[00:00:00] Hi everyone, my name's Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout to Leadership podcast, where I teach professional men to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work.

[00:00:23] Hello my friends, this is Dex, and I'm really glad you're here for this week's episode on Dex and the Deathly Hallows. And really no idea why I needed to To call it that, but I looked up deathly hallows and it means persons dying sacrificially or even as martyrs because of love to give life to their loved ones.

[00:00:43] And that, when I read that, it made me laugh so much I had to stick with it. Some slight over dramatization I think. I hope Harry Potter doesn't mind. Anywho, as we proceed, I'm really a little bit cautious to think I'm going to spout much sense today, but you're very welcome to keep listening in case. And, um, I'm going to be talking about my recent adventures in personal growth because I think it's worth kind of coughing up about me going through the same lumpy bumpy life as anyone.

[00:01:14] And, um, if, if with a slightly different perspective on events and, um, whilst I myself am not in burnout, I think reflecting on my own journey here has deep relevance to anyone journeying through. And this is, uh, part of series two of my podcast. On the deeper healing that becomes generally available once we've emerged from burnouts.

[00:01:40] All that juicy goodness, all that peace of mind that may have eluded us for a really long time and, and often for reasons unknown. Today I'll backtrack a little bit into burnout dynamics and precursors because that's my backstory and because I'm still learning about burnout as a whole. You know, always learning, and that learning too might be helpful for you.

[00:02:03] Although, did you know that knowledge alone doesn't affect mental and behavioural change that much, as you've discovered if you've ever had a New Year's resolution? And I wonder personally what that says about psychotherapy, but in fact it's emotions that drive change. You have to create a new experience for yourself through your emotion.

[00:02:25] So, I'm going to talk about trauma and PTSD since really understanding trauma You know, large, small and everything in between, um, it turns out, and more specifically, the coping strategies humans develop when they experience this minor everyday trauma can also inform our understanding of burnout. For some people, trauma dynamics have contributed to the emergence of burnout.

[00:02:53] I'm not suggesting that's everybody, but some people for sure. And a lot of what I'm going to talk about today. Is, um, coming from some new sources of wisdom for me right now, Gabor Marte, The Myth of Normal, and Peter Levine in an Unspoken Voice, particularly, Shoulders of Giants, and I'm going to include links to those books in the show notes.

[00:03:17] If you wanna take a look, and although it's a little bit tender to be talking about my own healing journey live as it's happening, I do feel compelled to do that so that you and I can remain connected. Um, and because what I'm learning is so fascinating, really, and largely not what mainstream psychotherapy and, and the medical industries are telling us.

[00:03:40] So then it'll just be our little secret, right? I'm sharing it with you because we're friends. So, also I've observed from my personal experience of therapy that therapists sometimes shield their own psychic wounds. Or, investigate and learn to heal them privately, and only when they've finished, they present their results as kind of a method for their patients to do.

[00:04:03] And all of that sounds okay in theory, but it really results in an imbalance between the quote unquote healer and the quote unquote sufferer. As if the therapist's own wounds were somehow shameful or diminishing, or, could be seen as detracting from their professional efficacy or wholeness assuming. And, you know, even reading that, I admit it can be hard to own what we regard as our deficiency.

[00:04:31] And I did present a system for resolving burnout after the fact of my own burnout. You know, once I'd figured it out for myself, not real time. Um, although my burnout wasn't secret realtime, it was scorchingly public. And I didn't even know you then. So I do talk about my own burnout, but I didn't present the solution obviously until after I'd learned it.

[00:04:53] But I do think that to hide or to fail to acknowledge our own wounds, our pain, our suffering, confusion, vulnerability. Um, and still expect others to speak about theirs is a little bit disingenuous. So, to create an even, compassionate playing field where our mutual dignity can be honoured. I'm sharing my path with you, even though it's as yet completely unresolved.

[00:05:17] I mean, the jury's still out for me. And that's why this, that's why I'm doing series two of the podcast. It can't just be a single episode because I'm tapping into a really rich seam of, uh, exploration here and discovering a lot of new, Uh, information and truths. So here it is for me. I have complex PTSD, CPTSD, and I've had it since I was young and I'm currently undergoing really deep and at times quite oddly, um, delightful healing work with a somatics expert.

[00:05:48] So that's in the body, the experience in the body. And that's continuing what, for me, has been a lifelong quest to sort my brain out. And I do struggle. I still struggle in ways that have not been easily remedied. And that, of course, for me, it's got a lot of physical repercussions as well. That doctors often tell me fall into the bucket of idiopathy or of unknown cause.

[00:06:14] And that includes my heart attack, because I think we can't have emotional or mental dis ease, particularly something like chronic stress, without it showing up in our bodies and affecting our bodily health. We're just one unit, right? Heart, body and soul, we're just one thing. Anyhow, right now, PTSD and all, I just want to be who I am, as I am, in acceptance of the whole bundle of squeaky eccentricities and brilliance that comprises this weird entity I've been labelling ME.

[00:06:49] No regrets, right? And however this meets you in this moment, whether or not you've experienced burnout, stress, whatever you're going through, we're all wondrously imperfect gifts to the world, right? We're all how we're supposed to be. And I would like to point out that I'm not suggesting that anyone listening has or even might have PTSD if they have burnout.

[00:07:14] I mean, you've probably had tough moments in your life. Maybe you are in burnout. I don't know when you're listening to this. You might self identify Type A behaviors in yourself. PTSD I think is a separate deal. It just happens to be my journey that I'm talking about. And let's explore the dynamics of burnout then informed somewhat by my recent learnings about trauma, uh, by Type A personality and by the human psyche in general.

[00:07:44] And as I understand it, burnout was for me, you know, like so many other difficulties I've experienced, it wasn't an origin problem. It wasn't a primary problem for me. It was a consequence of unresolved trauma. My PTSD experiences did incubate in me the The kind of preconditions for burnout. And again, that may not be true for other people.

[00:08:10] So if we explore instead the Type A personality traits that people typically predispose to burnout often display, such as perfectionism, people pleasing, uh, impatience, ambition, competitiveness, drive. Also hyper autonomy, very self directed, and, and a lot of self stuff, self denial, self abandonment's usually in the picture, self criticism, um, and sometimes a bit of aggression.

[00:08:43] And we begin to see that these so called personality traits aren't intrinsic, rather they can often be seen as adaptive coping strategies developed in response to challenges early in life, when we didn't have the resources as kids to, to handle those challenges. And I'm talking about attachment here. If our caregiving adults didn't provide unconditional love, care, attention, attunement, and emotional support, then we'll have experienced insecure attachment to them and develop coping strategies for that.

[00:09:20] For example, if it was hard for you to secure parental approval as a kid, you might have become an overachiever, a straight A student to try to get more. Or if you were told you weren't doing well enough, maybe you weren't as smart as an older sibling, and maybe you were criticized or ignored for that, you might become a perfectionist to get more positive attention or to avoid judgment and rejection.

[00:09:44] So, whatever you learned as a youngster, how you behaved then, and still now, might actually not be your personality at all. That entity you label as you, probably isn't how you were born. And by the way, while we're here, you may not know that the term Type A personality was coined by two cardiologists, MeyerFriedmann and Ray Rosenman, in the 1950s, when they realized that their parents were wearing out only the front edge of their waiting room chairs.

[00:10:15] I think this is hilarious. So they conducted an eight and a half year study of thousands of men aged 35 to 59 and concluded that Type A behavior more than doubled the risk of coronary heart disease in otherwise healthy individuals. And that's my findings exactly on a sample size of one, me. I had a major heart attack out of nowhere aged 55 when I was otherwise pretty ostentatiously healthy.

[00:10:45] Hence the idiopathic quip from my cardiologists. They all wanted to know what I was doing there. But you know, the heart attack nearly killed me just the same. But here's the thing. I believe I'll never return to burnout, despite still having a pretty riotous experience of PTSD. And that's because I have awareness of the early warning signals of burnout, and the skills and tools to work with them, and a motivation towards self care and offering myself grace around my experience.

[00:11:22] And also, and I think this bit's quite important, the awareness that burnout is not built on a reality of inadequacy on my part, or in fact yours, if that's your experience, but a perception of inadequacy which is false. And which I can easily counter. So I consider myself to be perfectly able to deliver on all my roles now, despite my inner critic still telling me I'm not doing enough, or sometimes even that I'm not being enough.

[00:11:53] And that's really shame not being enough. The message of shame is that we're fundamentally bad and that it's not fixable, you know, which it's a load of rubbish. Happily, we can, we can counter that and learn to, to reduce shame. But you might notice in this that I haven't transcended any of my mind chatter, and it can still be pretty hairy at times.

[00:12:17] I just don't take it so strong, so seriously anymore. And I don't engage with it so directly. I kind of observe it a little bit and let it all come and I offer myself grace about it. I mean, all of that's on a good day. I can't always do that, but I have a go. Because nobody, no human can still the voice in their head for very long.

[00:12:40] Possible exception, meditators at the kind of black belt Dalai Lama level, you know, it doesn't matter because any thought you have is fine as long as you let it pass through. Unmolested, if you like, as long as you don't fixate on it and lock it into your system, where it kind of persists malevolently, like a big lump blocking your good energy flow.

[00:13:07] And for me, the kind of neurological and biological biochemical mechanics of PTSD mean that I'm prone to more negative thinking, more reactivity than perhaps would would normally be my portion because my fight or flight is chronically triggered. Now I'm, I'm, I'm in a chronic, uh, stress state really. But even that I find it's workable because fundamentally this is who and how I'm supposed to be.

[00:13:40] If this is how I am, this is how I'm supposed to be. And luckily I have found a way to use how I am in service. in a way that's really engaging and rewarding for me. So I feel kind of very lucky to have found that. And I think each of us does have our place and our role in the universe exactly as we are.

[00:14:04] And I'm putting it this way. I am enough. And that declaration is permanent. It's a refutable and it prevail. I probably didn't feel that when I was in burnout. Well, I know I didn't. I really had to find, excuse me, my own okayness after burnout. And I thought that was going to be a really tough gig. I thought it was going to be hard to do, but it turned out to be a lot easier than I expected being in contact with the intrinsic okayness that was already inside.

[00:14:37] And today, being enough explicitly includes manifestations and experiences of PTSD. Which extend to mental, emotional, physical, and social implication. And if you're listening to this, I mean hopefully not in morbid fascination, but more with a bit of curiosity, and wondering how that reflects on burnout recovery for you perhaps, what I'm doing today is, I'm telling a bit of my story and I'm kind of linking it into burnout and some of the drivers of burnout.

[00:15:14] I'm just setting the scene today for future episodes on the podcast where we're going to examine those symptoms of burnout and their relationship to type A behaviors, coping mechanisms, and the drivers for those behaviors. And I'm gonna do this to draw the roadmap outta burnout by modifying those behaviors, cultivating radical set self-acceptance.

[00:15:37] And there's a predictable path out of burnout that I teach my clients, and that I can teach anyone, and I've been using it to enormous success for many years. So if you're in or heading towards or feel susceptible to burnout, I want you to have that method out of burnout, that path out of burnout too.

[00:16:01] Suffice it to say for now that if Type A behaviors are what generate the perfect storm of burnout conditions, then two pertinent conclusions suggest themselves to me. And the number one is, People in burnout are not fundamentally broken, nor is the condition permanent, since behaviors are fluid. They yield to coaching and neuroplasticity.

[00:16:24] And number two, burnout says nothing about a person, but much about the conditions of the person's life. The clients I coach, A good hearted, capable, high achieving people who, once restored to well being and energy, bring their gifts to the world in full force again. And that, my friends, is a story of redemption.

[00:16:49] And I really encourage you to participate for your own sake. It could be my redemption, and it can be yours too if you choose it. So the book of who you are is still being written. Your experience is in a state of constant flux. So if it's going to flux, you might as well be the one fluxing it, right? If you get my drift.

[00:17:10] And that's the thing that I'm working with my clients on. Take control of your life, who you are, how you want to be, and bringing it to a place that satisfies you. And I think all of that concludes my rather elliptical thinking for today. And I hope you picked up something to ponder in there and listen to future episodes on the symptoms and the drivers for burnout that I'm going to be bringing out shortly.

[00:17:33] Thank you for listening today as ever. Really appreciate you being here. If you like what you heard, hey, subscribe to the podcast and by all means, um, leave me a rating or a review. That'd be very kind of you. And please do come back for those following episodes where I'm going to start piecing together, undoing Type A personality behaviors.

[00:17:55] It's all about how you get to work with the challenges of burnout and come out smiling. So, listening on to the end of the link, you must come and talk to me about how to recover quickly and sustainably if you are in burnout and go back to your best performance, leadership, and most of all, enjoyment of life.

[00:18:15] If you're in burnout and ready to recover, come and join my Burnout to Leadership program. You can book in to talk with me at burnout. dexrandall. com. Just tell me what's bugging you and let's make a plan to fix it.