Why You Need to Learn About Your Energy Management

WHY YOU NEED TO LEARN ABOUT YOUR ENERGY MANAGEMENT

As a health professional, you are expected to manage and handle the emotional loads of your clients, families and yourself. So managing your energy is critical to future-proofing yourself and your career. In this episode, Jo shares why balancing your competence, capacity and capability plays an important role in managing your energy and being ‘fit for purpose’.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast.

I am your host, Jo Muirhead. And today, oh, we could get all kinds of ranty, Jo, which is an indication of how important I feel and I think, and I know this message is going to be. It is something that I have been working on throughout the Covid and my own personal cancer crisis, which gave me the incredible opportunity to be able to sit back and look at the behaviours of health professionals while we were trying to navigate this incredible crisis in this time in history.

So if we haven’t met before and somebody has shared this podcast with you, yes, I have an Australian accent. And yes, when I get excited and when I get passionate, I can speak really fast. So for those of you who like to listen to podcasts on 1.5 or two speed, because you think that that’s a good thing for you to do, I may not be the speaker for you to have this on, you know, some sort of faster pace.

I’m gonna do my best to keep my energy under control today because I don’t want you to miss the messaging that I’ve got. Because if we are going to remain able to do the work that we have so diligently studied for, practiced for, become proficient in, spend a lot of money, learning how to do and keep ourselves credentialed, then there is some things that we need to have some real talk about.

And the thing that we are gonna talk about today in terms of being fit for purpose is about managing our energy. If we are going to futureproof ourselves as health professionals, we need to understand what it means to be fit for purpose. Now this topic of being fit for purpose is huge. And I’m going to cover one tiny little aspect of it today. But I will come back to this theme of being fit for purpose, specifically for health professionals in future episodes.

Because if we don’t take notice of this, we are not going to last the distance. So in this episode today, I wanna talk about energy management. I wanna talk about all the language that I see, that I hear, that I work with people on about. I’m so tired, I’m exhausted. I am so tired. If you are one of those people who finds your immediate response to the question, ‘how are you?’ is I’m tired, or I’m good, but I’m tired, I’m good, but I’m exhausted, then you really need to listen to this. If you are somebody who is doing this work and you live with chronic pain, chronic fatigue, any chronic health issue at all, you need to listen to this. If you are a leader in any type of health business and you are concerned about absenteeism, presenteeism, silent quitting, you need to listen to this.

So this episode is actually going to be incredibly important. There will be a lot of what, because in the next 20 minutes, I am not going to be able to solve this rather large problem for us. So I see energy management and how we as health professionals manage our energy as a part of a bigger picture around psychological safety. Now, most of us, when we hear psychological safety, we think of vicarious trauma or specific incidences of violence, which is very common amongst health professionals, unfortunately. But it is, we think of bullying and harassment in the workplace. We think of those types of things, psychological safety. Also, calls us to account around burnouts about vicarious trauma and also about these high levels of exhaustion that we have taken with us into our work. We are asking our bodies, our brains, our emotions to carry an enormous load.

And if you’re not understanding this and you just think that you can’t cut it, I have some great information for you. Because you’re not failing. You are not failing. You are not failing. The rules of engagement have changed. And what we were prepared for back in the day when we were learning how to do this work has changed. So our fitness, what we need to be fit for now, needs to change. And why we need to talk about this is because we need to be prepared as health professionals for all high impact situations. So every time there is something that happens in the community that causes community unrest, civil unrest, people feeling unsafe, it could be anything from a weather event, cyclones, hurricanes, huge storms, bushfires to a pandemic to the threat of a measles outbreak, which we’ve got happening here in Australia right now, to a new strain of influenza, to a critical shortage of people on a team to actual incidents of horrible violence. Think of gun violence in the USA. I’m sorry to bring that up. But we as health professionals, we are the ones that the community looked to for leadership and for example, in these high impact situations. So if we’re not prepared for a high impact situation, if we are not causing ourselves to be able to rest and replenish so we can be prepared for the high impact situation, we are not going to remain able to do this work. Just want you to think about this for now. I don’t care if you’re a physical therapist, exercise physiologist, mental health professional counselor, rehab counselor, it does not matter. GP osteopath, whenever somebody comes into your room and wants time with you one-on-one, if there has been some level of unsettledness in the community in the news, it will heighten their symptoms. So if you think you are treating a physical injury and a physical complaint, you cannot divorce that experience of that physical complaint from a person’s emotional state. I wish we could. I tried to for many, many, many years, both myself personally and in my work as a rehabilitation counselor here in Australia. It does not work. We can’t not do it. So do not think that this is the domain only of mental health professionals. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Every health professional needs to be supporting our clients. That doesn’t mean that we’re replacing mental health professionals. It means that we can work alongside them, work with them, and get better at appropriately referring people when they need more help. So traditionally, when we’ve been asked to prepare for a high impact situation, we just do more. Think back to the pandemic. We just did more. We already had epidemic levels of burnout amongst health professionals throughout our hospitals, community health facilities, and in private practice. But we just dug deep. We just turned up. We did 20 hour days, we did 16 hour days. We recruited more people, we managed the onboarding. We helped people, you know, sometimes voluntarily.

We were helping people. It just didn’t go away. We couldn’t switch it off, right? Was constantly in our brains. Now we’re dealing with <laugh> here in Australia. We’ve just got waiting list after waiting list, after waiting list. We’re trying to find new talent. We haven’t got enough talent to fulfill the need. We’re still not bringing in people from overseas, which is how we managed our talent pool prior to the pandemic. But we just don’t have enough talent. So we just do more. We just do more. We just do more. We just do more. And what we know happens for those of us who continually do more, do more, do more, it comes to a breaking point. You will have a health crisis. You will wake up one day and your burnout will be so significant. You can’t get out of bed. You will start being resentful of your family because you can’t work when you’re with your family. So you feel resentful of your family.

Then you go to work and you’re resentful of being at work because you can’t be with your family or you’re resentful of your work and your family. Cause you can’t take time off without guilt and shame. So you’re just resentful. And I can assure you that level of resentment in your body is not doing you any good. So I just wanna talk about, you know, some things that happened over the last couple of years because whenever I present this at a conference or on a webinar or at other people’s podcast, everybody kind of sits back and goes, holy crap, that that’s exactly what went on. Now I’ve tried to make this an international thing so that people from all over the world, but there are some unique things that that happened in Australia.

And this takes us back to about the end of 2019. So in Australia, at the end of 2019, we had a terrible bushfire, or as my American friends like to say, wildfire crisis across the east coast. It decimated communities, completely decimated them. We actually had to let some communities burn themselves out. Here we are in February of 2023, we still have people living in tents in these communities. So that was the end of 2019. Then we had torrential rain, horrible flooding, a lot of these communities that got burnt out, then got flooded out. And then we had the pandemic start. So we’re in early 2020 now. So bush fires, natural disasters of bush fires and then flooding and then we’ve got a pandemic. Then we had a whole heap of social unrest as we tried to work out how we’re going to manage this pandemic here in Australia.

We had constant changes from the government about who could be funded for what. We have two large schemes here. Something called universal healthcare, Medicare. Yeah, we didn’t know what was going on there for a little while. Can I get it? Can’t I get it? What do I get it for? Can my clients get it? We need it. We need more of it. We need more of it. We need more of it. And then we have another scheme here called the N D I S, the National Disability Insurance Scheme. And there was all sorts of changes that happened throughout that time. And then our government here in Australia did some great stuff in terms of trying to boost the economy. But those of us who employed people, we had to get our heads around how do we access this extra income and this extra money. So all of a sudden we were speaking to our accountants a lot, not knowing what we should be doing and how we should be doing it.

Meanwhile, we’re trying to work out whether or not if I walk outside and speak to people today, I might die. So that’s the Australian experience for Europe and the USA, you guys had so much social unrest going on back in early 2020. It was terrifying. We had a lot of racism, we had horrible things being said about different types of people from all over the world. And then this led into all sorts of political unrest all over the world. You probably don’t even remember this, but your patients, your clients were turning up to session with you. They knew it was going on and they felt scared. And then we’ve ongoing from that, we’ve had the threat now of stock market crash and economic instability. And you’ve probably noticed those of you, especially in private practice, that health becomes a nice to have when there’s economic instability. It doesn’t become a priority. It becomes a nice to have.

Then we saw violence on the scale that seems like something from the Lord of the Flies. That’s just crazy. Then we’ve had a new war or more war that affects us. It makes it feel like war is almost on our doorstep. All of this has been going on in our news feeds, on our news services when we’re talking to clients, when we’re talking to friends and family, when we’re talking to our children, when we’re talking to our spouses, when we’re talking to our colleagues, we can’t get rid of it. It’s everywhere. Yet we turn up and go to work every day and listen to these stories again and again and again and we’re supposed to know how to handle it. .

So here we are in February of 2023. That’s probably gonna date this podcast very quickly. And our communities, regardless of where you live in this world, look to us look to the health professionals for leadership example and hope. Meanwhile, we’re all sitting there going telehealth continue to be funded. How will this insurance be funded? Community seems really confused. All the influencers and well-meaning health influencers on Instagram, not necessarily doing a great job. The community is confused, clients are hurting. Waiting lists grow. There continues to be a talent shortage. So many of us are looking at new graduate strategies to try and boost our employee numbers to be able to help manage this. But where’s the experience gone? So then we end up with a talent shortage and a skill shortage and everybody is angry, despondent, hopeless, and feeling pretty outta control. So is it any wonder we are soul weary. So the before the Covid era, we as leaders in our business, families and communities, we were feeling pressured. Is it any wonder we are soul weary?

So when I talk about being fit for purpose, I talk about three things and they all start with C. There’s competence, there’s capability, and there’s capacity.

So when competence and capability are working well together, we are able to perform. When capacity and competence are working well together, we actually have knowledge and skills that we can impart. And when capacity and capability are working well together, then we can expand. But when one of the wheels of this Venn diagram of competence, capacity, and capability falls off or is wonky, then we actually stop being fit for purpose and we start carrying an oversized emotional load.

So I wanna talk into something called the competence trap right now because I see this everywhere I go. I see exhausted worn out health professionals who are so used to living in hypervigilance that they don’t know how to live any other way now, who think that they are completely spent and they have interpreted that to mean they are incompetent. Please hear me. If you have been doing this work for any length of time, chances are you are not incompetent. Chances are you are completely spent. And we have well-researched data coming out of the United States. It’s actually quite old. That says that exhaustion and burnout decreases clinical outcomes. It decreases our effectiveness in our work. Yet most of us would say that we’ve experienced some type of burnout and we always interpret that as being incompetent. But what being exhausted for us actually means is that we are beyond our capacity. There is no more room to do more stuff. No more room. Your cup is so full of stuff, there’s no more room to put. So this is where we start getting snappy. If one more person asks me to do one more thing, I’m gonna fly off the handle. We often wanna hide cause there’s just no more room. And it might look like your calendar’s empty, but there’s no more room inside your head or there’s no more room inside your emotions. There’s no more room inside that self-talk you’ve got going on. We are beyond capacity. There’s no more room. It’s not that the cup is empty, that cup is over full.

And then we move to beyond our capability. There’s no more power left. The battery is completely drained. We the we, we might be sleeping. We’re might not be sleeping. Should I be drinking this much coffee? We’ve gone back to some other probably unhelpful habits and trying to reboot ourselves. We’re not moving as much, we’re not drinking as much water, but there’s a lot more caffeine and maybe a lot more alcohol or a lot more ways. We are getting other sugars, caffeine in our bodies. Ways we’re trying to stimulate our adrenal system to try and help us get back into some level of feeling like I can do this today.

So when we are completely spent beyond our capacity, beyond capability, we start going, I don’t know what I’m doing, therefore I’m incompetent. And I’m really sorry that we’ve done this to ourselves and I’m really sorry that we are doing this to each other. Just why this topic is so important for me. Cause we as peers, we are awesome at shaming and blaming at each other. And we’ve gotta stop that because if we wanna solve this so that we can continue to have the quality healthcare that our nations need, we need to start working together much more collaboratively so that we can actually solve the problem. Cause we know what to do that got us here, but none of us really know how to get us out of this and what we need to do next. And I don’t think it’s going to be an app. There we go.

So just in case you’re wondering about this capacity thing again, that is the amount of room you’ve got in yourself, not necessarily room in your calendar or if you’ve got room for more clients, but how much room is in yourself. And this is different for everyone. I can’t prescribe that for you. And then capability is about the power that you have to actually execute. And everybody’s battery, to use that as an analogy, everybody’s battery is gonna be different. So the way we power up is gonna be different and we’ve gotta learn to power up in a way that is sustainable. So on top of all of this that we’ve got going on for ourselves every day, we are expected to manage and handle the emotional load for clients, families, ourselves. And most of us have been doing this with caffeine and adrenaline.

And this is where the concept of fit for purpose really takes hold because the demands of our work have changed. Therefore, our fitness needs, what we need to be able to do this work, is changing. So instead of just running a marathon now, we are now competing in a decathlon. I wanna let that sink in. We all know that our work is not a sprint. And if we try and sprint through our work, we end up sick and exhausted. So we start using analogies like running a marathon, which is a great one, but it’s changed again, it’s now a decathlon. We need to have multiple modalities, multiple ways of being able to reach and attract and retain our clients. Multiple ways of being able to give them the service that they need. Multiple ways of managing our team, multiple ways of doing all of this at the same time while looking after ourselves.

We have a unique set of skills to learn because what we need to be fit for has really changed. Do you remember back in the day when you were learning how to do your work, many of us were taught how to work with clients who presented with single issues? In the curriculum for rehabilitation counselors here in Australia, this is still the same today. And I’ve heard that it’s same, the same for many health disciplines. And I can assure you, ever since I graduated and started working in the real world, I don’t think I’ve ever had a client turn up with a single issue because clients will always turn up with their issue and their baggage around the issue. So automatically we need to start rethinking our supervision, our community consultation, our peer consultation, our training programs to help build the fitness muscle on how you can leave a program having worked on single issues, but automatically being need, needing to deal with multiple issues.

And how do you do that? And how do you do that in a way that doesn’t completely <laugh>, sorry, completely make you feel like I can’t do this work at all. Right? Because you have to start somewhere. It’s not like we can just throw all of our new graduates and go, here’s a family, all these complicated needs go sorted out. But how do we actually help this? How do we help each other do this? Because the types of salaries that we need to be paying employees because the cost of living keeps going up and because the demand for talent is so high means that we don’t have budgets and we don’t have the time and the energy resources to train the people the way they need to be trained. So there’s all of this burden on leadership and business owners, particularly health leadership and health business owners.

And we just wanna help the people. Most of us who own health businesses just wanna make sure that the people get the help they need. So we put ourselves last and we probably put our team second last. It’s not good enough, but we don’t have the solutions today. So preparing for high impact situations, how you can start to get ready for this and prepared for this, you can start looking at your competence. Chances are, if you’re doing this work, no one’s complaining your competent, then you can start asking questions about your capability. Am I over full? What do I need to do differently? And then you can start asking questions about your capability. How am I powering myself up? What am I doing? How am I getting myself fit for this work? Some of us might need to go to the gym, some of us might need to do more clinical consultation.

I still use clinical supervision. I’ve been doing clinical supervision throughout my career. It’s incredibly important for me. Supervision here in Australia has different connotations than the way it does in the US. Basically I pay someone to talk to me about my relationship with my work to make sure that I am not doing things in a way that is harmful to me and harmful others. Really, really important part of the expense I need to keep me fit. It’s like my emotions are going to the gym, but more effective than me just going to the gym sometimes. Very cool.

Okay, so this is a huge topic about being fit for purpose and about managing our energy. So how does energy management turn up in all of this? Well, you’ve probably been a bit exhausted listening to me talk about it today, right? And energy management is a huge science. It is research backed and, and it’s the Spoonie community has a lot to teach us about this, which is why I’ve created an energy management program and it’s one of the building blocks that we as health professionals need to understand. It’s not about doing more, it’s not about becoming more efficient, it’s not about task switching, it’s none of that stuff. It’s actually becoming aware of what it is you need to be fit for and how you start to use your energy resources in a way that helps you sustain, maintain, and build a career or a business or a practice that supports you, that nourishes you rather than you feeling completely consumed and burnt out by it. So there’s gonna be some advertising in this episode around the energy activator event. I strongly recommend that anybody listening to this gets to this three hour workshop. There’s no homework, there’s no pre-work. We do the work in the three hours. Yeah, it’s three hours. There will be a break, but you will come away understanding so much more about your energy needs and how the simple small things you’re not even aware of at the moment can change to help you build a career and a life that starts to nourish you from the inside out rather than feeling like you have to escape from your work.

This is a big topic and it’s one I’m incredibly passionate about because I see it as the way we are going to be able to future proof ourselves. So I look forward to bringing you more episodes on this huge topic.

Until then, please make sure you give me a rating. You give this podcast a review. Share them your social story so other people get to know about it. And many, many, many thank you to all the people who are sending me emails, making comments, sharing it on their socials, leaving me reviews and ratings. That really helps the podcast platforms tell other people that this is a podcast worth listening to.

And if you haven’t done so already, jump onto Facebook, come and find the Future Proofing Health Professionals Facebook community where we talk about the these episodes, we talk about these concepts in more detail and we are starting to learn how to genuinely collaborate with each other.

Until next episode, go be your awesome self.