Well Wisconsin Radio

Interviewer:

Hello and welcome to Well Wisconsin Radio, a podcast discussing health and wellbeing topics with experts from all around the state of Wisconsin. I’m your host, Deb Ognar, and today my guest is Paula Davis. Paula is an international speaker, author, and global authority on burnout prevention, workplace stress, and team resilience. She founded the Stress and Resilience Institute more than 15 years ago to help individuals and leaders implement TNTs (tiny noticeable things) to better manage stress, to create strong teams and sustainable work. Paula left her law practice after seven years and earned a master’s degree in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. As part of her postgraduate training, Paula was selected to be part of the University of Pennsylvania faculty, teaching and training resilience skills to senior leaders in the military as part of the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness program. The Penn team trained resilience skills to more than 40,000 soldiers and their family members. Paula is the author of Beating Burnout at Work: Why Teams Hold The Secret to Well-Being and Resilience and Lead Well: Five Mindsets to Engage, Retain, & Inspire Your Team. Both books have been selected as “must reads” by the Next Big Idea Club, which is curated by Adam Grant, Susan Cain, Malcolm Gladwell, and Daniel Pink. The Next Big Idea Club selected Lead Well as one of its top 11 leadership books for 2025. Paula has shared her expertise at educational institutions such as Harvard Law School, Stanford, Wharton School Executive Education, and Princeton. She is a two-time recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Medical College of Wisconsin. Her expertise has been featured in and on The New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, Inc., Fast Company and many other media outlets. Paul is also a contributor to Forbes and Psychology Today.

Interviewer:

Paula, that is quite an impressive body of work. I’m happy you’re joining us today. It’s truly a privilege to have you here.

Guest:

Thank you so much, Deb. I’m really excited to chat with you about one of my favorite topics.

Interviewer:

That’s great. I’m excited to get started. I’d like to start by going back to the beginning. What was the moment that you realized that burnout was something you wanted to focus your work on?

Guest:

Because it happened to me, so if we unwind, go back all the way to 2008, 2009 I was in the sixth and seventh years of my law practice and, I noticed that I was not able to manage my stress in a way that I felt like I had been able to at other points in my career and in law school, and other high stress circumstances and I didn’t know what was going on. It kept getting worse. I tried to fix it and figure it out. I eventually did say something to my boss, who was amazing, and we tried a couple of things to sort of course correct and pivot and they just didn’t work. And it was just a really, really frustrating year long process that ended up with me in the emergency room twice. So I ended up getting really bad stomach aches from all of the stress that I was experiencing and it was the second time coming out of the emergency room that I went, “I can’t do this anymore,” like this is… I’ve always been very much a high achiever. Work has been very, very important to me in my life, always keen on accomplishing a lot of things, but I just thought like, I’m not willing to give up my sanity and my health for, for my work. And so it took me a while to kind of figure out what a next step was going to look like and what it was going to be. I tried staying in the legal profession and again, just, things just didn’t line up, so that’s what led me to finding the Master’s in Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania because I thought studying the science behind what makes people, what makes workplaces and teams and leaders actually thrive would be an important next step in me kind of figuring out what it was that I wanted to do.

Interviewer:

Wow, that sounds like it’s really come full circle then from actually experiencing it to where you are now. Because you work with burnout so closely, I think people hear that word a lot lately, but not everyone means the same thing by it. So that being said, when you think about it, how do you define it and how is it different from normal work stress? And then also on top of that, what are the signs someone is approaching burnout versus already in it?

Guest:

Yeah, this is such an important distinction and whenever I talk to groups about burnout, we always start here and I just kind of call it like Burnout 101 or the Burnout Basics, just to get everybody on the same page because especially in the last five, six plus years or so, we tend to use the word burnout very loosely. We tend to use it when we have any manner of significant stress in our lives and in reality, really all burnout is, is chronic unmanaged workplace stress. So there’s two very important words in that definition. One is chronic, right? So that’s one of the things that distinguishes it between just everyday work stress, right? I just, it’s always there, it’s always present, my regular stress management strategies aren’t working anymore and I can’t quite figure this out or kick it. The second word that’s also really important is workplace. So we often times get home at the end of a long day or it’s been a long week or month, and we’re like, “Ugh, I’m so burned out” and we really kind of conflate the home stuff, the home stress, with the work stress. And then the research on burnout is pretty clear that when we’re talking about burnout, we’re actually talking about something that happens at work. Okay, so it’s a workplace phenomenon. There’s a workplace cause or association or root really attached to the stress that we’re feeling. So, that is originally kind of thinking about how to define it and, and the other part that is also important in terms of differentiating, a couple of things, first, the three big dimensions of burnout are exhaustion, cynicism (so I’m really frustrated and annoyed by my clients, by my colleagues, by my patients you know, I’m annoyed a lot, you know people just bother me and kind of rub me the wrong way) and then a sense of what the research calls in efficacy. So this is like I start to lose, or I start to not see my ability to make an impact or where I’m potentially making an impact with my patients, with my colleagues, and what have you. And I start to kind of get that almost like a hopelessness kind of feeling. Like you throw your hands up and just say: “Why bother?”, “Who cares, like this isn’t going to change anyway?” or “I can’t change my circumstances. This must just be the way that it is.” And that’s a powerful combination of things to experience when you’re exhausted all the time, you’re frustrated with people, especially the people who you felt called to help, which is what brought you into a healthcare type role and then you’re also saying like, “well, I don’t really see any impact that I’m making,” and it’s just kind of, this is the way it’s going to be. That’s a very, very powerful set of circumstances. And so what I try to help people and teams and leaders see is if we unwind it kind of back all the way, like, if I could look at myself when I first started burning out, what were some of the things now in retrospect that I saw that indicated that something was off or different? And so it’s not necessarily like any one of these is like proof positive that somebody is potentially burning out, but there’s things that you want pay attention to and it’s things like procrastination. I remember when I’d roll into my office, I’d shut the door and instead of working on the 150 page lease, I had to negotiate, I’d start thinking about like this hypothetical bakery that I was going to open because that’s kind of what I wanted to do after my law practice. I thought I would research recipes and then I would do the lease stuff. So I started to procrastinate more. So pay attention to that. Pay attention to inattentiveness, right? If you just can’t concentrate, you can’t focus, your mind is scattered and wandering all the time. If you notice, and I noticed this too, like I stopped going to as many like holiday parties and like team stuff, right? Because it was just like, let get me home. I just need to disconnect. The exhaustion was, was really kind of starting to set in. And so if you notice that happening too, well. And then if you see a drop in productivity, like, you know, that you’re able to produce at a certain level and it just isn’t like happening, your productivity levels you’re noticing are dropping or different, those are all things to pay attention to. Like they’re little, they’re just little mini red flags kind of starting to, starting to pop up.

Interviewer:

That makes sense and I appreciate you clarifying that because I think there can be a lot of confusion about that, but I also think a lot of us have experienced that. So that’s interesting to hear. So what are those common causes that you see across workplaces and roles. You discussed a little bit now, just what people experience themselves. Why do you think burnout feels so widespread right now, even among people who like their jobs?

Guest:

Yeah. So a lot to say with, with this question, and so I think this is, so I would say one of the things that I’ve been trying to do, especially in the last, you know, half a dozen years or so since my first book came out and I’ve had a chance to continue to work very closely with a lot of leaders and teams. One of the things we get really wrong about burnout is we tend to see it as an individual failing of stress management and we go in kind of a wellness and well-being direction oftentimes when we’re thinking about burnout and that’s not necessarily wrong, it’s just a little bit off course because, I often times now see burnout as a work design issue really, because we often times don’t think about unwinding all the way back to if we’re noticing people on our teams burning out, or if we ourselves feel burned out, what’s really causing it. We don’t have nearly enough conversation around what’s actually causing it to begin with. And when you look at what the causes are, and the research has given us a nice framework, and I found this, really holds true across the teams that I talk to. And it’s actually something that teams can measure, so that’s important, but there’s, I call them the core six. There’s six kind of really big flashing indicators that we need to be paying attention to from a work design standpoint that if we don’t pay attention to them and they start to cause mismatches with our folks then we start to see some burnout happening. But the first one is huge. This is one that I have seen pretty consistently I would say driving the bus is the number one factor across industries, and that’s unmanageable workload, so different from high workloads. This is not about, we can’t have enough, like it’s, it’s okay to work hard. It’s okay to work really long hours, actually. It’s when we feel like we don’t have enough resources to kind of manage the workload or we’re just, something is off about the way our workflows are designed or what have you, that we’re constantly trying to get our arms around the issue and we feel like we are treading water, and at any moment we might sink. It’s that panic, kind of like, I can’t get caught up, or I just can’t stay on top of my work. So that’s a big one. The second one is lack of recognition, which shows up in a lot of different ways. It shows up as not hearing a lot of positive support, positive feedback. You don’t hear thank you a lot. There’s not a lot of connection of dots between the good stuff that you’re doing and the impact that you’re making and we all need to have that clean, that clear line of sight. You may feel that you’re working at a certain level and your title doesn’t match, so that’s an example of lack of recognition. You may feel like, wow, I’ve earned the ability to be part of this particular healthcare case, or to be staffed in a certain way, or prioritized in a certain level and you’re not being considered for promotions or other things, so that’s also a lack of recognition. The third one is unfairness. Unfairness is a lot of lack of transparency. It’s a lot of favoritism, right? I’m scanning my environment and it’s not about the effort or the work that I’m doing, it’s about who you know. That’s how people are getting ahead around here—just organizational politics and red tape also falls under that category. The fourth one is lack of community, which I think has been a really big deal, particularly since the pandemic. Thinking about just the way that we work now, like what does community mean? How do we intentionally go about building it? Values misalignment is the fifth one, and I’m hearing that much more frequently. I value and want certain things about my work and the work environment either doesn’t value the same things or just doesn’t prioritize what I need and want from work in the same way, so there’s a mismatch there. Then the last one is lack of autonomy, so I just don’t feel like I have a lot of flexibility or say, or control over how I work, when I work, the decisions I can make about my work, and what have you. I always teach that framework to any group that I am talking to because leaders have a lot more influence with how those items kind of happen or don’t happen, but I think it’s important for everyone to kind of speak that language so that as an individual, I can sit back and think, oh yeah, my workload is definitely a huge issue or this values misalignment piece is really, I didn’t even realize that that was a thing. You can start to put a common language to it so that you’re all speaking kind of from the same framework. So, I think that’s a really important place to start. I think that, you know, you’re talking about why does burnout feel so widespread right now? In part because it is, right? Just think about all of the workplace factors that are happening right now, both within work and then from a macro perspective. There’s a ton of uncertainty, not only in the workplace, but in the world. You layer on the AI conversation onto it and people are also feeling a lot of confusion and uncertainty about “I’m going to have to learn one new thing now and I don’t have the capacity or the time to be able to do that and is this going to replace me?” And, not a lot of transparency happening either around that conversation in a lot of workplaces. So you pile all of that together and it’s a really, really tough load for both leaders and individuals to be able to manage right now.

Interviewer:

Yeah, I think that that six pieces of framework really makes sense. And I think exactly what you said, to clarify that to understand where people are at and, you know, despite all of that, I feel like, so many people feel like the only option they have though is to push through. So what happens when people push through burnout instead of addressing it? And how does that affect mental and physical health over time?

 

 

Guest:

I can speak to this personally because I actually tried to do that. That was part of my journey at the end of my law practice. And what we have to realize about burnout is that it exists on a continuum. So where we start often times, we often times, like we were talking about earlier, kind of miss the starting pieces of burnout. So by the time we actually go “Whoa, something doesn’t feel right,” or something is significantly wrong, or maybe you have made an error of some sort, or maybe you got a bad review or something has kind of alerted us to the fact that there is something going on here—you’re kind of down the path, in a different way. Understanding that there’s a spectrum that exists when it comes to burnout—there’s different stages of burnout. One of the things that I have discovered, not only in my own story but through all the people I’ve coached and interviewed, is that at some point you have to say something. You have to , whether it is to your significant other, whether it’s to a therapist, whether it’s to a colleague, whether it’s to your boss, whether it’s to HR, whether it’s to whoever it is, pulling your head up and being able to say like in whatever language you have, “I’m feeling burned out,” or “something isn’t right here,” or “I can’t keep up with my workload, “ or however you decide to phrase it becomes a necessary step. Often times we don’t necessarily raise our hands to say something until we’re quite, we’ve tried the pushing through, we’ve put our head down. I’m like,” I’m just going to kind of like fight this and I’m going to push through it.” Burnout isn’t necessarily something that you can push your way through until you start to kind of pull back and address what’s going on. It’s something that’s going to continue to keep progressing if the conditions in your work environment stay the same. So it’s a tough, it’s hard because as high achievers we want to go in with that mindset, “we can do this” right? “I can outmaneuver this” or if “I just take a day off” or “I sleep in over the weekend, I can figure this out” burnout doesn’t operate that way.

Interviewer:

That’s helpful though, to learn because I do feel like a lot of people feel like just pushing through is the only way to do it. So what realistic steps can people take and what does recovery look like if they’re already there if changing jobs isn’t an option?

Guest:

Yeah. Which is a common question that I get, and I think that’s a really, because my story of kind of leaving the law practice and going on to get a master’s in applied positive psychology tends to be the exception rather than the rule, at least the people who I’ve interviewed and talked to and coached, right. Most people like aspects of their work, even if they might not like necessarily exactly where they are working, they still want to continue to be a nurse or be a PA or practice medicine or what have you. What happens is you have to kind of really evaluate, first of all where you are in that spectrum because it’s not a one size fits all approach in terms of what’s going to help going forward. Thinking about “am I at that kind of first initial stage?” of starting to notice procrastination and other things, because when you’re in very early stages of burnout, some of the self-care strategies that we’re often times taught may actually still help—so it’s recognizing that. But if you’re further down the road, then there are other things that you really have to take a look at. When I coach folks who are kind of further down the line in their burnout, one of the things we do is we take a look backwards, right? What are some of the things that they can think about that might be causing this? I give them that core six framework so that they realize it’s not just ways that you feel like you’ve messed up, but it’s really a work design issue too. Let’s add that to the conversation. It’s also looking forward and thinking about what do you want work to look like? If it’s not working and doesn’t look right for you, what are some things or ways that you want it to look? Then it’s also about too, “who can offer me some guidance,” right?” “Do I need to talk to some of my peers potentially about this?” “Are there other people who I know who have potentially burned out who I can seek out assistance from?” “Am I at a point where I can continue to work but I really need to see a therapist or I need to see somebody because I’m starting to notice some…a lot of anxiety. I started to have panic attacks very frequently. That was something that I didn’t do right. I didn’t seek out therapy in that moment, and it really is something that would have helped me. The other thing that becomes really important is that you have to kind of look inward and think to yourself in my world, we call these icebergs. They’re your core values and beliefs about the way you think the world should operate. And so what worked for us or what we thought being a good professional was at the age of 25 or 22 or 30 when we’re coming out of our training and residency and all of that into our thirties isn’t serving us potentially in other areas or stages of our life. Things like themes—”I will say yes to everything. I will work relentlessly. I will never let anyone down” or themes of perfectionism and my self-worth is measured by my job title and my career status. We really have to dig into those core values and beliefs about the way we think the world should operate. And that often times can be very helpful in the context of coaching. So, definitely something that I had to do. And it’s always an area that I look at with, people who I coach or interview.

 

 

Interviewer:

I really think those strategies and steps are important and I love that term icebergs, definitely relatable—love that term. And now we’ll take a quick break to hear about some of well Wisconsin’s program offerings.

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Interviewer:

And now we’ll head back to the Well Wisconsin Radio interview.

So one word that comes up a lot in recovery conversation is boundaries, but it can feel unrealistic or even vague. What role do boundaries play in preventing burnout and what do healthy boundaries actually look like at work?

Guest:

Boundaries are actually quite important. There’s a leadership researcher named Nick Petri, who is based in Australia, and I really love his work because he’s approached burnout from a qualitative standpoint. Through just thousands and thousands of interviews with people who have experienced burnout or might be burning out, he’s really discovered a lot of really interesting stuff. One of the key things that he found is that of all of the thousands of people that he and his team have interviewed, there’s a very certain small percentage of that group worked really hard, worked really long hours, worked a really hard pace, but didn’t burn out. He wanted to examine more closely, like what was it about these people that the rest of us, you know, could potentially apply? He found that that they had pretty significant boundaries in place, regarding work and life, but there was some nuance to that. I find the nuance actually fascinating because I don’t think we dig into it enough in our conversation about boundaries There’s two different kinds of, I think about it in terms of I don’t like the phrase “work life balance”, I call it “work life fit”, in terms of thinking about our work life fit boundaries we can be segmenters or we can be integrators according to the research. If I’m a segmenter, I really like a concrete hard boundary between my work world and my home world. If I am an integrator, I blend them all right? It’s just sort of like, woo, let me take the call at night. At night and like, not a big deal and, and what have you. And often times whether we’re a segmenter or an integrator can really influence our levels of burnout. It also depends on your personality preference. It depends on the type of role that you have, and it depends on your stage of life too. When I was an associate attorney just starting out, I didn’t have kids and it was just like, let me do all the things right. I’ll work really late, staff me on all the deals, not a big deal. Call me at 10 at night. I’ll do the email at one in the morning. Like, I mean, I had no I had no work, I had no boundaries really regarding anything. I was fine. I mean I wanted to learn. I was excited to be starting my career and it was something that I felt was really important. Fast forward to today, there’s no way that that would work for me. It’s, and it’s hard though to, as a business owner because you constantly think about your work all of the time, but I am for the most part able to do my work, kind of leave it at work, and then when I need to be with my 10-year-old, my almost 10-year-old Lucy, then I can really be fully present with her. What becomes hard is like when we really need that segmentation and we can’t get it, or we can’t have it because of our roles, right? If you’re a surgeon who’s on call you, you can’t have the integration type of boundary situation is probably what your world is going to have to look like. It’s just interesting. There’s a lot of nuance to the boundary conversation, but they are important.

Interviewer:

I think that’s helpful understanding segmenter versus integrator. I think a lot of us, again, can relate to that. That being said, boundaries are something that we can set on our own and understanding if we’re a segmenter or an integrator, but leadership plays a big role too. What specific actions or behaviors can leaders adopt to support their teams and help prevent burnout?

Guest:

This is really one of the reasons why I wrote my second book Lead Well, because I noticed a lot of leaders, I think really wanting to do right and well by their teams and not really knowing where to start—right? And a lot of leaders in order to prevent their teams from burning out, take on the extra work, and then they themselves feel burned out or sick because they’ve got too much to do in a number of different ways. And so I think starting with that core six framework becomes really important, right? What are the areas or causes of burnout that they need to be paying attention to first and foremost. But I have found too, again, I’m a big fan of kind of unwinding things down to the root or to the cause. One of the things that I, an area of research that I’ve become most fascinated with, and this is the first mindset that I wrote about in my book, is something called sticky recognition and mattering. If you do nothing other than start to let your team and people know the evidence of their impact, that will do loads of goods. What that just means is that you can do some simple things like saying a thank you plus. So, when I say sticky recognition, it’s a more specific way of showing a person or a team the evidence of their impact. When you notice that somebody has done well and you want to thank them, or affirm, affirm them or recognize them instead of just saying thank you, which is good, right? If you don’t say thank you at all, start there. I’m going to push, I always say I push people pretty quickly to add that plus piece. It’s a specific behavior that you notice that led to the good outcome. If I were observing you saying a thank you plus and I said, well, why are you thanking that person? The plus part is what you would say. It’s, “Oh, it’s because she organized those data tables in a really important way. I could really see the good outcomes very clearly and it helped me be able to make a diagnosis more efficiently.” It’s that part, and it from, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve interviewed people who have received, been on the receiving end of a thank you plus. We’re talking about two minute conversations, sone minute conversations. Somebody writes something really quick and leaves you a note, perhaps in your office or somewhere and people remember, this happened to me, I recalled an instance of a judge giving me a little note that was kind of that thank you plus framing. I still have it in my office, and that was like 20 years ago it’s just the way that it lands. It’s because I’ve slowed down enough to notice what you did. I’m kind of saying it back to you and now I can take that and I can do it again. So you’re giving me something, a positive, something that I can repeat. The thank you plus is important. Simply telling people how you rely on them—right? If it wasn’t for you as a great sentence starter, “if it wasn’t for you, there would be no way we would be able to run the operating room as efficiently as we do because”—right? And then just add a couple of sentences of explanation. It’s really thinking about different ways that you can…people need to feel noticed and needed and affirmed. Highlighting people’s strengths, things of that nature become… I think we know about them, we just don’t do them in practice. When you go back to that framework of the core six, we got our heads down, we’re busy, we’re answering texts, we’re multitasking, we’re doing all of these things, and it crowds out space for us to slow down and be able to do some of these simple steps. I always tell leaders, start with that sticky recognition and mattering. Then if you have like one-on-one opportunities to just chat with people, try doing that. Try sprinkling in some one-on-one opportunities to talk with people on your team without any sort of like business work case attached to it. Right? And often times we’ll start conversations like that with, “how are you doing?” Often times then what do people answer back? “Fine.” Right? “I’m fine” and especially if my boss is sitting down with me, “I’m totally fine.”Right? I’m like, why are you talking to me? I think one of the better questions that leaders can ask is “what has your attention right now” because it’s a different way of answering, like trying to get at how are you doing, but I’ve given you the ability to answer with a work related answer or maybe you might say, “gosh, we’re having such a hard time with our teenager. I’m really stressed out by that and it’s kind of messing with my concentration” or however people would phrase that. But you start to understand a little bit more about what’s going on with people’s stress. The other piece that I think becomes really important, what’s emerging, and the burnout research is how much we really need growth opportunities at work. As a leader, really kind of looking at the people on my team and balancing how much are they in performance mode and how much are they in growth mode? Because if I’m doing like every day, day in and day out, it’s just like 90% performance. It’s my functional job, it’s what I’ve always done. It can get sort of old and that has repercussions. If I have opportunities to enhance my skills to grow and develop in a way that’s important to me and advances me closer to like where I want to be in my career, other goals that I have, that’s enormously energizing. It’s enormously restorative and even giving people just little opportunities to kind of identify some of those growth opportunities can just give you that like little zing of, of energy that can be enough. Again, depending on where you are at in the burnout spectrum or if you’re not even there, can potentially prevent you from kind of walking down that path. That’s a cluster of things that I usually will have leaders start with.

Interviewer:

I think that makes sense, especially with leaders. It sounds like, you know, having their teams and employees that work with them, for them, have them being seen and understood. Sounds like that’s kind of what you’re saying in a lot of these strategies. So I’m curious if, if there’s one belief you hear over and over that really misses the mark, what is one misconception that leaders and employees have about burnout?

Guest:

Yeah, I think it’s that they each think it’s each other’s fault, right? I often times will hear leaders’, we’ll hear leaders point this way, and then individual contributors point the other way. We stay sort of locked in all of this. That’s also a big reason why when I frame it as a work design issue and as an issue of mismatch, that we just have to identify. It makes it less about your fault, my fault, the company’s fault, whatever it is. And it’s really, it’s like, no, we have to look and see how the way we’ve designed work is working for us and how it is interfering with our ability to get us where we want to go. It’s a great spot to go back to the values—language that all organizations have. What we want patient safety, we want great patient outcomes. We want to do really well by our patients. And the way that we’re designing these aspects of work is interfering with our ability to do that in this way and this way perhaps and so then it becomes like, wow, we can kind of partner together and see what are some things that we can do to potentially redesign how our workflow is, or “Wow, we don’t have a practice of recognition in our group or on our team. What would that look like? How should we do that?” Then we all start to kind of get behind some solutions and strategies for that because if I have an unmanageable workload issue, I need a workload solution for it. Right? The meditation app and some of the wellbeing strategies, which are really important again, in the world of stress aren’t necessarily going to fix one of these particular causes. It’s kind of selecting the right tool to help, leaders and teams kind of progress forward together.

 

 

Interviewer:

It sounds like there’s not really a quick fix that they have to kind of get down to the nitty gritty and look at the work design and use some steps and strategies that you had talked about.

Guest:

I think it depends on what the cause of the problem is, which is why, measuring the core six becomes an important step, right? If we determine that we don’t, we have a lack of community, however, we’re kind of looking at that on our team, there might be some quick fixes, right? We might be able to come together and have lunches more frequently. Let’s pick a time on the calendar three months from now and have a quarterly retreat or get together or whatever you want to call it. We can have coffee breaks together or there are quicker ways that you can accomplish some of these things. I think with the lack of recognition, implementing some of these frameworks supporting sticky recognition and mattering can be very, very easy. I mean, I think it’s in the next 10 minutes, you it’s all about the connections that you have with other people, in the next 10 minutes you can certainly tell somebody how you rely on them. When you feel like you matter to this team. What am I doing? Or what are we doing? That’s a question that you can ask anybody on your team very, very quickly to hear what they have to say about that. So there are, I think that’s why I call them tiny noticeable things, so you don’t have to necessarily, like redesign the entire way our workload is structured. We can say like, “okay, we’re, we’re going to trim non-essential meetings. What does that look like?” We can make sure that we know that everybody knows where all of our forms and documents are housed—easy access so that I’m not wasting 20 minutes every day trying to figure out how I can find something or who I need to talk to. I try to stay in that level of tiny noticeable thing where there are some quicker strategies I think that you can take advantage, but absolutely you’re going to have to probably do some digger deeping in some of them to identify more serious complex issues.

Interviewer:

I like how you broke that down. That makes sense to me. What is one message you wish more people understood about burnout and work?

 

Guest:

I think, again, just sort of reiterating the theme that at its core, at its heart, it’s about work systems and work design, right? It’s nobody’s fault. And that if we can think about some, incorporating some of those small strategies to help us run our work world better that we could potentially limit or shorten or hopefully and my goal is to prevent altogether some of those more negative health, mental health and well-being consequences from happening down the road.

Interviewer:

Zooming out, with that, for listeners who might be feeling burned out right now, what is one thing you want them to remember as a starting point?

Guest:

That’s such a great question and I think it’s just to think about where are you at right now? What do you need at this moment in time? And to the extent that you can verbalize that and start the conversation with somebody who may be able to give you some help, some support, some guidance, maybe, if it’s a shift in your workload, or how your staffed, or what have you, depending on what you discover that you need, don’t be afraid to have those conversations. I mean, I think the research now is, I mean in healthcare, we’re looking at pretty easily over 50% of healthcare providers are experiencing at least one symptom of burnout or burnout on some level—so you are not alone. You are in a system where lots of people have either, if not fully burned out, have felt like they might be going down that path. I applaud all of the research and things that have been done in healthcare because we all think we’re the only ones going through it, and I know I certainly did as well when I was. But that there’s a lot of stress being felt by people right now at work for a lot of different reasons as we talked about. I think starting to normalize that by speaking it, I think becomes a really, really valuable spot to start.

Interviewer:

Thanks for sharing that, Paula. Here’s my thank you plus—I really appreciate you sharing such thoughtful and practical insight on burnout. Your perspective is incredibly valuable for our listeners across every kind of role and workplace. I will include the books that you mentioned that you wrote and actually your website too in the show notes, so our listeners will have these resources. I really appreciate you joining us today.

Guest:

Thank you so much, Deb. It was such a joy to talk about this. I’ve learned so much in the last, you know, 15-16 years since my own experience and I’m always keen to pay it forward. On my website, I’m in the process of updating it, but we’ll find different resources, downloads. I’m going to have a Burnout 101 page that I’m in the process of creating. So if you just need some quick tips and strategies there should be a lot for folks to find.

Interviewer:

Great. That’s going to be a valuable resource for sure. Well, thanks again for your time. I appreciate it.

Guest:

Thank you, Deb.

Interviewer:

Thank you for listening to Well Wisconsin Radio. I hope you enjoyed the show. We love hearing from our community. So please take a moment to visit the Well Wisconsin Radio card under the benefits tab and your well Wisconsin portal to share your feedback or suggest a guest for a future episode. You can find our transcripts and previous episodes all at www.webmdhealthservices.com/WellWisconsinRadio. If you’re listening to this podcast on your platform of choice, be sure to subscribe so you can never miss an episode.

Tune into this month’s episode as we interview Paula Davis, an international speaker, author, and global authority on burnout prevention, workplace stress, and team resilience. We unpack what burnout really is, how it differs from everyday workplace stress, and why it is showing up so widely right now. Paula shares concrete strategies, practical frameworks, and realistic steps leaders and employees can use to prevent burnout and support real recovery at work.

Links to reference discussed:

Paula Davis’s website: www.stressandresilience.com

Book: Beating Burnout at Work: Why Teams Hold the Secret to Well-Being & Resilience (2021) by Paula Davis

Book: Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team (2025) by Paula Davis

The information in this podcast does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. It should not be used as a substitution for healthcare from a licensed healthcare professional. Consult with your healthcare provider for individualized treatment or before beginning any new program.