In this episode, Leah Weiss discuss how to recognize the hidden signs of burnout. She shares how burnout can creep in under the guise of purpose, why discernment can’t be done alone, and how to find your way back to yourself.
Key Takeaways:
- The issue of burnout, particularly in the workplace.
- Personal experiences and challenges related to burnout.
- The importance of recognizing signs and symptoms of burnout.
- The concept of discernment in addressing dissatisfaction.
- Distinction between burnout and compassion fatigue.
- The role of community and support in navigating burnout.
- Factors contributing to burnout at individual, team, and organizational levels.
- The significance of psychological safety and team dynamics.
- The search for meaning and alignment of personal values in work.
- The impact of entrepreneurship on well-being, particularly for women founders.
Leah Weiss, Ph.D. is a researcher, lecturer, consultant, entrepreneur, and author. She teaches Compassionate Leadership at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she created the perennially-waitlisted course “Leading with Mindfulness and Compassion.” She is Founding Faculty at Compassion Institute. She is also the co-founder of Skylyte – a company that specializes in using the latest neuroscience and behavior change to empower high-performing leaders and managers prevent burnout for themselves and their teams. Her first book, “How We Work: Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity, and Embrace the Daily Grind” focuses on developing compassionate and soft skill-based leadership while also offering research-backed actionable steps towards finding purpose at work.
Leah Weiss: Website | Instagram | LinkedIn
If you enjoyed this conversation with Leah Weiss, check out these other episodes:
Embracing Emotions at Work with Liz Fosslien
How to Deal with Burnout Through Self-Compassion with Kristin Neff
By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you!
If you enjoy our podcast and find value in our content, please consider supporting the show. By joining our Patreon Community, you’ll receive exclusive content only available on Patreon! Click here to learn more!!
Episode Transcript:
Eric Zimmer 00:01:04 What if the very thing that gives your life meaning is also what’s burning you out? That’s the paradox. Leah Weiss found herself in teaching compassionate leadership at Stanford.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:16 Working with organizations inspired by the Dalai Lama. Doing the kind of work most of us dream of. And yet she was falling apart. In today’s conversation, we unpacked the silent erosion of self that can happen even when everything looks right on the outside. Leah shares how burnout crept in under the guise of purpose, why discernment can’t be done alone, and how the small act of knitting helped her find her way back to herself. This episode is a map for anyone wondering is it me? Is it the job or is it the world we’re trying to survive in? I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Leah, welcome to the show.
Leah Weiss 00:01:56 Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:59 Yeah, I am happy to have you on. As we were talking before this interview. You were on the show almost four years ago to the day. It was just kind of interesting that we talked at this time and amazing that it’s been four years. So I’m really happy to have you back on.
Leah Weiss 00:02:15 I’m really happy to be here and continue this conversation. We started many moons ago in a very different climate that we’re in today.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:24 Yeah. And our basic topic is going to be oriented around the idea of burnout, you know, workplace burnout primarily, but we know it extends well beyond the workplace. But before we get into that, let’s start like we always do with the parable. There’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d love to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Leah Weiss 00:03:10 I think in terms of how I hear that in my life, one of the ways that this really resonates with me is acknowledging the degree to which we’re influenced and shaped by our surroundings, and that we want to be thoughtful about that.
Leah Weiss 00:03:27 I’m a parent of three young children, and so we talk a lot about the navigation of being a friend to people who need support, who are in distress, but also understanding what you need to thrive so you can be that friend. And I think one nuance I would say when I read this parable again in advance of our conversation is it really caught me these words good and bad, AD, because I think the way that I tend to think about this is tendencies that pull us in directions that are connective, supportive, conducive of compassion or fear based scarcity. And I don’t know that labeling them as good or bad helps us in actually navigating these currents that we all have. So it’d be interesting to talk that through. And then for the other side that you asked about in my work, how does this influence how does this relate? I think I spend my time now working within companies, helping to set up teams, climates of courts in the storm, within organizations that are navigating a lot of change and even often toxicity.
Leah Weiss 00:04:47 How do you think about feeding the positive? Not just within yourself, but collectively? So I think that it really does come to the heart of what do you do when you’re navigating things that are problematic, and how do you create mutual support so everyone can move towards the proverbial best selves, healthiest selves, together?
Eric Zimmer 00:05:08 Yeah, I think that idea of good and bad is really interesting. It’s brought up a lot, and I’ve said a lot of times on this show. You know, I’ve always loved the Buddhist phrasing of these things as skillful and unskillful actions. Like, I feel like that speaks to, you know, what we’re really saying more, but it’s kind of a boring story. The grandparents said there’s this unskillful wolf, and he was sent away to corporate training. And, you know, so I thought where we might start is with you and burnout because I think you suffered. I don’t know if this is how you would say it, but you certainly had a case of it. And I’m wondering if you could kind of share what that was like, what happened, and, you know, sort of how you made your way out of it. And I think that’ll lead us then into talking about this more generally.
Leah Weiss 00:05:56 Yeah, absolutely. I’m happy to share. I think, you know, for me, what is so interesting, at least from the vantage point of today, is to uncouple kind of what happened externally and internally. For me, that led me to kind of realize at some point a few years ago that I just I don’t want to go on this way. This isn’t how I want to work, how I want to parent, how I want to be in the world. I had just turned 40 when we spoke last time. I think for me, that was actually, you know, some of these symbolic ages I feel like really helped us ask the questions around, am I where I’m supposed to be in my life? And for me, I think what I was seeing was I was working in a way that was not sustainable, that I was missing elements of my children’s life because I was traveling or preoccupied when I was there.
Leah Weiss 00:06:56 I think a lot of what I was hooked by to use another kind of Buddhist psychology term. When I went back to Stanford to work full time after graduate school. Each of us kind of has currencies that we buy into. And for me, this kind of academic research understanding, kind of contributing in that space was so exciting. But also it led me to work around the clock, let go of a lot of what I now know are the signs of burnout. You know, tipping from starting to let self-care go, displaced frustration from work and to other elements of life. And then, of course, like for me, as someone who identifies as a practitioner, as someone who’s trying to work on myself, like I’m sure everybody listening to this podcast can relate to. Spent many years in doing meditation retreats, cultivating skills that it really hurt to admit weren’t working in this environment, and compounded by, you know, living in Palo Alto, one of the most expensive places in the world. Having three children, being a breadwinner for our family.
Leah Weiss 00:08:14 And I think then for me, what I experienced was a very similar to what a lot of people do. One of my mentors was the one who really made me see where I was at, and that often is the case. It’s hard to self-diagnose when we’re burned out. It’s our loved one’s a close colleague who calls us out and says, you’re not the version of yourself. You know what’s happening. So she called me out as kind of the frog in the pot over time, and I really all of a sudden I remember that breakfast viscerally, where I felt it and I saw it. And then, you know, that’s kind of the first step, but that’s also where the work begins. And one of the things I’ve been really interested in is playing both sides of this equation of when do you make decisions around, I need to change my external circumstances, which like, who in the world isn’t thinking about that now with the great resignation? Right. So when do I decide this fit isn’t working? When do I decide this is me? I can quit, I can move, but this is my stuff that’s going to follow me wherever I go.
Leah Weiss 00:09:18 And how do you uncouple all of this and understand what you need to do? So being a nerd, I’d been working in this space of burnout and compassion fatigue for many years, but I started to take this lens more. Looking at the question around how do you think about culture, of workplaces, of our communities and how I had guided so many other people through this question of, am I in the right career? Am I in the right location? Am I living the life I’m wanting to live, and then asking all those questions of myself and letting myself off the hook for like, I can’t expect myself to meditate my way out of this. And what if I allow myself to also come to a conclusion like this isn’t where I want to raise my kids. This isn’t the work that I want to be doing. This isn’t the way I want to be doing it. And let that part of the equation open up, which I think is interesting to look at now because it’s where so many people are, right? Because we can move now and people are quitting their jobs now and there’s other jobs available or that perception.
Leah Weiss 00:10:24 The set of questions. If you feel like this is not my beautiful life that you’re living right now, how do you start to go through that process in a way where you’re not blowing everything up irretrievably, but kind of in a thoughtful way, asking the right questions in experimenting with steps that you’re not going to completely end up regretting.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:44 Yeah, I think that question is so fundamental to so many things. Is this something that I need to change in the outside world, or is this something I need to change inside myself? Is that a little bit of both? And I think this is why I have often said, I think the Serenity prayer sums up so much of what life is about, right? Should I accept this or change it? And the wisdom to know the difference is really the hard part. What things for you helped you or still help you in sorting that question out? You know, how do you go about when you find yourself at one of those points and you’re looking in those two directions? What are some of the tools or ways, thought processes, whatever, that help you find that wisdom to know the difference?
Leah Weiss 00:11:28 I mean, I think there’s always some element of having quiet, some version of of prayer, juju prayer, in my case, meditation, if you will. Like there’s those elements. But I think what I’ve really been leaning into as well, you know, just getting back to like Embodied elements of life, like cooking with my little kids. Walking a ton. Knitting. I’ve been knitting so much. Gardening, like putting physicality front and center and and slowing down to do that and taking when that feels odd, to move back and forth between the pace of ideas and screens and zoom meetings, you know, hour after after hour. And it does feel jarring to be back into bodies and relationships and listening more deeply. And I think even taking that kind of discomfort of transition as an important daily practice has been huge. And just like so many of us, you know, sleep in the last few years with the pandemic, you know, we were already an insomniac world. But how much more so now? and, you know, experimenting with like what happens when I take screens out of the equation when I go back to paper books, when I draw, even though I’m a terrible artist, but I draw because of the process feeling, you know, grounding all the things we’re baking in the world, all the things that we’re like reclaiming.
I think this physicality is kind of shared. That’s been big, big, big for me too.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:10 Yeah, I think the other idea, it’s in the spiritual direction world, and I was trained as an interfaith spiritual director. The word discernment is used a lot. Right. And that’s what we’re kind of talking about. And I’ve more and more become convinced that discernment kind of has to happen in community. It really works much better when I’m not discerning all by myself. When that discernment is happening, by me processing it with other people, obviously the right people, the right circumstances, but still a really valuable part of the process. I want to go back for a second, though, before we move on to you. You’ve got this role at Stanford. You’ve got children. You’re the breadwinner. Your husband still, I think in school and you are doing work that feels monumentally important to you. You are working on compassion research that is sort of backed by the Dalai Lama, right? Like so I mean, you’ve landed in some ways, like dead set into, like, all right, this is it.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:08 And yet there were still aspects of burnout for you in there. Did that make it harder to figure out because the work did feel so meaningful?
Leah Weiss 00:14:19 Oh you’re good Eric. Yes it did. I think it made it harder to recognize it. Even a culture that is a group that’s come together around a shared value with noble ambitions, can still have toxicity and challenge in how to operate and how to function together. That, you know, since that time now I’m well aware, like even if you look at the research, like toxicity and cultural problems and nonprofits where we’re aligned on purpose, they can be pervasive because there’s a sense of you self-sacrifice and you sublimate the how you’re doing things underneath the importance of the mission. And I think I was personally very predisposed to that. And I think that culturally, that is a big part of the experience. And it’s even more painful, you know, and I see this even I do a lot of work in health care these days with the pandemic, when people who are purpose driven, they’re in a line of work because they want to help others, and then they feel divorced in their how they’re executing that work from their core values.
Leah Weiss 00:15:31 I think there is an extra layer of what we’re calling moral injury that happens and disillusionment. Right? Because, yeah, there’s a lot to say about that. And then I think for me it was a lot of self doubt too, and I felt like I was in layer upon layer of kind of worldviews that didn’t align with me as a mom, a woman. You know, academia is not known for notoriously being friendly to women, nor is Buddhist organizational structures. you know, it’s a lot. But I also want to come back to what you said, I think so profoundly this point about discernment in community. And when I went to Boston College for my graduate degrees, that was something that really jumped out at me. Not that we didn’t have community in the Buddhist world that I was being raised in, but I think the way in which it’s understood is really unique and profound. And I think that was something that gave me kind of strength, that amidst feeling overwhelmed, feeling like I’m in my dream situation and it’s not working, but there was access to some amazing people around me, even swimming in the same culture that was dysfunctional.
Leah Weiss 00:16:49 I remember one of my mentors described being in academia is kind of like being in a mafia oriented place, because you have to, like, hook yourself onto the people with power. But if you start getting powerful enough, then you become a magnet for other people who want your turf. And you know all of that. When I first heard, I was like, this is bananas. And by the end I was like, that’s pretty astute. So anyway, the people who are swimming in this kind of dysfunctional toxicity but have their heads on not necessarily just straight, but they have some practice, their grounding in those people that you can come back to to figure out who am I? What does this mean together? Is everything.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:50 One of the books that I’ve spent the most time with in my entire life is the Dao de Ching. It’s an ancient Chinese manual for living well that somehow also reads like poetry. Here’s an example of one verse that I come back to over and over through the years. If you look to others for happiness, you will never be happy. If your well-being depends on money. You will never be content. That kind of simple truth doesn’t just sound good, it actually changes how you live if you let it. It’s simple, it’s direct, and it hits me harder every year. If you’ve ever been curious about the Dao, or just want some ancient wisdom that actually works in real life, I’ve got something special. I teamed up with Rebind to create an interactive edition of the Dao. I handpicked 40 core verses translated them into plain, relatable language and built them into a guide where you can ask questions and get my take in real time. It’s like having a conversation not just with the Dao, but with me too. You can grab it right now at one you feed store that’s spelled T. That’s one you feed. To. If you’re looking for a little more clarity, calm or direction, I’d love to meet you there.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:10 I want to get to where you are now, and I have some questions about that. But I feel like before we do that, it would be helpful to talk about burnout a little bit more.
What are we talking about? What is it? How do we know when we have it? Like, I mean, I think there’s a lot that we can sort of cover in that area. And then I’d love to talk about how your current experience compares to your old experience and the differences there. So maybe we’ll just start with that very simple question. Like what is burnout?
Leah Weiss 00:19:36 Yeah, burnout is this combination of emotional exhaustion, dehumanization, and a lack of self-efficacy. So those are like the academic words to describe them. And it’s also part of the World Health Organization definition and more plain terms. I think a way to think about it is the emotional exhaustion, that feeling of like at the end of a long day, you just don’t have anything left to give. You can’t hear about another person’s problem. You know, the version of you that wants to show up to others is depleted. The depersonalization goes in both directions. So one of the kind of textbook ways people describe it as like the physician who’s become kind of a cynical, rude, like no grace or tact.
Leah Weiss 00:20:25 They’re just like going to get right to the question without thinking about how does that impact you? So it can be the side of personalizing others, but it can also be de personalizing yourself. And they often happen together. So if I’m treating you from a cynical, kind of dehumanized perspective, I’m probably also thinking of myself in that way and the people I’m surrounding myself with. And then the third part is a lack of self-efficacy. This is, I think, the actually trickiest part for building health out of burnout, because the more burnt out you are, the less you feel like you can shape your environment. So then all the options for where would you change yourself? Change the situation seem impossible because there’s no efficacy. Do you feel like a victim in the world is happening to you as part of the illness itself? Yeah. So you can’t recognize the help that is available to you. So you put those three together. One of the ways I often talk about it that people find helpful is it’s not a binary.
Leah Weiss 00:21:28 You have it or you don’t. It’s a spectrum. And so early burnout often looks very similar to workaholism. Middle burnout is like middle stages when you’re losing your habits of self-care, when you’re snapping at your loved ones at the end of the day, and then later stage burnout. You know, significant behavioral changes, either significant depression or anxiety, loss of hope, complete collapse. There’s physical symptoms that happen along the way. With all of this, when you’re burned out, your amygdala is enlarged. Your like old lizard brain. As people often kind of summarize, the amygdala is bigger in your cognitive resources. Your ability to think and problem solve is smaller. Like literally your brain functionality changes when you’re burned out, which is also really interesting. And then when you think demographically, women, people of color, those of us who don’t have a partner, there’s higher risk. And then in the context of the pandemic, you know, we’ve been seeing mass exodus of women from the workplace. and I’d been really looking into this a lot.
Leah Weiss 00:22:37 And the rates of burnout are much higher, which makes sense given all the contextual factors. Parents are higher than non-parents, women are higher, and so forth. So there’s all these other layers and features of the individual, but also the environment that feed into burnout.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:55 And how do we determine burnout from something like depression or anxiety, particularly if burnout eventually manifests itself in depression and anxiety? Is there any way to sort of tell the two apart, and is it important to tell the two apart, I guess.
Leah Weiss 00:23:11 It’s a great question. I think by the time you’re experiencing the anxiety and depression symptoms of burnout, it would be indicated to get mental health support. You’d be at the upper end of the burnout spectrum. And so you would want to be seeing a professional have the professional do the differential diagnosis between burnout or generalized anxiety or depression. One thing that people say you see in the literature, it’s like, is there a sense of it? It gets more acute in the workplace. Or more acute Sunday night blues. Or anxiety, you know, so maybe you’re you feel like yourself on your vacations, in the evenings and the weekends, but you see your reactive ness heightened in the workplace. That could be an indicator. But for listeners who are experiencing this kind of depression or anxiety, the upshot is basically you want to talk to a professional anyways and work with them to determine, you know, because it might be that you want to have medication or a certain kind of treatment alongside doing a whole discernment process around your professional context and path.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:25 Yeah. As somebody who has had depression in, you know, different forms for a long time and somebody who may have suffered burnout at different points. The relationship between the two is very difficult to figure out, right? Say like, well, depression often to me looks like what burnout might feel like, which is particularly a lack of enthusiasm of anything that takes energy from me. Right. So it’s like that’s one of its signal things is like, anything that takes energy causes me to be like, no.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:56 Which work gets implicated in, right? Work can be one of those things. I think that question around, you know, how do you respond on off work times is an interesting one. What about compassion fatigue? Because you also say this is not the same thing as compassion fatigue. So I certainly know that is something we’re hearing a lot about. Talk about how burnout and compassion fatigue are different from each other.
Leah Weiss 00:25:19 So the interesting thing with compassion fatigue, and I’m sure you’ve come across this, but I think for listeners, it’s good to kind of lay this out. When you start reading about compassion fatigue, one of the first things that you start humming across is people saying it’s not actually compassion that’s fatigued, it’s empathy. And the reason this is important is basically the neuroscience of understanding how our brains and bodies respond to chronic suffering. We have built into us these. If you remember back to psych 101, the ideas of of mirror neurons and the mother infant mimicry that from the time humans are newborns, they read and mimic the parents facial expressions.
Leah Weiss 00:26:10 So we have wired in these emotional kind of tuning forks. One of the things that has been really interesting with the advances in neuroscience in the last decade is we see that people who are chronically exposed to suffering, if they’re responding from a place of empathy. There’s a tipping point in which, like our brains and bodies, can’t stay empathically attuned. All the time we hit a point of overwhelm and collapse where our compassion then goes away. So that becomes interesting. So let’s say in the beginning, it’s useful if I’m with you, Eric, and you’re talking about a problem that you’re facing. It’s useful that I have this ability to mirror you, to understand and respond. We’re social. We’ve evolved to be like tribal in some way. Mutual support is part of survival. But at some point when it gets Eric times a thousand that I’m surrounded by suffering that I can’t solve, then the pain response in my brain that’s mirroring hits a point where it’s not signaling all the time. It like doesn’t function anymore.
Leah Weiss 00:27:25 When we talk about compassion fatigue, we’re actually talking about empathy fatigue. And then what’s interesting about that is that there’s compassion because it’s different than empathy. There’s a way that we can respond to other people’s suffering that doesn’t get depleted and used up is the thought behind it. And interestingly, this is a thousands of years old intuition from wisdom traditions. Right. Like the idea that you could participate in contemplative support of others emits massive suffering. I mean, there’s so many stories all the way back to wisdom, traditions, canons about people who who did that. So the idea then borrows on what does it mean for us as people to learn to respond with compassion rather than empathy? What is the difference? What is that feel like? How do we train ourselves? How do we train our physicians and health care providers to do that? And then therefore, how do we kind of solve this problem of compassion fatigue. So this is a discourse I’ve been a part of since I was in grad school right after September 11th, studying all the rise of burnout and compassion fatigue in healthcare, in first responders and all of those kind of studies.
Leah Weiss 00:28:43 And I think the implications for us today are fascinating, no matter what our line of work is in the pandemic, all the uncertainty and pain and anxiety that we were all navigating this lens of like hitting a tipping point with that where we can’t engage skillfully anymore. So what does that even mean for me is, you know, a parent navigating schools closed and changes in workplaces and yada yada. So, you know, back to your question of that compared with burnout, the way I would think about it is we need to both from the individual side, train people to understand how to respond with compassion rather than empathy, which in some cases means retooling, taking on, feeling the other person’s pain and having a responsive way of engaging with them. But that has an understanding of a type of boundary in support of both people, the person in pain and the other person. So it doesn’t become dehumanized and cynical, but it has a wisdom of understanding. Me getting overwhelmed by your problem isn’t going to necessarily help you, especially if I’m here to be in a role where you need me to not be crying alongside you about your diagnosis.
Leah Weiss 00:30:08 You need me to hold this space. To be able to be clear.
Eric Zimmer 00:30:13 That’s a really interesting idea there. The empathy versus compassion. And I kind of want to go deep down that hole, but I’m going to resist. But I have one question on it, which is do you find often that people earlier in their career. Start from an empathy perspective. Like that’s what comes most naturally. Then one of two things happens. Either they move into quote unquote empathy fatigue and they become cynical, or they figure out how to do this with compassion, and they move into sort of this wise healer mode. Is that the general path?
Leah Weiss 00:30:45 I think that is a really good way to summarize it. And when you said that, it made me think of I remember when I was in grad school doing my clinical training, I was one of the settings I worked in was a Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights, which is headed by this incredible physician who does work with refugees from around the world. Like, talk about someone being immersed in so many unimaginable kinds of pain and trauma on the daily.
Leah Weiss 00:31:12 And I remember walking out of the hospital with him at the end of one of the days, and I was just kind of asking him how he was or how he felt about his day. He just came back to being so grateful to be here. And what an incredible world. What an incredible opportunity. Like he was, you know, coming from that wise healer perspective. And I was the angsty, you know, clinical training, like, overly empathic to the point where it’s probably annoying to be the recipient of for the folks I was working with at that point. I think that’s right. And I think the other thing that reminds me of from the neuroscience perspective is, you know, one of the studies I often talk about in my keynotes is when we brought a group of meditation experts to Stanford, put them in an fMRI machine, had them do compassion meditation and the reward regions of their brain light up, not the pain empathy regions of the brain light up. And I’ve always said and felt like I would love to do the studies where we do this across traditions, right? Like because every wisdom tradition has some version of compassion, contemplative practice.
Leah Weiss 00:32:21 How interesting to see what that looks like as a way to motivate the rest of us to cultivate.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:19 All right. We’ve talked a little bit about what burnout is. maybe some of what it’s not. Let’s talk about some of its causes. And I know that you sort of delineate causes kind of at three levels. I’ve seen in some of your work, which I think is interesting. There’s an individual level. You talk about a team level and an organizational level. And I suppose if we were to take it one step further, we’d say there are societal components also. But walk us through those. What the causes are, you know, kind of in each of those levels.
Leah Weiss 00:33:49 You know, a metaphor that I find helpful for framing comes from the godmother of burnout research, Doctor Maslany, and she uses a metaphor of if you’re trying to understand burnout, what people typically do is analogous to looking at cucumbers in vinegar barrels and being surprised that they turn into pickles. So it’s nonsensical to just look at the individual level, not meaning that there’s nothing we can do as individuals and there’s not contributors, some of which we can address, some of which are intrinsic to who we are.
Leah Weiss 00:34:25 Our demographics. You know, as I mentioned before. So if we start from the individual level, it’s what are our habits around mindset, professional fulfillment? How clear are we on our values? How aligned do we experience our lives and our work with our values? All of that can contribute to burnout or resilience at the group level. Let’s say the team level in a workplace, you know, and this comes back to the profound point you raised about discernment in community. The role of the community, kind of our work, family, the people we spend the most time with interact with the most, you know, kind of back to the parable. Do we have a version of our relationship that is supportive, compassionate? We care about them. We know about their values. We believe that they’re are wanting to support us. We feel that way about them. Or is it the opposite? Do we see them as a threat to our advancement, even survival? Do we not trust them? You know, there’s all these interesting studies about if you have one workplace friend, you’re going to be healthier, more engaged, advance more.
Leah Weiss 00:35:38 If you can build that at the team level, like this microcosm point in the storm that is massive for your resilience and then the broader culture within the organizations we function in. And how do those impact our our values, our ability to be socially attuned to others, our ability to feel like we can do our work and feel like we’re being seen and rewarded all of that. That there’s fairness. Interestingly, like people often hear about burnout and they think working too many hours is one of the biggest precipitates. Actually, one of the biggest precipitates is feeling like we’re out of alignment with our values, or that our workplace isn’t fair. People are rewarded for bad behavior. Or there’s inconsistencies. We talk about being this great culture, but in practice we’re actually like, you know, live and let die. So you can do work at each of these three levels. I spent the first very long part of my career focus on what can you do as individuals? Mindfulness, mindset, framing, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, all really good stuff.
Leah Weiss 00:36:50 But if we start looking at applying even that, like next level to what does it mean to bring your self-awareness into the team? So if you and I are a team with five other people that we can then share, what are our triggers, what are our values, and how do those align with the work that we’re doing together? How can we support each other and how can we even tactically, you know, do things the way we allocate work, the way that we assign blame and credit, the way we help each other actually be off when we’re on vacation. Because that comes down to your team often, like, totally. Do you have a way of give and take? And then at the culture level, there’s so much to do. But it’s tricky because it’s big, it’s amorphous, and it takes a long time. Three years is like what the number that most experts give to a culture change project in an organization. So if you want to talk about bang for your buck, focusing on the team level, I think is the way to go, which is why I’m putting my attention there.
Leah Weiss 00:37:54 Build your community. Build your support. Get that interactive part, but it’s manageable. We, a team of eight, can make a decision today to try something different and do that tomorrow. We don’t need to go get sign in, you know, buy in and approval from a lot of different people and all the alignment and socializing that comes with a culture change project.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:17 Yeah, that resonates with me for a variety of reasons, but one is sort of a middle way kind of guy, right? Between the organizational and the personal. What’s there, the team. Right. But to your point, it’s influencing our organization maybe a little bit, but it’s going to be kind of hard. But we have more influence on the team. And it also addresses some of those issues that are slightly more important than the personal. This gets back to discernment questions, right. You just mentioned, like, you know, if I have teammates who are toxic, right? There are people I know in life who see nearly anybody who doesn’t agree with them as toxic.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:56 Their self-awareness is such that it’s like, if you don’t agree with everything that I think, then you’re, you know, I’ve labeled you as the problem. You’re the toxic person, right? And then the other extreme would be the person who, you know, thinks that doesn’t matter who it is out there. You know, Genghis Khan could be on their team and they’re like, well, I really should work on my ways of relating to other people from a place of loving kindness. Right. And so it strikes me again, as you know, how do we find this middle ground? Do you find that it’s helpful to start with the individual work and be sure that you kind of have that in place? Or is it really something you can start kind of at all levels?
Leah Weiss 00:39:32 You know, when we’re talking within the context of a team, we want to remember that power structure influences. So the team has a manager or a lead, and that person will realistically have an outsized influence on the culture of the group.
Leah Weiss 00:39:48 And what’s particularly tricky is often the folks who are middle managers are at very high likelihood of being burnt out themselves. So there’s trust they’re probably not at the top of their interpersonal game. Maybe they’ve been trained to be a manager, or maybe they became a manager because they were a good individual contributor, but they never, like, learned the kind of art of managing other people’s work, social intelligence, communication skills. So to come back to your question, the methodology that I’ve developed and work with is a combination of the individual and the team. So the individual needs to get back an understanding that they can see of where they’re at with their burnout, their strengths and weaknesses, and not just their burnout in general, but their burnout proclivities and their burnout specifically in this workplace. Right. Which is an important part of the question. We were coming back to you before, how do you determine what’s me? What’s the environment? So having that understanding what’s environmental then at the team level, understanding where’s my team at with respect to burnout? Are we all clustered at the high end of the burnout spectrum? Is it a range? Are some of us in actually like a pretty solid space? How can they help the others? What’s the role of the manager in supporting resilience or contributing to burnout.
Leah Weiss 00:41:15 And then what I’ve been finding a lot of success with is if you take some of this data and share back with a team, hey, Group, here’s where you’re at with your sense of belonging and psychological safety in burnout. So each individual doesn’t have to take the burden of saying, I don’t feel safe here, or these are the ways that this team is not working for me, but you’re laying it back at the group level, but anonymously. So your starting point is the group to address this shared problem that no individual has had to stand up and own or blame the others for. It’s just this is what is in this group. And then giving a methodology within Team Health, there’s four pillars. And based on where you’re at, we suggest you work on the belonging psychological safety component first. Or we suggest you work on structured rest because you’re all exhausted. Nobody’s getting any time off. There are some basic kind of stop gap so you can take rest up and then address, you know, the next and the next.
Leah Weiss 00:42:18 And thinking in terms of the science and behavior change, which is don’t do everything at once. Pick a keystone habit and work there as a group.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:26 Yeah. You just sort of answered a question I was going to ask, which is a lot of discussions about team efficacy these days seem to have boiled down to psychological safety. I’m not that focused on team work or corporate work anymore, but I see that phrase all the time when when people are talking about team psychological safety. And my question was going to be, is that all there is to this? But it sounds like you just identified four pillars that are important psychological safety and belonging being just one of them. The other three you mentioned, I guess R&R, right? Is that just kind of the team culture around what hours we work, how much we work, supporting each other in being able to take time off?
Leah Weiss 00:43:03 Yeah, that’s the most kind of tactical of the four elements and it really is around. Also just having the basic conversations like I’ve got little kids.
Leah Weiss 00:43:12 I live on the West Coast. The hours that I really want to carve out and need to be with my family are this and yours are that. Because you’re in another time zone and this is your life? Like having some structure around those basic conversations goes a long way because people are driving each other mad with the meeting invite. Like, you know, that is my Friday at five, like, but you’re in another time and especially in this global workplace, right? So it’s some of that very tactical coordination or having blocks and processes in place. I’d say slightly more like nuanced. But also important is autonomy. So getting that balance right, which is going to be different for each individual on a team of do you have the right amount of support and flexibility if you’re being micromanaged, that’s probably driving you bananas. If you’re untethered, being told to do things that you have no support or resources for, that’s also really bad. So autonomy is a collective process of resourcing and teamwork. That is so often a big part of what’s driving people into the ground with burnout.
Leah Weiss 00:44:21 You know, they don’t have to be deep conversations, but get some really productive work done on that autonomy place pretty quickly. And then the other piece is awareness, self-awareness, understanding your own values. Understanding basic tools of emotional and social intelligence. But doing that at the team level so triggers, values, alignment, all of that work. And so these four when you put them together you know are really they capture a lot. If you look at the literature and all the different participants have burnout or resilience. So psychological safety super important but not the whole story. And also I think so many people get it so fundamentally wrong thinking like, oh, if we want to build psychological safety, we should all, you know, share really, really vulnerable stories that are traumatic for ourselves. And actually, like when I work with a team to build psychological safety, the starting place often has to be the sanctioning around. Let’s come to agreements around how we want to be together and what we’re going to do when there’s microaggressions and when people deviate, because you can do all the work to share and be vulnerable.
Leah Weiss 00:45:37 But if you haven’t made agreements about how you’re going to respond when someone is getting pushed out of that group for whatever element of their personality or whatever ism is at play, then you can’t build a psychological safety. So that’s also part of I’m like, no, this is not about trust falls and sharing all of our trauma with each other. It’s also like naming norms for like, how do we want to be respected and respect others? And what will we do when those are transgressed to signal that we’re not going to be complicit.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:10 But there’s nothing wrong with the good old trust fall, is there?
Leah Weiss 4 00:46:14 No. I mean, we all. Who doesn’t love a good? Who doesn’t love a good a trust?
Eric Zimmer 00:46:17 That’s right, that’s right. I keep trying to talk Chris into one with just me being there to catch him. But he won’t. He won’t. He won’t go for it.
Leah Weiss 00:46:25 He’s not having it.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:26 No. He’s probably taking lots of notes about, team culture based on this.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:30 I want to ask a question about job satisfaction a little bit. This sort of ties in. And if I’m straying too far outside where you feel comfortable, just say, I don’t know. But I see a lot of people and what they feel is that their work isn’t meaningful. And what they often mean by that is that it’s not directly helping another person in like, say, helping starving children. And so they feel like, okay, I don’t feel like my work is meaningful, and I’m always torn by that, by by sort of going, yep, you’re right. You really should pursue that because that’s the path. Or are there other paths? And this gets back to our question before. Do I change myself? Do I change the situation? But what are paths to make work more meaningful? Assuming that we’re in generally a good situation, right. Generally, like we’re doing work that’s at least like somewhat challenging, somewhat interesting, you know, that can engage us. But the bottom line mission isn’t, say, philanthropic.
Leah Weiss 00:47:34 I love that question. I think coming back to probably work you are well familiar with from a spiritual direction is, you know, the values work getting really clear about values and then taking that from the abstraction and looking for the opportunities to walk the talk on those values. So maybe we’re not working to end world hunger, but one of our core values is around community or compassion and really exploring what are the opportunities within the work I am doing, the people I am interacting with, how can I lean into expressing that value? And then one of the ideas that we talk about in the academic language of extra role behavior. So what are things that are not part of my core job description that energize me, that bring me meaning, that help me feel connected with who I am and want to be? And often it’s a little bit of investing in those. And coaches and managers can really help the people that they’re talking with to identify not just the values, but what are the opportunities. And it’s amazing how many times I’m sure you’ve seen this, that you have someone who realizes they want to learn some skill and service of a core value.
Leah Weiss 00:48:50 They start to spending an hour a week and it changes everything around for them. So this is a place where, you know, in having taught MBA students at Stanford for years, I’m always saying like, don’t look at it like you’re losing time from this person if you’re bringing them alive, then you are doing the right thing, but also doing the smart thing for the business. So look for the values, the extra role behaviour, which means you need to know each other, have real conversations, and have honesty to the point where people can, you know the work. That’s just like they’re always procrastinating. It’s miserable for them. Can you get to an understanding of what that is why that is? And then within the realm of reason, respond.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:34 Yeah. So I want to bring us back around to where you are today. So we described you burnt out at Stanford, you know, overwhelmed. There’s something you’ve talked about that I think is really important here. You talked about how in addition to all that happening, there was an enormous amount of internal criticism of yourself because you felt like based on all the spiritual practice you had done, that you shouldn’t feel this way, that you should be able to meditate your way out of it, or you should be able to, you know, have enough equanimity to handle it.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:05 So take us from here I am. I am in this place of I recognize I’m burnout. I’m overwhelmed. I’ve got all this internal negativity happening. And maybe give us the short version of, you know, how you got to where you are today. And then maybe we could talk a little bit about today, because the thing I’d like to hit today is you’ve gone from one classical place where people can burn out, which is academia, to another classical place where people can burn out, which is the startup world. So I want to talk about that. But but walk us through the change process a little bit.
Leah Weiss 00:50:38 Well, I first have to comment like, I just I want you as a spiritual director. I feel like I could benefit from these conversations is therapeutic. I think you’re really picking up on things about my experience that it’s taken me a long time to. In some of it, I’m still definitely grasping to formulate. Well, long story short, a couple of years ago we came up from California to visit some of our friends who lived in Portland, who for years had all been saying, you guys really need to be in Portland.
Leah Weiss 00:51:10 Like all the things we are hearing from you about as a family that you’re struggling with, like, and just hearing this from two of my oldest friends in the world, my husband’s oldest friend. So we came up and I just had this, like, physical feeling from the moment we got here of just like, decompression. You know, I’ve experienced that in a few places in the world where I’ve gone before that, you know, it’s like a cellular shift when you get off the plane kind of thing. And, you know, I think fast forward to today. I was just talking about this this weekend. I was taking a walk with a very close friend who’s a physician, public health officer and was just saying, for me, it’s so powerful that, you know, the places I’ve lived in the past. and it had my kids in schools, like, I didn’t feel people around me. To the degree that I do now, where there’s so many folks who have similar academic backgrounds or kinds of choices about where they’ve taken their careers.
Leah Weiss 00:52:18 A lot of other families that are like ours, with the mom, you know, working a ton and the dad working a ton to support the family and home. So we came up this weekend, decided, oh my gosh, let’s just jump. Let’s just do it. Our oldest son was starting kindergarten the next year. I was like, if we just do this now, he can kind of come right in the process. So we did. We just moved really, really quickly. And since that time, I’ve seen, you know, so many people in the context of the pandemic do this. It did seem a bit bananas, I think, to some people in our life to just make the change so quickly. But I was like, I’m traveling so much anyways. I can travel down to Stanford as opposed to traveling to go see clients wherever, and then also taking some of the financial pressure off, which sounds ludicrous for someone you know. But coming from California anywhere is less insane. So there was that whole side of it.
Leah Weiss 00:53:13 Now, to your point about the startup world, yes, it’s another kind of microcosm. Less than 4% of venture money goes to women founders, including if it’s a woman in man co-founder. So me and my co-founder, my former superstar student from Stanford, two women, two moms. We are definitely not in a system that is like set up by or for us. But I think this discernment and community, like my co-founder, is one of my dearest friends who I think has more character and integrity and social intelligence than pretty much anyone I’ve ever known, including a lot of like, spiritually well-known figures like, you know, not to overly put her on a pedestal. She’s just a really good person who we can talk about everything together. It’s like my other marriage. And so there’s a lot of stress, but there’s a lot of alignment and values, a lot of ability to have real talk and a lot of shared commitment to the team that we’re building is going to walk the talk. We’re not going to be an organization dealing with team health.
Leah Weiss 00:54:20 That is a hot mess internally. I’ve lived that, you know, country song before. I’m not doing it again. and she has her own version of commitment to that. So, you know, I do feel like I have the right resources in place, but there’s a lot of stress, a lot of frustration. And, you know, also continued like doubt that I’ll have to work through around being a middle aged woman in a role that is not conducive. But I kind of am excited to do that on behalf of like, that’s most of the world. We’re not, you know, and if we can’t build Team health or think about organizational health and perspective of a middle aged parent like, I don’t feel confident that a 20 something year old non parent is going to do it in a way that works for me or anyone I know. So I’m going to lean into the discomfort and hopefully have enough support and clarity about what I need to do from having lived through kind of untenable ness before.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:26 Yep.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:26 Somebody I interviewed recently and one of their books was talking about age. They were talking about patience. But the thing they said, which I thought was really interesting, was they quoted some study where, you know, far more businesses that go on to be, you know, a certain size were started by 50 year olds and 25 year olds. Like, it’s just our cultural lens is, you know, 25 year old startups. But if you zoom out from just Silicon Valley and you look broadly, you go, okay, being 50 or in your 40s are is not an impediment. It can actually be, in a lot of ways, a benefit. You and I are going to talk for a couple more minutes in the post-show conversation, because I do want to go a little deeper into entrepreneurship and burnout because you’re an entrepreneur. I’m an entrepreneur. I think we could have some interesting conversations, but we’re out of time for the main episode. So, listeners, if you’d like to get access to Lena’s post-show conversation, add free episodes, all kinds of other good things, and the joy of supporting something you care about.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:26 Go to one you feed. Join. Leah, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you again.
Leah Weiss 00:56:34 Thank you for having me. It’s been great to spend time with you and your listeners, and it’s so appreciate the community that you’ve built and being able to visit.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:43 And just in case people are interested in the work that you’re doing with building team resilience, what’s the name of your company?
Leah Weiss 00:56:50 Skylite
Eric Zimmer 00:56:53 Perfect. We’ll have links in the show notes where people can go through and learn about that work if they like. So thank you Leah.
Speaker 4 00:56:59 Thanks, Eric.
Chris Forbes 00:57:01 If you’re enjoying the podcast, check out our weekly Bit of Wisdom newsletter. Every Wednesday, we send a short email with practical insights, reflections and takeaways, often featuring past guests. It’s a great way to stay inspired and support the show. Sign up at one UFI.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:21 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:30 Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.
