Mindful Monday’s

In this episode of Mindful Mondays we discussed “Career Related Stress''. While stress is relative to the person in the situation, there are ways to strengthen our coping mechanisms through career development intervention. We addressed these interventions and shared practical ways leaders can support their team through stressful times.

Speakers:

• Michelle Precourt, Mindful HR Services Inc.

• Dr. Dave Redekopp, Life-Role Development Group LTD.

• Ahmed Rammay, Marketing by Rammay

Mindful Monday’s E4

Transcript

Michelle

Good morning and welcome to Mindful Mondays. 

Ahmed 

Good morning. Good morning. How's everyone doing Michelle? Dave?

Dave 

Fine here, thank you. Good morning.

Michelle

Fantastic. Yes. Fantastic. Happy Monday.

Ahmed 

It's a snowy Monday here in Calgary today. So you know it looks like there's sun poking out next to me with a blank but it's not sunny at all. It's just the pipeline's coming through but we woke up to a dusting of snow.

Michelle

Fantastic. Well, it's just the rain season here in Squamish, British Columbia. There's wicked amounts of rain this year. So it’s just setting us up for that lovely moss, the greenery and nature all of those things that I really appreciate about this part of the country. 

Ahmed 

Amazing. Dave, how about yourself? How are things for you this morning? 

Dave 

Good like you. It's been snowing and it's supposed to snow for about the next five days. So winter is finally hit here. And we've got a great Fall. So, there's nothing to complain about as an Edmontonians. We've had a better than usual. 

Ahmed 

There you go. I love that mindset. Michelle, why don't you kick us off and then I will get into our introductions. 

Michelle

Wonderful. Just want to talk briefly about why we are here. So yes, we want to tap into that knowledge of yours Dave. But Mindful Mondays as a concept is something that I've been thinking about for a while and Ahmed and I have been doing since about Spring of this year. And what it is really about having conversations with individuals around HR, human resources related hot topics. So today, we're here to talk about career stress, but it could be things like culture, wellness, retention, performance management, all kinds of HR related topics. And today's is one that I think a lot of people will have will really be able to relate to, which is career stress.

Ahmed 

Absolutely, I think it's a super exciting topic very relevant, very timely. I mean, stress is one of those things that is always around us. But there are ways to manage that. And I think that's really great. Why we have Dave here with us today, And of course Michelle is our host, so I'll do a quick intro for those who are joining today. As Michelle said, we've been doing this for a few months now. And so anyone who's new, Michelle is the founder of Mindful HR services. She has a 15 plus year career in human resources, operations and career development. And Michelle now works with leaders in support of creating greater team cohesion and workplace wellness. So thank you Michelle, for putting this on. Next to us. We have out of Edmonton, Dr. Dave Redekop, a winner of provincial and national awards in career development. Dave has developed over 30 years to the development of better career development and workplace concepts and practices. He's also the president of Life-role Development Group Limited in Edmonton. So welcome, Dave, thank you for joining us. I myself, for anyone who doesn't know I'm a marketing and brand strategist. However today I am here as your host and moderator, and I'm excited for the upcoming conversation that we're about to have. So as Michelle said in this episode, of Mindful Mondays, we'll be discussing career related stress. And while stress is relative to the person and the situation, there are always ways to strengthen as we've said, our coping mechanisms throughout our career development, career intervention, we will discuss these interventions and share practical ways leaders can support the team through stressful times. So let's jump into it. Who's ready for questions? Michelle, I think it's fair to say that stress is simply a part of life and a part of our career journey wouldn't be saying but why is it an important topic for you? I'd love to get your input on this.

Michelle 

Yeah, I think that stress does definitely come and go and sometimes stress can be really motivating and sometimes it can stifle us and shut us down. So finding balance is really important. Why I wanted to talk to you and Dave, today in particular about career stress is that in Canada, this is known as Canada Career Month. And so there's a big focus on career development and, and career stress is part of that. So why not bring some focus there. And I also knew that there was this guy here at the bottom of screen who wrote about career stress and knows a lot about that. So that's, that's why I wanted to bring some focus to it.

Ahmed 

Amazing, I love it. I mean, as you said, this career month here in Canada, but I think it's such a broader conversation to you know, career stress is one of those things obviously is not limited to just this month, or this year, or through the pandemic that we've all been experiencing as a collective. But it's one of those things that we all go through, you know, we were taught in grade and go through school, you develop this career, you know, you have to be at a certain level by a certain time and all these stressors and then you have stresses that come in from outside of that, so career is a big one of our daily lives. Dave, how about yourself, what have you been seeing in the world of career stress and how has that impacted maybe your writing? Well, 

Dave 

Oh man, there's so much going on especially right now with COVID. But the fundamentals are still there that people have like you say these big decisions to make or that feels like a big decision. They don't necessarily know how to make them there's lots of pressure associated with it in terms of income and how you're seen in society and that is such a big deal. Right? The whole work-related choices, we make a huge deal in terms of how much time and energy we put into them and the impact in terms of how we live our lives. And yet, there isn't a great deal of connection that's been done in the research around so what does this process of career development do to help us manage our stress manage our well-being? And that was one of the reasons Michael Houston and I got quite interested in this career development mental health connection.

Ahmed 

Amazing. We have a really interesting question come in that I think is just timely to the conversation right now. So I'm gonna bring it up. And you know, for those that are on the line with us right now, feel free to drop your questions in the chat and I'll pick them up as we go or, you know, we'll take them at the end. Is stress required to elevate your productivity that she asks. And I'll ask Dave to answer that one.

Dave 

Okay. You know, the absence of stress is death, right? Yes, we need some stress, right. And the thing I think, to remember, and this is something I heard years ago, but it didn't sink in until recently, is stress is a perception. It is our perception of that I might not be able to cope, cope with the demand. And, so we in the career development world, in fact, we help people create demands, right set goals, have a vision and think about what else they could do and you know, progress, all those sorts of things. And so as a field, we're in the business of helping people create, manage their demands, change their demands. And yet, we don't always help them adequately manage their perceptions of what they've just done the right so they take on more than they can handle and now the perception is I can't cope. And this is where stress really kicks, right is where hang on, I might not be able to cope. No, need a little bit of that. Like if it's if you know, absolutely you're gonna be able to cope and get kind of boring, right? Like you know, washing dishes at home, you kind of know where you can go. This is why we don't want to do it eight, nine hours a day for the most part. It's just one of those things. And so we create situations where we want demands that just create a little bit of stress. But the key, of course, is how to how do we manage that? So I would say certainly in my case, it's absolutely essential for productivity. I'm not sure that's always true. But it just gives that kind of sense of adrenaline a little bit, of get up and go can do.

Ahmed 

It can really create that balance between you know, there's or it should create a balancing there's between positive stress that enables you to do more and negative stress.  I was reading a tweet the other day, and it's really stuck with me, but it was this whole idea that being busy is not flex, you know, or it's not a thing to be proud about in today's world, right? And now it's kind of caused you to stop and think about it differently. What does it really mean to always be busy? No, we say that, but here's the good thing with that. Michelle, do you have anything to add on that before we jumped ahead?

Michelle 

Yeah, I noticed that Agit had to ask a follow-up question about perception is just one of the factors. What are some of the other factors so two that come to mind and it's out of your research and this book that I want to highlight here I've got it in front of me, this is how important it is to me. I'll hold it up Strengthening Mental Health Through Effective Career Development. And what is pointed out in this book, which totally makes sense to me is yes, there's your perception to the situation. There's your coping mechanisms that are really important. But then also, is stress related to a lack of knowledge or tools and resources for you to be effective in your job. And this is where the employer comes in. Right? Have has the employer given the employee the right environment conducive to learning the right tools to be effective in their job? And yet still like the I think the part that you were trying to get at Dave was that the stretch may be causing us stress in this very moment. But once we have learned to do that thing, anything like think about a child who's learning to ride a bike for the first time, that is hard, that's stressful. They might get upset and but once they get it, they get it and they're often they're good. It's not stressful anymore. So it's the environment, tools and resources, your perception and coping mechanisms. I hope that answers your question Agit.

Ahmed 

And you know, if there are follow ups put them in the chat, we'll happy to jump into them. So I'm loving the engagement that we're seeing. Thank you for those questions and the follow ups. Let's jump to our next question here. Dave, given you have worked and studied in this field extensively, you know, I know you along with Michael Houston at Mount Royal University wrote a book on relationships between career development and mental health, Strengthening Mental Health Through Effective Career Development. We wanted to talk to you about this and why was it important that you published this book? What was it about it for you in this topic? That really just tugged at you and you want it to jump into it? So David, if you could so please.

Dave 

For sure. And you know, true confession you're part of it is just an ulterior motives of watching as the mental health movement has been gaining strength over the last decades, where it is a national conversation, international conversation, certainly in developing and developed countries around you know, helping students and employees and everybody with mental health what Michael and I started hearing, were conversations in the administrators settings that went sort of like well, hang on, we got to support mental health, but we don't have any money, where can we find the resources? Oh, look, there's a Career Development Service here. We'll just kill that. Take those resources. And put it over the mental health services. And they had no idea that those career development services were actually fundamental foundational to the mental health work that needed to be done. That's at least in our view. And so we thought, well, this should be an empty net goal. Just go tell them that right but then we realized there wasn't a whole lot of evidence that was clearly mapped out where we can go and make a presentation to an executive and say, here's the evidence that what you're doing won't work. And so that got us really interested in why is there no evidence is it just because the whole field takes it for granted, which we do, by the way, like, ask any practitioner, do you contribute to your clients mental health and of course they do. And yet, they weren't collecting evidence. And so the second part of the thing, which is less of the ulterior motive is we thought, well, man, if we could actually map out what the connections are some sort of framework by which we could understand this. Maybe we could trigger some people doing some research or effect better. What we're hoping is that every practitioner in every setting and career development starts measuring what's my impact, or the impact of my service on mental health? Because that's ultimately will do two things. One it'll make every single practitioner feel better about their work. Because even if your work might not feel successful in the moment, on a bad day or whatever, that knowing that every day you leave work you've helped your clients with their mental health, which the evidence does point to. That's pretty good thing. And then the other thing, we just need measurement, generally to make the case for development.

Ahmed 

I love the idea of this measurement piece because you know, I feel like in some respects, we get measurement, happy to have too much measurement to try to measure everything but I do think, you know, when we're trying to cope with stress, having a measurement and a marker point to say, you know, we are making an impact or things are changing or we're moving things forward. It's at least gives us something to look at point two and that can help some people manage their stress because it gives them something to feel tangible, whereas stress itself is very tangible until it has physical ramifications or other applications that you know, we can, we can observe so I like that idea. Michelle and I obviously didn't write the book, but I know you have a lot of ideas around this whole piece around career stress and stuff. So I just wanted to ask you if you had anything to add there before we jump to the next part about effective career development and how people can manage through that. 

Michelle 

I think we can jump to the next question Ahmed. I think that Dave's been really shared a lot of really wise knowledge. And my interest in this is really around supporting clients I see. Part of my work is around career transition and outplacement work. So those employers who unfortunately have to release staff, and then they come to me and I help them with their job search. And part of that is frankly, just a really stressful time for folks that they didn't they didn't anticipate the loss of job. It's their livelihood, it's their purpose. But now we're in this situation. So what do we do about it?

Ahmed 

Yeah, absolutely. So you know, Dave, we've talked a lot about this workplace stress. We've talked about measurement. We've talked about career development, all this what is one project and you don't have to limit it to one a different one, but what is one pro tip that you would suggest to someone struggling perhaps with workplace or career stress?

Dave 

Well, I have to know when you initially one, but given what Michelle just said, here's a pro tip and this is really interesting. There's a great deal of research on work, loss and stress and mental health and mental illness. Not so much about career development, but about work. And one of the things we know is is when people lose their job like in the outplacement kind of scenario Michelle does describe mental health drops considerably. When though, everybody loses their job, like an entire factory shuts down, the cost to mental health is actually far far less like on the order of 25% of cost, if just a unit was laid off, or just one person get laid off, because and again, this gets back to things being about perceptions to such a great degree, is that if you perceive that this had nothing to do with you, the stress is far less. The demand is the same. You still gotta go find work, you still got to earn a living, but the perception of it's completely different. So one pro tip is just always come back to, you know, how am I seeing this thing? The other pro tip in Michelle's piece on this on LinkedIn. You showed that model that we borrowed from Brian Heber, that goes, you know, in my experience in career related stress, yep. So well, there are three options. One is reduced demands, you know, just stop doing something that's making you or having you feel stressed. And then at the other end, we have just manage stress because you can't do anything about the demands. So you know, eat right, exercise, all that. But in the middle, is what Michelle alluded to earlier, coping skills, like are you actually skilled to deal with the demand because it's the perception. So very quickly, I would say the pro tip is get really good at those little things at work that drive you around the band, like how to use Zoom, how to use LinkedIn. You know, like all these little things, we kind of get flustered, but then we press on, right, rather than stopping and saying, I'm gonna get skilled up on how to use email effectively, Excel spreadsheets, effective, whatever it works, throws your way and it gets Michelle's point about the employer being supported. Because if you get good at all that stuff, then the demands is right, you're no longer worried. And it can be huge, because stress is also cumulative. So one little thing is not a problem. 100 little things all sudden, is a very big thing.

Ahmed 

Taking care of things right, and chunking and not focusing on the bigger picture. And that's so good. We can take little pieces and work in rows and those big small steps together. But no, I love that Michelle, humble yourself. Do you have a pro tip? 

Michelle 

Yeah. So everything is relative. If I think about the first time you and I went live, Ahmed's. We failed, technology failed us. I was quite stressed. I felt like I was letting you down. I was letting our guests down. I was let letting the viewers down. But we you know what we recovered, we went you know what? This isn't the last time we're going try again. And we did and so this is our fifth LinkedIn live. So I agree 100% Dave is what do you need to do to if you have this part of your job and that's just the way it is. And you're struggling with it. Ask for help. And that's what I did, right. Ahmed? We had how many prep calls before going live the next time you helped me with the tech side of things which was great, very grateful for that I found StreamYard. StreamYard is amazing. Not getting paid, just to say that. But part of it is asking for help. And then just also going easy on yourself right? Nobody is perfect. And then the other things that I'll say in closing this this topic off is the little things are the big things. So getting sleep, eating right, going for a walk, getting fresh air, even if it's you know we're in the middle of the winter and here when I go outside later, I'm going to be you know, a drowned rat because it is just raining really hard. For you Ahmed it sounds like you're going to have to navigate through a whole pile of snow so maybe you need to throw your snowshoes on, I don't know. But getting outside and getting some fresh air the little things are the big things. And the other thing part of it is a little bit like, fake it before you make it. So thinking about your body language thinking about you know, sitting tall, breathing. These are some of the things that I talk about with my clients who are interested in in mindfulness, that when you're under stress, self-regulation and self-management is really important. So what can you do before going into an interview, sitting tall feet flat, breathing, these types of things. You can also apply to your job as well. So it's not just a one and done. It's an every day the little things are the big things. ,

Ahmed 

Absolutely. And I think your point of the first LinkedIn Live and all held back. Thank you for being such a great person to work with and team member and I think you know what made that successful in the end was that leading part we were able to lean on each other and it's not always the point there is it's not always just you on an island on your own, whether you're in the work setting, or in that setting between you and I was knowing that we can lean on each other or lean on your teammates or what have you. So anyways, thank you for that. Let's jump to the next one here. And I think, excuse me, this one's a really important one. I don't know if I'll do justice to setting this one up. But I know Michelle in the career transition and outplacement work that you do. You've obviously seen a lot of clients, you've worked with a lot of clients who've helped a lot of people and I know that your work makes an impact and it makes a difference for both employers, employees and organizations that you work with. But perhaps you could share a success story of a client who worked through a difficult period of career related stress and how that worked out and what it's enabled that person to do now.

Michelle 

I think Ahmed I'll share a personal client story in that and that's my story with career stress.

Ahmed 

So it doesn't get any more personal than yours.

Michelle 

Yeah, I frankly I was in rough shape a few years ago who was actually my husband who first pointed it out. He took a picture of me one day sitting at the dining room table with, what you see behind me here is my Laughing Buddha. So Laughing Buddha was behind my shoulders. There was a glass of red wine waiting for me. And I had this scowl on my face as I was looking at my computer. So that was one of the signs that you know what I am taking this way too seriously. But where things really came to a head was in December of 2017. The team that I was on my manager took us all out for a really lovely holiday lunch, downtown Ottawa. Really nice Italian restaurant intended to be light and celebratory. And I'm sitting there and I look at my colleague and I say to him I think I need to quit my job. So that was the beginning of the end. And he looked at me and like talk about bad timing right? We're supposed to be out having this celebratory lunch and read the year wrapping up the year. Before we go on holidays. But that was three months later I left and what I think about now which is why I am so so passionate about work-life balance for me that is the number one thing is work-life balance. When I think about success, so this is a message that I that I'd have for the viewers, for people who might be struggling with career stress is what is success mean to you? And success for me is feeling balanced. There were times when I look back at those months leading up to me making that statement at lunch where frankly, I was unprofessional. I was sharp. I was sometimes rude. I wasn't myself. And I felt overwhelmed. I didn't have a clear vision and the goals that I was working towards. I just felt like I was making no traction and that was nobody's fault. I'm not blaming anybody for that. But when I think about the book that you published, Dave and those categories of do I did I have stress at that time? Yes. Did I have good coping mechanisms? No. Did I have the right tools to feel that I was being effective? No, but I didn't ask for help either. It's something that I've learned that I've learned over the years to really ask for help. And, and then the other part of that is did I have the ability to shift things? I didn't think that I did. But if I had asked the right questions I probably could have shifted things and life would have been a little bit easier for me. All of that is part of what I just call life lessons. And part of that is understanding what's important to you. And which is again why I do this work of trying to create healthier workplace cultures and healthier human beings. 

Ahmed 

I love it. I think you're closing there on healthier human beings. It's something that I always believe in. So in the marketing world, we talked about business to business marketing or business to consumer marketing and I always just call it what we need to focus on human to human marketing, and it's a human expression with everything, and ever, you know, in your context of creating healthy human beings. It's that focus that we are all human. At the end of the day. We're all people and we're all experiencing and existing in the same way. And we recognize that in each other as well as within ourselves. I think that really helps to all of us forward versus individually moving this forward. Right and so no, I love that. Dave, do you have anything to add onto that before we close here?

Dave 

This one thought you know that phrase, you just use Michelle? I wasn't being myself. That's got to be the best diagnostic ever. When things aren't working, right that that if somebody if you can see it, or your husband can see it or somebody can see it and say hang on, is this the you? Is this real Michelle? Man that just reveals so much right and then you can start unpacking the sources. Great question.

Ahmed 

And you can start to activate on it too. Right? But yeah, for plans, emotion and action, what you're going to do, I think this has been a really great, great discussion for our LinkedIn Live in November. today. You know, Michelle if you can please tell us about the next Mindful Monday coming up on December 20. I'm really excited to get into the next one and then start building what that episode is going to look like and create that for our viewers here. What do you have going for us?

Michelle 

Yeah, so we're still in draft. mode, but stay tuned December 20. That will wrap up the year with something fun and exciting, and something that I'm hoping leaders and individuals can take back with them. For their journey into 2022.

Ahmed 

There later on this morning. That's amazing. You know, Dave, thank you so much for spending the time with us today and all the prep work ahead of today as well. And we put a lot of effort into this. So thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your energy and willingness and just being present with us here today. Michelle, as always, thank you to you for you know, building this, putting us all together at the same virtual room bringing us together. I hope our viewers got a lot of value out of this today. Thank you to you as well. Thanks for viewers for taking the time to listen.

Michelle 

Absolutely yeah. Thank you to both thank you for all the questions in the chat. Really great dialogue. This video will be downloaded and loaded and available on YouTube as well for anyone that has missed it. And until December 21 I wish you all well. Stay well everybody. Bye for now.

Ahmed 

Bye everyone.