HealthcareInterviewStress, Self-Care, and the Path to a Healthier Workplace with Jeanette Bronée

1. What inspired you, and how did you become an expert on workplace stress and develop strategies to help others cope with it?

After both my parents died a year apart, I was told it was only a matter of time before I  would get cancer, too, because of my family history. This inspired me to learn about what makes us ill and what makes us healthy. At that point, I had already burned out twice. The first time was  because I was not respecting that my body needed me to take care of it as much as I needed it to take care of me.

The second burnout was brought on by worry. I was worried about my work, my parents, and life in general. I had just gone through a divorce and given up my branding company to join a client as their Executive VP. These are all huge life changes. And then, both of my parents were diagnosed with cancer, in treatment at the same time and they died a little more than a year apart. I had to completely rethink my life and with that, my career.

I have always been ambitious, so I focused on rethinking work and how to have it all. Having it all to me meant being successful and preserving my physical, emotional and mental health at the same time. This is when the proverbial “light bulb” went off and I realized we have self-care all wrong. Society has taught us that success at work and self-care are two separate concepts; however, self-care is actually the foundation for both personal and professional thriving.

The paradox is that we think of self-care as something we do after work to recover rather than as a mindset, we have with us all day long that helps us work better so that we don’t have to recover. Working with people one-on-one, I realized that self-care doesn’t start with a list of habits but rather with having the emotional and mental tools to navigate the daily challenges life throws at us. Self-care is how we support ourselves in facing uncertainty with curiosity, courage, and confidence in order to reclaim agency over our well-being every day; essentially, self-care starts at work. When we feel we have agency over our work and lives, we are happier at home, and we have the energy to spare to do things that bring us joy in our spare time.

2. Based on your research and experience, what are the most common causes of workplace stress in the U.S.?

Working in survival mode has long been a badge of importance, and we have long accepted stress as an ingredient of success. We need to change our thinking about what success looks like and what drives high performance. Instead of speed and stress, we need to focus on care  as the cornerstone of our drive. Instead of being driven by fear of not achieving our goals, we should be driven by how much we care about the quality of our work. The more we care about our work and goals, the better we will do. When care truly drives us, it becomes apparent in our work and then we have an impact on those around us.

Many factors induce work stress. Unrealistic deadlines and demands cause an inordinate amount of undue stress. This is because we don’t get stress from what we have to do; we get stress from what we think we cannot achieve or complete.

Toxic relationships also cause stress. These can be relationships with co-workers and or managers. We tend to think that we burn out from working too much, but actually, we burn out from worrying too much. We worry about work for many reasons; feeling that we don’t matter, feeling that we are not respected or that our perspective is not included in how the problems rays being solved. And of course, these days, we worry we may be fired.

Additionally, stress has a ripple effect. If the culture is a fear-driven performance culture or a competitive hustle culture, it’s much more difficult to stay focused and balanced on doing good work. Working in survival mode, we waste time looking for ways to feel safe, acknowledged, and respected. Instead, we need a culture where we feel cared about so we can achieve our full potential. Of course, there is good stress which comes when we move past our comfort zone of what we already know and reach toward what we believe is possible. However, being supported and feeling safe when pushing our own boundaries is essential to growth.

3. Can you discuss the impact of stress on both employee productivity and businesses’ financial performance?

Intention fuels our attention. When stressed, we look for danger, putting us in survival mode or fight and flight. Confirmation bias kicks in, and because we intend to be safe from danger, our attention gets stuck on what’s not working. This is why we focus on the problems rather than looking for solutions and being open to the possibilities of how to get there. Essentially, we become worriers instead of warriors.

It’s a bit of a paradox because what we worry about is also what we care about. What ends up happening is that we waste a lot of time focusing on the wrong problem, what I call the pothole. Instead, we need to find a solution to the problem that caused the pothole and discuss how to get past the pothole in the direction of where we want to go. .

Stress tends to be an accepted part of productivity because it makes us seemingly work harder and faster. Yet in reality it keeps us stuck doing what we have always done to play it safe. So, if we want top performance, we need to pause and recognize what truly makes us produce results; the fact that we can think, engage and act with care. When working under stress, we miss out on curious conversations that lead to creativity and conscious collaboration – both of which are essential to navigating uncertainty, harnessing change, and fueling growth.

Stress also creates a toxic culture because of how it affects our relationships. As I mentioned, intention fuels attention, so when we focus on what’s not working, we look to catch people in what they are doing wrong, and we create a culture of fear. The belief that fears causes people to work harder is old management and simply sad and wrong. In a fear-driven culture, people will do what they have to do to survive instead of unlocking what causes growth; our human advantage to care. So, to harness our attention, the intention must be to support people in doing good work by making well-being and work-life quality the foundation for growth.

4. How do you believe workplace culture contributes to stress, and what can be done to create a healthier work environment?

Human relationships are at the core of a healthy culture. This is why it’s so important that we challenge the belief that stress is an essential part of a high-performance culture. Care is essential got high -performance work culture. When we feel cared about, we thrive, and when we thrive, we do better work. it’s It is an essential core human need to feel valued, included, and that we matter.

This is why I always say self-care is really only about the care. Care is at the core of what we all need and the care that is needed the most starts at work. When we don’t feel cared for or about at work we worry about our job security, our status at the company, and our performance. When we feel cared about, we feel safe, and we engage and contribute with curiosity, courage, and confidence. A manager who doesn’t care about the team will ask why something isn’t done. A manager who cares will ask someone what the team needs to get it done. There’s a crucial difference in these approaches.  One induces fear that we are not good enough or measuring up, while the other is respectful and supporting which nurtures confidence.

The pattern I have consistently seen is that a caring workplace culture is essential to human thriving because we don’t exist or work in a vacuum. Our three core relationships of self, others, and work are continuously connected at work. This is why a healthy culture must be a foundational core value as we look toward the future of work. We also cannot separate self-care from work because part of our self-care is our relationship with others. Essentially, we don’t self-care alone; we self-care together.

5. In your book, The Self-Care Mindset®, you discuss the importance of self-care skills and behaviors. Can you elaborate on some key self-care practices employees can adopt to manage their stress levels? 

The self-care mindset encourages us to pause more so that we can think, engage and act with care. It puts us in the mindset of focusing our attention on what matters, which ultimately helps us achieve our goals. I have developed a framework that gives us a way of asking ourselves questions that align us with our intention and direct our attention. The way the mind works is that it will answer the question you ask. Essentially, the question hijacks your attention and the problem you want to solve.

The C.A.R.E. Framework  I developed helps us focus our minds. It starts with taking a pause, what I call Power-Pausing™, which helps us come back to the present and focus on what matters, why it matters, and then ask what we need. This is how we reclaim agency over our thoughts.

How we think becomes the inner dialog that fuels our attention and affects how we feel. This, in turn, affects how we engage with others, and make choices and decisions. Learning to listen to our own thoughts and emotions with curiosity is essential to harnessing our mental health. When stressed, you may think you are not doing a good job or will never finish your work. These thoughts can result in feeling less confident, anxious, and confused about how to achieve good results leading us to over-perform and work extra-long hours. This can fuel strong emotions, like anger or frustration, causing even more stress.

We need to learn to pause so we can use our emotions as information so that we can make intentional decisions that direct our behaviors, both supporting ourselves and knowing how to speak up and ask for help if that’s what we need.

The Self-Care Mindset is a toolbox of emotional intelligence and cognitive behavior skills. I call it reclaiming emotional agency. We can learn to harness the power of our emotions and, in doing so, strengthen our mental health to be a force for change because; intention fuels attention.

6. How can employers better support their employees’ mental health and well-being in order to reduce workplace stress?

Cultivating a culture of pausing is essential for creating the kind of change that we need to survive the future of work.  A culture of pausing, what I call Power-Pausing, is a workplace where care is rewarded. Not care in the traditional sense of caring for but caring about. Pausing gives us the opportunity to connect, communicate and collaborate in a more intentional and care-driven way. That means pausing to listen and ask more questions before we react or rush to judgment or send that angry email.  When we take a Power-Pause we reclaim the power of choice in how we respond. If everyone responded with more care, there would be less acrimony and angst in workplaces.

The reactive fear-driven workplace is wearing us out and leading us to a less human future. We already know that we are burning out from the speed of work. What we also need to realize is that we are burning out because we simply don’t pause to think, engage or act with discernment. AI is calm, cool, and collected. Tech is nimble and fast. We need to learn to use tech to work better for us instead of trying to compete with it by working faster.

We, humans, are superior because we can pause to think, engage and act purposefully. We can ask questions, collaborate, and make decisions. We can be creative, innovative, and imaginative. This is why we need to learn to pause more. The future of work is not about the speed of productivity; it’s about the speed of the human connection. We are entering the relationship economy where care is our most important currency and culture is an ecosystem system of relationships, starting with the one we have with ourselves.

7. In your opinion, what are some long-term strategies that businesses can implement to reduce workplace stress and its associated costs?

Changing the meeting schedule and cadence is the first step toward protecting our mental health. Get rid of back-to-back meetings and endless conference calls. Even just five to ten minutes between meetings can make meetings more productive because it gives our minds some space to let the nervous system calm down so that we can recover, reclaim and reset our energy, attention, and focus before the next meeting. We tend to abandon even our basic human needs for water and food when busy. However, that keeps our physical body in shape for working all day. When we include more micro-pauses throughout the day, we can tap into the regenerative power that helps us work better all day long, ending the day with energy to spare.

Several studies show we get just as much, if not more, work done when we have more breaks, more downtime, and a work week of fewer hours. Ford already knew this in 1926. Rethinking how we work best is essential to create real change. Designing space and time to allow for how we do our best work and developing schedules that time-batch the day and the week based on when we best engage with others versus focusing our attention on deep work and problem-solving. Essentially, we need to understand ourselves better and what we need to engage in different types of work: individual deep work like strategic thinking versus problem-solving and time to do “daily work-chores” and meeting times.

For example, we focus and engage differently in one-on-one meetings, small group discussions, or bigger team creative think tanks.

Different people work best at different times, and the optimal solution would be to support that.

This way, there’s a shift in what we need to be at our best to either focus or think so that there’s a sense of recognition that we need different circumstances to support different kinds of optimum work performance.

Essentially the CARE framework teaches us to become more aware and take responsibility for what we need and how to ask for it. At the same time, it also gives managers the tools to ask better questions to cultivate a work culture where people feel valued and therefore engage in solving our collective problem to make work, work better for us. We have to stop thinking that mental health is a personal problem and instead recognize that it’s a work-culture possibility. That’s what builds a Culture of Care®, where people belong and work better together.

8. Can you share a success story of a company or individual who has significantly improved their workplace stress levels by implementing your strategies and recommendations?

I could mention so many examples, but there’s some consistent feedback that I often hear. Clients changing the meeting schedule to harness the regenerative power of pausing and have changed the meeting schedule to 45 min instead of 60 and given 15 minutes in between to catch up so people felt they were on top of things rather than having to answer emails at the end of the day or be distracted in meetings. That also gave people the option to get food and water, stretch and give the mind some airtime if that’s what was needed. It has lowered the tension and stress in the meetings, and people were more engaged, and people report back that their personal energy, focus, and joy have improved exponentially.

They also started using The Self-Care Mindset® language to remind everyone to keep practicing. For example, their leaders start meetings by asking if there’s anything to pause on before getting started and asking the same question during meetings to allow for everyone to be able to engage. They also use the FUD to remind people that the conversation is stuck in the pothole of what’s not working, to pause and ask what we need so that we can solve the problem we need to solve right now. It has allowed for more constructive and creative thinking for teams that would otherwise tend to feel anxious when solving problems. A couple of my clients are even using the CARE framework with their customer service team to engage better with customers.

A leader told me the other day that he feels he has reclaimed his time because he’s more focused, and he bounces back from problem stress faster and can reset his focus on being more innovative in the way he thinks.

The real test is when a company no longer needs to give people permission to pause; instead, the entire company pauses by default as a way to connect, communicate and collaborate better together. Then we will have finally made self-care the foundation for reaching our goals and changing the work culture for good.

BIO

Jeanette Bronée is a global keynote and 2 x TEDx speaker, a culture strategist and an author. Jeanette is rethinking self-care in the workplace as the foundation for peak performance, engagement, and a culture where people belong and work better together. She has spoken at the United Nations, given keynotes across the US, and spoken to audiences on five continents. Her clients include IBM, Lockheed Martin, Kaiser Permanente, Genentech, Microsoft, Facebook, ebay, Siemens, and more. Her newest book “The Self-Care Mindset, Rethinking How We Change and Grow, Harness Well-Being and Reclaim Work-Life Quality” is a book of tools to harness our human advantage to grow through adversity.