Triple Bottom Line
Triple Bottom Line
Burnout! How Does One Overcome it?
Dex Randall is an accomplished burnout coach that helps over-stressed professionals back to peak performance, but with tools that allow them to reach new heights. Listen in as Dex explains how to look for signs that you, or someone you know, may be heading towards burnout. Plus, he gives practical tips to help you get back on track. If you're stressed, anxious, and overworked—this podcast is for you! https://dexrandall.com
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Triple Bottom Line | Episode 40 | Dex Randall
[Upbeat theme music plays]
Female Voice Over
[00:03] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin!
Taylor Martin
[00:17] Welcome, everyone. I have Dex Randall on the show today. Dex is a burnout coach. Yes, there is such a thing as a burnout coach. He helps professionals overcome work stress, anxiety, and of course, burnout. In all my years of business, though, I have to tell you, it seems like these days I have heard the word burnout more than I ever have. It seems like it’s an epidemic of its own. Dex, welcome to the show. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about your background and how you got to be what you’re doing now?
Dex Randall
[00:44] Sure, thanks, Taylor. Great to be here. Let me just quickly talk about my burnout because basically that’s what brought me to this space is I used to work in IT. I was a software developer and I was a team leader. I worked in entrepreneurial organizations and startups. I basically was the person in charge of gluing all the teams together so they’d work effectively and also turning out product. I had a burnout in 2017. How that looked for me is I was working for a startup and I was the CTO basically. I was in share of deploying product. The owner of the startup was in charge of not letting me deploy product because he didn’t want his baby out there in public. I mean, my specialty was bringing product to market, but it was too scary for him. He and I fought quite a bit about doing that and he was always siphoning me off into other projects. Basically, I became very stressed because I’m really good at what I do and I’m really used to doing this quickly, effectively. I just wanted to get on with it. He was like no, no, let’s go and have this meeting with these people. Let’s go and raise some more money. Let’s go and tinker with the financial arrangements. Let’s get some sort of certification backing. No, let’s make a $10 million video. It was all of that stuff. I was only working there for a few months but I got more and more stressed at not being able to deliver on my only job which was to get the product out in public.
I kept coming to him saying, no, we really need to deploy a product and we need to start small and let it grow, not keep it in the cupboard and hope that at the end of two years we’ve got something people want. Long story short, I had a meeting with him one Tuesday morning and I just saw he’s blocking me again. I can’t do this job. I will never be able to do this job. You’re never going to let me do this job. I’m out. I’m out because I sat there and I was looking at him and I was listening to him and his mouth was going like this. I just thought I can’t deal with this level of stress. The amount of stress I feel about not being able to do my job is actually going to kill me. I believed it. It was like, no, the physical stress in my body was so big that I’m going to keel over soon. I left. I just said, I’m sorry, I can’t be that person. I left. Three weeks later I was running on the beach and I had a massive heart attack. I was out of the game for about six months. I just thought, okay, well, I was right about the stress then.
I think this is what so many people experience when they’re in a burnout like situation is the stress just piles up and piles up. Chronic stress, chronic anxiety, chronic frustration and lack of reward and all of that, it chips away at our physical health, not just at our wellbeing and our enjoyment and our mental health. Our physical body systems are in stress all the time and they’re just bursting with this need to do something different. I couldn’t find any help when I was in burnout. Took me ages to track down anybody who could support me to fix burnout. I thought well, okay then. I’m going to learn everything I possibly can and help other people.
Taylor Martin
[03:48] You found your new calling.
Dex Randall
[03:50] Yeah, I found my calling. I learned how to fix burnout and I just thought, oh, it’s much simpler than I thought, but most people are not proposing a solution that works.
Taylor Martin
[04:01] I can only imagine from your vantage point going into COVID and going through COVID and now we’re coming out of COVID. I mean, like I mentioned at the introduction, the level of burnout is at the highest I’ve ever seen. From your vantage point, what do you see?
Dex Randall
[04:19] Yeah, I would agree. I think that’s a good observation. COVID has certainly ramped up the potential for burnout when all of us went through kind of lockdowns and illness and the illness of loved ones and all of that and disconnection from people. Burnout is a disease of – it’s a condition of disconnection. COVID made us even more disconnected when we couldn’t work together or have our normal relationships or our normal meeting with people. Yeah, I think it really did escalate. It was like the perfect storm that creates burnout. I see burnout as being an exponential curve. Even before COVID, it was really going up the exponential side of the curve. It was becoming its own epidemic before COVID, but in COVID, it even escalated further.
Taylor Martin
[05:05] COVID was more like an accelerant.
Dex Randall
[05:07] Yeah, and lots of people who were previously kind of doing okay had additional stresses, financial stresses, educational stresses for their kids, trying to work from home with the kids there and all just…
Taylor Martin
[05:19] Let’s dive a little bit deeper into that. What are the biggest top contenders right now for burnout? What’s the biggest cause? Maybe they’re in order of most important and second and third and fourth because I’m sure there’s a lot.
Dex Randall
[05:32] It’s an interesting question. I see it more as triggers. There are a lot of triggers in the outside world and there are more strong triggers now than there would’ve been previously. Our work environment, our work culture are imperative to succeed at the highest level. We’re all supposed to be in the top 5%. I think that might be an impossibility, right? We can’t all be in the top 5%, but this expectation of always being on, always being available, always working harder and never refusing a challenge, also the shifting landscape of work. What we thought of as our job last year is not the same as what we think of as our job this year. We don’t do the same things. We have to be an expert in far more things than we’re ever used to. Also, we have to be able to perform with or without other people. I think the bar got higher on a lot of things about general life and finances, homeownership, jobs, even the divorce rate and the splitting up of families has an impact on our connection. If connection is core to all of this, in a whole lot of facets we’ve got less connection than we need as animals, as herd animals. We need to be tied together.
Taylor Martin
[06:46] It’s a community.
Dex Randall
[06:48] Community I think in the style of connection we have, like internet connection, social media connection is not supporting us in the way that we’d love to be supported. Because it’s not honest and authentic enough and it’s also not direct enough. You’re not face to face. It’s not visceral.
Taylor Martin
[07:03] Yeah, it’s different when you’re in a large group of people or a small setting of people coming over for dinner or something like that. It’s an intimate little moment that you guys share and have as opposed to posting something on social media or commenting or liking.
Dex Randall
[07:17] Yeah, completely different. It’s much harder to be vulnerable and authentic on social media because the convention is we put our top 5% personality bits on social media and we keep the rest to ourselves. Going around to dinner is a really good example because a lot of us have lost that intimate social connection with our friends, with out peers, with our community or religious organizations, our schools, or whatever, we’ve lost that visceral face to face contact. We need that. We can’t survive without it because there are human levels of communication that only occur when we’re in the same room. I mean, if you think about pheromones and energy and nervous system, they all communicate all the time with all the people we’re physically close to in the same room as. If that level of connection is missing, then we’re kind of destabilized because of that.
Taylor Martin
[08:11] I always think about those different locations around the planet where people live beyond 100 years old. Every single one of them has this really tight community behind them. I’m just like, yeah, that sounds about right.
Dex Randall
[08:26] Yeah, and which of us has that in the way that we used to 10 years ago, 20 years ago, beyond that? I mean, my family were 500 years in the same location geographically. Now in my generation, all of my family is split all over the globe.
Taylor Martin
[08:45] Yeah, everyone basically is really. I want to get back to those triggers. What are some of those triggers that people can look out for, see them coming or they might see them happening to their spouse or a friend of theirs or something like that. How can we look out for this?
Dex Randall
[09:03] I think one of the external triggers we can look out for in our work is having to be available all of the time. If you’re checking your work messages last thing at night, first thing in the morning and every time in between, if it’s expected that you be present to work at all times, that is a risk factor because it means you’re always on. It means you don’t get the down time from work. That’s one of the things. Also, if you’re required to move around, shift jobs, shift task bases, if you’re never really sure what it is you’re supposed to be doing, whether it’s working or not, if you’re not getting any feedback about your efficacy and the way that you’re valued in your role and the way that you are a resource for other people in your work, whatever that may be, if you’re not feeling that reward and that connection, then it’s going to be predisposing you to burnout if you don’t feel a sense of your role and your value at work, which so many of us don’t now in these very over systematized systems that we work in. That can be something.
The way that you can detect it in yourself and in other people is you’re going to be very, very stressed. You’ll notice your stress levels and your physical stress levels in your body, the tiredness in your body. It may be insomnia, irritability, anxiety, very much anxiety, constant anxious thinking, that’s one of the barometers, and a sense of not really being part of, but I think one of the ways you can detect it in other people is if they’re frustrated and irritable and angry, resentful all the time, and as well if they withdraw. Withdrawal is a really good sign, a really useful sign to look out for. If somebody is withdrawing away from you and you think they might be in burnout, the withdrawal is a little bit of a tell. Also, there’s low level anger they’ve always got, irritability, they don’t want to be bothered by anything. In families, generally speaking, people in burnout who are in a family situation will withdraw from their partners and also not want to spend time with their children because they’re so irritable, there’s such a hair trigger.
Taylor Martin
[11:10] Oh, man, just hearing you say all those, I was just putting myself in those situations and I got a little – I got stressed out just thinking about them.
Dex Randall
[11:18] It’s not that those people don’t have the love anymore or don’t feel the love, it’s just that they’re so bothered by life itself that they can’t show up to people in a way they think they can rely on themselves to be nice to everybody.
Taylor Martin
[11:31] I was thinking what if somebody doesn’t get help, what if they stay the course and they just continue this burnout sensation? I mean, for God’s sake, you had a heart attack. I mean, that’s massive. What are some other things that people have to watch out for on something like this? Because I can see them getting burned out with things that don’t even have to do with the job that’s creating the burnout.
Dex Randall
[11:56] Yeah, absolutely. There’s all kinds of burnout. It’s not always job related. There’s parenting burnout. There’s caregiver burnout. There is first responder burnout. Different burnout goes with different professions, like the medical profession, obviously there’s a massive epidemic, teaching profession as well, law, but they’re all with their own special little flavor. It doesn’t really matter where the burnout comes from, but what happens is we get a build up of pressure because what we’re finding in ourselves is, when we’re feeling burned out, stressed, anxious, defeated, helpless all the time, powerless, we just bottle it all up tighter and tighter and tighter. The pressure we’re putting on that is pressure on the body, pressure on the organs of the body, typically the brain, the heart, the guts. We start getting physical symptoms, insomnia is an obvious one but also a lot of digestive complications, heart problems, lung problems. Our kidney and liver get a bit weak and everything is going slightly bursting at the seams like that.
We will get ongoing more metabolic disease, disease of inflammation. We can be more predisposed to things like heart attacks to even cancer to Alzheimer’s is another one, anything that’s inflammatory, diabetes is another one. Because we tend to get into a bit of an addictive cycle as well. We’re trying to escape the pain into our addictions. The physical health profile is on a downward trajectory. We’re getting more and more accidents, illnesses, disease. We’ll suffer more physically as time goes by in burnouts. I would never, ever recommend, if somebody recognizes that they’re in burnout, that they don’t do anything. We need to relieve the pressure.
Taylor Martin
[13:42] It’s like what the norm now is is this high stress level. That’s what you’re talking about. Then sustaining that and thinking that it’s normal, it’s okay, it’s what I’m supposed to be doing.
Dex Randall
[13:52] Yeah, thinking that it’s what we’re supposed to be doing, but also, feeling that we’re incapable of performing at an adequate level that the pressure will come off. We can never do enough to take the pressure off ourselves externally. Like a hungry beast, it’ll keep wanting everything we’ve got.
Taylor Martin
[14:08] That’s good. I totally empathize with that one. Walk me through the steps of someone comes to engage you to get them out of this burnout trajectory, what’s like the first step, second step? How do you get them through this?
Dex Randall
[14:22] Yeah, good question. Initially, when people come to me they’re so defeated and exhausted and worn out that Step 1 is really finding a way to bring them back to more energy so they can rest a little bit, sleep a little bit, ingest a bit of food, start taking care of those things so they get a bit of energy back because typically they’re so crashed, they can’t envision a solution is even possible. They’re so exhausted and so fed up. When I work with people, my first few weeks with them is to bring them back to energy because there’ll never be a smile on their face until they get a bit of energy back. If the tank’s empty, it’s empty. It’s got to need to refill it a little bit. What I work on with them is really helping them see that they do have some power still, that they are still a fantastic person because everyone in burnout will tell me, I’m not doing okay in all these different areas. They’ve got a very low self-image at that point so I need to boost that up with them. People that come to me in burnout are always brilliant people. They’re marvelous, lovely people, strong people, essentially. I have to bring them back to that point where they can feel their own goodness and their own strength and their own capacity to be who they want to be in the world. I do that by dealing with stress and anxiety, typically, because they’re the first two things that are taking all the energy away so we have to reduce stress and reduce anxiety to bring some of the energy back in order to do the remainder of work and recovery. Does that make sense?
Taylor Martin
[15:57] Absolutely, what are the next steps after that? Because I’m starting to feel better.
Dex Randall
[16:02] The people who get into burnout are type A people, type A personality, like the alpha type people. They’re very much overachievers, massively motivated to do work at a very, very high level. They’re just high performers. They’re just very strong. They would do anything to achieve what they need to achieve. Unfortunately, in burnout, they’ve pushed that so far the needle’s gone over the top and they’ve gone into lack of performance because they’re overworking without getting the results. Those type A personality features, we need to deal with those in burnout. Some of those include never stopping when you’ve put enough effort in. You can’t solve every problem by efforting. The type A people think they can always solve every problem. Burnout is the situation where they’ve stopped being able to solve every problem by themselves. They’re very self-driven people. Suddenly, they’ve hit a problem they couldn’t solve, like me with the guy who wouldn’t let me push the product out. It was a problem, first time ever, here’s a problem I can’t solve, oh, no. I’m this super performing professional and now I can’t be that. The shock is quite great so we need to get through that situation.
Taylor Martin
[17:13] Yeah, I can see your experience is such a wonderful tool for when you’re coaching people because you align, you understand. You’ve been in the trenches. You know what they’re going through. You’ve come out the other side and you’re helping them out of the ditch.
Dex Randall
[17:27] Yeah, I certainly can relate. I’m very type A. It’s horrible. It’s not horrible now because I’ve found a different way of relating with my type A-ness, but at the time when I was in burnout, I just wanted to keep slamming and slamming harder until I solved the problem, but slamming harder was what was making me so ill. Slamming your head on a wall, if the wall doesn’t go down, then you break your head. That was what was happening for me then. I’ve got a different way of relating to work now. I’m back. Personally, I’m back at a very high level of performance without overwork, stress, anxiety, frustration, without feeling thwarted, without feeling like I couldn’t do something. I’ve got a much lower set point, I suppose. That’s what I teach to our people because people in burnout are perfectionists. They will always effort their way to success. Those two things together work when they work while you’re going up your career. Once you hit the top in burnout, they stop working because you keep efforting trying to find a solution that’s no longer available and you start driving yourself downhill into the pit.
Taylor Martin
[18:34] You put engine back in the tank for them. You figure out where they’re at in the cycle and how they need to take on the problems that are causing the burnout. How do people react to that? Do they feel like they can do it yet because they’ve got a little fuel in the tank? Do they see it? Is it something you have to convince them to understand?
Dex Randall
[18:56] At the beginning, they don’t believe it. When they first come to me in despair, they don’t believe it’s possible. Their brain – it’s a bit like being in depression. Your brain tells you no solution will ever be available to the problem. Most people, when they come to me, are very cynical. Cynicism is a big feature of burnout. What I promise to people is, okay, you’re going to start feeling considerably better within four weeks. I’m going to put a smile back on your face and then we’ll do the rest of the work to give you more and more and more power back to do the things you love to do. What I watch for in people is that three, four-week mark, I watch the lights come back on again. They suddenly realize that this is working and that it will keep working and keep giving them more of what they want instead of the helpless despair they’ve been sunk into. They can have all their power back, basically, which is what they want, but also they can have their enjoyment back and their enjoyment of people back and their relationships back. All of that, they turn the corner in the first few weeks, and then within a couple of months, I’ve got them laughing and joking with me about the whole thing. That’s how I know they’re coming back on.
Taylor Martin
[20:10] Wow, I’m just thinking about the complexity of all this. I could see so many different elements driving it. I mean, even as simple as – I was just going through my rolodex of ideas in the back of my head, all of these different things that I’ve done in my life. One time I remember, I don’t remember what conference I was at or if I was watching a podcast or something, but some guy was talking about, you want to reduce your stress, turn off all of your notifications. I was like, what? Then I did it and I was like, oh, my God, I’m never going back. I didn’t realize how much stress it was causing, not like it was overstress, but it’s like you mentioned earlier, I was always on. I was always getting notifications. I was always checking. I was always in that headspace.
Dex Randall
[20:54] Yeah, and I think what we probably don’t realize is, when we’re in burnout, we’re dropping into an anxiety cycle which triggers our amygdala. It triggers our fight or flight constantly throughout every day. When we’re looking for these notifications, there’s a kind of addictive quality to it, isn’t it? It’s an addictive quality to social media. I need to see what’s going on, make sure I know what’s going on, see what needs a response, make sure I’m safe, essentially what I’m saying is I’ll make sure I’m safe because I know what’s going on, what everybody needs from me, but there’s an addictive quality about that because there’s an addictive quality to the stress hormones. The stress hormones give us a little boost of energy. When we’re feeling a bit ordinary, we want that boost of energy. Even the stress cycle itself becomes addictive. The anxiety cycle becomes addictive. Then we even more want to check all of our notifications. What you’ve talked about is kind of a detox from that stimulus, because ultimately, that stimulus is not good for our nervous systems. It keeps us from sleeping and resting. It keeps us from noticing the amazing goodness we have inside of ourselves. We’re always looking outside of ourselves for something that makes us feel momentarily better.
Taylor Martin
[22:05] I love this detoxing part. Let’s continue. What are some other things that people can do to help lower that stress load and bring that detoxing down?
Dex Randall
[22:14] I think a lot of it is about taming your schedule, taming your willingness to be always available, taming your social media and notifications. It’s not trying to be all things to all people because you actually don’t need to be. You’re not designed to be all things to all people.
Taylor Martin
[22:31] I concur with that.
Dex Randall
[22:32] You can have a better life by just centering in on who you really are and what your genuine skills and contributions are. It’s enough. A lot of us think of ourselves as not enough. Whatever we do, it’s not going to be enough. That’s actually a mirage. That’s not really how it works. We can never give our best performance when we’re trying to be all things to all people, when we’re saying yes to every request, when you’re immediately responding to everything that comes across your desk or your phone. You can’t possibly give it your best because you’re stretching yourself too thin.
Taylor Martin
[23:04] What if somebody is listening right now and they’re contemplating now I might be in burnout? What advice can you give them to help them get help or to get better?
Dex Randall
[23:16] First of all, for type A personalities in burnout, one thing we are is very high self-driven. We’re not the kind of people that like asking for help. We’re used to being problem solvers. Step 1 is, if you have a problem with burnout and if you’re not succeeding in working with it yourself, find somebody who’s good at helping you. That’s what I had to do. It didn’t come easy to me, but fundamentally, we’re not fixing it for ourselves, and with our type A personality attributes, we’re not going to. Stick your [inaudible] up and find somebody who can help you. Because this is where I came unstuck and I found the solution was almost trivially simple compared to what I thought it was going to be like. When somebody showed it to me, I was thinking, oh, that’s doable. I can do that, but you’ve got to reach out. You’ve got to be willing to change your MO and accept guidance from somebody who is effective in treating burnout, not who’s just is going to say, yeah, have a couple of weeks off. You’ll be all right.
I’m just going to add one example because I had a client, an accounting senior CFO. I’ve had a few CFOs that I work with. I had one recently. He was starting to have panic attacks at work. He started a new job at a not for profit and everything was so messy there. He couldn’t get it together. The team was starting to leave. It was all looking horrible. He started to doubt himself. He had panic attacks. They sent him home for a few weeks, which was wonderful. It was so supportive of them. It’s lovely that he had the break, but having time off is not going to fix burnout. You can’t rationalize your own nervous system just by having downtime. When he came to me, I taught him how to have a different outlook on how he was a wonderful person, had a massive contribution to make, could really support his team, could turn the company’s finances around. I showed him that picture, because otherwise, like I said, burnout is like depression. It tells us we’re useless and we can’t fix it and it's terminal. I just teach people to look at the other side of the coin, and yes, turn off their notifications as well. That is part of it.
Taylor Martin
[25:25] I’m telling you, man. I love that. Everyone I ever talk to about that I just say that helped so much. I did take a look at your website and I noticed some really great testimonials on there from past clients. That’s got to make you feel really good helping people like that. When you get back in touch with them months later, what are some common things that you hear from them that they say to you in feedback?
Dex Randall
[25:52] Yes, and this is a mission for me. This is I feel I’m able to help people in burnout and I can’t wait to help people who are in burnout because they’re such capable and wonderful people I just want them back on deck for themselves, for their work, for their families, for their partners, for all the people around them. For me, my biggest reward is seeing people get back on their feet, but typically, I don’t want to – this is not a done for you solution. I don’t want to be the person that people rely on to feel good. I want to teach them how to stay out of burnout for the rest of their lives so they don’t have to keep worrying about it.
Taylor Martin
[26:29] You want to teach them how to fish.
Dex Randall
[26:31] Yes, so typically, when people come back to me, I mean, and even during the course of the time I work with them, a lot of them get promoted to much higher roles, a lot of them start turning their business around if they’re business owners. Most of them have enormous gains in their families, their partnerships, the things that are happening outside work. All of that happens generally while I’m working with people, they have a massive improvement in their experience of life and the successes that they get, often successes they never even dreamed about getting before. I tend to take them not just to a level where they’re not in burnout but to a level which is much higher performing than they would’ve ever imagined they could have. They tend to start dreaming big dreams about their careers or their lives or their legacy or who else they can support and that really is ongoing. I had somebody come on a couple of months ago. He is a professor of neuroscience and he runs research projects for people in depression and also for marginalized, for the black community. I hadn’t spoken to him for about a year. He came back to me and he’s bursting with this next exciting research project and telling me about starting up a research center for the effective treatment of depression. I mean, I love that. The people who come out of burnout tend to be exceptionally high-quality mentors to other people in their organizations. They become a hub of goodness and value that spreads. Their sphere of influence is normally very big so they propagate their recovery from burnout into their environment and into the people around them, which I think is fantastic. They take other people along for the ride.
Taylor Martin
[28:20] I love that. It’s like paying it forward in a way.
Dex Randall
[28:22] Paying it forward, yes. Because I think as well like leadership these days it’s a little bit of a problematic subject. A lot of people in leadership positions aren’t really quite sure how to help their teams. Some of the leadership qualities that we’re taught, or even not taught at all, are not working that well in the modern environment. Teaching people how to be a really, really good quality leader, how to really support their people, have their backs and develop their best performance in their organizations and their teams is such a propagator of the goodness that they’ve got. I think developing high performing teams is not rocket science but modern culture is telling us the wrong things about how to do it, to some extent. Modern culture is what’s caused this disconnection, this anxiety, this stress that we all feel, this always on mentality, overwhelm, overwork. It’s our culture that’s doing that. I think finding a different way is very powerful.
Taylor Martin
[29:27] Do you think that this is still growing as a trend or do you think it’s leveling off? Where do you see us on that?
Dex Randall
[29:35] Oh, dear. A lot of people are paying a lot of attention to the solution, but my perception is a lot of people are trying to solve the problem, a lot of people who are heading big organizations are trying to solve the problem, are trying to understand the problem, but their understanding is not up to a point yet. To some extent, it’s a bit lipstick on the pig. It’s doing things that look useful that aren’t particularly well – they’re not working that well, like giving people paid time off. It’s a beautiful thing. It just isn’t fixing burnout. There are some organizations who are going a lot deeper into this. Funnily enough, Pixar is one that springs to mind and Google is very incented on creating positive team values and positive teamwork. There are some organizations that are doing it. There’s a great deal of research going on, but I think it really hasn’t hit. It really hasn’t hit critical mass yet.
Taylor Martin
[30:33] We still have a ways to go.
Dex Randall
[30:35] I think so. We have tackled the root of the problem of disconnection. I think just dealing with the symptoms, stress, anxiety, frustration, overwork, overwhelm, and all of that isn’t enough. You have to go back to the root cause. Why am I getting these symptoms in the first place? Because otherwise, if I fix stress and anxiety without fixing the root cause, it’ll just be recreated again next week or next month or next year. It needs to be a cultural shift in leadership. I think more people need to understand how this works.
Taylor Martin
[31:07] Dex, can you share some additional resources or knowledge that people could find out there on the interweb or in their local bookstore or something like that to learn more about this?
Dex Randall
[31:21] What sprang to mind when you said that is Brene Brown has done a lot of research into shame, vulnerability, fear, workplace, effective team building. She is one of the greatest exponents of the kinds of strategies that will work in team building. Her podcast is very good on that. My own podcast, the first 20 or so episodes of my podcast are what is burnout, who gets into burnout, why is it they get into burnout, how can they get out of burnout, how can they tackle the specific individual symptoms of burnout. It’s full of practical techniques to reduce frustration, fear, overwhelm, all the other things, and also to tackle the shame that comes behind it. Because there’s a kind of guilt and shame component of burnout which I really think does need to be mentioned. I felt incredible shame when I couldn’t do my job in burnout. It was horrible. I didn’t want anyone to even see me at work in case they could look over my shoulder and see I wasn’t doing my job.
Taylor Martin
[32:24] What’s the name of that podcast?
Dex Randall
[32:25] Burnout to Leadership, burnouttoleadership.com it’s anywhere you get podcasts.
Taylor Martin
[32:30] Oh, well, there you go.
Dex Randall
[32:31] What I’m really aiming to do with that is to give people a starting point to help them work with their own burnout. I work with private clients but this, all the information in the podcast, is self-starter. It’s a little bit DIY. If this is your problem, then these are some things you can try to reduce the scale of the problem and help you gain a much more positive supportive sense of self because fundamental to all of this is we have to love ourselves more, because who in burnout thinks the sun shines out of their bum? Not many. They wish it did. We don’t have a very favorable view of ourselves in burnout because we over identify with whatever role we’re in as I’m successful if I’m successful in this role, caregiving, family, work, doesn’t matter, [inaudible] work, if I’m not successful in my role then I’m not a successful human. I’m going to be real nasty to myself about that and my failure to deliver. The self-image is pretty rotten. The inner critic is on fire most of the time so we have to start being nicer to ourselves.
Taylor Martin
[33:40] Dex, is there anything else you want to leave our listeners with? We covered a lot of ground. You can say no if you want to, but do you have anything else you want to add?
Dex Randall
[33:49] I would love everybody to have access to the resolution for burnout and it’s not – there’s no future in staying in burnout. If you are in burnout, it degrades over time. It’s not going to get better by itself. It starts out episodic but then it starts to become more dense and occur longer. If you’re in burnout listening to this, don’t listen to the podcast to find out a little bit about how you can help to resolve it but there is hope that you don’t have to stay this way forever and just take action. Take action for the people you care about. Take action for yourself. Take action. Do something.
Taylor Martin
[34:29] Yeah, next steps, take steps.
Dex Randall
[34:32] Yeah, and I do have a video series as well that people can watch, can teach them some tools to deal with stress, anxiety, frustration, overwork, and all of that, because I think putting practical tools in people’s hands, it gives them a sense of, oh, okay, here’s some things I can do.
Taylor Martin
[34:48] You’ve got your hands on a lot of pies here. What are all the different ways people can reach out or follow you online?
Dex Randall
[34:56] Dexrandall.com is the hub of all of it. I put a lot of tips out on my social media about how to manage things as well. Everything starts there.
Taylor Martin
[35:05] Yeah, I saw you have, of course, YouTube, like you just mentioned, you have your podcast, you’re on Twitter, you’re on LinkedIn. Anything else I’m missing? Instagram, are you on Instagram?
Dex Randall
[35:14] Yeah, if you go to dexrandall.com, all my social media links are there. My podcast link is there. Also, if you do want to come and talk to me, come and talk to me. That’s there, too, so dexrandall.com.
Taylor Martin
[35:26] Excellent, this has been a great conversation, Dex. I really appreciate your time today in sharing all your insights. Fingers crossed, hopefully, this helps some people out there.
Dex Randall
[35:36] I really do hope so. That would be lovely. Thank you so much for having me on the show today.
Taylor Martin
[35:41] It’s been my pleasure. Over and out, everybody.
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[35:44] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.
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