In this episode of Transform Your Workplace, Dr. MH Pelletier, a leading expert in workplace psychology and author of The Resilience Plan, delves into the critical role of resilience in maintaining mental health and work performance. Dr. Pelletier explains how burnout develops gradually, as exhaustion, cynicism, and declining performance set in. She emphasizes the need for leaders and professionals to stay self-aware, recognizing early signs of overextension before it impacts their well-being. By creating a personalized strategic resilience plan grounded in individual values, we can proactively manage stress, preserve our mental health, and optimize workplace performance. Tune in and learn how fostering resilience at both the individual and organizational levels can lead to healthier, more effective teams and workplaces.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Dr. MH Pelletier is a work psychologist and senior leader in clinical, counseling, and workplace psychology. She helps leaders and professionals enhance resilience and workplace mental health through engaging speeches, workshops, and executive coaching. Dr. Pelletier is also the author of The Resilience Plan: A Strategic Approach to Optimizing Your Work Performance and Mental Health.
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A FITTING ANALOGY
Dr. MH Pelletier begins her book, The Resilience Plan, with an insightful analogy relating a mountaineering experience in the Rockies and the challenges we face in work and life. She recalls an eight-day trek where she and her partner had to cross the same river twice — once on the first day with careful planning and energy, and again on day eight, when exhaustion and changed conditions made it much more dangerous. This serves as a metaphor for how we often handle challenges in life and work — initially with resilience and control, but later, under strain, with depleted resources and heightened risk. But, according to Dr. MH Pelletier, there is much that we can do to mitigate these struggles.
Self-awareness is critical when our resilience is waning. Just like the trek, we perform well when we’re fresh and prepared, but when personal and professional demands pile up, it’s easy to neglect rest. And that’s when our strategic planning falls by the wayside. It’s at these critical moments that our mental health and work performance are most at risk, so we must prioritize self-care and sustainable practices to maintain our long-term resilience.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Defining Burnout
“Even though we often assume [burnout] means being exhausted — it does mean this — but per the World Health Organization, it means three things. We’re exhausted, and we’re also cynical — no hope anything’s going to change. And third, it impacts our performance. The thing with burnout is that it does not set itself instantly. It builds over time. It builds out of challenges in the relationship we as individuals have with our workplace. So the source of the problem is often a combined place in this overall system of us, the workplace, and the relationship between the two. […] Before we get exhausted, we’re going to start being overextended. Before we’re cynical, we’re going to be less engaged — not feel the love as much. And before we are having performance problems, we’re going to have more significant things fall through the cracks.”
Ignoring the Signs
“Here’s the thing: high performers will disregard these signs. They will tell themselves, ‘Oh, it’s normal. It doesn’t matter. Keep moving, head down.’ In some ways, we’re disregarding an opportunity to be self-aware. If we did listen to these things, if we said, ‘No, wait a second. That level of being overextended is more than my usual ups and downs of being a bit tired. I’m now further down, and it’s not the end of the world to recognize this,’ it actually allows you to take action more proactively, but that’s how we get into the trap. The signs are there. We disregard them.”
Understanding Ourselves
“One of the core components of emotional intelligence at the basis of it is self-awareness. And so I think we get into leadership roles, having adopted that belief that we are a rock, and we and people around us and those beliefs we’ve now nourished for a while — sometimes for decades — become the basis of thinking, not fully objectively, that we’re a rock. Obviously, we know we’re humans, but secretly we actually think we’re not going to be impacted ever. We will never have burnout, never be depressed or highly anxious. So the challenge with this is that the reality is we’re human, and therefore we will be impacted by the demands we’re facing, and it’s okay. What we want is to recognize this so that we can take action on it early.”
Planning with Purpose
“As we’re creating our strategic resilience plan, you want to start from your own values. Otherwise, it will become, yet again, a list of to-do’s. We’ve all had this — to do things, to feel more resilience. But we don’t have time. So the only way for these to become meaningful and impactful is to connect them with our unique values. Then, it connects with, like we said, meaning, purpose. Some people call it their ‘why,’ and that now gives a whole new lens to the decision to possibly breathe five times more deeply when you wash your hands, as opposed to just letting your brain do whatever. I’m deliberately giving this very simple example because this is what I mean by creating a strategic resilience plan that works. It’s not massive goals that are impossible to reach. It’s action that we can take now in our context that we can build from at the next iteration, and they are doable, and that’s what changes everything.”
Building Resilient Organizations
“An organization is a system. We have individuals, teams, and the overall organization. And we want to pay attention to all these levels if we’re going to increase resilience. And it’s interesting, my book has been named by both Forbes and Ink Magazine as one of the top five books to read for yourself as a leader, and one of them was saying specifically, have your team read it. And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s exactly what I was hoping for […] because even though I have focused this book, yes, on us as individuals within this system, […] even when [there are] challenges in the broader system, the culture of the organization, the maybe less-healthy leader we have right now, for example, we still here as individual have a lot of control, a lot of agency, and we do want to increase our individual resilience as much as we can to handle all this. And as we do this, we will bring an even better self to our teams, which means we can have the conversations about how we can improve our resilience as a team here, and that can be brought by the leader, but it can be brought up by any of us. We’re members of a team, we’re influencing it.”
LEARN MORE
Take a deep dive into Dr. MH’s work by heading over to her website, theresilienceplan.com, or connect with her on LinkedIn.