Educational Leadership, Burnout and Wellbeing with Dr. Pete Stebbins

Jenny Cole: 1:02

Welcome to Pete Stebbins, who's an executive coach and psychologist with an extensive background in both clinical work, the healthcare sector and education, and we met through HPT Schools, the company that he runs and the amazing work he does in schools, and he's been on a previous podcast, but I thought we might dive deep into some of the work that he does that perhaps you're less familiar with. You wrote a book Life Strategy Living your Endless Summer 10 years ago and you've re-released it with a new introduction. A lot has changed in the last 10 years around work, life, wellbeing, burnout. Do you want to talk to me about what's changed and what you've updated in your book?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 1:45

Yeah, thank you. Well, firstly, thanks for having me back on the podcast, and you're right, it's really exciting for me. I originally trained as a clinician, a clinical psychologist, and before I did the work that I'm known for in schools, around teams and leaders and support systems, so that's right. 10 years ago I wrote two books, one on life strategy and one on resilience, and they're near and dear to my heart and my research, et cetera. So I've had this kind of sleeper effect where for many, many years, before I did what I do now, I was a practicing psychologist with a clinic and then I worked in psychiatric hospitals and all this sort of stuff.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 2:18

And Life Strategy, which is the updated publication that's just come out, 10 years ago that was just so powerful for me about how to create a structure and a process to take back control of your life and to not let the time slip by.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 2:32

One of my favorite quotes is there's never a right time, there's only time, and it's always been a challenge for me personally in my own journey to be able to take hold or seize the day and move forward.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 2:43

So Life Strategy has been a book to write, but also a process I've lived out. But, yeah, the reason we released and put a whole new introduction in is because 10 years ago, I was busy trying to help audiences engage in what we call the myth of balance and how everyone thinks they've got to balance this and balance that to be happy. And right now, 10 years on from there, the last thing anyone's really worried about is balance. What we're worried about is how to not keel over too soon, how to cope with enormous amounts of stress, and so the introduction to the new book, as you rightly said, starts with this issue of burnout, and our audience, if you like, are those midlife executive leaders who this kind of stuff is elusive, and so Life Strategy as a book is designed to bring in a missing ingredient that everyone can benefit from, especially very busy leaders.

Jenny Cole: 3:31

So burnouts? I jokingly say that I was an early adopter to burnout. I burnt out and became overwhelmed 14 years ago. Things are significantly different now because, as you say, there's a great deal more. We're not even looking for balance anymore, we're just looking to cope and make it through. Talk to me about the definition you use around burnout. What is burnout?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 3:52

Yeah, I know, thank you for going there. As a clinician, I was trained to diagnose major depressive disorder or anxiety, and these little codes, 296.20 and all of this. So, talking about burnout, well, it doesn't actually have a code in the ICD or DSM-5, but it is a really good idea because burnout, as we say in the book quoting Melinda Smith and her definition in the US, but it's basically just a state of emotional exhaustion. So there's a number of different symptoms. If you like that could fit inside that bucket Then, importantly, it starts to impair your ability to function. And what does that mean? It simply means that you start to forget things, you start to be more irritable. You know a change in your behavior. But also, the key feature of burnout is cynicism being jaded, being angry or frustrated or suppressed anger is more what we see in leaders, in schools, and so, yes, a bunch of symptoms work, not going so well, and usually this huge amount of suppressed anger and frustration, often seen as cynicism, sarcasm, you know, just over it.

Jenny Cole: 4:57

Yes, and I didn't realise. I thought my sarcasm was the highest form of wit. I realised that my sarcasm hid a cynicism which hid the burnout and the overwhelm. And just yesterday I was talking to a principal we've got a new director general in Western Australia and he comes from a non-teaching background and my colleague said to me we're wearing black because it's the death of education. And we all laughed and we thought that was hilarious. But I know her well enough to know that that's cynicism. And so, as a coach not a clinician I'm listening for the other signs that she's perhaps heading towards burnout.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 5:36

Besides that joke about education, yeah but maybe it's the highest form of wit and a sign that there's some stuff not right that you're pushing down. And the problem with burnout is it's sneaky, it creeps up on us and because we habituate, like the frog in the pot, we get used to needing in my case, a whiskey every night to cope with kids yelling. We just get used to all this stuff and we warm up and warm up and warm up, to the point that we're basically no longer functioning very well at all. If we took a bright, light white room, look at ourselves, it's not that pretty but we get by.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 6:12

And then it's not until my own experiences in turning 50 now my own midlife experiences it's not until ultimately, something significant in our physical and mental health breaks that all of a sudden I've got this insurance claim going at the moment with the builders and a storm damaged my roof in my house. But the insurer says, oh, that's wear and tear. And then I say, yeah, but if Eve's fell off the house during the wind and rain and storm? So I don't understand, if the storm wasn't there, that Eve would still be in. It's a pretty good metaphor for us because we all of a sudden have a major problem, but it's often deterioration behind, like the iceberg analogy. So I think it's a really important topic for all educators, of course, but particularly with school leaders, because even me as a leader, I don't know how much I'm accruing in myself, so much of this goes on outside our awareness.

Jenny Cole: 7:03

Let's just go back to the beginning of your book and you reference Bronnie Ware, who wrote the fabulous book the Five Regrets of the Dying, and you make some connections between what she writes with her, the people she was looking after in terms of palliative care and what's going on for principals. So let me read what the five regrets of the dying are and then I might get you to talk about the themes, what you sort of saw as the themes and how they relate to principals. So Bronnie said that one of the five regrets are I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself and not the life that others expected of me. Number two I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Number three I wish I had the courage to express my feelings. Number four I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. And number five, I wish I had let myself be happier. Why did you include those and what's the connection, what are the links that you're making between that and the work in your book?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 8:08

yeah, well, I wanted to start there because, having read bronnie's book and listened to a whole bunch of podcasts with her and all of that, I really like her message and sometimes when I'm doing coaching work or therapeutic work with school leaders that are burnt out, sometimes you have to go to an extreme position to shake them and go okay, that's not related to me, so I'm not avoiding it. I can just listen to you with your other idea. And so the five regrets of the dying Bronnie wears really cool stuff is something I use a bit because it's out there and I can say to people hey, over here in palliative care land, here are these five regrets, and because it's somewhat divorced from what they're normally doing, they're safe to think about it. And so they think about that. And then what I say to them and we cover this in the book there's really two themes there, if we look at that list as you read it.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 8:58

Regret number three I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. And regret number five I wish I'd let myself be happier. Well, those two things are about suppressing emotions. I've stopped myself from expressing my feelings and I've stopped myself from feeling happy. And then the other ones we've got, of course, are one, two and four. One, I courage to live a life true to myself, not what others expected, not working so hard and staying in touch with friends. Again, that a phenomena, if you like, where people are just not being able to maintain the focus on growth and development. They're just overworking, to cut a long story short. And so, by starting with thinking about this end stage and these people over there that are suffering these things, and then realizing that, out of those things, suppressing emotions is something that we all have and that we might need to think how that's playing out for ourselves, and over-focusing on work at the expense of our own growth, the expense of maintaining friendships Again, these things are universal.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 9:54

So, yeah, I like Ronnie's stuff because it's this kind of thing that's out there and most people I work with are happy to entertain my idea or sharing an idea, and then it comes rocketing back in and we have to stop and think okay, well, am I suppressing my emotions? How does that work for me? Is it relevant to why I feel annoyed, frustrated, exhausted, lack energy all the time? And am I over-focused on work? Am I satisfied that I'm spending enough quality time with my friends, my family, my spouse? Have I finished building the model plane or done the. When was the last time I went out and learned a new skill? And every single burnt out leader I work with this is always relevant.

Jenny Cole: 10:33

Absolutely, and the dying regret what they didn't do while they were living, while they were working and leading and having families and all of those sorts of things. We're going to dive deep over the course of these podcast episodes into both suppressing emotions and not focusing enough time on our own personal growth and development, but it occurred to me as you were talking there's even that philosophy that work is not a place for emotions. That's not where we do emotions. It's not a philosophy that I agree with. I believe you bring your emotions with you, but for some people we're not only suppressing them, it's just not what we do at work. Emotions are somewhere else.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 11:18

Yeah, and not only is it a work thing, potentially it's also cultural. One of my favourite bands, pink Floyd they have this line in one of their songs hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way, or whatever. And there's a Simpsons episode where Marge looks down at Lisa saying well, you'll just have to bury that anger deep inside you because you're a woman. And so throughout culture, be it American, uk, wherever it's not just work we're surrounded by the normality, if you like, of not recognising or attending or processing emotion, and it's complicated though. Hence why I'm so glad we've got time to talk, because people would say, yeah, but Pete, because I feel angry, I'm supposed to just let it out randomly. Whilst I'm in the middle of a staff meeting, or in the classroom, I'm supposed to just throw the chair back at the kid because I'm angry too, and that's a very understandable and logical thing to say about this.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 12:09

When we're talking about processing emotions, there must be some sort of way of reckoning with them, and in workplaces where there's not enough tension, how do you reckon with, how do you process how you're feeling, without resorting to all that dysfunctional behavior? And then what are the practical ways that can happen? Just the other day I was working with a leader who teared up about some really, really difficult stuff in this school and then they were apologizing for that and I'm just like, hey, you are in a safe place and this is great. Let everybody around you, everybody's just cool, be you. And they just had no ability to be them because of that social conditioning.

Jenny Cole: 12:45

And this brings me to some of the data and stats on principal wellbeing. That's lots of people who are listening to this, who have read some of that information, but for those people who aren't as overwhelmed by it as I always am every time I read it because, as you said, those school leaders, there is lots happening in their day and they're having a variety of emotions. So difficult staff member, difficult parent, happy occasion there's lots of things happening in a day and they're told just to be more emotionally intelligent, whatever that might mean. And then there's some point where, though, they're not being able to deal with or regulate those emotions, and it shows in the data about their wellbeing. So share with me some of the horrifying stats about principal or later wellbeing.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 13:38

Well, and it is horrifying If I go back a step. When I did my PhD back in 2005, I looked at carrots of people with disabilities and how they cope, and the reason I researched on people who care for others with disabilities is because I was interested in understanding resilience, burnout and all of that. And there's a 70% prevalence rate of depression, anxiety and stress in carers of people with disabilities, compared to sort of 10% in the general population. And so when I'm trying to find a group of stressed people to then understand who's coping, who's not and what's going on inside you, why are you so resilient? Carers were just an extreme example of high stress, but if we look at all the statistics, school leaders are tracking at 50% to 60%, again compared to 10% of the general population, and that's gone up over the years. So if we're looking for some of the most stressed people on the planet, we don't need to do my special piece of research on carers and disability types anymore. We just need to get a bunch of principals in the room. They are off the Richter.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 14:46

And that research is interesting for a second reason because, again, the principal well-being surveys in australia dr amy maxwell, paul kidson, philip riley long-standing research, we know that they're ridiculously stressed as a population, these school leaders. But then we decide well, what are the most important triggers of that stress? And there's two standouts for me. One relates to their perception, slash reality, of excessive workload. They can't keep up. The other one, which is a little more interesting from a psychology perspective, is they state that attending to the emotional needs of their staff and students is the other one, and that one's really interesting in terms of needing to put your own emotions on hold or suppress them, because you're constantly needing to attend to everybody else's distress and emotions. And so it starts to make sense now why school leaders are a special category in their own right in terms of focusing in on preventing burnout, helping them have these deep insights into themselves to be resilient, yeah.

Jenny Cole: 15:45

Because you've done a lot of work in the healthcare sector. I listened to you speak around the difference between the kind of very high stress environments that you might find in hospitals and why that is different to what principals suffer, for want of a better word. So both have very high workloads and high demand, but is the difference the fact that principals have to care so deeply about both their students and their community and their staff? What is the similarities and differences between those in healthcare and those in education?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 16:20

Yeah, thank you, Jenny, and that's right. When I'm working with leaders, I often cite because all the years I've done this how a hospital functions compared to a school, and play all that out as you've kind of really tipped into the rabbit hole or the Pandora's box with what you've asked.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 16:34

Because at one level the answer is around the operating environment, if I can say it that way. So an executive in a hospital system usually has layers and the structures of different processes around them. It's highly structured and so that then creates gates or time management or blocks and boundaries. Just the system itself is a boundary and so that then regulates how much stress they encounter and obviously we're not addressing it who they are as people and their own underlying characteristics. But if we just start with the environment itself, there are layers of management support and there are systems and reporting lines and then the patient load, if you like. That's highly regulated into wards et cetera. You don't have people kind of randomly coming in and out of all sorts of different spots. It's a highly regulated people environment.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 17:18

Schools, on the other hand, often lack a lot of that structuring. Again, that's a lot of our work to make sure that's in there as a buffer, and so when that structuring is not there, there's ambiguity around how to deal with things. So that's really important. Another is, unlike a hospital, students and staff are moving way more fluidly around the place. They're not confined to their bed or only working on level three, ward three A, and so you don't then have the boundaries and structures of the hospital to regulate the amount of people demand. So you still obviously can be distressed and have all sorts of difficult people interactions, but they're very controlled.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 17:51

A school's the opposite of that. It's the Wild West. Students, of course, are doing whatever they're doing, moving between classes, heading off to specialist lessons. Teachers, of course, are moving around as well, the school itself and how it's structured. Often the principal and the leaders are working near the staff room and the business manager, the school office where parents come in. So you've just got this completely unregulated exposure to really upset people. But I think the biggest one of all is the learning pit. The point of a school is for education and that involves learning and learning involves stress.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 18:24

The point of a hospital is health and recovery, and that involves lowering stress and following sharp and narrow advice that the leader usually isn't giving out Specialist doctors giving out that advice. So, yeah, really different mechanisms there. And yeah, hands down a school is a way more stressful and complicated place.

Jenny Cole: 18:43

Fantastic. I could talk about that forever, but you're right. No, no, it is the rabbit hole because but it's a good rabbit hole.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 18:53

The other one I talk about is in a hospital. I worked in a psychiatric facility Wollstone Park Hospital in Brisbane and by the time I got my patients I was on a general adult ward. They had already been diagnosed or been moved from another hospital to my facility. I was in a chronic ward and we already knew lots about them and there was only one of them at a time. Right, and you think about a school. Yeah, they're not adults. They're not already diagnosed and medicated and wrapped up in a package before the teacher gets them?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 19:19

You've got 23 of these people and they're in a development stage. They're young children all the way through to teenagers and young adults. They're going through some of the most fundamentally radical life changes continuously, that their parents are going through their own life stage, traumas and goodness knows what. And then we put again it's learning. We put them in the learning pit and make them distressed, no more than we have to. But for the sake of Professor Nottingham's learning pit, we make them learn things. You could not create a worse experiment for the craziness of stress and challenge than a school.

Jenny Cole: 19:52

And I'm just going to throw this in, not for you, but to be controversial to the people who are listening there's a lot of states at the moment who are making quite radical changes based on good research about what pedagogy should look like, and mandating change. So we've got kids in a learning pit, we've got staff who are in a learning pit or in this rapid change cycle. They're in the pit. You're spot on.

Jenny Cole: 20:15

They are in the pit and people are burying stuff yeah and they are distressed and then we've got leaders caring about those.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 20:22

Well, they don't even care. Yeah, nobody's doing the maths, no, but I think that's really important. People think you know, we always talk about the learning dip, learning pit lever gots these zones of practical development and everybody nods and yawns and rolls their eyes because they've all heard that that's about kids. And then in the work I do, I have a little pit diagram on the screen. I point out that adults go through exactly the same stuff. You see, and when you go into the pit, if you've seen those cheesy little diagrams where the kid crayon style things and I can't help it, it's too hard, and all this sort of stuff from the caricature of the child going down into the pit to wrestle with learning Well, adults are the same, but they don't say I can't do it, it's too hard, and they often don't voice it.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 21:02

It's all internal and they're suppressing a whole bunch of swear words and everything else and everything else, and then they're beating themselves up. They should know. Well, then somebody else seems to know and that makes them feel even worse. So we're in the pit, but we don't have a culture, except schools that we work in, the flourishing schools, because they have a culture of saying that's how it is. Let's talk about it.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 21:20

That's okay, you're in the pit, but otherwise you're just supposed to be some expert that just knows. There's nothing worse than sitting in that anxious, emotionally suppressed state just winging it, hoping you're going to make it. It's hard enough. When you're a kid, no one notices, but when you're an adult, biology is not on your side. Your health, physically, is going to crush pretty fast If you can't be back in a place where you can normalize. Hey, I'm stuck with that. I know you just told me your name. Could you just tell me again? It's one of those days. If that's not a safe thing for everyone to do, your health and wellbeing is going to get really crushed really fast.

Jenny Cole: 22:01

Which kind of brings me back to the kind of layers of intervention and we're going to talk in a moment about the two fundamental questions. But you talk about three layers of intervention the system, the peer and the individual. We're going to kind of focus on the individual level, but do you want to talk about just generally what those interventions are at each level for people's well-being, what those layers of intervention are and what they mean?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 22:23

And yeah, that's right, and I talked about that. I had to deliver a presentation to a whole bunch of principals about well-being and I was thrilled about that, dusting off all my old clinical psychology hats. And 20 years of 600 schools later. And then I was thinking to myself, how do you do that topic justice? How do you get school leaders who are in systems that are completely dysfunctional or have massive dysfunctions in them, how do you even get them on side to put aside that stuff and actually think about themselves and what they could do differently? It's like a victim trauma, survivor thing. When you've just been through a terrible earthquake or a flood, what you're going through and the cause of your distress objectively is so obvious. Right, my hours are too long, the amount of violence in my school is too much. It can feel insulting to sit with someone who's trying to say, yes, but what about you? What could you do differently?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 23:23

And so, yeah, we always want to foreshadow that there are system level interventions, and those system level interventions are about regulation of workload. They are about consistent industrial relations practices for teachers who aren't fit for duty, or when some states, for example, trade off meeting hours so teachers don't have to come to any meetings anymore as part of an enterprise bargaining agreement or whatever. But in doing so there's not enough collaborative time left in the day, and so you have this principal trying to run a school and communicate and train and maintain quality, but the system has taken away all of the collaborative time and, understandably, teachers aren't wanting to volunteer that. They would prefer to be paid. So you've just got this devilish disruption in the system where we don't even provide principals with the sufficient resources they need to do their job.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 24:14

So that's what we mean about sort of system reform, about taking an honest look at a human factors way of running a school and then readjusting time and money so that everyone had a fighting chance. That's a long way away from what I can see. The louder the teacher voice and the staff shortage, the more the industrial mandate is give them whatever they want, understandably, sorry, I used to be a welfare worker. I'm all for it, but when we give them what they want, we just can't give them more money. So we start taking away hours. But in doing that we robbed the school and the leaders and the very teachers themselves with enough contact time to actually be able to collaborate. And so that's a systemic issue.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 24:45

And that just needs to be on it. When we have rules, in many states there's a pressure for principals not to suspend children, and so, on the quiet, do what you'd like, don't suspend them. And so when that happens and I really get passionate about this one we have this impossible problem where students are behaving badly and, yes, they have these low-level consequences, but there's no suspension, there's no significant consequence, and so they learn quickly that that's how it works, as any child would with their parent, and then there's no constraining force to stop huge amounts of occupational violence. And so the principals then are stuck in this trap where they're exposing their staff and themselves. I think it's 96% of principals have been threatened with assault or assaulted by a student or parent in that same research.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 25:29

It's off the Richter. But instead of workplace health and safety and all the other laws, they're in a political culture where it's just not seen as appropriate or an incorrect use of trauma-informed practice. We think that allowing kids to do all that stuff and not giving them a consequence is somehow a better way. So, yeah, they're the system-level things and then the school-level things. Sorry, it's taken a while no no, no.

Jenny Cole: 25:50

I'm just for anyone who's listening who's now feeling more overwhelmed because of that. Don't panic, because you're going. In a moment we're going to talk about some strategies where we can take back a little bit of control, but carry on. That's the system level system and school. Keep going.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 26:07

And I apologise to our listeners, but, on the other hand, often this is why I spend time there because leaders, all they've done is school, and so now they're in this impossible situation, like the hospital thing we talked about earlier, and they've never stopped to think. Hang on a minute, maybe what I'm doing can't be done, maybe what I'm being asked to do is impossible. And this now gets to the heart of fear, of success and failure and a whole bunch of other psychology that I hadn't planned to talk about. But we live in a world and social media has made this so much worse but there's always someone who's got it together that we would think is equivalent to us and therefore there's always an easy access for us to devalue ourselves, because we look at that other person smiling and go well, they're handling it, and we all know maybe they're not, et cetera. But we're not dealing with the bigger issue.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 26:55

There is no right answer. Okay, so when we work with entrepreneurs, this is really important. If your guess is what we call the BPO the best possible outcome, if you're already there, then all this post-analysis, or thinking you should have done better, or worrying you're going to get in trouble, or all the things principals do. Well, all of that's pointless, because there was no right answer to begin with. You thought and spoke to people before you did what you did. Therefore, if there was a right answer, you've already made it, and now that there's this negative consequence to whatever happened, that's called learning. That's not called failure, that's not called regret, that's not called a bad decision, that's simply called learning.

Jenny Cole: 27:30

Yeah, and it's such a tough place for principals and I find, because of the work that I do, that often females will beat themselves up more about I should have been better, I should have done more I should have and maybe men do too. But I think there's the caring aspect, carrying a lot of that society's pressure, that we have to care for our staff more and care for the community more. 100%.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 27:49

Absolutely. I mean, I think men do it and it's a real killer for men. But I think men do it and it's a real killer for men, but I think they do it very differently and nowhere near as I guess it's more specific, whereas I see that as you say, is much, much wider from a gender perspective for women.

Jenny Cole: 28:05

Yeah, yeah, so it's an undoable job, and so maybe what you're doing is absolutely the best that you can do, but there's so much freedom in that I've sat with I'm doing it right now.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 28:12

You know, there's some schools just all like record-breaking dysfunction. I mean I've seen it that bad and I'm sitting with the people in the leadership team who are acting and all the different temporary nature of things. Things just seem to keep getting worse and over and over again they're saying well, if I don't think I want to be a leader or I don't think I'm good enough because I don't know something and I'm like a broken record, no one knows. See that grey haired, calm suit wearing principal down there. They don't know. But what's different about them is they know, no one knows, and so they just-.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 28:42

And they phone a friend if they're stuck? Yeah, but they've learned just to sit and ask more and more questions and just be okay, not knowing. And so the difference between you junior principal, who thinks you're going to throw it away and this wise old owl is simply that you are still learning that there are no answers, that most of the time you're winging it, and that what's important is you wing it calmly and you don't beat yourself up for error. That person on the other side they just know that beyond that, no one's actually smarter than the other, and 20 years from now, you're not going to know the algorithm for bloody timetabling or whatever. All you're going to do is just be much more au fait with being at ease with a huge amount of uncertainty.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 29:18

And so all that doom and gloom we were just going on about, I'd encourage listeners if they're like oh, wow, it really is that bad. It's like, yeah, but it's also the best job in the world. A teacher affects eternity. You know, henrietta, and you've got the best job in the world, provided you can sit with uncertainty, provided you don't beat yourself up.

Jenny Cole: 29:34

Which brings us back to the themes about suppressing emotions, and we're going to, in the next couple of episodes, talk a great deal more about focusing, at your own individual level, around two questions. So we talked about the systemic. There's also the peer. We're going to be diving in deep at the individual level, but I want you to talk just at the end of this episode about the two key questions that we need to ask of leaders as the result of the work that you've been doing.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 30:11

Yeah, absolutely, thank you. So, again, linking to the life strategy book and the new introduction chapter that we're working through, bronnie Ware has those five regrets of the dying, which are beautiful, and her book is amazing. As she says, it's a memoir and I would encourage people to read it and find time for it, because the stories behind one-on-one qualitative data, shall we say, rather than all this empirical research, stories behind one-on-one qualitative data, shall we say, rather than all this empirical research the stories are amazing. But, just to wrap this around, I've been using that way of getting people to start thinking about the big picture, and it's an easy thing for them to do because it's out there. They themselves aren't in the throes of palliative care and, as we said, bringing this through.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 30:51

The two themes of those five regrets are about suppressing my own emotions and about not prioritizing my own growth, development and relationship work taking over. And then we say to the leaders we say, okay, look, yes, the education system's not perfect, yes, it's an impossible task, yes, there's all these complicated layers of things that are pretty hard to manage, but at the end of the day, we say to the person who's just survived a hurricane it's obvious at the big picture level what happened to you or why you, at times, are vulnerable. Or I said in my PhD to these carers it's really obvious that your son or daughter's had a frontal labrania. It's obvious that their personalities be changed. It's obvious that everything's derailed. The question is do you want to be the person who, despite all of that trauma, is then able to go on and see the beauty in life, go on and be okay with ambiguity and uncertainty, go on and make the most of the cards you've got left to play? Or do you want to be the person that just screams out at those external circumstances and sits in a negative state and doesn't live a beautiful life, lives a difficult life instead? And so the two questions then that we get principals to consider are all school leaders, teachers Based on all of this research, phil Riley and the 60% versus 10% of the population, all of this stuff. We say okay.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 32:09

Well, look, the bottom line is if you can put aside everything else, you have to ask yourself one why do I allow myself to tolerate so much other stress coming at me to the extent that I suffer, that I get distressed, that I drink too much, that I don't do my exercise routines, that I start to regret not communicating the way I want to with my partner or my kids. Why do I tolerate the stress to the extent it affects my health? And that's relevant to all educators. The second question why do I allow myself to become so over-focused on my work at the expense, mentally, of growing and developing in other parts of my life and continuing to grow and develop with those I love, building relationships? And so those are the two questions.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 33:02

One is about me tolerating distress too much to crush my own health. Why do I do that? And the other is about, I guess, time management. Why does all the time end up over here, even the non-work time? My brain stays there and what can I do about that? And so, yeah, I'm really excited for our next episode, where we're going to go deep into question one tolerating personal distress to the point I suffer. Why do I do that? Then question two, and then the antidote to it all, hence the book how life strategy is so powerful in that way.

Jenny Cole: 33:35

Fantastic. So let's leave it there, pete, and in our next episode we are going to dive deep into those questions, so stay tuned.

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