Disrupting Patterns of Burnout through Community with Jennice Chewlin and Lori Hanau

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

SPEAKERS

Beth Tener, Jennice Chewlin and Lori Hanau

Beth Tener 

Our title for Episode 2 is Disrupting Patterns of Burnout through Community. The overall theme of the podcast season two is how we find kinship and community to support us in times of transition, both personally and as cultures and societies. So to recap episode one, that was called Answering the Call to Change.

Those were some stories of what it feels like when you’re successful on the outside, but on the inside it doesn’t feel good. I was telling the story of being a corporate consultant with a successful career path, but it wasn’t really what I wanted and how I kind of got the bug around sustainability, which also meant living more simply and maybe less materialistically.

I had an epiphany of that it’s not about being rich and on this achievement track, I want a rich life, that is more grounded in my community and connection, land, friendship. I shared this quote from W. H. Murray about “until one is committed, there’s a hesitancy and the chance to draw back.

But the moment one commits oneself. Providence moves too.” So I jumped in and I made a big decision to leave my corporate job and co-found a nonprofit organization around sustainability education. So the question is: did Providence follow? 

So that’s what we’ll get into today, continuing that story, with what happened when I stepped into that change to step out of the institution to start a new organization. that was a transition I chose. In other episodes, we’re going to talk about life transitions that you didn’t choose. I’ll give you a little heads up, it may not be as smooth sailing as I expected with all the stories in our culture of “head on out there, live your dream.”

Today I’m really grateful to have two amazing guests with me to explore these topics. One of the things we will talk about is what happens when we burn out, what happens when we don’t have all the support we need as we’re trying to do big things. The guests I have with me today are Lori Hanau and Jennice Chewlin. Both of these are women who have carved their own paths around how we create more wellbeing in the world for ourselves, for our teams, for our communities.

Both have their own businesses and are amazing coaches as well. I’ll ask each of you to briefly introduce yourself and your interest in this topic about disrupting patterns of burnout through community. Would you like to start, Jennice?

Jennice Chewlin 

My name is Jennice Chewlin, and I’m the founder and CEO of Chewlin Group, and we help organizations who give a damn about the health and well being of their workforce. We help them manage stress, prevent burnout, and return to joy. 

Beth Tener

Thanks. So good to have you here. And Lori?

Lori Hanau

Thank you so much, Beth and Jennice, it’s just a real joy to be with you today and to be meeting you in this way. I am the founder and CEO of Global Roundtable Leadership.  a business that I’ve had for 23 years and have shifted along the way to go from me to we within our own business here and and have built a team to support other teams all over the world in how we cultivate our humanity in the workplace for our greater well being and to build the skills of teaming and working together in healthy relationship and to learn how to share leadership and share power and responsibility and meaning.

Beth Tener

Glad to have you both here. So I’ll return to the story of, as you might recall from the previous episode, I had quit the job and followed my intention to create a rich life.

I did. I actually made some real progress. I set up a home office and I was officially an entrepreneur and there’s a joke that says an entrepreneur is French for someone who works from home in their pajamas. So that’s what I was doing  I didn’t have to put on business attire every day. I could go jogging in the middle of the day. It was just awesome.

On Sundays, I joined a community farm and I’d go get fresh farm vegetables every week. I learned what was grown at what time of year. I would see a plane flying overhead – I used to travel so much and I’d think “I’m so glad not to be on that plane.”  And then the hours that I wasn’t doing all this travel, I was able to devote myself to this new venture, this founding, creating a board of directors, building the organization, deciding our mission and logo, creating workshops and conferences. I jumped in with two feet, with a small team that wasn’t fully funded yet.

I also set up my own freelance consulting practice and was doing some consulting on the side. So as you can start to hear, there was a lot going on. I was so passionate about the work. I didn’t mind. I just kept working harder. I was also dealing with understanding what was happening to the earth  and to so many people whose needs weren’t getting met.

When I took in the pain of all that, I felt like I needed to do more. So what happened over time was, even though I had set this new intention of living more simply and having a relaxed pace and a fuller life, I was falling back into the same patterns that I’d had of overwork.

One of my wake up calls at this point was I remember I had gone down to Connecticut from Boston for a work meeting. I came back from the event and my roommate asked “so how did the meetings go?” I put my briefcase down and I said,  they went fine, but you’re not going to believe what happened.

She’s asked what. I said, “I drove over my laptop with my car.”  And she, said “what?!”  I picked up my black briefcase with a tire mark over it. It was crazy. We had been in our client meetings and then we were going to lunch. I said I would drive us and the client.We went out to the parking lot and my car was a total mess because I was so busy.

I had Dunkin Donuts wrappers and all these papers in the back. So I shuffled them, made space for the people. I didn’t notice that I’d put my briefcase down next to the car. So off we went to lunch and I had actually backed over it.  So I realized, I’m trying to live simply and sustainably, and this is not at all happening here. 

I wasn’t really living at a sustainable pace in my own life. And the humor aside, I had just given all my life energy out, out, out. It was hard to know when to stop. I remember getting to points where I was so tired, I couldn’t talk to anybody. I literally just have to go in my room for a day, and people were thinking “what is wrong with you?”

I just didn’t have the tools for how to even know what to do there. And it felt like all the cultural messages were: go, go, go. 

I’m curious what you hear in that story and if you might have a similar story from your experience of following what you think you’re supposed to do, even your good passion, but then reaching that point of exhaustion. 

Lori Hanau

There are a number of stories that are running over the 35 years I’ve been in business and at work. Beth, even your statement of people saying like, what’s wrong with you? when you’re exhausted and needing to show up differently or needing to rest. I remember a time when I was bridging out of working within our family business and my father’s entrepreneurial business, which was manufacturing corrugated boxes.

I was 10 years with him the final 10 years before we sold the company working and selling corrugated boxes.  I went on to become president and COO of a ceramics manufacturing company. 

In the culture of my family business, I knew my father was beloved. I knew we had a great reputation. I knew a number of the employees over the years, but until I worked there and worked in the culture, I didn’t understand. His way of leading was vibrant, treating us all as equals and caring about our health and wellness and making sure that we had vacation time. He’d turn to all of us to solve challenges together and we had each other’s backs. We felt the honor and the dignity.

Then when I went on to the ceramics manufacturing company, the owners were wonderful people and the products were beautiful products, but there was a way that we worked in the hierarchy  of power over and under each other. It was a patriarchal and authoritarian ways of working. If somebody had to be let go, they were walked out of the building that day.

It was these dehumanizing ways of working that I don’t believe are the values of the owners of the company. And yet, I found that without changing my diet,  I gained over 30 pounds while I was there. It put me on a journey of  what makes up the quality of an ecosystem of people working together, because I knew that I was becoming sick at work. I was becoming mentally, emotionally and physically and spiritually sick.

Beth Tener

Thank you, Lori. It shows the degree that the environment around us affects us . I think our question is always “what’s wrong with you?” as opposed to “what’s happening to you or around you that affects our well being and our level of energy and life force to do the work?”

Lori Hanau

Yeah. I will also mention how willing I was to conform, to try to adapt, to try to show up in that culture, without really seeing how much it was impacting my greater health.  I’ve been very humbled also by the power and the innocence of conforming, to fit in, to get along, to show up in these structures.

Beth Tener

Yes. We’re trained to be good girls, good employees -so you want to fit into that expectation. 

Jennice Chewlin

Beth, I can speak to that desire to fit in. When I reentered the workforce after being a caregiver, I had a mission. I want to get back in the workforce.  I don’t want to be a caregiver the whole time. I found work that I enjoyed doing. It was working for a startup company that could help multiple nonprofits with fundraising. And I thought,  I’m going to help propel these organizations missions. It’s going to feel great. And the work was remote.  

It was not too soon after I started and I was still managing caregiving roles that I quickly  found myself in an ocean of doubt, with little skills regarding how to cope with this new onslaught of responsibilities. A lot of it felt very isolating. I felt like I was swimming in this ocean on my own.

I’d look around to other working parents and kind of give them the look of, “Hey, is this hard for you too? Or am I the only one?” And that’s where the “what’s wrong with me?” dialogue came in. Why do I feel like I’m suffering?

I even put out a call to friends, like, tell me how you do it? Unfortunately, it was a resounding, “you just do. You bear down and you get through it.” Like Lori said, I subscribed to that and I conformed. I started adopting unhealthy coping skills  that were problematic to my relationships and to modeling behavior for my children. So for me, it was, you know, that conversation of what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I be good at both?  

The other aspect of how I knew that it wasn’t working out for me was that I felt depleted. Every day, I felt depleted. But what kept me going was dollar signs. A really good paycheck helped me keep going, saying “okay, this life, this hamster wheel is just my new identity.” 

We’ll talk more about like really ultimately what that change was and how I woke up  to conforming and saying, “this isn’t serving me. I am willing to make some changes.” 

Beth Tener

I hear it is a common thread of moving from “what’s wrong with me” to waking up to say, “wait, if every one of us, so many of us are asking what’s wrong with me, I think we’re asking the wrong question.” What’s wrong with the culture and the system that makes this “normal?”  I looked up the word ‘exhausted’ the other day. One of the definitions of exhausted is: lacking the conditions that allow growth.  If you think of that like a depleted field. If the systems, as designed,  constantly put us all into that position, that’s nuts. That’s really off.

Lori Hanau

I just want to applaud you, Jennice, whatever it took for that waking up, whatever part of your integrity, of your care that’s larger than your willingness to conform. It started bursting through the ground of you in a vibrant way to support you.

I want to invite the listeners to not just listen to us in a storytelling way, but to listen in a way that you apply it to your lives and to look at where might these stories have some thread of connection to your own life, so that we can continue to support the shifts within ourselves and with each other.

Jennice Chewlin

Thank you, Lori. 

Beth Tener

To our question of kinship and how I had an instinct in this time of my life to reach out for social support. I wrote an email. to about five different friends and colleagues who were doing similar sustainability work, who also I knew had an interest in personal growth and spirituality. I said, would you like to form a little small group?

Maybe we meet once a month just to support each other in these times, like staying true to our values. We ended up calling it the Life Balance Group. For many of us, it really became a touchstone, a real source of strength. Having the space to meet once a month and check in, how are things going for you?

Each one would tell their stories at the frequency of a month. It’s quite helpful. It’s not the day to day friend, you tell all the ups and downs. For example, we might share-“Oh yeah, that big issue with my boss that I, you guys helped me process last time. Let me tell you what unfolded. I did step up and have the conversation and then this happened…” Or the person who would come in and be all full of self doubt. Then the friends would say, no, no, no, no, no. That critique is not right!

We offered each other a fresh set of eyes and we were journeying with each other  – it was incredibly helpful. That’s a model of things we can all start to do to cope. There’s a lot of room for those kinds of small group supports in these times.

For me, as someone who thinks a lot about patterns and systems, I started turning that on my own own life. I felt like I kept going through the pattern of having just enough work and being balanced.

Then requests would come in and I would say yes and I’d say yes and I’d say yes. I mapped it out in a circle at one point. I had taken on too much and I was starting to get stressed, a little more stressed. And then like you, Jennice, then I would often abandon all healthy habits and then, get more mentally unbalanced and critiquing myself, saying- you’re not doing enough – because I was so out of balance. And then I either get sick or just say, I’m done and pull back. I cycled through that so many times. I started to realize, that the “say yes” part was so hard for me.

Why is it so hard to say no when someone asked me to do something? I was so ingrained that you have to say yes and be good, be responsive, be dutiful. And that took a lot of work to be honest, I still struggle with it. Why is that so hard?

At the time I had a friend who was actually quite good at it. That’s another thing I think with kinship. She had other things she struggled with that I didn’t. But in this area, she was pretty good at having boundaries. I would go to her and ask, should I take this or not? She would just be very clear “if you’re overwhelmed, if you don’t need the money, you just say no.” And I’m saying, “you can do that?”

Curious if you have stories or reflections about times of how you find kinship and social support to support you in those journeys from your point of exhaustion to finding a more healthy pattern. 

Jennice Chewlin

The universe gave me a promotion that I wouldn’t give myself.  I stayed in a line of work that just wasn’t serving me anymore, that wasn’t giving me life balance. If I look more critically, I know that although this workplace was doing good work, I don’t think they understood who was working for them.

They didn’t know who I was, my identities, and how that impacted how I show up. I share that because for several months, more than half a year, I hid the fact that I was a mother. It had been ingrained in me so much that you hide that because they will have all these assumptions about you. Entering back in the workforce, I had everything against me already, so I wanted to try to level the playing field by hiding that. 

Eventually, yes, I burned out. And… I ended up not working there anymore, and it was a gift. It was a gift because, I wasn’t willing to jump ship. I kept getting the paycheck that made me stay.  And it gave me a chance to say, okay, this was also like right before the pandemic, like three months before the world shut down.

The whole experience really hit hard for me. And so Beth, to your point, I had to again call out to my group, “Hey, this is what’s happening. I’m not doing well. I need support.”  I had the infrastructure there already where it was  easy for them to jump in.

Beth Tener

Your friends, you mean? 

Jennice Chewlin

My friends and current colleagues. They understood where I was, and it was in that space that I said, okay, what do I really want to do?  What do I love doing? And I really began to explore my passions and my purpose.

I often share this quote by Mary Oliver that says, “tell me what you want to do with your one wild and precious life.”  That was my anchor affirmation throughout the whole journey where I finally said, I’m going to bet on myself and I want to approach  mental well being in a very unique way, one that really addresses these conditions that we’re talking about, these social norms and rules  impact the way we take care of our mind and body. 

When I kind of had that conviction of like, yeah, okay, I’m going to do this and I’m going to do it this way.  I met another colleague, to go through the ups and downs with. I had my friends and then I had my entrepreneurial buddies that I could troubleshoot with who could cheer me on and get me out of like this whole issue.

Beth Tener

That’s great because there are different qualities of kinship, right? If they really know what you’re going through. It’s that mutual cheering for each other on that particular journey. That’s really useful. 

Jennice Chewlin

One of the pivotal things that I did for myself was, what you’re talking about, Beth, is expanding my kinship. Go out and search for it, find people who are aligned with similar values and how they want to run their business. You will find success. 

Beth Tener

Yeah, thank you, Jennice. How about you, Lori?

Lori Hanau  

Friends and cultivating friendships and my social network has never been an issue for me. That’s been dynamic in my life, I’m an adventurer who loves people. And so that part of my life and even the intentionality of what I think of as like my soul sisters and my soul, my brothers, and my soul family and my kin, like literally the language, using the language of kin over my lifetime. 

I feel where I came into a greater kinship was with my healers and encircling myself in a very intentional way, whether it was acupuncture or getting support on healthy eating and massage and chiropractic, like whatever it was, even my GP,  my general practitioner. There is a way I feel I moved into greater kinship and holism and the quality of the relationships, the conversations and the steadiness in which we were in relationship with each other. That was about coming into my greater health. I introduced those people to each other and we became a vibrant circle. That has made a huge difference in the groundedness of my health and well being and the way I feel in genuine care and kinship for myself.

One other community that I feel I moved into greater kinship with was nature. I took a break of what I thought was going to be a month that became longer than a year and went into very deep listening. It was out in nature and I deepened my relationship with nature and with all of life and when I would be out there, I never felt alone. I feel it’s like a living art gallery, the mushrooms, the colors, what grows every day, it’s different. The beings that are out there, the moss starts to sing when you really pay attention to the micro world and the wind would talk to me on different days in different ways.

I feel that I moved into kinship with nature and to the seasons. It’s in a way that has brought me more alive and has given me greater health and vibrancy and has been so dynamic. 

Beth Tener

I’m grateful you brought that beautiful relationship with the living earth in Lori because that’s certainly something we can all do. Connect with that’s right there and such a resource.

Jennice Chewlin

It’s true that we all connect with each other, but it’s so often overlooked. When you were sharing it, I thought t one of the grounding techniques is to get more in tune with your senses and nature helps you with that. I think that’s a beautiful reminder for all of us. We often think of kinship and community in people, but it’s also our surroundings.

We say nature, but if some of us listeners are in urban environment, it could also be,  the sounds of traffic, the horns, whatever is around, I think is important because there’ll be less opportunity for seeing mushrooms growing if you’re in an urban environment, but just getting more in touch with your senses is another good reminder.

Lori Hanau

I live in both Keene, New Hampshire and Brooklyn, New York, and have for the past almost 30 years. I will say, even when I’m in Manhattan or Brooklyn or traveling in any city, feeling the wind, looking at the sun, seeing what trees are around, what plants are growing up through the sidewalks, visiting the farmers markets. I used to be more in the narrative that when I’m in a city, there’s no nature and I have discovered how much nature there is everywhere. 

Beth Tener

I’d like to talk more about exhaustion. Within the emphasis on self reliance that’s so strong in our culture, for many years, I felt it was up to me to rest and replenish it. I’m coming to see there are sources of energy and wisdom much bigger than me, like sitting by a river, like being nature, drawing on spirit. That are always there. They are infinite. We can come into relationship with those. Our Western culture got so out of balance was cutting off from nature.

We talk about left brain, right brain. And one way you can also describe that is the instrumental brain. The fix it, get it done, make it happen, brain and there’s the relational brain. And when they’re in balance and we’re using both of them, I think we don’t get so burned out. But if we’re in an environment where everybody’s in fix it, make it happen, instrumental brain, it’s very hard to draw the resource in of all those, the relational web that could be keeping us fed in that flow. 

I also want to name that we’re three women. I think women sometimes can more easily have the friendships. I want to name that with the way we socialize men and boys – it might be harder to ask for help the way, Jennice, you reached out and told your friends, Hey, I’m having a hard time. Some of the statistics now say that one in seven men have no friends, so that’s a pretty sad state we’re in.  

Lori Hanau

In my generation, (I’m 65), the messages were that men can’t cry at work, that you’d look weak if you were vulnerable. We, as women leaders, took on and adopted a lot of those practices, if you will, these conformed ways of being. We don’t cultivate our authenticity at work, our vulnerability.

Most people at work have a certain kind of relationship with their boss, man, or woman, where they don’t feel they can be their true selves. They are there to do their task, but not necessarily to build relationships with each other. They don’t feel that they can be approached or that they can approach their boss.

It’s interesting the ways we consider what’s a healthy relationship at work and what may not be a healthy relationship?  I don’t think we can have a full conversation around burnout without naming how sick we are at work. All the statistics since Gallup research has been in existence – and not only Western based, but are international – are about how sick we are in the workplace. I think that at least a portion of it has to do with having power over and under each other versus power with each other and sharing power.

What does it mean to start to practice sharing leadership and sharing power and thinking as teams and not as lone wolves, so power with each other.

As I left from a solo coaching practice to having a larger team and all of us working together, I have had the commitment of practicing: What does it mean for us to be more collaborative?  Create a space of, even as we have our different roles, what does it mean to make space for each other’s ideas to make space for each other’s challenges, to listen deeply together as a practice, to build relationship by starting meetings, by getting to know each other relationally and humanistically asking a question about our wellbeing. How do we practice building that genuineness with each other?

Beth Tener

There’s this persona we show up at work. I remember it was fake it till you make it. You don’t let them see you sweat, all that stuff. And what we heard that with you, Jennice, of what you keep silent about. 

Jennice Chewlin

I want to say that while, yes, I had a support system, I did not tap into them right away.

There was a lot of shame around my experience, that I had to go through to finally make a call  and ask for help. So I do want to name that because it’s not as easy when something like that happens. It’s not easy to just admit failure. Lori and I here are, we’re talking about being vulnerable, sharing your stories, but the culture and the system isn’t set up for men to practice vulnerability. It’s important that we talk about that and create spaces for, and not just men, but especially men of color, you know, especially with people who identify, who have historically been marginalized.

I talked a little bit about how I approach mental wellbeing with my business is that, we look at conditions that live in systems and structures. We talk a lot about our individual well being, but I also honor that that lives within a system. We’re working in two systems, the overarching grand system and then our own homeostasis, our system within ourselves  that we do have access to that.

Beth, you were saying, I didn’t have any tools to move out of that, and that’s the space that I’m in. I want to be an approachable organization that provides tangible tools for conversations, for groups at work in the community to move beyond work tasks, strategic planning models, and share a space where we can build connection, engagement. And therefore, impact our well being as we share tools, as we talk about myths around mental well being that then get internalized because of the bigger system.

In my situation, I had shame. I didn’t want to say that something had happened to me and I need help. That’s that bigger system. Eventually, I arrived in the willingness to say something to a network that I had in established.

Beth Tener

Each of us does that then makes it easier for someone else to do it. I watched you. I can see – okay she did it –  now I can. Everyone’s in the same mess, we’re just not talking about it. 

Jennice Chewlin

Exactly. That was my experience. And even now. I have four kiddos and I can say it, right?  I have accepted that this is my identity. I’m no longer going to hide it.  And I’m going to work with any assumptions that are made about me. The first thing people say when I share that I have four kids, it’s, Oh, you must be a busy mama. 

I’ll say, I sure am. But I also have passion and purpose. And that gets them, Oh, what do you mean? Then I get to share my story about my business. That’s one tiny ripple of how I work on those resisting those assumptions.  

Beth Tener

I want to thank you both for being here and to ask you, we’ll put in the show notes about each of your work and any offerings, things coming up next where people could get in touch and learn more.

Lori Hanau

Thank you, Beth. And I too, I just wanted before I do, I thank you both so much. What a privilege it’s been to be with you in this space. And thank you too, for your generosity, Beth, with even this offer. Here at Global Roundtable Leadership we have just launched our first cohort in October of teams taking a learning journey on how to cultivate healthy relationships.

What are those practices applied to the workplace and how to share leadership and share power. We have teams from all over the world that have joined us on this first maiden voyage. Our second cohort, we’re launching the end of January. If anyone has an interest in team development  and leadership building within your team, then please contact us at info at grtleadership.com to learn more.

Beth Tener

So thrilled for your team, Lori. That’s great. And how about you, Jennice?

Jennice Chewlin 

We are actively offering trainings in person and virtual for organizations who give a damn about the health and well being of their workforce So you can hire us to come and do some really out of the box trainings around emotional intelligence, emotional well being  But I’m really proud to share that next year, we will be launching our virtual cohort called Joy as Resistance and this cohort will be a five week cohort for the BIPOC community, those change makers in the community who can spend time looking at you. Some of the barriers to mental well being that live in the conditions and systems we’re talking about, learning strategies to help us not burn out or collectively help each other and grow our social network. So I’m excited to share that, that we’ll be launching that and you can follow me on LinkedIn or my website for more information.

Beth Tener

Great. Thank you all. 

Jennice Chewlin

Thank you, Beth

Lori Hanau

Thank you so much, Beth.