What would change if leaders truly held the delicate balance between hope and realism? Our guest, Ashley Andersen, is the Founder and CEO of EzraSage, where she supports clients as they move beyond burnout and disconnection to manage stress and even benefit from it. During this rich and informative discussion, she breaks down how small, intentional practices can spark real connection, why leadership strategies sometimes miss their mark, and how the body, breath, and even healthy venting become tools for resilience. Ashley also offers practical ways to foster accountability, shift mindset, and embrace consistency without overwhelm. At the heart of it all is her mission: to empower clients to make the changes they need, navigating the paradox of hope with grounded strategies that truly last. Join us to hear from an expert in her field with pearls of wisdom to share.
[0:01:14] DF: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Staffing Show. Today, I am extremely excited to be joined by Ashley Andersen, who is the Founder and CEO of EzraSage. Ashley, really great to have you back on the show. We always have deep, great conversations about how to improve our mental health, our mental well-being. And today, we’re going to be jumping into something that I know a lot of you in the staffing industry are experiencing because it’s been some challenging times, is the topic of burnout. And discussing what it is and how to kind of improve outcomes with where we’re at today.
To kick things off, Ashley, I always like people to have a little bit of background on who you are and what you’re up to today. Let’s start there, and then we’ll go and jump into the topic of burnout.
[0:01:58] AA: Thanks, Dave. Well, solve all the world’s problems, right?
[0:01:58] DF: Absolutely.
[0:02:02] AA: That’s the hope. That’s the hope. Scratch the surface, maybe. Thank you so much for having me back. I love these conversations. Yeah. I mean, a little bit about me. I’ll start with me. My background, my career started as a social worker. I have that kind of clinical lens when it comes to human behavior and kind of our neurobiological hardwiring, which comes into the work that I’ve been doing over the course of the last, I don’t know, 10, 15 years, which is more in the professional development, leadership development space, executive coaching, things of that nature, building and running leadership development programs.
And then, it was the last year or two, I’ve lost track of time completely. But I remember I turned to a colleague of mine at the time and I said, “People are not okay.” And that really hasn’t changed, unfortunately. I would love for there to be a reason for my company to not exist. But we’re working on it. We’re working on it. Maybe one day. But yeah, we were trying to do a lot of leadership development, skill development.
But then, looking at what people were kind of showing up with and the challenges that they were really dealing with in those moments. And understanding human behavior, that if we’re not addressing these kind of foundational areas of people’s lives in terms of their mental and emotional well-being, it’s going to be really hard for them to become really skilled as leaders and to put some of these other more tactical leadership skills into practice. That was sort of the impetus of EzraSage. And we provide a number of services. But fundamentally, we help organizations to make sure that their people can withstand and thrive through change, and uncertainty, and pressure without that burnout happening.
[0:03:57] DF: Yeah. And I just think it’s such an important topic because, I mean, we’ve all either experienced burnout ourselves or had a teammate who’s going through burnout. And I think that what it does from a productivity lens, from the outcome, the creativity. I think trying to be creative when you’re burned out, trying to solve something in a new way when you’re burned out, or trying to be at your best. And sadly, it seems like burnout tends to happen when you might need to be performing at your best. I think this is such a hot topic for leaders in the industry right now.
Jumping into it, I know one of the things that you talked about with burnout was you said it’s not just stress, it’s disconnection. Let’s kind of explore that a little bit deeper.
[0:04:40] AA: Yeah. I mean, you think of stress, the idea isn’t that we’re removing stress and creating this utopia of stress-free. That’s not only unrealistic, but it’s actually not desirable. There are some really positive effects of stress when it is kind of that run-of-the-mill day-to-day stress and not this chronic, compounded version that we’re under right now.
But when you think about what is driving burnout, I think our immediate kind of place to put blame is on things like workload. We hear a lot of, “I don’t have enough minutes in the day.” “I have so many meetings on my calendar.” “I have these impossible client demands or these impossible metrics.” But if we’re talking about us as human beings and how we are hardwired and the world that we live and work in, there’s this fundamental, you can call it like a mismatch, you can call it like a tension point between our wiring and the world we live in.
And one of the biggest ways that we see that is around connection and disconnection. And if you’re familiar at all with the loneliness epidemic, it’s phrased. And Vivik Murthy, who was a previous surgeon general, wrote a really fantastic book called Together that is really looking at the impacts of loneliness. And in some ways, the research has shown that aloneness and that loneliness is more detrimental to our physical and emotional health than anything else. They compared it to smoking cigarettes. And that it’s worse than smoking cigarettes.
[0:06:24] DF: Wow.
[0:06:24] AA: Wasn’t it like there was like the new – sitting is the new smoking. Now, loneliness is the new sitting. But it is really terrible. We’re hardwired to be connected with each other and to be in deeper connection. And you can look at your calendar and go, “Wow, I’m connecting with people all day.” Right?
But the problem is, is those are really transactional connections and really transactional conversations. And what we are getting further and further away from today are more deep, kind of supportive, inspiring, thought-provoking, growth-oriented types of connections and conversations. We just aren’t making space for them. We aren’t engaging in those types of connections.
And as a result, we’re feeling less capable of handling the stress and pressure that we’re going through. It’s like you don’t see it automatically as the culprit. You’re like, “Oh, it’s workload.” But when you get down to that neurobiological needs that we have, you can see how that tension between those needs and the world we work and live in are really causing us more or compounded stress or pressure, or they’re making it more difficult for us to cope effectively and healthfully with the stress and pressure that we have.
[0:07:51] DF: Yeah. With that in mind, I mean, I feel the aloneness, the sitting on Zooms all day, it’s like that’s not – it doesn’t feel like real connection, and it’s not like actually having lunch with somebody or sitting with somebody in the office. What are some things that leaders can do to kind of help either alleviate the feeling of aloneness or improve the experience?
[0:08:15] AA: Yeah, I think first and foremost, we have to confront some of maybe the doubts that we have. And I’m sure there are people that are listening or watching that are going to go, I don’t have the time to create those types of connections. Or maybe they don’t feel like it’s their responsibility. But again, you’re dealing with the outcomes of a lack of that type of connectivity. It sort of is your responsibility.
[0:08:42] DF: Proactive or reactive. Where do you want to sit?
[0:08:45] AA: If you’re interested in the outcomes of things like you were talking about, creativity, and innovation, and collaboration, then you got to get to the source of what’s getting in the way, whether that’s uncomfortable for you or not. But I think there’s this myth around the fact that deep, meaningful connection needs to happen over long spans of time. That we need to be in person. Oh, does that mean we need a three-day retreat? That’s great. Love me a three-day retreat. But no, you don’t need that. You can build deep and meaningful connection in 10 minutes of time. You can take a moment.
I just wrote a newsletter article about this of like doing a two-word check-in, that’s a practice borrowed from Brené Brown’s work, at the beginning of every team meeting. And it’s really like what are you feeling right now? Just two words. No story, no context, no explanation, and no responses from other people, which that’s the tough part, especially as a leader to – Oh, you’re struggling.
[0:09:46] DF: I got to solve that. I’ve got to dig my way through that.
[0:09:51] AA: Right? To create more empathy, more understanding, more – again, less aloneness. Get to hear like, “Oh, I’m not the only one kind of in this experience.” And that is really meaningful. And it takes, depending on the size of your team, barely any time at all. There are a lot of different ways that we can just set aside the transaction for a moment. It doesn’t mean don’t get back to the agenda, but create those small moments.
[0:10:22] DF: And what was the second question? What are you feeling right now? And then what was the second one?
[0:10:25] AA: That’s it. Just two words. Two words what you’re feeling right now.
[0:10:30] DF: Yeah. Yeah.
[0:10:32] AA: Yeah. You want to set it up so that you’re saying to people – because we are naturally storytellers. People will go, “Oh, well, I just got off the phone.” You’re like, “Nope, nope. No story. Just two words.” And it’s pretty powerful. I can tell, I can see you’re taking notes. I want to hear back from you.
[0:10:49] DF: I’ve been taking notes. I mean, whenever we talk, I take notes on how to be – I’m like, “This is going straight to the books. I’m going to use your knowledge, your expertise to improve.” I hope others that are listening do that, too, because that’s great.
[0:11:01] AA: I love it.
[0:11:02] DF: And I think you just shared a behavior that we can do proactively to help build connection that honestly feels very approachable. What are some things that leaders might be doing that they think are helping but are actually having the opposite impact?
[0:11:19] AA: That’s a great question. There’s probably a lot.
[0:11:22] DF: I’m finding more and more that I subconsciously do that don’t necessarily have the intended impact.
[0:11:28] AA: Yeah. How do you recognize, eventually, that the impact is not aligned with the intent?
[0:11:34] DF: I most recently took a call transcript and threw it into Gemini from a coaching call that didn’t go as I had intended it to go, and identified some key areas where I thought I was suggesting some of the right things. And I was like, “Well, here’s the moment where you actually created more stress.” You actually made the problem worse unintentionally. And I think that those things happen. My example was I was like, “Oh, well, this seems like a stressful problem to solve right now, so let’s just put it as homework and we’ll get to it later.” And I was like, “That was not the right thing in that moment.” But, yeah.
[0:12:11] AA: Yeah. And the idea is not that we need to be perfect as humans or leaders. You can go back to that individual. And, actually, it’s so valuable to the relationship, and the trust, and the safety in the relationship to go back to them and say, “Hey, if I worked for you and you told me that you took the transcript of our one-on-one, put it into Gemini, in an effort to learn and do better, I would be blown away.” I would be like, “Wow, this is a leader who cares, who cares about showing up. Yeah, he’s imperfect. Yeah, he messes up sometimes, but he genuinely cares.” And that goes so far.
I think one of the things, when I work with people one-on-one in coaching engagements, I always look for three traits before I say yes to that person, which are humility, openness, and courage. And you just talked about having two of those. And I’m sure you went back and repaired the relationship, which takes courage. But having the humility to acknowledge none of us are perfect. We all are going to mess up. And then having the openness to put your transcript into Gemini and read. And you’re like, “Ooh. It’s uncomfortable as a person to see where you mess up.” Because we all are, for the most part, well-meaning, well-intended.
When we see an example where that didn’t align, we’re like, “Oh, gosh.” And it’s easy to go down that rabbit hole of like, “God, I suck. And I’m dropping the ball,” and blah-blah-blah. But really important to not shame yourself. Instead, talk about, “That wasn’t great,” like you did. Oops. And what do I need to do to make it better?
But I think back to your original question of how do leaders kind of get in their own way a little bit. There are a couple things that come to mind. One of which is not doing their own work. And when I say that, I don’t necessarily mean work, like you have to be in some sort of program or anything, but we are all human beings regardless of our role. And as humans, we’re emotional beings. Stress, and pressure, and high-stakes decisions that are landing on our desk last minute, chaotic fires we need to put out, we’re going to react. We can’t stop that reaction, but we can build the capacities to be able to recognize like, “All right, I’m not in a good headspace right now. And what do I need to do?” And it could be really simple, a couple deep breaths. It could be I’m going to get up and stretch a little. Or I’m going to call somebody to skillfully, productfully vent, which is different than just calling and complaining.
But having your own practices in place for your own stress relief, stress management. Because if you don’t do that, don’t kid yourself that it’s not going to pop up in your one-on-one, that it’s not going to pop up the next time you’re leading your team meeting or in front of the board. It’s going to pop up. You got to deal with it, so that it doesn’t pop up outside of your kind of control or agency.
[0:15:23] DF: And what are some tactics or processes that people can put in place to build that capacity? What are some things that you suggest for helping to show up –
[0:15:34] AA: They’re super simple. And we love to over-complexify things. And people hear these things, and they’re like, “Really?” I was just on the phone with somebody yesterday where she said I’ve been doing these things. And, yeah, they actually work. I’ve been getting sleep.
[0:15:53] DF: That is always such a funny one. It’s like, “Oh, the world’s ending.” And then you get like a good night rest, like, “Oh, I got this.”
[0:15:59] AA: Life-changing. I don’t know why we need more complex solutions. That’s too simple. I am not going to believe that that is going to work. Truly, I mean, all the work that we do is based in research because – don’t waste your time on hacks that are not based in research. Just because you don’t like what the research is really illuminating, the simplicity of it, or sort of out-of-the-box nature of it. And nothing that we teach or we promote is revolutionary. I always say that to people.
And I think one of the things that’s really beneficial with services like ours is that there’s consistency, there’s accountability. Because that’s more so where we get in our way. We listen to a podcast, we read a book, we go to a conference, we learn something, and we’re like, “Oh my gosh, that is such a great – Oh, breathe. Oh, my gosh. I totally forgot that I can breathe. I am going to breathe. This is great.”
And then we hop onto our next call, and we’re like – we’re not breathing at all. We lose connection if we don’t have kind of that consistent support, and practice, and accountability. But the practices themselves are simple. Breathing is a huge stress reliever. It is scientifically proven for those that are naysayers of taking a deep breath every once in a while that it will slow down our stress response. That kind of freeze, fight, flight response, you can slow that down and bring more calm to your brain by just getting a little bit more oxygen.
If you pay attention to how you’re breathing, typically it’s pretty shallow. Right now, I can feel like I don’t really feel my breath. It’s pretty shallow. And so just stopping and taking a deep breath. There are different types of breath. If you want to really geek out over it, you can look at what types of breath help you tap into calm. There are different types of breath that can actually energize you and pick you up if you –
[0:18:02] DF: I didn’t know that.
[0:18:05] AA: That’s more like rapid breathing. If you’re familiar with Wim Hof, that’s this person’s name. The Wim Hof breathing. You have to be careful with that because it can make you a little faint. That’s my little disclaimer for folks. There’s nothing you have to be careful about with the slower breath.
[0:18:26] DF: Yeah, breathing deeper. Yeah.
[0:18:28] AA: Yeah. I mean, breath is a huge one. Being aware of like your body, because that’s usually where stress and emotions show up first. The pit in your stomach, the tension in your back when you’re like, “Ah.” I mean, yeah, it might be that your chair sucks and maybe that’s why you have tension, but a lot of times it’s something else. And so, if you can just pause and maybe like, “What is that?” Work it out a little bit, do a stretch, get some movement.
I talked about this in a post, or article, or something, but I have a pillow on my ground, on the floor in my office. And when I’m just sort of spiraling, I’ll lay down on the ground for – maybe it’s 30 seconds, maybe it’s 3 minutes. But just that shift from whatever space you’re in. As I said, phone a friend. But be really intentional about the phone a friend because it’s easy to get into this more of a spiral, right? And then you’re like, “Yeah. And then you know what they did to me? They did this.” And then you walk away more angry.
[0:19:38] DF: You escalate. I feel like sometimes you’re like, “Oh, I’m calling events.” And then you walk away just like really angry.
[0:19:44] AA: Yeah. Yeah. Or we’ve all also been on the receiving end where somebody’s calling us, and then we’re like, “God, I felt great before. Now –”
[0:19:50] DF: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[0:19:52] AA: I call it getting slimed.
[0:19:54] DF: Yeah.
[0:19:55] AA: Be really intentional. Like I always say with venting, skillful venting, is there are parameters around it. There’s a purpose to it. You’re making a request, like, “Hey, Dave, I just had this really big client meeting go totally sideways, and I’m really in my head about it. Or I’m really stressed about this. Can I just kind of vent for a couple minutes? And I would love your two cents on what you think a different perspective I could take. Because right now, I’m thinking that this is the end of the world.” You’re making an ask of the person. Putting some limitations.
[0:20:31] DF: Framing it ahead of time.
[0:20:32] AA: Yeah.
[0:20:33] DF: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that’s great. And the breathing side, I just recently learned about box breathing. And now I’m a fan. Definitely a fan. And then Rachel on our team, and also my wife have forever been telling me about the legs up the wall. And that’s a new – these little things, they work.
[0:20:53] AA: Yeah. And they go back. I mean, legs up the wall. I really don’t like yoga for a variety of reasons. Different episode. But that goes back. That’s ancient practice. Again, it has been scientifically studied. And there’s all kinds of reasons why just lying on the ground, putting your legs up against a wall, in terms of blood flow and heart rate, it really, really helps. Now, that’s a little – you can’t do that everywhere. You can do the box breathing no matter where you are, on the train, or in the car. You can’t just throw your legs up on the wall. But yeah, just having different practices, different techniques, but remembering can be hard.
When I was trying to get into breathing more, more intentionally, more deeply, I had a sticky note that just said breathe on it. And I put it on my computer monitor. And so having visual reminders so that when we’re like working on developing that practice again, we have a tendency to just forget and abandon it. We need that accountability. Those are easy ways to build in accountability with one another.
[0:22:04] DF: Absolutely. That makes sense. And I know these – the one I firmly – they’re scientifically proven practices that, you guys, if you’re listening to this, try them. They work. What are some of the kind of broader, more – think about sustainable fix. And I shouldn’t say that these are sustainable fixes, too, if practiced regularly. But what are some of the broader approaches that you’ve seen kind of reduce burnout in a longer term approach versus some of the band-aid solutions that people are trying?
[0:22:32] AA: Mindset is huge. And again, I’m sure there are going to be people that are rolling their eyes right now thinking about mindset. We discount how powerful our mind is in terms of impacting our mood, our attitude, our beliefs that we hold, and what those beliefs then kind of compel us to do. And we all have these sort of underlying beliefs that cause us, if we’re kind of holding them as truth, to act in ways that are not in service of our well-being and that are not in service of us being less stressed, but actually create more stress.
Some of the typical things that we see a lot, especially with leaders, the kind of presenting problem or the initial complaint of, “I’m so busy. I’m in so many meetings. There’s too many meetings.” And again, I’m not saying that that’s not true. There probably are opportunities for us to do some auditing of meetings. But especially in work-from-home, or hybrid workforces, and knowledge work, we need meetings. That’s part of the work.
But often, if we’re just focusing on that initial complaint and the answer becomes let’s get rid of all meetings, and we aren’t digging below the surface to get at the belief that might be contributing to some of the stress around the meetings. Here’s an example. I have so many meetings on my calendar. We dig into what’s beneath that, and we find that there’s this belief that I need to be – there’s a little bit of FOMO, right? We want to be involved in everything. Especially as leaders, we feel like, “Oh, I got to be in that conversation. Decisions could be made. Yes, I’m going to –” what is that desire to be involved in everything or that need to be involved in everything causes us to go, “Yes, yes. Yes, I’ll RSVP. Yes to that, and yes to that, and yes to that.” Because we don’t want to miss out.
And so that’s really where we need to target the change. And that’s where mindset comes in, because it’s on me to do the work to change this belief that I need to be involved in everything, or else. This kind of scarcity mindset.
[0:25:00] DF: Yeah. Kind of like the, “If I don’t touch it, it’s going to fall apart.” And as long as you feel that way, then you’re going to overwhelm yourself because you don’t have capacity to do it all.
[0:25:11] AA: Right. Exactly. Or like I need to be involved in everything my team is involved in. I need to know everything they’re doing. I need to have my hands in it. Because, ultimately, it rolls up to me, and I’m going to pay the price if something goes wrong. Well, yes, but that belief that you need to be involved in everything now has you totally micromanaging, not truly delegating everything. And that is causing you tons of unnecessary stress.
Your work is always going to be stressful. Again, the idea is not to remove the stress. And especially if you’re a high achiever, it’s going to be stressful. You’re taking on challenges. You’re tackling difficult things. But the idea is like where are we compounding that stress? Where are we contributing more stress and pressure to an already stressful and pressured work environment?
[0:26:05] DF: Yeah. I mean, I feel like I’m, as always, just like very aligned with how you approach and think about these things. You’ve got it so dialed in, this what you do. But the mindset side of it, that’s such a hard thing to change. Especially when it goes into a place of burnout, or like figuring out how to get somebody from the I believe every week is going to suck, or I believe every day is going to be too much, how do you go about that? I mean, what type of work does that look like? Yeah.
[0:26:36] AA: It is. It is tough. But it’s not unlike if you wanted to pick up a new sport and you’ve never played it before. That’s tough, too. Again, it requires that consistency. You can’t pick up a tennis racket, play once, and then 3 years later think you’re going to be great. I almost said Andre Agassi. Now, I said it. A lot of people are not going to know that reference. Oops.
But yeah, it requires practice. It requires commitment, accountability, consistency, kind of a structured system for that practice, any change or growth. It’s just that we don’t have a lot of those systems accessible to us. We’re kind of like, “Okay, well, where do I go?” If I’m trying to do tennis, I’m going to like sign up at the local tennis, the racket club. If I’m trying to learn how to mountain bike, I might get with a mountain biking crew. But where do I go if my desire is to work on my mindset? And that’s really what we’re trying to shift and provide for people because that’s what creates change.
But ultimately, it also goes back to personal agency and ownership. The individual has to want to change. And often, through coaching, people don’t come to coaching and say, “I have this belief that I need to be in everything my team does, and that’s causing me –” they’re not making those connections, right? It’s like what is the pain? The pain for them is that they feel like there’s not enough time in the day. And then it’s helping explore that with them.
If you, as a leader, have somebody on your team – leaders tend to be very problem, solution-focused individuals. It’s why they climb the ranks and become leaders. But not everything is a problem for you to solve. Sometimes, as a leader, it’s worthwhile to take a step back and take a little bit of a coach-like approach to the conversation with the person in front of you who’s struggling in some way or who has a complaint.
A question that I sometimes ask in coaching is what’s the request behind the complaint? If you have somebody who’s coming to you and just complaining, complaining, complaining, everybody else has felt – like putting it back on them. That sounds kind and compassionate way. But I see you’re writing that down. So, everybody on his team [inaudible 0:29:16]. Yeah. Yeah.
When I’m working with coaching clients, a lot of times when we’re trying to figure out what the problem is, there is a lot of finger-pointing and a lot of blaming. And I only have that one person in front of me. I have no idea if Ted in finance is really as much of a pain in the butt as you’re saying. He might be. But like you’re here. Reminding people again, and I’ve said it a few times, the world is stressful. It is. I’m not here to say that the world isn’t stressful or that your organization doesn’t have ways that they could improve things to create less stress, or your leader could create less stress. Those things probably are true, but you’re here.
Do you want to spend all your energy focused – which is a finite resource, by the way, focused on everybody else and what they’re doing? Or do you want to focus on yourself? It’s about like how can I reframe this so the person recognizes that they do have control, not all the control. They do have agency, that they do have a level of empowerment in affecting some of the stress and pressure that they’re experiencing.
[0:30:43] DF: I think that’s really great. And one of the other components that you and I talked about previously was just the kind of internal narratives, which I think ties into the mindset components of this, and some of the different elements that people can take action on. One of them, I think, we brought up briefly was the idea of fear setting. And I just love it if you’d talk a little bit about what other ways that you can kind of control the internal narrative, and then maybe explain that, the fear setting concept as well.
[0:31:11] AA: The internal narrative is so interesting. You use the word control.
[0:31:16] DF: Yeah. Is that the right way to think about it?
[0:31:20] AA: [inaudible 0:31:20].
[0:31:22] DF: That was a little micro expression there. I was like, “Well, I got that one wrong.”
[0:31:29] AA: I’m going to stop you there, and we’re going to let go of that desire because that’s never happened. Whenever people say things like, “How do I get them to –” I’m like, “All right.” We can’t control other people. We also can’t control that inner narrative in our head. It just pops up. But we can become better at recognizing it and making more of a conscious choice as to whether – what do we want to do with it? Do we want to believe it and kind of go down – I always talk about two paths. Do you want to believe it and go down that path? And we all know what’s down that path. And it’s not particularly pleasant, or helpful, or productive. Or do we want to choose a different path to go down? Yeah, we all have those different voices in our heads that pop up.
And a lot of times – it’s interesting. I have a coaching client that I’m working with now, and she came to me. And she’s an HR executive. Has a lot of hard conversations all day long. And she’s pretty tenured in her career. She’s been in it for about 30 years. Loves her work, loves her job. And she’s just like, “I am so exhausted. I’m so overwhelmed.”
We were digging in, and what she recognized is that the initial complaint was I’m just going from one hard conversation to another. Like that just feels like my whole day is just one conversation. But the reality was that not every conversation was causing her overwhelm and exhaustion. There were just certain ones.
And when we dug in deeper to that, we revealed that what’s happening is that she’s like beating herself up after certain conversations, where she’s like, “I should have noticed that. I should have known that that was happening. I should have should have should have. I should have had this crystal ball.” She’s placing these impossible expectations on herself.
It’s not really that she’s in difficult conversations all day that’s exhausting her. She’s done that her whole career. It’s how she’s treating herself after certain conversations that’s exhausting her. And I could even see as she was talking about it, she was physically getting exhausted. That’s where the work happens. Where it’s like you got to target that, versus you need a whole new career. Maybe HR isn’t for you.
And again, her job will always involve difficult conversations. That’s out of her control. But what’s in her control is how does she treat herself? What does she do when that voice pops up? Because there’s no way to stop it. Now you know what the cost of believing that is. Do you want to pay that price or do you want to choose something else?
[0:34:22] DF: It’s really reframing the concept of the internal narrative and not trying to control it.
[0:34:29] AA: The less we can try to control in life.
[0:34:34] DF: It does seem like that’s the path.
[0:34:36] AA: I think there’s a correlation between people who are very control-oriented, I will say, and stress. The fact is that we live in a very messy world. We are messy as human beings. And so if we can increase our capacity for ambiguity and acceptance, those sorts of things, that alone will cause a great drop in stress and pressure.
[0:35:06] DF: That’s amazing. I know we’ve talked about a handful of different kind of tangible action items. If you were to share any one thing for the listeners that are on here today, knowing where the staffing industry is at and some of the challenges that they’re having, what is one or two things that you would recommend that they consider taking away from this conversation?
[0:35:29] AA: Yeah, I think I talk a lot in every arena I’m in about paradoxes or polarities, whatever you want to call them. And I think one paradox that we need to be really mindful of and careful around, particularly in staffing, is this need for hope and the need for reality. And I think I see that that resonates for you, right?
[0:35:56] DF: Yeah.
[0:35:57] AA: Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of like, “It’s going to get better. Just next quarter. Oh, did I say quarter? I meant the back half of the year. I actually meant next year.” And this hopefulness of it’s going to get better. And I am a hopeful person. And hope is extremely important.
There’s actually was just an article. I can’t remember the publication last week that came out around – I think it was Fast Company or HBR, something, around the importance of hope, and as a leadership trait, the importance of hope. And I fully believe that. And there is such thing as too much hope when we are neglecting reality. And there’s such thing as like too much reality to the neglect of hope. And that’s kind of how paradoxes work, is we don’t want to swing the pendulum too far to one side to the neglect of the other. We really want to be in that messy middle where it’s a bit of both. We want to show up individually as leaders embodying both a sense of hope, and a transparency, and a reality.
This is tough. There is a lot unknown. There is a lot out of our control. And we have a really fantastic team. What do we know? We have a great vision. We have a great strategy. Those things sit in the hope factor. But we are still being realistic. Because when people are like – it’s like a roller coaster, where they’re like, “Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.” And that’s really jarring to our mental state. And it can be exhausting in and of itself to go from those extremes. How do we kind of keep things a little bit more level?
[0:37:42] DF: I know that’s a failure I’ve had over the last couple years, where it’s like, “All right, well, this is –” there’s times I’m like, “All right. Two months from now, things are going to be like crystal clear. It’s going to be super easy.” I mean, actually, I would say that this is – I was saying it was like the false summit, where I’m like, “Once we’re here, it’s going to be easy.” And now I’m like, “No, once we’re there, we’re just going to see the next peak.”
[0:38:07] AA: It’s such a great analogy, Dave, because for anybody who’s not hiked or anything like that, the false summit’s like you’re hiking the mountain and it looks like it’s the top of the mountain. And it’s actually not.
[0:38:21] DF: You’re like a third of the way up, and you’re like, “Oh, are we going to make it?”
[0:38:26] AA: And if you are only informing your approach. How much energy I’m expending, and how much of my food, and supplies, and water I’ve consumed, on the visual of that summit, then you’re likely to not be able to get to the actual top. Because you’re like, “Well, that’s all my energy. Now I have to turn around and go back to the bottom.”
Versus if you’re keeping your eye on the visuals, but you also are informed by – you’ve done your research. You’re informed by the facts. How high it is? You have your little altimeter or whatever it is that tells you how many feet you’ve already climbed. I know how many feet I have to go. Even though there’s that visual kind of tricking me, I know that I still have quite a bit ways to go.
It’s important to have that hope, but it’s also important to be rooted in facts and reality. And I think that’s – you said failure. With any paradox, there’s no landing point. There’s no perfect, “Uh, I’m perfectly balanced.”
[0:39:33] DF: Navigating it.
[0:39:34] AA: Yeah. It’s just a constant kind of in-between. And the key there is to be aware. How do you know when you have gone too far over to hope? And how do you know when you’re now too far into reality? Maybe everybody on your team’s eyes look like mine do right now. They’re a little like – then that might be an indicator that you’re swimming too much in reality and you need to bring a little bit more hope into play. Or being attuned to what’s happening around you and inside of you for your own internal self, too.
[0:40:09] DF: Well, that’s really great. And I think we’ve covered a lot of really good topics and tactics here, and I think we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. I always enjoy having a conversation with you. For those of you that are listening, if you’re leading a team and you want to go deeper on building capacity, connection, and resilience, you’re trying to reduce burnout, increase the outcomes, I highly recommend you reach out to Ashley. Ashley, where can people find you? Where should people reach out to you to connect?
[0:40:37] AA: Yeah, you can send an email if you want to do that directly, at Ashley or [email protected]. You can go to our website, ezrasageco.com. But I’m also really active on LinkedIn, posting there regularly with these tidbits of practice and insight. And as I said before, it’s really about keeping it front of mind, having structure, having consistency, having reminders. I look at LinkedIn and our newsletter as an opportunity to create some of that kind of practice, and habit-building, and reminders for people around a lot of these practices that are simple. They’re just not always easy to remember to do. But I would love to connect with folks.
[0:41:23] DF: Well, I highly recommend that you all reach out to Ashley. And it was so great having you on as always. And as you saw me write down notes, I feel like I always leave every one of these conversations a little bit better as a leader myself. It was great connecting with you. And we’ll talk soon.
[0:41:37] AA: Likewise, Dave. Thanks for having me.
