How to Double Your Capacity to Earn - With Valerie Ling

HOW TO DOUBLE YOUR CAPACITY TO EARN – WITH VALERIE LING

It’s easy to talk about wellness but hard to implement when you’re a busy health professional. So in this episode, Jo is joined by Clinical Psychologist and business and leadership coach, Valerie Ling. Valerie’s focus is helping people optimise their wellbeing and reduce burnout so they can optimise how they serve and lead others in their health practices and business.

Jo and Valerie discuss:

The importance of having your wellness mapped out via what Valerie calls her ‘wellbeing disciplines’ that are ‘non-negotiables’ in her work and life,
Why it is your responsibility and duty as a health professional to prioritise your wellbeing,
The importance of pausing in your life and how to implement your wellness disciplines with your team, and
The ROI on wellness and how it improves your effectiveness and your ability to earn.

Jo and Valerie are hosting a 3 day Health Practitioner’s Retreat in the Blue Mountains from Thursday 27 April to Saturday 29 April 2023. You can find out more and book your spot here.

You can find Valerie Ling via her website at https://www.valerieling.com/

Other resources mentioned in this episode:

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

TRANSCRIPT:

Jo: Excellent, and welcome to another episode of The Entrepreneurial Clinician. I am Jo Muirhead sitting here with my second double shot macchiato on almond milk for the day. So I may need some encouragement from my guest today to slow my speech down. This is going to be a fantastic episode because today I am joined by Valerie Ling, who has been working in the space of burnout for much longer than me <laugh>. She has some incredible wisdom, not just from what she has observed, but from what she has lived, and we know that burnout is at epidemic proportions amongst health professionals of any discipline. And I invited Valerie to come along and talk to us today because she’s going to provide us some really useful insights and practical applications. So, sit back or take some notes, unless you’re driving, don’t do that. And I’m gonna let Val now introduce herself to you. Take it away.

Valerie: Hey, Jo, I myself am having a regular coffee with almond milk as well, so cheers to you. <laugh>. I’m Valerie. I’m a clinical psychologist and I’m a business and leadership coach. And basically I’m all about helping people to optimise their wellbeing and reduce burnout while they’re actually optimising the way that they serve and lead others in their health practices and businesses.

Jo: You sound like you’ve been able to say that many, many times. It was very, very well polished. Thank you.

Valerie: That is my homework for myself. Yeah.

Jo: Optimising wellbeing. I mean, how many health professionals have heard that and gone, this doesn’t apply to me, or they’ve gone, or, that’s too hard or they’ve gone, that’s a nice to have. How did you get into the space of optimising wellbeing? Tell us that history.

Valerie: There’s a story to this. And it surprised me actually, and it came from my work with our very good friend, but your very good friend, Nicola Moras. And I actually discovered that my primary motivation is I don’t wanna leave a messed up world to my children and to children in general. I found myself one day really looking at my kids who are growing up into young adults going, we’ve made a mess of this world. Not only that, but we’re now showing them that we’re too messed up to fix it. <laugh> Too tired and too exhausted. And so here you go, do the best that you can. Now, to me, that really burdened me because not only were we saying to them it’s a messed up world, but we were also modelling that it was too hard for us to level up and, and to take care of the problem by taking care of ourselves. No role modelling. What are we gonna leave a legacy of powerlessness, helplessness, and hopelessness. And when I discovered that, I was like not on my watch. And I’m gonna bring as many health professionals and leaders as I can on that journey. Yeah. Well that’s really my primary motivation.

Jo: Oh no, I get that. It’s just not often that I’m speechless, but you’ve done it to me again. So I’m just like, boom, if you didn’t get the gold nuggets in that we have, we are leaving our children and possibly our grandchildren a messed up world that we have to take some responsibility for. The way that we have done that is with some fairly poor role modelling and then we’re just handing it to them going, now you guys get to fix it. We actually dunno what tools and resources you need to fix it. Please go and sort that out.

Valerie: Mm-hmm.

Jo: Oh my gosh. Is it any wonder that people don’t like Gen Xs?

Valerie: <laugh> Yeah. Until I saw my kids, right? Yeah. They’re now the Gen Z that I would say all those things about. And I’m like, oh, but you guys are great. Yes. Oh, you just dunno how, I’ve gotta show you how.

Jo: Yeah. And, and in our inability to role model how we look after ourselves, we’re actually creating generations of powerlessness. I actually found that statement incredibly confronting. And we’re gonna unpack that a little bit more, but before we start doing that, Valerie, quite a contentious question. Can you tell us what a clinical psychologist is? Because we’ve got people listening from all over the world. What does it mean?

Valerie: I just say that clinical psychologist is a title that in Australia has more legal meaning that it really needs to have. But a clinical psychologist is a psychologist. We essentially work with our clients in the range of illness, mental illnesses for the assessment, the diagnosis, and the treatment of mental illness. That’s pretty much what it is.

Jo: Great. I love the simplicity of that as well, because we can here in Australia get very caught up in demarcation and I’m not about that at all, because let’s face it, we just don’t have enough talent here in Australia to meet the need. So why should we argue about who is the best person to do that? Anyhoo, not the purpose of this episode today. So if we’re going to be talking about wellness and we’re going to be talking about health professionals, particularly leadership, health professionals in leadership, and then need to role model wellness, how did this become apart from looking at your family and looking at your children, which is quite a confronting thing for me to have experienced just then, but how’s that turned up for you? Have you experienced periods of time where you’ve gone maybe not the healthiest I could be <laugh>?

Valerie: Yeah, so I often say that burnout knocks on my door every day because I’m a psychologist, I’m a mum, I’m also a ministry wife which basically means that my husband has been in and out of being a pastor. And so for me, my reality is that resource depletion happens every day. It leaks from my pores <laugh>. So there was a period of time, particularly when I was living overseas and I had kids under age of five and I was a psychologist and I was a ministry wife and I was living away from friends and family. And there’s a photo of me that horrifies me till today because it’s a picture of me with my kids and my husband and I’m smiling. And the Valerie in that photo thought she was okay, but when you look at me, I’m run rugged. I’ve bags under my eyes, my skin is paper thin, I’m so tired.

Valerie: And the me looking at that photo goes, you didn’t even know. And not long after that, a series of grief and losses, I had a miscarriage. My best friend whom I was visiting in Australia, she says, we need to get you back. You need to get out of this, this needs to stop. And it was only because she said that, that I remember we walked out to the stars and we prayed and we said, God, please get me out <laugh>. And that was how my journey started, recognising that I didn’t know I had this limit. I didn’t even see it for myself. Somebody else had to tell me and somebody else had to actually name it and say, you need to get out. We need to get you out.

Jo: So we hear quite a lot of stories of people who have these almost come to Jesus moments, <laugh> from their burnout experience, where it’s like they didn’t recognise it, they let it go on in, in retrospect, they let it go on for so long. Can you see that? Like, is that the only way we get to experience burnout? It just gets to the point where we’re almost disabled by it. Is that what we have to do to recover?

Valerie: If you don’t have your wellbeing awareness mapped out, generally that’s what happens. Because I can tell you that I’m in the burnout grip now, right? I call it like dancing for the fairies. If you ever read these young adult fiction books, when you have fairy juice or whatever, you dance and you dance and you dance until you literally die. I’m like that at the moment. Because I’m finishing a research project and I am working in flow, excessive flow. I’m hyper focused. I dunno whether I need to go to the toilet, whether I’m eating <laugh>. So I’m in it now if I didn’t have my wellbeing disciplines, but just happen, right? They happen because they’re a discipline. I tell myself, you must do this. There would be nothing to counter my dance with the fairies <laugh>. So I would just run myself to the ground. But because I have these disciplines and I pull back and I retreat and I reflect, and I do all these things, it’s circuit breaks that destructive pattern, if that makes sense.

Jo: Well it makes sense to me because I do something very similar and I even use the phrase circuit breaker <laugh>. So I love your dance with the fairies because that’s possibly nicer visualisation than what I give myself. But the things that you’ve really spoken into very succinctly there is we’ve gotta have our wellness mapped out. We’ve actually gotta understand the role that wellness plays in our ability to execute, not just our work, but our life. And you have put into place some wellbeing disciplines. And these are things that you do, we’ll get to that in a minute, but these are things that are non-negotiables. These are things that I need to do to keep myself being able to do the things that I say that I want to do. Is that correct?

Valerie: I see it as my responsibility, almost my duty, that I would be negligent as a parent, as a leader, as a health professional if I didn’t have those things going.

Jo: Ooh, you’ve touched on something that I have brought up before, which is, are we being negligent? If we turn up to clients and we actually can’t give them what they need? What are we missing? What are we not seeing? Are we putting them in a position of harm? And I think for health professionals, it’s a very, very serious question. And it terrifies me when I hear of registrars doing 80 hour shifts in a hospital and 36 hours back to back. I’m like, please don’t put a sharp object in me if you haven’t slept for three days. <laugh>.

Valerie: So here’s the thing, Jo. I think you’re spot on. So when you’re a medical professional or when you have physical contact or there is actual observable detriment to the patient, this becomes like top priority in trying to think about it. You know, people will die if we don’t take care of ourselves. Now if you’re a mental health professional or a health professional that deals with the software of people, it’s harder to detect. And so you can kind of feel like, I’ll be okay, I’ll be okay. I’m still doing good work. But actually things like the quality of the treatment plans that we’re designing, the length of time we’re keeping people in, the strength of a voice of advocacy when we’re writing reports or when we’re having the phone call with that case manager, they’re all things that will most definitely decrease in quality. So while we may not be able to say, nobody died on my watch, or nothing really bad happened. Really? Really? I think if we actually really drilled down to the quality of our advocacy, the quality of our treatment plans and the quality of our connections, we could probably do better if we took care of ourselves.

Jo: Well, they go hand in hand and there’s enough research being done now for a long period of time that says the health of an allied health professional directly correlates to the clinical outcomes they achieve.

Valerie: Exactly. But we don’t see it. That’s why we convince ourselves that it’s right. That it’s all going, we’re okay, we’re ok, nothing’s going wrong. So we don’t see it. And this will lead to one of my big practices, which is why I feel one of the disciplines and responsibilities is to retreat and reflect.

Jo: And that was gonna be my next question. But before I get to that, I think there’s a really big point that you brought up there. I am hearing health business leaders talk about early discharge or inappropriate discharge of clients. Because one of the things I talk to them about is what are your retention rates like? How do you know you’re actually doing the things that you as a business you set yourself up to do? Because we are in the business of taking care of people and helping people learn how to take care of themselves. And invariably when I start talking to business owners about that, they are terrified, horrified, gobsmacked about how people get lost, how people are not contacted, how phone calls aren’t returned. And I’m like, you’re gonna be on this. This is actually…in my way I would use, use the word negligent. Like you’re actually setting yourself up for some really big problems here. Not to mention the distress you’re causing the person who has been vulnerable enough to reach out and ask for help.

So talk to us now about your wellbeing disciplines. Now you mentioned taking time away and retreating, but I’m assuming there are others as well. What are yours?

Valerie: Yeah, so they’re pretty much six R’s that I cycle in and out of. They’re always at the top of my mind. Most of us I think will have more we need to keep an eye on than others. I’ll tell you what those are for me. But broadly speaking, the first non-negotiable R is replenish. It doesn’t matter whether you like this one or not, you’ve gotta replenish. And replenish has got to do with your sleep and your eating, and your exercise, the functions that we know goes with wellbeing, mental health, as well as physical wellbeing. So there’s replenish. There’s reconnect. Reconnect has got to do with relationships. So they go from your significant relationships, your fun relationships, your family relationships, all the way down to your professional relationships, whether you have a mentor, a coach, supervision as well as do you need to have a health professional in your world. So, that’s the reconnect. Resource has got to do with the way that we do our work. Are we doing it in a way that is resource replenishing or resource depleting? Some of that has got to do with levels of perfection. Optimising the way that we do jobs, being able to delegate that sort of a thing. Restore. Restore has got to do with – and it goes with the next R, which is reflect – restore has got to do with regularly returning to the purpose of why you do what you do. Returning to the point of story of why you chose to be a health professional, restoring all of the gratitude’s and the celebrations, and really just remembering the reason why you do what you do, and assuring that you continue to remain aligned to that. So that’s restore, which is related to reflect and reflect has got to do with needing to regularly pull back and think on your thinking and just absorb what stuff is coming at you, what are you thinking, what are you feeling? What’s life like for you? How are you even feeling in your body? What’s going on? So that’s reflect. The next one….I always leave out six. It’s like my memory can only hold five. So what did I just give you? Replenish.

Jo: Reconnect.

Valerie: Oh, rest. Rest. Oh my gosh. No, that is a Freudian slip because this is the one that we all are bad at.

Jo: So there’s too much fairy dancing going on today for the resting to occur. Fairies are going haven’t got time for that. Haven’t got time for that. I can see how that works. So talk to us about rest.

Valerie: I differentiate rest and sleep because I think sleep is part of a function that you must do. So rest for me are really they’re pit stops, Jo. So I talk about soft rest and hard rest. Hard rest is your all-stop in the year, whether it’s your annual leave, your quarterly breaks, so it’s when you clock off from work a hundred percent. No phone, no email, you are just having a break. And then soft rest are your rest patterns that you do daily. I call them the dailys and the weeklys. So every day, how do you bring your mind and body to a rest every week? Where is that point where you shed your professional clothes and you put on your Jo clothes and you go, I’m having a break. And I like to say that the rest has to go in first in your diaries planned <laugh>. And that’s what I do with my team. Every person goes through their rest diaries with me, and then as a team, we figure out how we can help one another to get to those pit stops. Yeah. So those are my six odds. Now, I particularly am bad on three.

Jo: Okay. Which three?

Valerie: Reflect <laugh> Replenish, I’m very bad at. And the reconnect.

Jo: Ah.

Valerie: And my closest friend and my friend and executive assistant, that will be one of the first things she’ll say to me. Have you done replenish yet? Have you done this yet? What can we do in your diary to give you those at the moment?

Jo: Well this is such a powerful model and I’m sitting there trying to assess my own here. <laugh> I must admit it took a cancer diagnosis for me to actually put rest and actually understand genuine rest, even though I’ve been teaching about it since 2012. Funny about that. I love the resource, the way we do our work. That’s my passion. I wanna help every single one of us keep doing this work with longevity. And in Australia at the moment, we have a whole drive towards psychological safety. And that’s a topic I wanna talk about on my podcast, but I’m hearing these R’s in a workplace setting, and you’ve already started talking about it. It’s like, this is how we can keep ourselves psychologically safe in a workplace. And the fact that you sit down with your team and you go, so how are we doing with this guys? And how can we help each other with it? That’s incredibly empowering for your team.

Valerie: Yeah. Actually you are right, because the R’s circulate through the practice. So the pause and reflect in our diaries as well. I love when I see Chris, my practice manager, she’s got the big reflect in her diary, which means she’ll take a whole day, in work hours to actually reflect. And we call it pause. Cause pause is my weakness. Chris just did this to me this week. She said, pause. And I’m like, but, but, but, but….

Jo: <laugh>. Wow. That’s so empowering. So you’ve created this common language inside of your business as well, where it’s not about, you don’t have to feel sick to legitimately take time off which was what I grew up with. It’s so now this is an expectation for you to be at your optimal performance, I need to know that these six R’s are occurring.

Valerie: That’s it.

Jo: Whoa. There is so much for every health business leader in this. We will be putting links to Valerie’s stuff so that you can actually learn about her optimising wellbeing. Because if we don’t learn about this, we’re setting ourselves up to fail. I mean, that’s the bottom line, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve talked about burnout being on your door. I’ve been the burnout queen before. I can’t create great outcomes for clients or serve my team members or serve my family if I’m constantly burning out. I just can’t. It’s like trying to relaunch a jet. It just doesn’t work.

Valerie: I often say this, you can go to Costco and buy a coffin. Yes. But you can’t go to Costco and buy a new body or a brain. Oh. And it’s gonna be one or the other. Sorry guys. That’s right.

Jo: That’s fairly confronting!

Valerie: So you’re gonna have to accept that there are finite resources that we have and we are the ones that have got to watch over it. Really.

Jo: Yeah. No, that whole concept of what, what I refer to as stewardship around. It’s not just about money. It’s about who I am as a person and the gifts that I’ve got and the passions that have been put inside of me. Because my passions are different to yours. Which are different to your children’s, which are different to our husbands, even though both of our husbands have been in ministry before. So when do you take time away? Like how do you take time away from your business? Because I’m assuming that turns up somewhere in these R’s. Like you can’t do these six Rs on the job all the time. Would that be correct?

Valerie: Yeah, in a hundred percent. So it’s in my diary every year. So Kathy, who’s my executive assistant, will put my leave in first. And it generally never changes because I have a pattern and encouraged the team to think the same way. I have a team with psychologists to think about when they’re gonna need that rest, the all-stop. And usually for me, my diary as a leader is different from their diaries as health practitioners. When I need rest is different. So that goes first into my diary. Then I have my quarterly retreats, which I’ve booked in which I’m due for one. And everything in my whole body and mind knows, I can almost feel it, like it’s this weird sensation of I can hear my body saying, Valerie, Valerie, Valerie. And I’m like, it’s coming. It’s coming guys. It’s coming.

So that goes into the diary as well. I know every quarter when I take it because it gives me the best reflective power when I do it at those times. And now I also have a Monday off as well for me, which many of my coaching clients feel guilty taking a weekday off. I said, no, you’re actually working. That’s an example of soft rest. So you’re not actually uncontactable, but you are pulling away to actually do a weekly reset, recharge, reflect, replenish all your R’s ready for your team actually. So I do that as well. So it’s in the diary.

You’ll know that I have this weird reconnect formula. I have to because reconnect is one I’m bad at it. So I actually also have to make sure that I make appointments with friends, like people that I would like to see.

Jo: Really powerful. So what I’m loving hearing here is as the leader in your business where everything rises and falls on your leadership, right? So we often health professionals have learned to put everybody else first. But what you are saying is your annual leave, your vacation time, your quarterly retreat time that goes in the business calendar first. And essentially the business needs to function around your needs for that rest and replenishment. That’s incredibly empowering because most business owners aren’t doing that.

Valerie: I see it as my job, Jo. Otherwise I don’t show up for them. The quality of my thoughts and decisions that I make to serve them and to serve our clients will be very compromised. And in the same way my team has the same sort of rhythms in their patterns. So we have our workplace like okay, this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, right? So you’re gonna hear it now, I don’t like the rubber band approach to taking leave. I’m not coping, I’m not doing okay. I think I need to take leave. No, I don’t like that. I much prefer to go with let’s have workplace flexibility based on a need for reflection and you’ve recognised that there’s too much noise, that there is some energy conservation that you need that would be better served if you didn’t come to work today. So our team also has the ability therefore to have days where they just email me and say, Valerie, I actually think I need a full focus day today. Can I work from home? And I’d be like, yeah, totally get it. Go for it. So it’s got to do more with that. Looking at what you need to reflect and to focus and our early careers actually need to put reflection time in their diary.

Jo: Oh hell yes. Before the Covid era, one of the big challenges when I was speaking to anyone in leadership was when I’d ask them, what do you need more time to do? And they would say, think. I need more time to think. And that’s the same as this reflection piece. But I wanna come back to something here because I can imagine there’d be health professional leaders listening to this going, well that’s all well and good, but how does this affect your bottom line? If you’re giving all these people this flexibility to not work and not turn up? How have you even got a business? Do you have a business? Is your business profitable? What sort of money are you making now without you disclosing your dollars and cents to us? Does this affect your bottom line? Has it helped improve it?

Valerie: Yeah, it doubles my effectiveness for every hour I give so I learn more money and my team earn more money because they actually have more mental capacity to hold that client and think why did they cancel? They have more positive mindset, and courage and conviction to say, I’ll call that client. They don’t avoid. They don’t numb what they’re feeling to hold the experience of the client. So I see it as I actually used stewardship of resources as well, Jo so high five. So I actually think that it actually multiplies resources, it’s like when you’re a service professional, what is the product? Well, you. I can’t go make more of me. This is it!

Jo: Yep, absolutely.

Valerie: Revenue is tagged to the resource, which is you. So when the quality of the resource is excellent and exquisite and optimised and efficient, you gonna give a better service. You gonna retain more clients, you gonna earn more income. And so therefore you gotta take care of the resource – you <laugh>.

Jo: So this is fascinating because you were so adamant that yeah, it doubles my effectiveness, therefore it doubles my ability to earn. Because it’s been such a difficult conversation for people to go, well, all this preventative wellness stuff, where’s the return on investment? It’s like a nice to have, it’s a discretionary spend. It’s the thing we do when we’ve met our KPIs. What you are saying is what most of us intuitively know but don’t know how to do, which is hang on a minute, you’ve actually gotta improve your effectiveness, not efficiency, improve your effectiveness first so that you can actually go and earn more or create more or deliver more. Or do the thing that you’ve said that you wanna do. Have I got that right?

Valerie: Yeah. And the reason why I’m passionate about actually working in the leadership space is that effectiveness changes from when you’re a practitioner to the leader. So my primary aim for my clinicians in terms of their effectiveness is strengthening their ability as a psychologist to attune and to empathise and to think clearly about treatment plans and holding their clients in. Right? So I need to release space and energy and resources and conversation and dialogue for that as well as, and this is my job, my effectiveness as a leader, quite apart from overseeing the operations of our business and optimising it, is to be creative in the decision making, problem solving, strategic thinking. That’s my job. If I don’t rest, recover, reflect, replenish, and do all of those things, the quality of what I do effectively as a business leader is significantly reduced. Because all the research, as you would know when it comes to creative thinking, decision making requires optimal brain, mind, spirit, everything. Now, if I do that well as a leader, what I bring back to my team is meaning purpose, work, engagement beyond seeing their client, they’re now connected to something bigger. So as an example, during the Covid pandemic, we were not burnt out. I can say that confidently because we kept a tab on our whole team. What we did was we actually took time to create and innovate and serve even harder, right? So when the leader does this, we can come back and we can say, guys, I’ve really been thinking about what you’ve been saying to me. Let’s have a think tank and let’s see how we can actually figure out some ways around this. That’s leadership, right? So it’s really important.

Jo: That’s very, very cool. You are modelling something here that is so necessary and I encourage anybody listening to this today to go back, find the show notes, join the Future Proofing Health Professionals Facebook group because Valerie’s a part of it. Ask her questions, she’s in there, she loves answering questions as you’ve noticed from this episode today. I think this is a conversation that we need to progress. This is how we’re actually gonna stop having the questions that we’ve been having for the last 20, 30 years is this type of conversation. So Val, we are so passionate about this, we’re actually doing something about it. Am I correct?

Valerie: We are indeed.

Jo: Yeah. So do you wanna talk about our retreat or do you want me to talk about? No, I want you to talk about it. Why did you decide that we were gonna put on a retreat?

Valerie: As you know, I do this as a quarterly practice for myself. And I believe so strongly because I also work in the clergy leadership space. And I think health leaders have very similar challenges to clergy leaders. And my research is actually going to show that we have to take care of our emotional and reflective life. Otherwise it will lead to destructive leadership patterns, significant burnout, and people leaving. So we have to make space for it. And I was noticing that in my peers when I was chatting with people that they were just desperate for rest, but they wouldn’t rest. Their businesses were desperate for them to lead, but they’re not leading. And there was this reactive space. but it was pretty early on and I’m like, we’re not gonna make it till the end of the year if we don’t do this. So I thought, you know what? I have this practice every quarter of retreating. April is one of the times when I do that. How about I do it with some other people and we can create a start to create a culture of doing that, but also provide so they don’t have to think about it. Like I structure my own retreat, but other people won’t have to even think about it. They just can come and soak it all in and get that opportunity to open up that awareness. But rest deeply. If you wanna sleep in, you sleep in. The replenish, eat well, enjoy nature, and have that space to do it. And then I think I had said that I’d like to do this and you said yes, <laugh>, let’s do this.

Jo: So I have a similar quarterly practice and I know the value of it. And one of the things that I do with my coaching clients, one of the first extremely challenging things is I make them take a vacation and sometimes it can take us six months of working together for that to actually happen. So when you started talking about people need to learn how to do this, they need to know that this is the way that you create a culture for yourself and your employees and your family and you need role models. So you and I are gonna be the role models and you need to be shown how to do it. So let us create that opportunity for you. And I can’t not do it now. So like you, my body and my mind knows when I need a week off. I need a week off. I couldn’t believe it when you were saying that you have Mondays off. I have Mondays off. Everybody knows I go to yoga on Mondays. I have a coffee on Mondays. That’s what I do on Mondays and our annual leave goes in the calendar first. So we’ve very, very similar and we’ve never talked about that before, which is kinda crazy.

Valerie: Yeah. Look, and I actually do go away. I usually book myself into a hotel or whatever. It’s a way to say thank you to our body. It really is. And people go, it’s too luxurious. I can’t. It’s such a splurge. What would my team think? I’m like, well you’re giving them permission to actually do the same thing. It’s a thank you to your body when you say weary soldier, come and lay down your weary body at rest. A comfortable bed, no responsibility, rest now heart. Nothing to be thinking or feeling other than the sound of your own heartbeat. Food that you don’t have to think about. Be served. This is the other thing, Jo. Our professionals need to embrace being served. Because one of our problems is we have poor health seeking behaviour. One of my first challenges for clients is to ask for help. Learn how to order what’s on the menu based on what you want. I want you to do the normal thing, whatever. No, I want you to get into the habit of saying what you want, even if you don’t know what you want. Because when you are burnt out, you won’t know what you want. I want you to just get used to the practice of going, I would like this, please <laugh>. And that’s why we removed the cost of the food too. You don’t have to think about the price, just tap in, say thank you to your weary body. Give it what it desperately means and acknowledge the hard work that it’s taken to get you and your clients and your team to this point.

Jo: Wow. So I’m just gonna let you know, the retreat is happening from the 27th to the 29th of April, 2023. So it’s only in a couple of week’s time. We still have spaces available. It’s happening at the most gorgeous resort, called Lillenfels in Katoomba, which is kind of my backyard. But it’s a beautiful, beautiful resort. We went up there and had a look not so long ago, and we ate the most magnificent charcuterie board. Oh my God. That was the biggest. Wow. That was huge. That was big.

Valerie: It was the best charcuterie board I’ve ever had. Yes.

Jo: I couldn’t believe how indulgent that was <laugh>. But I invite you to start learning these new habits and to do it in a way that feels safe. So that when you are sitting there going, this is too indulgent. I don’t deserve this, what are my team thinking? You’ve got people around you who are number one, probably experiencing the same thing, but then you’ve got people like Val and I who can actually help you shift that mindset so that you can go back and demonstrate to your team and to your clients, this is the power of me taking a circuit breaker. So Val, how can people get in touch with you? How do you want them to connect with you?

Valerie: My website, valerieling.com will point you to all my links, all my socials as well. I have a podcast, I have Facebook activities. So that’s probably the best way to do it. Valerieling.com

Jo: Beautiful. That’s wonderful. So if there’s one piece of advice that you would like to give people listening to this podcast today, what would that be?

Valerie: You cannot endure without rest. And you cannot rest properly without reflecting, which means you need to retreat <laugh>. That’s what I wanna say.

Jo: And she had no idea that question was gonna be asked. So well done. You well, Valerie, I wanna say a special thank you because I know that your research project is due today. So thank you very much for being here and for having this conversation with me. I have no doubt you’ll be back on this podcast sharing your great wisdom again.

Valerie: Thank you so much for having me, Jo. It was a joy