conversation than that. And I also don’t really think we understand what are our genuine tools of our trade. So when I talk about tools of the trade, I want you to think about the carpenter who looks after his tools. At the end of the day, what are the tools that a carpenter has? Well, he’s gonna have a ladder and he needs to make sure the ladder’s stable. He’s gonna have some sores. He needs to make sure that they’re safe, he’s gonna have a hammer. We need to make sure that that’s in good working order. Otherwise, they could fall, they could get electrocuted, they could cut off an arm. 

So let me examine with you now the tools of our trade. We think it’s a chair, we think it’s a computer, we think it’s a screen, we think it’s a medical record or an EHR. We think it’s a way of getting paid. We think it’s education, training and credentials. That’s what we think the tools are. They’re the things that we think of when we go, what are the things I can’t do my work without? They’re very functional. That’s very superficial. That’s not gonna be enough to help you remain fit for the future.

So what are the genuine tools of our trade? Well, it’s our brain, our executive function, our emotions, our health, our energy levels, our finance, our self-care, our community and our commitment to lifelong learning. These are the tools of our trade that we need to keep in tip top shape to enable us to keep performing at the extremely high levels that we have known have come to expect from ourselves. But if we’re focused on the chair thinking that the chair is gonna be the answer to all of our problems, when really it’s your brain and executive functions because you’re so tired, then the chair’s not gonna fix that. You are isolated and starting to not have people to reach out to or don’t know where you can go without feeling compromised or harassed or at risk of being told that you’re foolish. Then you need to find a different community.

You need to find different ways of being able to engage with your peers and learn from others and learn how others are doing this. It’s why this whole podcast series exists. So we can start progressing these conversations away from which chair should I choose? How am I gonna look after my health in this new season of my life? So being fit for our future means that we are resilient. But you need to understand as health professionals what resilience actually means. So we’re gonna talk about that some more. Any podcast I’ve ever done with Kylie Worry. There are conversations around resilience. So go and search those in the Entrepreneurial Clinician podcast because you wanna be listening to what resilience really is. What does it mean for you to be resilient? Because it doesn’t mean life without difficulties, that’s not what it means.

So being fit for the future means that we are resilient and that we operate from our core strengths. It doesn’t mean that we only get to do things that we love, but we are operating from a place of our core strengths. I should not be doing any proofreading for typos. It is not a core strength. Have you noticed that I should not be doing anything that requires a lot of focused attention to details because it depletes me of energy in no time flat? It’s not a core strength.

Fit for the future means that we are resilient, that we operate from our core strengths and we have necessary support. This could be supervision, this could be therapy, coaching, mentoring, instruction. But actually it should mean all of those things. If we get really down to it, we all need some sort of supervision, peer consultation. We should probably all should be in some type of therapy, all participating in coaching or participating in mentoring and instruction. We gotta keep learning. Now, you might not do all of those things at once, but there are seasons and times when all of those things are relevant and necessary. And therapy for those of you working with in the physical modalities as well; don’t think that you don’t need some therapy if you are struggling to keep your clients engaged. If you are struggling with how you are coping when you get home from work, you need to be talking to somebody about this and having a safe place to be able to express what’s exactly going on for you. 

Being fit for the future means we are resilient. We operate from our core strengths, we have necessary supports and we learn to trust that we can work it whatever it is out.

Now, if I had told you back in 2019 that we were gonna have two years where you didn’t know if you could go to work, where you didn’t know if the people around you were going to try and kill you with a disease, where you didn’t know what your kids were gonna be doing for school, you would’ve freaked out. Now, we did have a community global freak out. Good on us. We should have, but we worked it out. I would suggest that we are still paying for the working of it out now, but we didn’t know what we didn’t know, right? But we trust that we can work it out. Isn’t that something we tend to say to most clients? Just trust the process, trust the process, trust the process, trust the process. I’m inviting you to understand that you don’t need to have it all worked out. You just need to trust that you can work it out. 

Being fit for the future means we are resilient. That we operate from our core strengths, that we have necessary supports. We trust that we can work it out. And it means that we learn how to create a way of working that is good for us, for you, for me, for all of us. But let’s take responsibility for ourselves first. Some of you are gonna be confronted by this today and think my workplace is not healthy for me, or I’ve created an unhealthy workplace. I really need to start taking some of this seriously. I know it’s confronting, but if we don’t start having some confrontational discussions, then we are not gonna progress and we’re not going to be able to create the type of change that we wanna see. And all we’re gonna do is end up teaching health professionals that the only thing they’ve got to look forward to is burnout, stress disorders, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and who wants to join that type of profession.

So the success steps that I want you to take away with you today is number one, you need to identify a way of working that nourishes you. Now, that might be different from five years ago, it might be different in five years time, but that’s your responsibility. Yes, there are people around who can help you, but that’s your responsibility, the first thing. And then we need to learn how to connect with the people who need us because your spray and pray marketing thing isn’t working and it’s actually adding to your psychological stress. And then we need to learn how to become our own risk managers, where we’re asking what is the risk here? What controls can be put into place? And how will I choose to approach this risk? It’s a really, really powerful way for us to start thinking about our longevity in this system.

So I’m curious to know from you today, listener or observer, what of those success steps are you going to put into place? How are you gonna start investigating the way to create a way of working that nourishes you? How to connect with the people who need you? And what is it that you wanna start identifying in terms of your own risks to your own psychological health or physical health? Because it may have progressed that far. 

So this was the presentation that kind of undid me because I actually presented this with an excruciating migraine and I had an excruciating migraine for the 10 days of the Symposium. So I think now you can understand and see why I had to rush through the end of this presentation during the Symposium, because I had been confronted by my own behaviours. Having somebody who is so unwell as the primary income earner for my team was not a smart business decision. Not having the health or the psychological resources to be able to delegate effectively was a problem for my business. And it’s been a problem for me being able to heal because the weight and the emotional load of the work wasn’t changing, even though the tasks associated with my work were changing. 

So I trust that you have been able to hear my intention here today, that you have been able to go wow, Jo, you’ve given me a lot to think about here. So I invite you now to come into the Future Proofing Health Professionals Facebook community so we can have some real and honest discussions about this and start to figure out in a safe way how we are going to become fit for the future. 

So that brings me to the end of this podcast episode today. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen, and I look forward to being back with you in our next podcast episode. So until the next time, go be your flawsome self.