Overcoming Burnout in Leadership with Dr Pete Stebbins

Jenny Cole: 1:02

Welcome back to Positively Leading the Podcast. This is our very special series on principal and leader well-being in schools. Welcome back to Dr Pete Stebbins. Welcome, Pete.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 1:14

Hey, welcome. Thanks for having me back.

Jenny Cole: 1:16

We've been looking at this and we're up to question two, the major question, which is why, as school leaders, do we allow our personal time to be consumed by work and overload, instead of pursuing our own goals or our own personal growth? Really interesting question. Do you want to talk about that and why that's such an important question that came out of your deep dive into this topic.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 1:40

Yeah, absolutely. And it's an interesting question because when you hear it in isolation, like we talked about last time, you could easily be sitting there going. I can't believe they're even going to talk about this. Isn't it obvious why that is? And again, I always start these sessions with principles, with a giant apology or disclaimer, which is, yes, it is obvious why the research and your own experiences you have too much to do, you have a job that involves after hours, you have a P&C, but again, the value in people focusing in here is not to throw rocks at obvious targets. It's to say, I choose to be a principal, I want to stay a principal, I work in a job that's required long hours. I've chosen that I need to look beyond the obvious factors and the to-do lists and time management sheets. Again, this series is focused on burnout and life strategy and I love that. We're almost at the point where we talk about life strategy. But to go there prematurely is just not okay and that's why, in the rewrite of the book, the introduction is what we're focused on.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 2:42

Now. Most of us are struggling with burnout and suppressing our emotions is a tricky hidden thing that actually is big in why we get stuck and work overload. When we look at that, we're discussing it from a cognitive perspective, so we're not arguing with a time and motion study and pointing principles. When they can prove that they work long hours, they have a lot to do. In pointing principles, win, they can prove that they work long hours, they have a lot to do.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 3:12

But again, viktor Frankl, they who have a why and journey how. We have to go inside our minds and say, well, regardless of the long hours I work, why do I allow work to become the dominant focus at the expense of my personal growth and relationships? And that's a worthwhile question because we can set aside the obvious and, like we talked about throughout this series, we can look at resilience. We can look at two people struggling under the same tremendous workloads and one of them has much higher life satisfaction than the other. Remember, we'd match them for crazy workload at busy school and cranky parents. We'd match them. So this question, as we get into it now, is to say well, what's going on inside that person that isn't allowing all of the stresses, challenges and the long hours to overload them? What are they thinking and doing differently?

Jenny Cole: 3:57

because we talked last time about the stats that say it's the quantity for leaders what's causing the? Stress is the sheer quantity of the work and the student and staff mental health and well-being, having to care for all of those other people that's right.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 4:14

That's the australian principles well-being survey.

Jenny Cole: 4:16

There you go, yep yeah, and then you just talked about, if we take two principles, equally matched for quality of, you know, quantity of work and the stressors and stuff, some are more resilient than others and the research in wellbeing lately has said that it's those people who thrive in spite of challenge that are the most resilient. So we've got to assume that challenge exists, but some people are just more resilient than others.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 4:46

Well, here we go. I mean my PhD with yeah, it's a thing just more resilient than others.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 4:49

Well, here we go I mean my PhD with yeah, it's a thing In my thesis, when I finally submitted my PhD because remember it was about resilience and care I dedicated it to Vic and Maud, and so these were two people in this massive field and actually I worked with them and both of them were caring for adult children who had brain injuries, horrific situations. If I was to disclose them I'd traumatize everyone listening, so I won't. But Vic, when I met him, he'd bring his son into respite who's 50, and horrendous brain damage and disability, and Vic would laugh and carry on and he'd have a smoke outside and then he'd come back and pick up his son later, and that was my job at the time. You have a smoke outside and then he'd come back and pick up his son later, and that was my job at the time. And he just kept trooping on. He was in his eighties as a carer and Maude, her son, was also in, I think, late forties and she'd drop him off and she'd freshen worry and all of this.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 5:36

And over the two years I worked in this day respite program, vic just I don't know went from strength to strength with his family situation and all of this and more, died, she deteriorated, had an illness and took her really quickly, and so we've got matched carers right. They've got the same really difficult, impossible diagnostic category and all of that and trauma, the whole box and vice. And we've got one of them, still a smoker, powering on into eternity continuing to be a carer, loving and caring, and we've got another one, non-smoker, pretty healthy person, disintegrating. And if the listeners can take that to be two school principles, then we can get somewhere in this question about why do we allow work overload to interfere with our personal growth and development in our relationships? Because it's what's going on on the inside of those two people. Hence the dedication of five years of my research would all boil down to those two.

Jenny Cole: 6:31

That's fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing that, because there's a lot going through my head about the positive psychology wellbeing theories, and it's not just about being more positive or having a positive attitude. It's about some of those things that we need to understand get in the way of us living our best life, and you talk about two in your book arrival fallacy and context dependent memory. Do you want to talk about those and how they impact on our wellbeing 100%?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 7:02

Yeah, yeah. And so the way to kick this off further, now that we've got our principle A and principle B and I've shared a real example from my research, which were about carers, we can start to sort of understand things, like we'd said at the start, about how difficult school leadership is and how complex the system is. I'd like to start by just referencing, exactly, going back to my two key carers, why it's normal to be mauled, if you like, the one who didn't do so well over time with her health and wellbeing, and why it's not normal to be rich. And so, if we start with well, why, why is it normal then to be so stressed? Because, remember, six times more diagnoses in principles than general population. It's normal for the two things you've arrayed the arrival fallacy and context-dependent memory. So, yeah, let's do those, and then let's talk about how to get out of those traps. So, the arrival fallacy I love that concept and I came to it at late in my career, so it was three or four years ago. Jimmy Bowen was a podcaster and he sent me his brief sheet for what he wanted to talk about with school wellbeing, and in the sheet was the arrival fallacy. And he just said the other thing and I'm like, oh, my goodness, I don't know what that is, so off I go to Google.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 8:04

And the arrival fallacy is simply when we delay our sense of happiness to a future date. And so it's a pretty common phenomena that when we're stressed and tired, perhaps suppressing our emotions, grinning and bearing it, that we say, oh, I can't wait till the bell rings end of the day. Or oh, mate, wednesday, hump day, friday's coming. Or TGIF. Or oh, week eight, end of term soon. Or, nick, summer break, I'll get fit, I'll do all these heroic things. All of those tendencies are common and they're all forms of arrival fallacy.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 8:39

And the point, of course, is, when you put off your happiness, when you go, I'll endure and suppress my emotion, endure this distress and this is coming. You don't live in the now and you don't say, oh, I'm feeling distressed, I'll quickly do one of those mindfulness activities, reset myself and spend the rest of the day. Awesome, you're just tolerating distress. And in the last episode we went deep into why that happens and then why that's bad for you, why you end up with a shorter lifespan, why you end up with health problems, why I ended up.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 9:06

And so the arrival fallacy is just something we all do. We all go oh man, can't wait till the parents, I can't wait till the kids get into bed, just don't lose it now. And all of that. And when that idea was put out, the psychologist who invented that concept it was basically a way to drag back all of this happiness and inject it back into our days. If we can trap our realize, the arrival fallacy trap, then we can overcome it and say oh, I'm not going to wait to the end of the day, I'm just going to shut the door or take five deep breaths, reset.

Jenny Cole: 9:33

I love that because it's so common in schools which everything waits till the holidays. Everything waits until after reports are done.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 9:46

It's worse in schools than any other population. The very fact that we have holidays and we have calendars and timetables and we have so much routine that way makes the arrival fallacy 10 times worse.

Jenny Cole: 9:52

It's really weird, isn't it?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 9:54

The fact that you have holidays suddenly means you're way more likely to fall into the trap, and we see this with our pulse data in schools with staff. Because they work in such a structured environment that has such definitive endings, they don't regulate their emotion throughout the day, they just suck it up till the end of the day, whereas if you're a doctor on a 12-hour shift, it's impossible to suck it up to 12 hours straight. So you're going to have to start breaking up your coping cycle throughout the day to have a better level of wellbeing or wellness through the day. So, yeah, it's ironic that the various frameworks of our schools make the arrival fallacy more likely.

Jenny Cole: 10:27

And there's the notion of savouring or noticing. I've got something that I call jolts of joy or joy snacks, which is when you know it's about finding moments of the day to notice. Instead of a little snack of chocolate, have a little snack of joy. Go and, you know, sit in the sun or do something. You don't have to wait till the end of the day to unwind and relax. It's just my own little personal thing, but I've said to people that I work with you can pass the beach on your way home. You don't have to wait till the holidays to go to the beach. Every day you can have a snack of joy. Go to the beach. Why not? And we all know because of what happens to teachers when they wait. Well, they wait till the holidays and they get sick because they're exhausted. Just going to hop off my little soap box there.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 11:16

I couldn't agree more with you about that. And again, that's almost a segue for the next episode, because how you life strategies is that's just a one example of how you actually have to put a lot of effort sometimes into intentionally aligning and organizing yourself to literally do those constant micro breaks and prompt cards, cues, all the stuff that you do. It's great because what it's doing is interrupting the arrival fallacy and that therefore increases your day-to-day emotional energy. So, yeah, I just want to confirm and endorse the very things that you're saying.

Jenny Cole: 11:51

And let us listening will know that there's always. I'm just going to do this one thing and then I'm just going to finish this other one thing and I'm going to ring that parent and so they're on this treadmill the whole time.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 12:05

That's the micro point. I'm just going to ring this one parent after I put my fingers up and down the desk three times and just really centered myself. I'm just going to run this staff meeting after I've shut the door, took my shoes off maybe, did child pose or something, just quickly did a grounding spin, yeah. And then we carry ourselves all day with all this enjoyment and we don't emotionally suppress again, linking to the other question, but yeah, look, that's not normal, right? That's the point. The normal is to just grin and bear it, grin and bear it and grin and bear it. And so we start by acknowledging the fact that if we are just grinning and bearing it more than we'd like to, as we said last time, that's about being driven.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 12:45

But all of this stuff's just normal. It's not normal to be so self-aware it's easy to become that way but it's not normal to do that and then to constantly micro intervene. And again, forecasting the conversation on life strategy you'll need to be really intentional and have a much bigger frame of reference about your life and what you want and much more prompts. You know the little stickers on the fridge of the palm trees or the shoes in the car, the park, the visualization of your health and wellbeing routine, and you're doing that about day to day. What you might see is trivia. So that's why we don't do it and then we pay. You know the other normal reason it's to be more not Vic in my case study. It's to be normal to be overloaded at work and not balancing it out is context dependent memory.

Jenny Cole: 13:30

Yeah, so tell us about that. What does that mean?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 13:32

Well, look, it's pretty obvious stuff. The context is where I spend my time, what I'm physically doing, and that's wherever that is is where my memory does better. I encode memory that way, so it's a bit of jargon, I suppose, context-dependent memory, but it simply means that we're most likely to remember, act, follow through and feel emotional states tied to where we spend most of our time, and so we know this idea. You're the sum of the five friends you have and all those self-help quotes, or you're the sum of the main environment that you spend your quality time in, your awake hours, your energy. And where do we mostly spend our awake hour and energy as school leaders? Our value time, our time of attention we're at school or thinking about school.

Jenny Cole: 14:16

So what does that mean? So if I'm a leader in a really complex, difficult school, if I'm in a low socioeconomic area perhaps lots of violent kids or difficult parents or whatever what does that mean for our context-dependent memory?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 14:32

Well, a bit like the arrival fallacy, what we're starting with is to say these things are not good, but normal. It simply means that the more you're occupied by your work, the harder it is to remember memory anything other than your work. Okay, so the question we're discussing in this one based on the research, was why do school leaders allow work overload to interfere with or compromise their personal growth and development and relationships? Jumped over the notion that they just have lots of work by getting deeper into case A and case B, we're exploring the negative one, the one that is overloaded all the time. We're saying, hey, the arrival fallacy.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 15:11

You're always like your peers. You put stuff off because you have a 10-week term. You always got a place to put stuff off too, unlike a doctor or any other employee who doesn't have such structured things. Your structure works against you in this way. And then you've highlighted to all our listeners how to overcome that, which is to increase your self-awareness and your micro moments of joy. So you never put anything off. The moment you catch yourself going I can't wait until the end of the day you say, well, let's do something right now. I can wait until the end of the day.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 15:40

That's what I need, and then all of those micro mindfulness tools. That's their home, that's where they belong. But the other side of this is context-dependent memory. So that's to come to the other side of the puzzle. So the other reason your work overload consumes you is because you're a normal human being and that's pretty much where you spend your time, and you don't interrupt your memory during that time.

Jenny Cole: 15:58

you just track along with all the crap raining down on you and you get on with it so, using vick and moore and context dependent memory, why was one more healthy and resilient than the other?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 16:10

using that notion, yeah, what a great question, and so that's really interesting and that relates to our cognitive state and so the research phd, lots of stuff going on in that. But the research talked about they both have a long hours as carers going back to that, so that's not too dissimilar to long hours, as principles, working with someone who's distressed. Again, we've got some ticker box things going on, but one of them, vic, the way his days work and when his son is frontal lobe disorder, acting out and being violent and all these things he is able to manage or take control, if you like, of what he was able to laugh off and not internalize difficulty. And the opposite of not internalizing and laughing off difficulty in the clinical literature is called worrying, and worrying in my research is where we're concerned about possible adverse consequences around us in the present or possible adverse consequences to us or around us in the future. You can't worry about the past, you can only regret the past. And so bringing this together in a context-dependent memory state schools are full of things going on right now that are pretty crazy, full of things that totally could go wrong shortly. That will be crazy, and you're back to the principle A and principle B, right. So the context-dependent memory thing says it's normal for you to just preoccupied about all of that, because that's just what you do. But then the resilient ones are the ones that interrupt that by being able to change what they think about in the midst of it all. Because, again, systemically addressing work overload well, that's what we talked about in your very first episode.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 18:01

There's a whole bunch of things outside our control Recognizing your mental pattern and breaking it and disrupting it, or putting prompts around you to break it up, or taking the time to dig deeply into your life strategy to have actual other things that you've spent enough time dwelling on that they're actually really important to you now. Well, all of that disrupts because it's the other context, and so the context is a bit of memory. It's like the honeymoon effect. When I was on holidays, it felt great because that was my context. Two weeks back at work, I can't even remember being on a holiday. Why? Well, because this is your normal context and this one wins because you spend more time there.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 18:37

So what if every day at work involved at least 10, five minute or three minute or one minute sessions of palm tree on the beach or cricket, or favorite photo of my kid and me actually forcing my brain to do 30 seconds continuously. I have a picture of me as a baby and one of the tasks I have to do every day in my trauma therapy is adopt the. I'm smiling in the sun, right? So I have to adopt the posture of me smiling in the sun. And isn't it interesting? Anatomically, my physio will say that's the correct posture. You are so far away from that. But what's really crazy is that if you could be like that, all your musculoskeletal problems would go away.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 19:14

So context dependent memory. It's normal that you end up where you are. What is it you can do to break it? What is it you can do to still work your long hours and do all the amazing work you do? But how can you do that differently? And that's the Vic and Maud story. They still had what they had. They just started to understand why it's normal to be here and once they work that out, they could interrupt it. And that's life strategy. How do you change how your context-dependent memory works? Because you can't necessarily change your hours.

Jenny Cole: 19:44

And I'm so looking forward to dipping into the life strategy, because we've talked research, we've talked psychology, we've talked trauma, the whole gamut but I'm really conscious that we've not talked a lot about. So what do we do about it? Yeah, the solution we're definitely going in the next episode or two. However, the context-dependent memory has made me think about all sorts of things that we know contribute. You talked about worry. People are anxious, which is worry, and when we're anxious, we're telling ourselves stories. Our perspective is a bit off. We get stuck in those loops. We're less able to get ourselves out of it. The other thing I thought about also was those people who seem to get it right with this mythical balance. They actually have other things in their life that are also important, so they've got multiple contexts, so they're not just all about work 100%, but anyone can be that.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 20:40

That's the point. Those people they weren't born that way. Just look at baby photos of yourself if you're ever in doubt. You weren't born the way you are now. So, however, we got here. And if we're not happy about here, well, if we take the time to work it through, we can work it out and change it it. And so those people that do that well, they put effort into that and then it's cost them something.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 21:02

And life strategy is a tool that just allows you to follow a process across four areas of your life your family, your friends, your relationship, play in all of the words. That means for us grown-ups and work. It still belongs there. There's just one of four, and so, without having, if you're someone who wants to get on top of stuff, this is a great way for you to get intentional and go through a proper developmental process. It doesn't take too long, but there's a bit of effort. And then you are that other person, because you're constantly immersed in a bigger view of what you want out of life, and so you can work long, long hours and still be mentally healthy. You won't be suppressing emotions, because you want to live as long as you can and as healthy as you can, because you want to give that energy to other great things in your life. So it really is a little bit of a panacea. It really is a bit of a magic pill, albeit with strings attached, with hard work and effort on your behalf as well.

Jenny Cole: 21:54

I'm looking forward to that, because it answers two things that I'd written in my notes that we'd not talked about. But the first question what drives us to endure higher levels of stress? One of the things you said is what is the thing that you need to say no to in order to change that? And for the second question why do we allow our time to be consumed by work? Your question is what do we need to say yes to in order to pursue our own goals? And so I'm sure they're the questions we're going to answer when we get into life strategy and we start planning a different way of living, leading and being yeah, absolutely, and it's always good to start with well, what's your ideal life?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 22:34

Not start with well, what's one tiny change you could make? When we're talking about life strategy, we take the opposite. Instead of the 1% rule, we start with the 99. If you haven't taken the time to think big, then how are we going to work out the 1% step to the 99? And that's an interesting thing I'm looking forward to getting into with you in the next episode.

Jenny Cole: 22:51

Thank you so much again for your time, Pete. Hang around if you're interested in learning a little bit more about life strategy. We're going to get tactical about how we can put into place some ways, as I said, so that we can live, lead and be just the better, healthier, more resilient versions of ourselves. Thank you so much, Pete. Thank you, Jenny.

 

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