The Hidden Cost of Caring: Burnout and Vicarious Trauma in Healthcare – Interview with Yolanda Harper – The Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast

In this episode, Jo is joined by therapist and writer Yolanda Harper.

Yolanda is a therapist based in Florida who is a specialist in trauma. It was in the process of supporting Yolanda with the writing of her first book, Soul Sabbatical, Jo realised that she needed to take a sabbatical too and address her burnout, her work and her life.

In this episode, Jo and Yolanda discuss:

• the concept of vicarious trauma
• that you don’t work in the traditional field of ‘trauma’ you are likely to be dealing with clients who have experienced traumatic events,
• the difference between vicarious trauma and burnout
• the shame and stigma associated with burnout
• how Yolanda arrived at the point of realising she needed a sabbatical, and
• why a sabbatical is not a holiday.

About Yolanda Harper: While many authors know all of their lives that they want to
become published, Yolanda Harper’s first book, Soul Sabbatical, started as a series of journal entries written during a burn out “meltdown” that led to her taking a sabbatical from her roles as a trauma and relationship therapist, researcher, trainer, mental health thought leader, and business owner/entrepreneur. As she shared more about her experience, she realised how much people resonate with the idea of a sabbatical, but don’t know how to step back from the demands of hustle culture to take one.

Yolanda is a warm hearted music and nature lover who has a strong faith and likes #TrailLife. She is real; a therapist, mental health thought leader, entrepreneur, TEDx Speaker, Soul Sabbatical Doula, wife, and Mama always to her grown children – but a human first.

You can find Yolanda at https://yolandaharper.com

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Ideal Day Workbook
• 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 to another episode of The Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast. Now, before we get started today, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that I am recording from. And if you have been around me a little bit, you’ll understand that I haven’t done this because I have struggled to pronounce the Aboriginal people’s name, but I have learned that the traditional custodians of the land that I’m standing on are the Darug people. And I will now pay respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and say, thank you for looking after the land the way you have done for the many, many years you have been doing it.
So thank you for your listening to this podcast. And I am nervous about this one today. I’ve probably over thought it, perfected it, all the things that I was challenged to address because my guest today is Yolanda Harper.

Now Yolanda is the author and creator of the book Soul Sabbatical. And in helping Yolanda bring this book to life, it was another one of those confrontational moments in me that went, oh, I need to pay attention to this. So, given that this season four of the podcast is all about burning out self-care, how do we recover? What tools and resources do we have available to us? I thought it was extremely important that we got to understand how Yolanda got to the point of writing this book. So, Yolanda, welcome to the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast. I’m thrilled to have you here. Yeah, a little nervous, but thrilled to have you here. <Laugh>, can you share a little bit about who you are, what you do, how you turn up in the world?

Yolanda:
Oh, my dear Jo <laugh>, you’re nervous. I’m finding myself emotional. Oh. Because so much of this journey includes you and you were pleasant with me through so much of it and supported me through it. So I by trade, am a therapist in the Tampa Bay, Florida area. I have a specialty in trauma. So from the very beginning of my therapy days I have been a trauma therapist and then have expanded through into couple’s work from the brain work of trauma. So understanding how trauma impacts relationships, because that’s my history <laugh>. So that’s what I do by trade.

Jo:
Okay. So you started as a therapist and you’ve been doing that for a little while. How many years have you been in the world of mental health and relationships?

Yolanda:
Since 2010. And so since 2010, I have been doing trauma work and, you know, deep trauma work, the type that they make movies about, you know? So it’s been quite a road. And that’s a small part of what led to all of this. It’s like you can’t do trauma work for that long and not pay attention to the impact of it on you. And that’s even with all of the skills and the training and like the professional knowledge and using modalities that are more likely to prevent burnout and like all of those things. And still the truth of the matter is that and the human being with a human being heart. So part of it is the impact of the work and a lot of other things.

Jo:
Yeah. I’m so glad that you brought that up so quickly. The impact of the work. Since I have created space, thanks to your fabulous, wonderful book I have been able to see the impact of my work. Now, I would never have said I work with people in trauma.

Yolanda:
But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Jo:
Well, exactly, because I don’t consider myself to be a trauma therapist. There are specialisations where people deal with that, but I am working with people who have survived horrendous motor vehicle accidents or have caused horrendous motor vehicle accidents. I have worked with people who’ve had horrible situations occur for themselves at work. Horrible situations occur for themselves in the medical field. Like the impact of some sort of health event on their life is traumatic for them. And yet I failed to see how that would rub off in some ways on me.

Yolanda:
That’s vicarious trauma.

Jo:
Yeah. But not even being aware that it’s a thing. So talk to me a little bit more about the trauma. I don’t want to downplay it, but you called it vicarious trauma, and I think some of us have heard that word for so long doesn’t apply to me. I don’t have PTSD from working with my clients, <laugh> possibly not in the traditional way, but I certainly do <laugh>.

Yolanda:
So, how does that show up for you? How have you noticed that it shows up for you in your work? Do you mind me asking?

Jo:
No, I don’t. Well, my anxiety went through the roof, and I didn’t know it because it’s like the boiling a frog from cold water, right? So I put myself in this situation. I put myself in a lot of situations. I did a lot of community home visits. I still remember turning up to one of the very first home visits being confronted by a naked man with a knife. I didn’t tell anybody. For a 22-year-old, white, middle class Protestant upbringing, young lady that was, and I just thought it was something I was supposed to deal with. You don’t talk about that stuff, right?

Yolanda:
Right

Jo:
But what all of these incidents have turned into over the years is perfectionism and I used to call it excellence, but I was deceiving myself.

Yolanda:
Aren’t you adorable?

Jo:
I know I can rationalise anything. That’s why I know how to hack everybody else’s smarts. So needing my work to be perfect, not perfectionism in others, but then what we know from someone who practises perfectionism as well as what I did is become very rigid. And I’m not good with change, and I’m not curious. And all I think Covid time, what’s to happen? ’cause I’ve, I’m 30 years into my career, I think over time what’s happened is not understanding that this was going on for myself, is that my coping skills of do more work, see more clients, be more rigid, be more certain, AKA bossy led to some fairly traditional signs of burnout. I was aggressive. I don’t like myself. So I wasn’t the sort of person who fell under the table and, and I didn’t get paralysed. I came out fighting, but my fighting was fighting myself.

Yolanda:
Right. And what I’ve noticed for myself about burnout and even vicarious trauma is the impact on my relationships. Like, that’s where I start paying attention ’cause I’m like, I want the people that I love to like me <laugh>. For me, all of the perfectionism and stuff predated the vicarious trauma and the burnout. But certainly, I mean, you don’t have to be a trauma therapist to experience vicarious trauma. I mean, healthcare professionals, we think about that during Covid, how much vicarious trauma there was in the healthcare industry. You know, just being present to these situations that there’s a sense of powerlessness over, I can’t do my job effectively. I feel a sense of powerlessness to be able to be effective in my job.

Jo:
So do you have a working way of differentiating between burnout and vicarious trauma?

Yolanda:
You know, that’s a really interesting question. I think that the difference is that with vicarious trauma, I have colleagues who one of ’em calls us “sin eaters”, which is an interesting term. Right? And, some conversations that we have had in the past are like, when you start having your clients flashbacks and nightmares, you know that you’re not in a good spot.

Jo:
Yeah. Wow.

Yolanda:
When it just kind of starts infiltrating.

Jo:
I’m sorry, I’m just, I’m nodding my head here going, how debilitating would that be? And that would be terrifying. That sense of reliving your client’s experience.

Yolanda:
And maybe not as vividly as a trauma nightmare, but having those thoughts running through your mind for sure.And then as opposed to burnout, which is more where I disconnect for myself. The going gets hard. I press into busy mode, get things done, meet the quotas and the expectations and all of that stuff. And then there’s like this switch that I turn off to this connection to myself. Because the numbness is what gets you through.

Jo:
Yeah. Oh, I understand that completely. I over function. When we were putting the book together about over-functioning, it was one of the most delightful conversations I’d ever had because it was like, oh, I’m not the only one.

Yolanda:
Right. <Laugh>, it’s one of the reasons I wrote the book.

Jo:
I’m not the only one, and there’s a word for this thing and I’d never thought to apply that word to me. And coming from a hardworking background where I was praised for the productivity, which you write a lot about in your book. And how we are affirmed for what we do, not affirmed for who we are. That was another, and I was just like, well, nobody tells me, you look nice. And it’s like, yeah, I had my hair done. Or have you lost weight? It’s like, why can’t I just look nice regardless of having those other qualifiers put on the sentence? Or Jo, what a beautiful thing to say. Rather than that really made me feel loved, Jo, I feel loved by you. So it’s really got me challenging my self-talk, which is a constant battle. But helping me understand how, like, you talk about this in your book as well. It’s not just blaming the victim here. It’s not just us because we are in a much bigger sociological, geographical situation. So can you speak into what Brene Brown calls the soup that we swim in. How does that contribute to health professionals vicarious trauma and burnout?

Yolanda:
Yeah. Well, it is one of those, like, as a therapist, one of the most powerful things that I find for myself personally, and then in the work that I do, is this idea of common humanity. Like I’m not the only one. And there’s so much power in realising I’m not the only one who’s so broken and so wrong. And so just to be able to wrap words around these experiences and go, me too. Like, oh my gosh, I’m not the only one. So, when I started thinking about some of the things that have added to my burnout, and as I’ve had conversations with people, it is the hyper capitalistic societies that we inhabit that praise and really basically say overfunction or die. I mean, really it’s the messaging, right? Patriarchal societies. Be a good girl, sit down, don’t have needs, don’t have wants. Don’t be connected with the truth of who you are and, and what is good for you. And certainly don’t take action on that. And a lot of my own upbringing, I was raised in a house that was really turbulent and chaotic so I am a trauma therapist, but many of us are because of my own experience of trauma growing up. And so that tied to the perfectionism, the staying small, the don’t pay attention to your needs and make sure that everybody else is, is happy and taking care of.

Jo:
So from the day we are almost born <laugh> and I will overgeneralise here, but it is to try and paint the picture for us. We are conditioned to work hard, keep working, seek praise from the working, keep the peace, keep people happy, keep people happy at the expense of yourself. So I know one of the features for me is that if everybody else is happy, then I can sit down. If everybody else is looked after, then I can sit down. But my “everyone else” stopped being the people in my immediate household and ended up becoming this circle of 20 people. You actually give us an exercise to do in your workbook that highlighted that for me. I’m like, oh my gosh. Look how much of this self-sacrificing still goes on. So I think it’s really important to understand that burnout does not just happen to an isolated individual. It happens to an individual in the context of their world.

Yolanda:
Yes, it is in the context of what is happening in the world. And, you know, so much for me has been amplified, like, that firstborn good girl. Look at you. You got an A, we’re so proud of you. What do you mean you got an A minus? What do you need to do to make that an A plus next time? And so my value and worth was put on what I did. I didn’t understand this concept until recently. I mean, I knew it, but now I know it. I knew it in my head. Now I know it in my heart. That’s part of what came for me from the sabbatical that I have inherent value and worth simply by being alive and breathing air on this earth. And it’s one of the beautiful and touching ways you started honouring the ancestors. And that practice of that when we can do it in that space, we honour and acknowledge it for all of us.

Jo:
Yes. Wow.
Yolanda:
We might know it with our heads, but how do we know it with our hearts? And how do we live from that? Me seeing 10 clients in a week is not gonna make me an inherently more valuable person, a better human being.

Jo:
Say it louder and say it again.

Yolanda:
Especially that when it leads me to crash and burn and be nasty to the people that I love.

Jo:
And I think that’s why we go, I’ve gotta see 25 clients a week, and I often see these questions. What’s the best caseload for you? I want the number, I want the prescription, and I cringe because it’s so individual and it’s gonna be tied up in what you are doing before work, after work. What are the clients like that you like working with? How well do you look after yourself?

Yolanda:
Yeah. And why do we need permission from someone else to determine that?

Jo:
Of course! That’s the real question, isn’t it?

Yolanda:
Literally I need to give myself permission to figure that out for myself, because you’re right. Yes. I’m the only one that knows that.

Jo:
And sometimes the only way you can know it is by trying a few things out. Right?

Yolanda:
Sometimes really the only way that you can know it is by burning out <laugh>.

Jo:
Yeah. And again, you’ve burnt out. I’ve burnt out. It’s not a death sentence.

Yolanda:
And not only is it not a death sentence, it’s not a judgement on our characters.

Jo:
Hallelujah. Thank you.

Yolanda:
I fought with myself and I went on my sabbatical in 2021. We were just starting to really kind of have these conversations in 2021. And I was so hesitant for so long to use the word, because I thought that makes me a bad therapist. Somehow I thought it was a bad therapist if I couldn’t figure out how to do this job without burning out, without it taking a toll, without acknowledging that it takes a toll.

Jo:
Yep.I’m right there with you. And I think that’s one of the most profound things that working with you around the book has highlighted for me is there’s nothing wrong with me in fact, the way we were able to grapple with this together was actually, I’m such a great therapist or rehabilitation counsellor because of my work, the way I work. I help clients do incredible things. But now it’s time to work out how to do this in a way that doesn’t have such a detrimental toll on me. Because we only know what we know. Right?

Yolanda:
Exactly. So how can I hold the warm regard and the respect and the care that I have for my clients and that for myself? Yes. And those things coexist.

Jo:
And with the same weight. For me, it’s been when all my clients are sorted out, then I can take some time and look after myself. Well, that never happens because of the type of work I do, someone’s gonna get a bed sore or a pressure sore. Or they’re gonna get sacked from a job, or they’re gonna go and do something inappropriate in a shopping centre. And it’s like, I guess I’m not taking that week off now.

Yolanda:
<Laugh>. And then I hear myself, why can’t people behave?

Jo:
So then we start blaming the clients, right?

Yolanda:
Or my husband or whoever I feel is making life difficult for me.

Jo:
Yeah. Why can’t you read my mind?

Yolanda:
Yeah. The sad thing is it’s typically not my clients. It’s typically like my husband.

Jo:
A family member.

Yolanda:
Right. Yeah. It comes out sideways like that.

Jo:
I don’t know if you had this but in my career working for other people we had this corporate attitude of leaving your personal stuff at the door. Do you remember those days? And I can imagine there’s a lot of people of our generation going, oh, I remember, we are a stupid thing. It’s like, and how many times could we not do that? But, we were forcing ourselves to take on this new shape as we crossed over the threshold into our jobs going that horrible thing I saw on the weekend, or that argument I had with my husband this morning. Right. I now need to park that somewhere where it’s not allowed to affect me for the rest of the day.

Yolanda:
Well, especially in the world of mental health as a therapist. Like I am sort of, they teach in graduate school, like to be the clean slate and like all of that crap, <laugh>. And, there’s no humanity in that. There’s no room to be human. And that reinforces that view like, we’ll just turn that part of you off and don’t pay attention to it. And like, we’ll check in with you when it’s a more convenient time only there’s not a more convenient time, because we always prioritise others, like, there’s other things happening like you said. So yeah, that’s part of the disconnect that I found that I do. And my personality tends to be a little bit more walled off anyway. I learned how to do that to keep myself safe from a very young age. Like, just shut down, turn it all off, go behind the wall. Not that I don’t feel things, I feel things very deeply, but, you know, like turning off that switch.

Jo:
I like the metaphor of the switch because I found my switch, and it wasn’t until mid last year coming out of my very chaotic, hectic, overachieving work life and into cancer during Covid. And, you know, it wasn’t until the middle of last year that I kind of went, oh, there was a lot. And my switch stopped working.

Yolanda:
Same. How was that?

Jo:
Yeah, that’s very unpleasant. So the switch here we are referring to is our coping skills, our coping strategies, the things that we’ve had before. And it doesn’t mean I’m any less of a person now, I just gotta find like those, my body, my brain, my sociology is telling me that those things aren’t gonna work. Now I’m a different person and as much as I’ve resisted that, there are elements of me that are different. And I think that that has been true, I guess using your soul sabbatical workbook and the book. And I’ve read the book three times now and worked through the workbook, but being able to do that helped me feel safe in exploring this stuff. So I know you’re gonna get emotional about that, but that was the purpose in writing it, right? You wanted to give this exercise some space.

Yolanda:
Can I share something that’s coming up for me? That you said to me as we were working together, and I don’t remember the exact context but what I find so beautiful about what you said was there was a particular section in the book and you gave me feedback, like, you’re going too deep too quickly here. So hearing you say that this allowed you to have space that felt safe for you is really just so beautiful.

Jo:
Thank you. So we know what your soul sabbatical has helped. Well, a little bit of what it’s helped me to do, but how did you arrive at the place of knowing you needed to do this work that you needed a sabbatical?

Yolanda:
Yeah. So you just said,the switch didn’t work anymore <laugh>. And I totally felt that. So my switch has been stuff that I’ve learned over life that was adaptive at some point, and now maladaptive, it doesn’t serve the same purpose. And so I mentioned taking the sabbatical in 2021, and I vividly remember stepping onto a beach in the spring of 2021 and taking a breath and going, oh my God, I can breathe. I don’t remember the last time I breathed like this. But the scary thing about that for me was I didn’t realise that I wasn’t breathing. Like, I didn’t realise that I hadn’t been breathing. And I was like, what in the world? How does that happen? And I had been used to doing, like, let me file that away. I knew I had this business retreat coming up. I was like, I’ll deal with it later. And, the later came and I sat down to do the perfect day exercise, or the best day exercise, which is a journaling exercise where you just write out like, what would be an ideal day? What would be just a really lovely day. And as I was writing that, I realised that none of that was my actual life. Like, none of what I was writing for an ideal day was what I was actually living. And that just hit me like a ton of bricks. And I started crying and I basically cried for the next week because the combination of those two things made me really sit up and pay attention and say to myself, if you do not do something about this, this is going to go to a place that you will be able to come back from. It’s either sh*t or get off the pot. Like, you deal with this or something bad’s gonna happen. I don’t know what the something bad is, but it was just like a shake, a wake up call. So I had been joking around for a while about wanting to take a sabbatical, and really, I had no idea what that meant. I really didn’t. A sabbatical to me at that time sounded like a fancy way to call a vacation that didn’t sound like laziness and taking a vacation.

Jo:
Oh, I hear you. Yep. So people have known that I’ve been on sabbatical, and they’ll still say, are you enjoying your holiday?

Yolanda:
I know <laugh>. Isn’t that funny how people say that?

Jo:
And they don’t realise how incensed I am about that.

Yolanda:
They don’t know the kind of work that goes into sabbatical.

Jo:
Exactly. So I’ve no longer tried to educate people on it. I don’t respond anymore either. So if you’re waiting for a message, because you’ve messaged me and you’ve said, how’s your holiday going? This is why you haven’t got a response <laugh> Ain’t no vacation <laugh>.

Yolanda:
No, no. It’s some of the deepest work. It’s some pretty, pretty intense work for sure.

Jo:
For sure. So you had to get over that sense of shame. Like, can’t take a sabbatical because it’s just a glorified holiday

Yolanda:
<Laugh>. Right. And here’s the fact, if you don’t do something, this is not gonna continue. There’s no way that this can continue like this. So I started to kind of explore what that might look like. And I had the support of my husband and the coaching community that I was connected with at the time and came to this process because my husband and I are co-founders of our practice. I’m a trauma therapist, but we also have employees and we have a group practice. So we started to put some structure around what would need to happen for me to take some time out of the office and take time away from seeing clients. And I really tackled that in those two different ways. There were my responsibilities as the business owner and as the supervisor. And then there were my responsibilities to my clients. And so we put that structure in place. I took a month away from the office completely. I didn’t step foot in the office at all because I knew that if I did that, it would all just come crumbling back, pushing back and then three months away from seeing clients.

Jo:
Wow. You and I both know that your immediate outcomes are nothing compared to the longer term outcomes. So after that initial three month period, what did you notice was starting to change for you?

Yolanda:
Well, one, just very logistically I stopped getting in my own way. Like releasing things that weren’t responsibilities, that I didn’t need to be caring anymore. But when you build a business and a practice, you bootstrap it from the beginning and things grow and change and whatever, and I was still stocking the fridge with water bottles and it’s like, you know, other people can do stuff like that. So that was a really tangible, realistic step. It’s amazing how much time and energy you can regain just by taking a look at that kind of stuff. But that time period was so much connecting to myself at such a deeper level. And even the process of preparing for the sabbatical where I was just wrestling with, like, if I take this time away from the office and away from seeing clients, then who am I? Like, what is my identity? How do I count as a human being if I’m not doing something that is “productive”? And it’s hard to tease that out.

Jo:
Oh, I knew it would be difficult. I wanted people to understand. ’cause I know that there’ll be people listening to this going, but what were the outcomes? And I’m like, that’s part of the problem, right?

Yolanda:
Right.

Jo:
The fact that we continue to think like that. Like, if I take three months off and don’t talk to a client, don’t step foot into my business, what can I expect to happen?

Yolanda:
That’s exactly it. When I was planning my sabbatical because a lot of times when people think sabbatical, they think of a writing sabbatical or like a process that someone goes through for research or like travel. I decided that for me, what my goal was for my sabbatical was how do I want to feel? This is how I’ve been feeling. Overwhelmed, stressed, irritable. I hate you and your mama. If you <laugh> are making things difficult or like on the other end of that spectrum, like I’m over accommodating to help you and make your life better. So how do I wanna feel? I wanna feel peaceful. I wanna feel connected to myself. I wanna have some space for creativity. And then I list it out. What are the things that help me to feel this way? Reading, putting together a puzzle. Does this count as productivity? <Laugh>.

Jo:
Yeah. <Laugh>. Oh, I’m sitting here going, tell me more. Because hearing you say things like that, it’s gives me permission because I’m still wrestling with sitting down and knitting for four hours a day.

Yolanda:
Yeah. I mean, I have totally been that person. I have sat in a movie theatre feeling so anxious and literally having to say to myself throughout the entire movie, this is what happy people do. Happy people sit in movie theatres and watch movies

Jo:
They do without need to be on their phone or talking to other people or vacuuming the house.

Yolanda:
Or calling back clients.`

Jo:
Yeah. Or doing their yoga, because some yoga instructor said, we’re allowed to do yoga in front of the tv. This practice for me of the sabbatical really tapped into my need to be the most efficient. And the question I no longer ask, is how do I do this efficiently? I ask, what’s the most effective way to get this done? It’s a totally different question.

Yolanda:
And I’m much more likely to say it takes the time that it takes.

Jo:
Oh, yeah. smart goals are a thing of the past for me. They’re smar <laugh>, I just ignore the ‘t’ altogether. <Laugh>.

Yolanda:
I love that.

Jo:
Funny. Okay. So I have an interesting question for you now, in your mind, having done this and having wrestled with yourself; what makes work good?

Yolanda:
What makes work good for me? I write in the book about how all of this has led me to have an overarching meaning of my life which is to leave a love legacy. So what makes work good is for me to carry that intention through the day, to allow me to simply be present with the human being in front of me, whether that is a client or an employee or a family member, and to be loved in that space. And sometimes that love looks like an intervention, and sometimes it looks like, you know, a trauma modality and sometimes it looks like sharing a personal story, and sometimes it looks like simply being human beings.

Jo:
Yes. And sitting in the space with someone and not trying to force an issue or force a conversation or tell them how they’re feeling or prompt them in some way.

Yolanda:
Yeah. And so in holding that, it takes the time that it takes.

Jo:
It takes the time that it takes. We could have a whole other conversation about that. So work isn’t inherently bad and it isn’t inherently good, but there are bad things about work. Like, you don’t wanna go to work and hurt yourself. And the purpose of the season of this podcast is to help people understand how we get hurt at work, because it’s not a slip on a step, although that could happen. It’s not being confronted by some weapons, although that could happen. It’s the slow way that work disables us.

Yolanda:
It’s insidious.

Jo:
It is insidious. And like I said earlier, it’s the slow burn of the frog being boiled from cold water through that. You just don’t notice that. And you take on more and more and more until like you and I discovered our switches no longer work and what used to be adaptive, all of a sudden there’s maladaptive <laugh>.

Yolanda:
Right?

Jo:
So if you could pick three things that, because there’s not gonna be a one size fits all, right? So everybody who wants to embark on this process, you’re gonna have your own experience and your own journey. But what are three things that you think we need to take with us if we’re gonna embark on this? You said to me, you can’t do it on your own. You’ve made that really clear.

Yolanda:
Right.

Jo:
You’ve gotta have supportive people and not just lip service support. If you’ve gotta take people with you who will get online and say, why are you here? You told me you weren’t doing this.

Yolanda:
Yeah. And we’re not meant to do any of this alone. We need the people to come alongside us and reflect back to us what, you know, what we think that we’re seeing and hold us accountable in loving ways.

Jo:
Yeah. Is there anything else that you think would be wise to bring with you on this journey?

Yolanda:
So not only can we not do it alone, but it is like checking in with ourselves below the neck. We get so used to functioning above the neck and our society rewards that so much. And there’s so much wisdom when we stay embodied and we can check in with ourselves about the things about work that feel good and ease useful and the things about work that feel harmful and heavy. And having some wisdom and discernment about sure, parts are gonna feel heavy from time to time. But having some discernment about when to cut those parts out.

Jo:
Yeah. That’s great. Wisdom and discernment really turned up for me when space started to arrive.

Yolanda:
That’s the thing. You gotta have the space to do it.

Jo:
Yeah. I’m so good at reacting to gut instinct. I mean, I’ve been working for 30 years now. So my gut instinct is a well honed neural pathway. And I’m so good at snap, snap, snap. This is what we do, this is what we do, this is what we’re doing. And I’m quite an intuitive person as well. And you know, I have a spiritual practice of discernment that helps with all of that, but geez, it’s not fast when you’re trying to do it with yourself. I’m still peeling the layers of self-sabotage off myself.

Yolanda:
Yeah. Jo, I look at it this way. I am still in active recovery. I have a newsletter that I sent out and a couple months ago I was like, I had a little bit of a relapse. And relapse is part of recovery. There’s still layers that I’m peeling back three years later. Now, I just think part of it is knowing it’s part of the process.

Jo:
Thank you. And that comes back to my outcomes discussion is that it’s not three months and you’re done. It’s like if you start a gym program to get strong. You don’t just go to the gym for three months and then you’re strong for the rest of your life.

Yolanda:
Right. That’s actually what I was crafting in those three months. I knew that I was going to be wasting my time in this entire opportunity and I was going to be betraying myself and the people who helped me take the sabbatical if I did not understand what I needed to carry forward. To continue the learning and the practising of doing things differently. So that was the beginning of a cultivation of these new practices. This checking in with myself.

Jo:
For those of you listening and thinking to yourself, I check in with myself all the time. Do you? Do you really? How many of you have learnt not to go to the bathroom because you’re seeing back to back clients all day? And then you like to tell yourself that your bladder is not full. I challenge that you are not connected to yourself.

Yolanda:
And, just like this recovery process, like this connection with myself, it’s going to evolve until the day that I die. And I thought I was pretty connected with myself and Jo, to be perfectly honest with you, there have been understandings that I have uncovered about myself in this past week that I’m like, oh, I didn’t know that. But if we go around saying I know myself and I’m connected with myself, then we’re gonna miss out on that opportunity.

Jo:
And we’re also not putting ourselves in the position that we say we wanna be in, which is I wanna do the best work with my clients because we’ve all been in a situation where we’ve received medical treatment or health treatment where we know the person hasn’t been with us in the room. We can tell, we can feel it. And I have yet to meet a health professional who tells me that that’s the way they wanna practise. I’ve never been told, and that’s probably partly because of the people I attract, but they’re not gonna be those types of people. But usually I’ve stopped caring for my clients. I need to work with you, is kind of the way that conversation starts. So just to summarise for the listeners right now, you got to a point where you could breathe on a beach. And then that helped you recognise that I’m not breathing. It was such a visceral experience for you. And then you started getting curious about what do I need to do to interrupt and get connected? Interrupt how I’m living.And get reconnected to myself because of my ideal day exercise. <Laugh>. Thank you for having to do that exercise, by the way.
‘Cause I think so many of us do it and don’t realise the true intention of it, but recognising your ideal day will be so far removed from your experience that it caused you to hurt. So then as you said, it’s asking what do I need to change in the world of my work? What operational things need to change? And then what client things need to change And then who do I bring with me on this journey? Who are the people that I can trust enough who will lovingly tell me when I’m not doing the things I said I wanted to do? And that led you to a new way of being which is things will happen in their time. And my responsibility is to keep myself well.

Yolanda:
Yeah. So that I can continue to be in this game for the long term.

Jo:
Yeah. It’s the whole being, not doing, thing. The whole being, which we all think as health professionals, we get but I think we do ourselves a disservice. I certainly was deceiving myself.

Yolanda, this has been an incredible conversation, which I know people are gonna want more of, which is kind of good for them ’cause of what we’ve got planned next <laugh>. But how do people get their hands on your book to find out more about your book? Where do we go to find it?

Yolanda:
So my website is yolandaharper.com. You can of course get the book on Amazon and all that kind of stuff. You can join my email community. You can join from the website yolandaharper.com. And I’m hoping to share space with others on this journey of reconnecting to your heart and a space of shared common humanity where [people can feel] I’m glad I’m not the only one. Such a relief to not be the only one and let’s be in this together. So I kind of see myself as a sabbatical. Doula.

Jo:
Nice. I must admit, I’m hearing you speak and I’m like, can you get us all together? Can we come and spend the four or five days altogether? <Laugh>

Yolanda:
Well, I don’t know. I would love to come and visit your side of the world, but that is something that has been brewing in my heart. How can we make something like that happen?

Jo:
So, Yolanda, if we’re gonna meet up one day in person, because this might happen and I’m gonna take you out for coffee because coffee, yes. What would you order? What am I ordering for you?

Yolanda:
You know, I am a happy girl with just a really strong brew with a little half and half.

Jo:
Excellent. And if you are in Australia, I would have to totally deconstruct that, but everyone else is gonna know what that means. That’s awesome. <Laugh> So what I would order for you here is a long black with milk on the side.

Yolanda:
Okay.

Jo:
Yeah. Because we don’t do the half and half thing. Nobody knows what that is. <Laugh>.

Yolanda:
Any kind of cream or milk.

Jo:
So it’d be full cream milk on the side. But that’s all good. I’m glad we got that sorted out. ’cause I feel like I am the coffee order whisperer. You are the sabbatical doula. This is my gift to the world. It has been a delight speaking with you today. I could keep doing this for hours, but that’s not fair to the people listening. And probably not fair to you ’cause it’s later at night. So I am going to say thank you again. Wish everybody a wonderful day and take the next step. If you are thinking about what this podcast might mean for you, please get the book, become a part of Yolanda’s community through her email list. ’cause you don’t have to make the decision today. Let her gentle loving words help you work out when it’s right for you, because that’s what she did for me. Until next episode, go be your awesome self.