Ep17 Live to work, work to live

The podcast episode is about the topic of work-life balance and the impact of work on our well-being. The hosts, Rachel and her husband Bob, discuss how performance is measured in different industries and the pressures to go above and beyond. They talk about the difficulty of setting boundaries and leaving work behind, especially in social services. Bob shares his perspective as a small business owner and the pressure to always be productive. They also discuss the motivations behind working extra hours and the potential negative effects on one's happiness and burnout. The conversation highlights the importance of supportive bosses, realistic workloads, and a positive work culture in preventing burnout. Kia Ora and welcome to another episode of Bellbird's Social Work Squawk. This is Rachel and today, well, it's Sunday afternoon and I'm sitting around my kitchen table with my darling husband, Bob. So do excuse the noise interruptions, we have dogs in the background. But we were sitting here having a conversation and I thought this would make a great podcast chat because I think it's a conversation that a lot of people are having and even though this is from a social work perspective podcast, I think what we're talking about is quite relatable across all sorts of fields, as everyone knows, my husband is not from a social work background, he's from a business background. But we're talking about broadly work-life balance and we're talking about the impact around performance versus productivity, the impact of how work infiltrates our life to the extent that it impacts on our well-being and the cost of what that might be. So I think that's a pretty relatable topic, no matter what industry we work in, but we also know that people who work in health and social services are particularly vulnerable to those lifestyles. But I also think small business owners, as my husband is, is very vulnerable to that kind of lifestyle too. So we were talking about it and I thought, what a great podcast. So here we are, Sunday afternoon. Welcome Bob. Welcome. Thank you. And for everyone, I'm Rachel's husband. This is my second time now having a chat with you on your podcast, so hopefully this goes well. I think it's a good topic for you and I to talk about in particular because that work-life balance, why we both work independent of each other, we share that life. So we experience the toll that, I guess, all the pressures work puts on us and how we socialise with each other. So good topic for us. Yes, absolutely. And I think that we both work in industries, as I was just saying, where there's this funny measurement of what is performance, right? Like how do we measure performance? And it's something that I find particularly interesting because we have lots of measurements in my world around performance that are acknowledged. We have KPIs, our key performance indicators, we have contract outputs, we have expectations and we count the widgets and we count the outcomes and you count the bottom line and the dollars and the amount of coffees you make and all the rest of it. But we also have these unwritten rules around how we measure performance. And a lot of that is around how late do you work? Who stays the latest? Yeah. Who's there the earliest? Exactly. Who sends emails on a weekend? You know, quotes above and beyond and how that might be rewarded or validated as being a high performer. But there's a cost to that, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think you and I have both been in roles in our careers where we feel that pressure to perform above and beyond, definitely. And I think, absolutely, we've both had times where our careers have put tolls on our home life, our family life, our relationship. There's this sort of unwritten expectation to go above and beyond. And so part of it is around how do we put a boundary in place to say, actually, it's five o'clock, I'm leaving work, I can leave it behind. And I think that's very hard to do in social services where we carry the weight, particularly emotionally, of the funner we work with, the support that we provide. It's very hard to just say, I'm going to leave that at work, close the door, go home, not think about it again. And the flip side for you as a business owner, you know, if you ain't working, you ain't making money, right? Like, if you are not being, quote, productive with your time, then there's no output. When we were talking earlier, one thing that stuck with me in my head is, as an individual, and we're all individuals, as an individual, what is it that drives me to want to perform above and beyond? Or what drives me as an individual to commit to do a little bit more, a little bit extra, or take a little bit away with me home? And I was thinking about myself, and I think that has probably changed throughout my career, or certainly as I've matured or got older. And I think early on, I felt the pressure to perform or work harder, just to progress. You know, you've got a job, you want to do as well as you can, so that leads you to the next step. And you want to be recognized as someone who's contributing above and beyond, so it does open those doors. But then I think, as I get older, you've still got those external, I guess, demands and pressures. But there's something more internally driving me, where I don't want to let people down, or I don't want to put people out. I want to do more so people can do less. I'm less worried about the progression, I'm more worried about the people around me. And that was something that stuck in my head before. And maybe that's the flip, in some ways, though, between you working for someone versus now working for yourself. Because in some ways, even though the person you used to work for was family, because you worked in the family business, what you wanted was career progression. But that was at the behest, I guess, of someone else. Someone else had the ability to control your career progression, right? Yeah. Someone else was judging you, and so you could only progress if you were seen to be performing, seen to be productive, right? So you have to show somebody else how hard you're working. And I think when you're in those middle management or leadership positions, you lead. And you lead by example. And you don't want anyone to see you not contributing to your utmost, because you don't want them to not contribute to their utmost. So you almost feel the obligation to be there earlier, be there later. Sort of modeling a behavior. Yeah. So you said the benchmark that other people adhere to. Thereby, potentially, inadvertently, contributing to an unhealthy work culture. Absolutely. Yeah. Where everyone feels the pressure to outstay everyone else. Yeah. Right? Because, I mean, I saw this sort of meme on one of the social media things before, this little video of this person going, you know, our team starts at 7, but I got here early to record what time everybody arrives. And they're recording everyone going, oh, look at the early bird. He's here at 6.45. Look at this person. They're here at 6.47. Da-da-da-da. Everybody's at work early. And it's like this congratulatory kind of, we're so cool because we actually get here before we start work. And it almost creates a culture whereby, for the person who might actually turn off at 7, which is actually the time you start work, they're already. There's a slacker. There's a slacker. I know. You know? And actually, we don't know what's going on in other people's lives where they might have children and, you know, like, we don't know how far they have to travel or whatever. But actually, they're not paid to be there. You know, I mean, I have said to several people before, you know, if you actually counted up how many hours a week you work, like, honestly, with the extra emails on the evenings and the work you do on the weekends, and you counted up your hours and then paid yourself an hourly rate according to your real hours, not your supposed hours, your hourly rate is pretty low. And that's the value you are giving yourself. Yeah. Right? Because you're paid to a value of whatever per hour because you're paid for your 40 hours or your 30 hours or whatever it is. But if you're actually working 60, if you're actually working 70, then you're giving yourself $10 an hour or whatever it might be. That's what you're paying yourself because you're going above and beyond. And yes, I think it's an interesting thought. What motivates us to do that? Yeah, if you've got those 10, 20 employees all walking in, getting their time slotted and, you know, one's at 6.45 and one's at 6.50 and one's at 7, who's actually happy in their job? You know, is it the one that's found the right boundary? turning up when they need to be there, getting the work done, going home? You know, if not everything's done, that's fine. They'll be there tomorrow. Are they living a healthier life? Are they enjoying their job more? Versus the people, and previously we've talked about burnout, the people who overexert themselves into their job to try and do more. Are they fundamentally unhappy in their workplace? Well, it's interesting you say this, Bob, because Massey have recently put out a report on some research that was done around burnout. And what they talked about was there are a mix of individual and organizational factors that contribute to burnout. And they said that the top three organizational factors that contribute to burnout are an unsupportive boss, an unrealistic workload, and a toxic culture, i.e. bullying, gossiping, that kind of thing. It's quite funny because all those things often exist at the same time. 100%. Yes. And the top three individual factors that contribute to burnout is having a belief system that creates an extreme work ethic, values misaligned with the organization, which I think is a really interesting one and I do see quite a lot, and a lack of recovery, or what they call the inability to switch off. So if we just look at the factors, there's some things in the report around what people are doing to mitigate burnout, and we can talk about them in a minute. But if we just look at those factors that contribute to burnout or contribute to that thing, exactly what we're talking about, I think that you have this unrealistic workload. So people create this individualized belief system that I need to work late, I need to take work home because I can't ever keep up. I can't keep up with my work, I can't get my work done in the 40 hours. I mean, the amount of people that I hear saying, I'm just so busy, I'm so busy, I'm so busy, I'm so busy, right? And it's almost like we've created a belief system around busyness and a culture around busyness, rather than actually focusing on, well, what is achievable and productive in my time, and where do I draw the boundary and say, if the work doesn't get done, it doesn't get done. Because also, the work's never going to get done, otherwise the job's finished. There's always work in front of you, you hope, you're never going to complete it all, because the next day there'll be new jobs that come along. There's this quote that says something along the lines of, stress sits when we live in the future, and what it talks about is the fact that if we're constantly in that future focused state of, I just need to do this report, or I just need to finish this piece of work, or even when we're driving, I just need to get there, I just need to, we're kind of constantly focused on the, I'm going to be all right when this happens. Then we, in the meantime, until that thing happens, we're stressed, rather than sitting in the space of, I can only do as much as I can do in this moment, and the rest of the work will either get done or it won't. But if you're constantly in that projected sort of space of, I've always got stuff to do, I've always got to get through my next lot of case notes, or workload, or invoicing, or whatever it is that you have to be doing, you're constantly in a state of stress, and that's just that really unhealthy space that we sit in. When you look back at your working career, what moments or what positions have you found you feel have been most unhealthy in terms of the workload, or even work that you've been unable to just leave at work, stuff that has followed you home? I think it's interesting what you said before in terms of sitting in that middle management space and feeling a sense of responsibility. I don't think I necessarily felt like I had to show up early, or work late, or get my work done, because I was modeling that as a culture of how a team should work. But I definitely felt like I needed to try and hold the slack, if you like, for the team. Slack's not quite the right word, but I guess what I mean is I never wanted my teams to feel that sense of pressure. I wanted to alleviate some of that pressure for them. So part of my responsibility is holding it, right? Yeah. But it's interesting that one of the challenges it says is in organizations is that unsupported boss. It's like if I'm holding it for my team, who's holding it for me? How do we hold, kind of share responsibilities, give permission to say, it's okay this work doesn't get done. It's okay that you go home at five o'clock and don't think about it again. It's okay for you to not feel that individual burden, because actually you don't have to. It is just a job. I feel that more now as a small business owner, that kind of kept the team wanting the team to be safe and not overloaded, that you end up carrying more of the workload yourself without question. I feel more of that now than I did perhaps when I was running a SaaS team. I don't know. Maybe that's also because, again, one of the things that it talks about is when your values are not aligned with your organization, right? If as a small business owner, you're setting the values of your organization, you're setting the values of how you treat your team, what your team should be able to experience, how they should feel, what's important, and you are living to those values. If that means you have to carry a little more to remain sort of ticker to that and hold those values, then you're going to do that, because that's important. Whereas I think we sometimes have people in roles who, or certainly I've seen it, where it's really hard to feel okay holding the work or doing a job or undertaking responsibilities when the values of the organization are just so out of alignment with your own values. For me, actually, it's more than just the values of the organization, because often the values are the written words on pieces of paper stuck on the wall that all sound great. Culture. It's the culture, right? So values plus behavior equals culture. So the values might be fine. I mean, I've worked in organizations that have great values. We talk about monarchy, we talk about honesty, we talk about integrity, we talk about good, outstanding values. I can fully get on board with all of those. Respect. Wrapped all around that. All of that. It's a good word, culture. Wrapped all around that. It's behaviors that don't uphold any of those things. Where we're not honest with each other. We're not respectful to each other. We don't show monarchy to each other. We don't treat each other like farno. We don't have integrity in what we do. Those behaviors are completely incongruent with the values that are sitting on the wall. And then I'm sitting there thinking, well, how am I supposed to work productively in this space? And why would I hold space for my teams or my workload? I don't know. Like any of that stuff. How can I, when I'm out of alignment with my own personal values in an environment that has just these toxic behaviors that are just so unhealthy? The other part of the equation is the personal life. So the impact of working at home or working longer hours that that has on us at home is our personal life. And our personal life has changed a lot throughout our marriage. So early on with young children, I think the impact of working hard probably had more of an impact on our personal life and the support we needed at home. I think as the children have grown up and left the house, we are probably more open to, you know, it's not uncommon for you to be sat on the couch with a laptop in front of you just chipping away a few jobs. I feel there's less impact at the moment than perhaps 15 years ago when we've got young kids and other obligations in the household. Life just changes, right? I think you're absolutely right. I mean, you've gone from a farming background. I think raising two children in that was incredibly difficult because farming is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You know, you would work Christmas Day if you needed to and have done, right? Like, that's the reality. You know, the birth of our first child, within an hour of getting home from hospital, you were back out on the farm. Like, the farm would always take precedence, right? Because that's what farming is. So, there's that overlap between it's not a job, it's a life. You know, farming is life, right? Like that. Maybe that's what's critical with me. Maybe working in the grocery is like my little farm. Yeah, but I also think it tied up within that is this whole sense of identity around, you know, it comes back to me around motivation. I think the reason why you work so hard is because it's tied to your sense of purpose, it's tied to your sense of productivity, but it's also tied to your sense of as a provider, as a husband, as a father, my job is to go out and provide and work and be productive. The word purpose is, you know, absolutely. When you go and you contribute, you feel like you've got purpose. I think those moments in our careers where we haven't perhaps had full-time employment for any length of time, quite quickly the first thing that starts to fade away is that purpose. And we've talked about this before when we've talked about burnout, or particularly my experience around burnout, the risk within some of that is when our purpose becomes so intrinsically linked to our job that actually we invest so fully in the job that we don't have a life outside of the job. And that's the risk, right? Because the job is just a job. It's one aspect of our life. And, you know, you talked about... We all overvalue our jobs. And we know that. When people leave a job, you feel like it's this big thing that's not. You just leave and someone else takes over your role and everything carries on. We put so much importance on our employment. It's crazy. Absolutely. I mean, it's just amazing things, isn't it? It's this turmoil of, you know, I'm leaving my job and everyone's talking about... I'm not going to survive without me. I better do the best I can. Yeah. And everyone's like, oh, we're going to really miss you and all the rest of it. And then the next Monday rolls around and it's like, oh, well, you know, they're not here, but life carries on and we're just replacing them. Yeah, and on we go. And it's like, okay, well, we're not really that important, you know, because we're just part of a... We're just a cog in a machine, whichever, however big and important we might think we are. The more we talk about it, the more I'm liking the idea of the people who have the balance right and they work the 9 to 5 and they get the work they can done and they enjoy life. But it's about having boundaries that work for you. I mean, it might not be 9 to 5, right? Like, you don't work 9 to 5, but it is about having a life outside of work that balances you off, right? Because I think that when work is your everything, if it's so intrinsically tied to your identity, to your sense of purpose, then I think the risk becomes we lose facets of ourselves and the balance of ourselves. And that means we lose perspective and it's been harder to leave work at work. And we get home and we think, oh, I've got nothing to do, so I will work and I will just send some emails and I'll just work on this and I'll do some other stuff. And there are things that we do feel passionate about. And absolutely, there's things that I work on as passion projects outside of work I might get paid for. But also, I am part of the theatre, you know, and I enjoy being part of a play where you go along and, you know, I work backstage or I might be on stage or I'm, you know, helping out, being an usher or whatever. It's a whole other world in which I'm not a social worker, I'm not a manager, I'm not your wife, I'm not someone's mum, I'm just this person that turns up to fill a role, to be part of a completely separate community. And I think that's a really healthy thing to be part of that's so separate from work. And I think, so I think there's aspects that are important around what creates balance because these are important jobs, but they are just jobs, they are one part of our life. Have we talked about the behaviours we can adopt to help us live a better life? Yeah, according to this research. Any research. Yeah. Yeah, that research. So, what it says in this Massey report, it says that people who perform at high levels but don't burn out have these similar behaviours. Okay? I'm going to checklist this in my head as you go through it. Yeah. See where I... Okay. You can be the overachiever in this and you're doing all of these. So, they make peace with not getting everything done every day. And that is quite a hard mind shift, right? But it is actually a really important one is to be able to walk away and go, that's left undone, I'm going to have to pick it up tomorrow or I'm going to have to pick it up next week, right? The ability to make peace with not getting everything done. Having a ritual from switching from work to personal mode. And I think one of the things that people talked a lot about with the whole COVID thing is, you know, people have really enjoyed or embraced the whole working from home side of stuff, the flexi working, the capacity to be able to work from home. And certainly, research has shown that we can be just as productive at home as we are at work or in an office. Although, it's interesting because research has also shown that if you work at home, you are less likely to be promoted than if you work in the office. And I think that goes to what you were saying before about being seen to be being a performer. Someone's got to see you turn up early, stay late, right? But if you're at home, you're less visible. So, people think that you're slacking off, but actually, your workload is still as productive, but you're less likely to be promoted. I'm looking at Steve walking down the hallway with papers. I know, exactly, that's right. He's always rushing around. He's always in a hurry, lining up for promotion. But rituals for switching from work to personal mode. So, my point with that is when you work from home, even having like, you have an office. So, coming out of the office and shutting the door and saying, I'm not in work mode, I'm in personal mode, right? Even if you work from home, not allowing it to bleed from one space to another space, maybe. I don't know. I do think that's a good thing in the house to have that space, because I don't work at the dining room table. I don't work in the lounge. It's in that one room, and I have to go to that room to engage in work. The next thing, they develop different roles and identities outside of work. As this is your, I'm a theatre-goer person, and I'm so much of that character, and I'm now that person. Lots of people do lots of different activities. You go to the gym. You belong to an exercise club. You go to yoga. I'm part of a book club. Theatre. Exactly. I have a different identity, a different set of people that I talk to. They reduce how much they use their phones at home. God, wouldn't that change the world if we dialed back to the 80s, we had one phone in the house connected to a wire, and we could walk over to it and use it. Even if it was a smartphone, you'd never use it. You wouldn't go stand by the wall. I know. I do worry about it's so invasive. Your phone, not our phone, one person's phone, it goes ping, but it's like your work emails come through, and you check them, and you look at them. That boundary between work and home is so challenged, but also that sense of being present. How many times do we have debates? We could be in the middle of a conversation, your phone would go ping, and you pick up your phone, and you look at it, and I've lost you. How did we get by for all of history until 10 years ago when the mobile phone turned up? You're just going to sidestep the marital issue. The final one is they keep their work in perspective. It's not their whole life. That's an individual thing. That's that person turning up at 7 o'clock on the dot or 8 o'clock on the dot, happy in their job because they've got a good perspective. That's right, but I think it's about what works for you. If you want to get to work at 6.45 because it makes you feel good, and maybe it's because you get to work at 6.45 because you want to have a coffee before you sit down and work actually starts at 7, but you want to have that moment to have a break, that's fine, but it's about knowing that it doesn't consume you. It doesn't take over your whole life. It doesn't follow you home, and I think it's not just the practicality of it follows you home in terms of emails or workload. If I think about conversations I've had with people over time, I know people who go home and write up their case notes of an evening because they haven't had a chance to do it during the day, go home and will check their emails, or there's the practical administration stuff. It is also the emotional burden, the ability to actually say, I did what I could do today and I will come back to it tomorrow, but I don't have to lie in bed at night worrying about what's going to happen to this person or whether or not I did enough or what's the emotional toll on me because I can't let go of that. I worry because I think we'd get tired and we'd burn out because of the amount of workload, but I also think because of the emotional load that it has on us too, that sense of responsibility. We work in complexity. We work with families who've got a lot of things going on in their lives and some of them are really unhealthy and we don't feel there's a lot of safety and we're trying to enable people to make self-determining decisions to create change, to be in a better space and work towards healthy. But in those moments, you walk away at five o'clock thinking, I don't know how this evening's going to go for them. Yeah, it's hard because your field that you work in, and there are lots of them, especially in social services, you deal and work with trauma all the time and a lot of people have to, it's a whole other conversation, how do you live or work in a space where there's trauma all around you and how do you disconnect from that trauma to go home and live a normal life? That is a challenge. Exactly, but I think some of this stuff is completely applicable to that because I think in some of it is around just giving yourself permission to understand that even though you can care deeply, and I think we are emotionally invested, I think it's not possible to say I don't have a level of emotional investment because we're humans and we care about people, but that doesn't mean that I have to carry it home with me, that there is permission to say I've done my best and actually that's a responsibility that's shared and part of that comes to that organisational healthy culture and it comes back to having a supportive manager and it comes back to having values that align with us because I can turn around and say I've done what I can do and my manager knows that I've done the best that I can and I feel supported by them and my organisation says that we uphold what we do but the reality is it is just a job. We don't have magic wands and we can't fix everything and the unfortunate thing is sometimes we don't always get things 100% right but we can't allow for our amazing wonderful workforce, whoever they might be, to be lying in bed at night, stressed out, not sleeping, not in a healthy space because they are overworked and undervalued. Do you know what I mean? It's just not... Yes, the argument is that at 8 o'clock the next morning they're going to be back championing for that same cause, that same person that's in need. They're going to be back doing the same job, hopefully in that supportive organisation with a supportive leader in front of them. Yes. That's what we want. Yes, with people with strong values and good processes and all that sort of stuff, right, and that's what you want. And so, yes, I think in our space we work in that trauma-informed, for want of a better phrase, space but I think a lot of what we've talked about is applicable in any workplace where we take it on too personally and we don't uphold these boundaries. And I think, particularly, I think some of these vocational jobs, there is this expectation to work that bit harder, to care that bit more. I mean, it's like the amount of times I hear people sort of say, you know, oh, it's all right, I paid for that myself, you know, because there's this expectation that, you know, as a social worker you're not going to get paid very well, organisations aren't very well funded, you don't have access to money or resources or whatever, so you're just kind of expected to put your hand in your pocket and buy your own stuff. And it's like that's not how we look after people because all of that stuff takes a toll with this expectation but it becomes a culture of how we treat people that we want you to pay for stuff yourself, to turn up early, to work late, to stay home and catch up on your case notes and just go the extra mile and do things on the weekend without even being asked to do it and then being judged by that and then we say, well, that's what we think of as performance, that's what we think of as productivity. Not, are we doing a good job? Are we actually making a difference? Are we creating outcomes? We're just measuring our outputs, right? We're measuring performance. People who know me well know that I love Simon Sinek and he talks a lot about the difference between how we measure performance but actually within a team you don't need a high performer, you need high trust, right? And that actually you'd rather trade performance for trust, you'd rather have a medium performer for a high trust person than a high performer who's low in trust, right? But we've got all these measurements for performance, all of this like, they're amazing because they stay late and they work hard and look at their outputs and they've got these numbers and they're carrying a case load of 80 or 100 and it's like, that doesn't make them good at their job, right? That just ticks boxes and counts widgets. That's Steve walking down the hall carrying the papers. Yeah, and it makes them look busy but actually there's a person who's stressed out and, you know, creating some of these behaviours that aren't aligning with values and they might be the people that are attributing to this toxic culture because they're not in that healthy workplace or in that work space of balance because they're overperforming but we can't trust them because they're in this kind of chaotic high performance space but we're rewarding high performance because we see it as productivity and I think that's part of that organisational culture mindset that we've become, you know, so like... Do you feel, if you go back a decade, you've changed how you view your own work-life balance? Do you feel that you have a different view on what level you should be contributing to a job? Those are two quite different questions in my view. I think what I have learned in my journey and I think, you know, I talked about it quite openly when I did the podcast on burnout, I talked about the fact that, you know, I think even when you journey through burnout it's like being a vase that has been dropped and glued back together again and I might hold water but I'm never going to be the same again, right? I know that I need to look after myself much more consciously now than perhaps I used to because I am more fragile, right? I've been broken once and therefore probably I have vulnerabilities that are exposed that didn't maybe exist 10 years ago. You probably need to look after yourself the same way. Yeah, but I just didn't before. Yeah, and that's true for everyone. Until you get to that breaking point and that burnout point you don't look after yourself and you feel like I'm vulnerable so I have to look after myself more. No, you should have been doing it back then. You should have found that balance back then. Yeah, and that's probably true but I guess having done it once I'm hypersensitive to the triggers not that that's a good word but like some of the feelings that might take me back there again and I say hypersensitive because I'm probably over cautious in some areas so am I a little bit more protective of myself? Yeah, and am I a little bit more mindful of what my boundaries are? Yeah. From a positive place, yeah. Well, positive for me. I mean, how other people perceive that might be different. You know, like when you put in place a boundary then the boundary's for me, right? Not everybody's going to like my boundary. I don't know. But for me, it's what I need in order to work well. Something else that has been really good for me in a way is I did the mental health first aid instructor training and I've delivered about 10 programs now and they are great reminders around some of the things that you need to do in order to remain well, right? And how when you're well those things that we do are quite straightforward. You know, go to the gym, eat well, exercise, socialize. You know, if we think of Te Whare Tapawha with our holistic view around social well-being, physical well-being, spiritual well-being, our mental well-being, our identity, all of that. When we're in a good space we can connect to those things and engage in activities that reinforce and uplift those things. As soon as we're not in a healthy space, as soon as we start to have a mental health challenge those things are really, really difficult. I know that the first things that I do is I retreat from people. I don't want to be around people because my anxiety is that people don't like me. They don't want to be around me. My worries are that I have nothing to offer, all of that sort of stuff, right? I don't want to exercise because I sabotage and I sit on the couch and I eat chocolate. You know, all those things, it's that slippery slope, right? Being really mindful of those indicators that actually you're in a space where you need a little bit of looking after and sort of having to tell yourself, right, go out and do these things, fill your cup back up while you have the chance before it gets to a point where it becomes really too hard. But the trick for me, and I think it comes back to this organisational responsibility, is when we're well we focus on self-care, right? When I'm doing all right, I can manage my self-care. My self-care might be doing my exercise, going for a walk in the redwoods, walking the dogs, spending time with people. That's my self-care because I can manage it. When I'm in a space of burning out, not coping, feeling overworked, feeling overwhelmed, my self-care plan is not going to resolve that for me because I'm not well enough to care for myself. What I need is collective care. What I need is my organisation to step forward and say, let's look at your workload. Let's look at what supports you need in place. Let's look at how you are working in order to mean that you are not going home and doing your case notes every night, that you're not coming in early and feeling stressed out. What support do you need to get back to space? But what I think happens a lot is this sense of people start to get stressed out, people start to move towards that space of burnout and in the much longer study of the Massey research, it talks about first stage of burnout, second stage of burnout, third degree burnout. But as we start to move into those stages, people, organisations often kind of go, well, what's your self-care plan? How are you looking after yourself? And I just think it's the most ridiculous thing to ask somebody because if I'm in a space of unwellness, I'm clearly not looking after myself and I probably don't know how to right now and maybe I could do with some help. In those bad organisations, you're probably the problem. From their point of view, it's like, just be a widget, just tie the line, work the hours, do the job. You're not performing. You're not performing, you're not a problem. I hate problems. Exactly. We've got to deal with the problem. Rather than, actually, you're my responsibility because I care about you and you're a person in my workforce, in my team. How do we build you up? How do I support you to get back to a space of wellness, which equals productivity, equals performance, but actually just equals good human-ness. I don't know, we've kind of gone on a bit of a journey. I think there is a lot of personal responsibility around setting boundaries, around setting behaviours, around what balance between work and home looks like, having a mindset around balance between work and home, but I also think that organisations have a responsibility to be part of that conversation and not just put everything on the individual to have to deal with that. The individual, I also think, if you're one of those hard-working, long-working people who have moved outside the 95 hours, go time with you, the first step is actually just identifying or recognising with yourself, I'm doing above and beyond. That's having an impact. I don't know necessarily what the impact is, but it's having an impact on things. It might be on me, it might be on the people around me, but it's going to be having an impact. That's the first recognition to then start to work out how do you reign and find a better balance. Yeah, well, that's right. I guess, what's the cost, right? There is a cost. There's a cost somewhere. Yeah. Where is it sitting? Who's it impacting on? That's like a little bit of enlightenment. Exactly. All right, you're off the hook. You're allowed to go and have the rest of your Sunday afternoon now. I have enjoyed our conversation, as always. It's been lovely to sit down with the lovely Rachel over a cup of tea and knock out another topic. I'm sure that even after the conversation now, you and I will talk about this over the next few days. Well, thank you so much for your time as always. I appreciate having a chat with you. I'm sure you'll be invited to many more podcasts because I've got to talk to somebody. Oh, thank you. I look forward to it. Thanks very much for listening. I look forward to your feedback. Best of luck.