[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.

[00:00:22] Hello people, this is Dex, back at the desk. Another week, potentially another rant. So welcome, actually it might be, welcome to this week's episode on moral outrage, where we're going to discuss our overwhelming desire to prove ourselves right. about other people being wrong and all the bloody good that does us.

[00:00:47] Let's talk a wee bit about that. Mostly because a clash of morals can be so inflammatory to our mood, nervous system, and our reactive behaviors. And it affects our work and above all, our connection with other people and our connection with ourself. Much discomfort can arise, eh? Because as I see it, the ego is triggered in outrage.

[00:01:15] It's a kind of defensive mechanism. Ever so slightly defensive anyway, isn't it? That comes from our ego, or from our super ego, if you're a Freud fan. At any rate, if we receive a values challenge, a moral challenge, Usually we find in ourselves a vigorous need to defend who we are and the rightness of that, as opposed to whatever moral view has come up to oppose it.

[00:01:48] And I sometimes describe this as our belief in the only way to be a good human, which we learned as kids from our forebears. But here's another of my foolish examples. I don't know where they pop up from, but here's another one. Imagine a sheep feeling moral outrage that lions eat deer.

[00:02:11] The sheep knows that only eating plants is the correct thing to do. So what's the sheep going to do about it? Anyhow, if we think about moral outrage, in recent years. The way I see it is moral outrage has had a popular resurgence, shall we say. It's peaking, don't you think? And possibly in line with what is commonly called a sense of entitlement and possibly impacted by our governments, politics, economics, workplace culture, and of course, COVID.

[00:02:52] Many of us are now feeling more sensitised And more disempowered than we had previously realized. And we might notice this kind of amplified public perception of outrage on social media, coming across most often as polemic thinking. Or being cancelled. But really, that's not why I'm making this episode.

[00:03:17] I'm making this episode on moral outrage because if you yourself experience this, you may react strongly. But if you do, it's likely to increase your emotional suffering, rather than diminish the insult. Probably not ideal. And so because of that, I think it's A very productive area to coach on, to receive coaching on, because I am all about you taking up more of your own power and reducing your own suffering.

[00:03:51] That's where we're going to go with it today. And I think in this context, coaching might explore in a moral outrage, what the perceived breach actually is. How that contravenes your values. How it affects you when you know that it's contravened your values. And whether you would like to fight for your views.

[00:04:13] in that space, or find a way through that makes the challenge unfruitful or unnecessary for you. You can just sit with it. And I'm going to elaborate on all that in a moment. And it came up for me today when I was coaching a nurse, and I coach a lot of clients in the medical professions, and moral outrage is a very common experience.

[00:04:36] across the board there, as is moral injury. And both of those can repercuss into a person's sense of safety, selfhood, wellbeing, often autonomy and efficacy. And also their sense of reward in whatever it is that they're doing. And I looked it up in Google, as I quite often do when I make an episode. I look up what a word means, because I don't want to misrepresent it.

[00:05:03] But I looked up moral outrage on Google, and it's pretty hard to find a common definition for it. So I'm going to give you a few. Oddly enough, the first four definitions I came across were all from academic sources. Make of that what you will. And maybe it's a coincidence, but I do find these definitions, all of them, slightly flawed.

[00:05:29] But anyway, I'm going to give them to you. You can decide for yourself. How about that? So the first one is moral outrage. Anger about the wrongfulness of a deed. Number two. Justifiable anger, distrust, or frustration directed towards others who violate ethical values and standards. And that article goes on to suggest that then one's own moral integrity has been thus compromised.

[00:06:00] Not sure I agree with all of that. Another definition in a nursing context, when a patient is experiencing extreme suffering and the nurse doesn't feel that treatment is working, but the family has requested that life sustaining therapies be delivered at all costs.

[00:06:18] And the fourth one. When a situation is interpreted as both unfair and a threat to one's group.

[00:06:27] I don't know what else to say about all of those. You look them up for yourself, see what you think it is. But I think we've all got a rough sense of what moral outrage is because a lot of us have experienced it. So given this widespread experience of moral outrage particularly amongst my client base in burnout, and given how much grievance it provokes in a person, Let's start to discuss today some of the ways that we can handle it.

[00:06:56] And I will talk a little also about moral injury later, which is where we're forced to violate our deepest ethical values and conscience, which can have a really deep impact on our well being, spiritual, psychological, social, even workplace. And it can give rise to very strong feelings and persistent feelings like guilt, shame, disgust, remorse and anger.

[00:07:22] So obviously moral injury is well known to be another accident black spot in the medical professions. So I'll come back to that later, but for now let's focus on moral outrage, which is where we think someone did something morally wrong and In practice, the other person might compound this effect in our eyes by not acknowledging that they've done something wrong.

[00:07:49] Kind of figures, right? Because they probably don't think they have. But the slight problem here is humans do not share a single moral code. If the other person's actions are in fact aligned with their own moral code, That's a dilemma for us. It signals, at least, that we are unlikely to ever agree with them about what's right and what's wrong.

[00:08:18] Either we have a battle on our hands if we want to be right, Or we might collect people on our side and they might do the same on theirs and a battle may ensue. Now, in the, in an area of moral outrage, when somebody comes to me, and I'm coaching a client on moral outrage, I have no investment whatsoever in who is right.

[00:08:45] I will never know objectively who is right in any argument because it's usually outside my domain of knowledge, but more because it's usually subjective. I'd have to have a belief about it too. And I really don't want to impose my belief in a coaching situation, so I'll never know who's right. And I come from that place.

[00:09:08] What I'm more interested in as a coach is how you, if you're my client, can feel better, can resolve it for yourself, however that works out. And really bearing in mind, if we have, a moral dispute with an adult, we have very little influence over other adults, particularly over their values, because those values would have been formed a long time ago, like yours, and they're really going to be, by this time, part of their essence.

[00:09:40] And their identity as a human. So mostly they're going to continue being who they are, believing what they believe, and doing what they do. So we don't have much influence over that. But we don't have to sustain a grudge against them for not agreeing with us. Because there's 8 billion people on this planet, and we can never harmonize our moral values with all of them.

[00:10:05] Impossible. What we can mostly do is decide who we are, And how we will believe and behave such that we live by our own moral values. That's a basic expectation that we can meet because we can meet it within ourselves. And we can also decide on top of that whether to go in to battle with the other party, whether we feel strongly enough about it to do that.

[00:10:33] If we feel that their choices and their actions need to be altered. So one of the examples that popped into my mind about this is marriage equality. Many people stood up over what they believed to be right there in a moral way. And in the end, the tide of public opinion in many states and countries was swayed towards that belief and laws were changed.

[00:10:58] It can happen, but often, particularly in a work context, particularly in specific industries or work environments, effecting change can be harder. We might still choose to advocate for our own values or join movements that share and advocate for our values. But if our values are not popular or unlikely to be adopted or we lack the power or the will to act, we might also just let it go and go home and lick our wounds.

[00:11:33] I think one thing is really needs to be faced in this is protecting yourself from moral outrage is not the answer. It's probably not actually possible unless you choose to, of course, develop out your equanimity in the face of all things. So that's a principle adopted in Buddhism that I admire very much, equanimity, and I do aspire to, but developing it has not been, for me, the work of a moment.

[00:12:03] It's more of a lifetime epic work, to develop equanimity in the face of anything that happens. To not regard things as right or wrong. I don't know how it's looking for you, but if you're not trained in equanimity, if you're not adopted that practice, it might be a bit of a big reach for you to adopt equanimity suddenly in the face of moral outrage that you have already experienced.

[00:12:30] So might be a little bit out of the park. So , Avoiding moral outrage without such skills might be tough because there are always going to be moral difficulties in your world. But what we can do is we can choose what to do when we feel reactive about somebody's moral capacities or adventures, right?

[00:12:54] We can choose whether or not to take moral outrage personally, and I strongly suggest you consider this because therein lies most of your power. Moral impingements can often be related to a specific group, like in a societal level it might be ethnicity, religion, color, sexuality. And you might receive those moral impingements personally, if they are directed straight at you, as a member of one of those demographics, for example.

[00:13:28] You might take it personally. It looks personal, it sounds personal, but you don't have to take it personally. You can choose to depersonalize their words. Because something like homophobia, for example, is fear of same sex attracted people at its base, or other attracted people. And for the person who has made the action that's caused you the outrage, homophobia is really just self protection turned outwards as aggression.

[00:13:59] For example, if there was somebody name calling you in the street, and there was no real threat, You can just choose to act or not act on it, speak or not speak about it. You're not obligated to fight every fight where you think a moral has been impinged. Unless you choose to, okay? And I think that's a really important distinction.

[00:14:24] Because the alternative really is approving of ourselves, giving ourselves the support internally that we lack externally. So we can choose to centre in on our self approval and stay aligned with our own values. So that we ourselves are not internally compromised. We still agree inside that we're okay.

[00:14:47] When we choose to do that, it has a moral safety attached to it. We're okay with ourselves, which is generally much more important and significant to our well being and our self acceptance than being aligned with those people who do not share our values. Remember really, moral outrage starts wars.

[00:15:12] The violation of your moral standards may begin with others. But the outrage is all yours, and I say that only because then you have agency over it. So don't unconsciously allow moral outrage to start a war in your heart. You might choose resistance, but be conscious about that choice, and about your reasons and intention.

[00:15:41] If it's an unconscious, knee jerk reaction, That might not be in your best interest, so take time to work out what you want to do next for yourself. All right, so let's come back to moral injury, where that choice has been taken from you. Moral injury is where you're forced to violate your deepest ethical values and conscience, and we might see that happening in the workplace, such as in medicine.

[00:16:14] Now, you don't have a choice. It's been mandated that you take an action, or witness an action, or fail to act, in a way that violates your values and conscience. And sometimes this can play out as burnout. It's a general kind of chafing away all of the goodness of your workplace and your vision of who you are.

[00:16:39] So it can result in ongoing psychological or spiritual distress. And feelings such as shame, guilt, disgust, remorse, futility, anger and despair. And it can be a cloud over your head that's really hard to shift. And anyway, it deserves to be taken seriously. It's a wound. And an example might be being forced to provide a level of care in medicine that's inadequate to a patient's needs.

[00:17:11] In violation of one's oath to put a patient's needs first. And it could be due to constraints such as staffing, patient time, EMR, hospital systems prescription expectations, insurance metrics, and so on. I myself have worked with a lot of doctors and nurses under extreme moral, mental, physical, spiritual, time and financial pressures.

[00:17:40] And it saddens me so much to hear their distress. However, if that's happening to you, I want you to know you do still have the power inside you to resolve these experiences and find more satisfaction and reward at work. Coaching really helps you to develop an approach and an action plan to help heal your wounds and reconnect you with the aspects of patient work that fulfill you.

[00:18:08] You most likely do not need to leave medicine to create a better life. And in fact, my clients tend to get a second wind and go on to find much more rewarding experiences where they feel more effective in their care without changing their role. Or maybe by switching to a new medical role that's better aligned with their desires.

[00:18:31] And when we come back to moral outrage, you're often going to be able to handle yourself with some thought and intention there and get yourself through it. Whereas people suffering moral injury often need support to help them move through and past that. And partly I think it's because of their level of internal distress.

[00:18:51] It's like a dislocation inside where you feel a bit in conflict with your own value system. There's a wound that needs healing there, but also I think it's Often in moral injury, people question who they are, that they could have done the things that they've done. I think of people in war.

[00:19:14] There'll be a jaundiced, almost a bitter view of the self that receiving a coaching eye on can really help clear up. So this is about refinding the goodness in you that's still there, that's always been there. And as you listen to this, if you have moral outrage or moral injury, I know your heart's in the right place and I can help you through coaching to reconnect with that goodness and downplay the moral affront that you've been suffering.

[00:19:50] And of course, if you experience moral injury outside the medical world, it can happen in war, obviously, many other industries and situations, than medicine, the same remedy applies. You can tap into power you didn't actually know you had to shape the future of your work and your outlook in a way that's less morally challenging and more fulfilling for you.

[00:20:15] So if you have experienced or are experiencing moral challenges, And if that's contributing to a sense of burnout for you, you must come and talk to me about how to recover quickly and sustainably and get back to your best performance, leadership, success, and most of all enjoyment inside work and out.

[00:20:33] You can book an appointment at DexRandall. com. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love you to rate and review the podcast to help me reach more people and I really do appreciate your support with that. If you know somebody who is in or heading towards burnout, please send them the podcast link because I always speak about how to help yourself recover or how you can recover from all of the negative experiences of burnout.