SixSEED Partners

Joy Goldman

The Shift from Burnout to a Focus on Purpose and Well-Being

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“Far from being out of touch, leaders who work to reconnect the health care workforce to a sense of purpose and restore the meaning behind what we do and how we do it are facing some of health care’s biggest challenges head on. Health care leaders have to understand that their choice is not between addressing all the pressures on the system or supporting the workforce. To improve our whole system and get out of this morass we find ourselves in today, leaders have to first support those who devote their lives to health care.”

Today’s post quotes an article from IHI (the Institute for Healthcare Improvement) titled: “Don’t Talk To Me About Joy in Work” by Kedar Mate. This shift from burnout to a focus on purpose and well-being is the topic of a few workshops that SixSEED Partners will be facilitating in healthcare organizations over the next couple of months. As Mate states in his article, this isn’t an either/or situation. We can have compassion for the numerous demands facing healthcare workers and leaders as we also courageously lead our purpose-driven work.

We’d love to hear what resonated for you. Feel free to offer a comment at: https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/

To Create Results, Leaders Must Take Actions

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With deep gratitude to our colleague Vinay Kumar for his work in powerfully training leaders on shifting their IOS: internal operating system to better manage complexity. Vinay and I will be co-facilitating a leadership retreat for healthcare leaders where we will continue our work using the leadership circle profile mat to help them notice reactive thinking and behaviors and shifting those to create cultures focused on well-being and excellence. In this LinkedIn post, he discusses OAR: How we observe, leads to our taking actions which get results. If we want different results, we need to shift how we observe.

We’d love to hear what resonated for you. Feel free to offer a comment at: https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/

10 Ways to Deal with Stress

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This article from the Cleveland Clinic: “Your Definitive Guide to Work Stress and Burnout” highlights ten ways to more effectively deal with what might be creating stress and contributing to burnout in your life. While there will always be factors outside your control, we have more control than we think in minimizing our everyday stressors. The authors cite managing efficiency; dispelling self-doubt (imposter syndrome); and addressing your tendency to overwork, amongst others.

We’d love to hear what resonated for you. Feel free to respond with your one, easy, accessible habit to minimize your daily stress! Feel free to offer a comment at: https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/

National Women Physicians Day

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In honor of National Women Physicians Day, SixSEED Partners wanted to remind our readers on those attributes which are important to retain female physicians, including flexibility, respect and equitable advancement opportunities and pay.

Women physicians were found to be at increased risk of burnout due to their lessened ability to decompress when they returned home after work:

“A gender gap was particularly apparent when physicians were surveyed on their ability to decompress when they returned home from work. Female physicians had lower scores than male physicians on all four areas of decompression, including enjoying personal time without worrying about work (females: 3.39; males: 3.61), freeing their mind from work while away (females: 3.22; males: 3.43), disconnecting from work communications (females: 3.20; males: 3.41), and rarely losing sleep over work issues (females: 3.31; males: 3.51).”

Read more here: https://hbr.org/2022/01/why-so-many-women-physicians-are-quitting

We’d love to hear how this might apply to you. Feel free to offer a comment at: https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/

Conscious Leaders Step Up & Take Responsibility

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Most of the leaders we work with possess an Uber-sense of responsibility– they take on much more than is theirs to do. Yet in their “get it done” spirit, they are quick to act which can also mean quick to direct others without realizing they may be omitting essential data in communicating the conditions of “done” for their direct reports. Our colleagues at the Conscious Leadership Group offer this simple and powerful algorithm for assessing your own actions in contributing to an unsatisfactory outcome, regardless what that outcome might be. Ben and Rosamund Zander, in the “Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life” (buy here: https://tinyurl.com/2jzbd4ky) talk about “looking in the mirror” before blaming others. The Conscious Leadership Group aligns with this thinking in this framework.

We’d love to hear how this might apply to you. Feel free to offer a comment at: https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/

Putting the Care back in Health-Care

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Lessons from an Osteopath

By: Joy Goldman RN, MS, PCC:  CEO SixSEED Partners, BSN, ACC

Background:

At SixSEED Partners, as we coach leaders and teams to see common organizational stressors as interdependent challenges (like activity AND rest, mission AND margin), we invite our leaders and teams to better leverage the science AND the compassion in healthcare.  This personal story from Portugal is a wonderful illustration from which we can all learn.

“Alternative/Complementary Health” in Portugal:

As someone with four decades of experience working in healthcare, I know enough to know that my best strategy for staying healthy is to take an active role in my own health through exercise, nutrition, mindfulness and using complementary methods for their health-promoting influences.  Since moving to Portugal, I take yoga classes; go for morning meditation walks and have been using an osteopath who also practices acupuncture.  Toward the end of one session, as I was waiting for the osteopath to come to do his manual adjustments, I began to get teary recalling a recent loss.  Working with the body can do that- evoke emotions that the body has stored when the mind pushes the pain or grief away.

Kindness in Action:

After caring for his other patients at this busy clinic, Luis came to see me and paused.  He did what might be unusual in modern healthcare, which was to pause, notice a tear on my face, suspend his agenda, get a tissue to wipe away my tear, and provide Reiki where he placed his hand above my heart.  His actions only took moments, yet in those moments he cared for my mind, heart, and spirit. He was not concerned about doing real-time documenting in the EMR; he was concerned about me as a whole person.

Application for Busy Clinicians:

I recently coached a GYN-Oncologist who was describing his packed clinic days.  Our work focused on how she might show up with her patients in a more authentic way, and how centering might help her feel less stressed.  We decided that she could invite her patients for a moment of prayer, gratitude, and breathing at the start of their visit so that both physician and patient were in a more peaceful state, allowing for a more healing visit.

How are you impacting science and compassion in your interactions?  We’d love to hear from you! Let us know at SixSEED Partners.