Someone recently asked me, ‘what can you teach our staff about coping with stress, high pressure and Burnout?
I started the talk telling them a little of my journey working the emergency on-call shift in Hospital Laboratory Medicine. Something that I did for 22 years first at the Royal London Hospital, (NHS), and then at The London Clinic.
I went on to explain that when I took on the role, (2002), as the Head of Pathology in an acute Hospital in London, I thought I had a good understanding of the operational skills and the emotional and psychological qualities needed to manage in a high pressure work environment.
How wrong I was!!
I also explained that my confidence was bolstered by something I’d noticed during my early training years and I went on to describe the early training years.
In my early training years, (1980’s), I noticed that there was 2 types of Scientists, those that could do emergency on-call and those that couldn’t.
The long emergency on-call shift was definitely the ultimate test for most people in our profession.
In the first year there was a constant battle with tiredness, fatigue, stress and the long hours.
One my colleagues who helped train me, and also new I had a keen interest in the aircraft of WWII, compared it to the young fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain.
He said, ‘get through the first few months and you’ll be okay’.
My reply was, ‘when they made a mistake they often paid with their lives’.
He responded with, ‘you might want to think about that’!!!!
Even at this early stage in my training I began to wonder what enables people to cope with intense pressure and what leads them to give up.
At this time emergency on-call was NOT compulsory so it was easy to ‘throw in the towel’ and simply give up doing it. The ‘downside’ to that was that you lost a lot of valuable experience.
I can still clearly remember being ‘severely tested’. I eventually began to wonder why I started to feel more confident and better able to cope.
One thing I remember was with the constant exposure to high pressure I started to build a mental toughness that was to serve me well for many years to come.
Are you a Stressaholic on your way to Burnout?
There is a ‘downside’ to this the adrenaline rush!! which for many lasts for most of the following day. Its also easy after many months to become addicted!!
Anyway back to my new role. I’d got to ask many questions at the interview, so I thought I new exactly what the challenges were going to be!!!
We needed to rebuild the team, improve the productivity and the efficiency of the Dept. and also make it profitable again.
I loved the challenge and relished the thought of getting up to go in to work every day.
The financial aspect was the easier than I expected. Rebuilding and training the team proved to be much more of a challenge and took much longer than I expected and after 18 months I was tired. But I got there in the end.
Although not before waking up at 3am one Friday morning with pains in my chest and spending a week in Hospital. Fortunately there was no major disease apart from exhaustion, stress and near burnout.
My body was telling me to slow down and recover.
Once I stopped worrying about the situation and all the other negative thoughts like losing my job, my career, my house etc. I started to think about what had happened. I began to realize that even though I was more than capable of dealing with high pressure work environments. Caring for a new team had made me push myself even harder and for longer.
I liked working with the team and I was responsible for the welfare of my staff which I took very seriously. I also knew that a leader sets the tone and the Energy of his team.
This is one of the main reasons why people Burnout.
Its also something I noticed in many of my colleagues and later many of my clients.
It’s like being alone in your car late at night. Your driving fast to get home and the engine light comes on.
You know you should stop but you just keep on driving until you come to a ‘grinding halt’.
I was tired, exhausted, overwhelmed, demotivated and more than a little annoyed with myself.
Annoyed because I thought my years of experience of working under high pressure really should have prevented me from burnout.
So I started to do some research with work related burnout. What I found surprised me.
Burnout is more common than most people realise.
And it often goes unreported because people are too afraid to admit to themselves and to others that they ‘ran themselves into the ground’. Sometimes their employers contribute or even cause this to happen!!
If you want to read more about this, I recommend Daniel Friedlands book ‘Leading Well from Within’.
You can get more info’ about him and his story; here.
Once I started to recover I became determined not end up in this situation again.
But I also wanted to thrive not just survive. I wanted to build a resilience that would prevent me from collapsing on the sofa all week-end and have the Energy to enjoy life.
So I used my training in Medical Biochemistry and many other research resources to develope a robust Energy building programme, known as ‘Metabolic Conditioning’.
Over the past 8 years of consulting, coaching and research, I’ve tested and refined the principles of Metabolic Conditioning to help numerous clients recover and achieve more in their life.
These include mothers juggling family commitments with a career, business owners and even Doctors.
So if you’ve been suffering from tiredness, fatigue or stress and want to build more Energy go check out my book;
‘How to Overcome Tiredness, Fatigue, Stress and Burnout and Boost your Energy for High Performance’.
This provides the foundation steps of my programme and covers diet and nutrition, exercise, stress and much more.