Intentional Leaders Podcast with Cyndi Wentland

Navigating Burnout in Work & Life with Dr. Hiba Khalid

• Dr. Hiba Kahlid • Episode 136

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When the weight of a career in anesthesiology pushed Dr. Hibba Khaled to her breaking point, she didn't just bounce back; she reinvented herself as a beacon of hope for those suffocating under the burden of burnout. Join us for a discussion with Dr. Khaled, co-founder of Embers and a burnout recovery specialist, as she shares her transformative journey and the lessons she learned along the way. From her hands-on experience in Uganda to her scholarly pursuits at Harvard, Dr. Khaled's path is a lesson in turning personal struggle into a lifeline for others.

Dr. Khaled's story is more than just a narrative; it's a roadmap for navigating career transitions with purpose and integrity. Her candid reflection on the tough choices that have shaped her life, including the decision to walk away from a coveted position, offers a rare glimpse into the heart of someone who has courageously defied convention, and the expectations of others.

This episode provides a glimpse at the mechanics of burnout and the possibility of crafting a fulfilling life. Dr. Khaled breaks down the factors contributing to our burnout epidemic—misaligned values, toxic work environments, and the perpetual push for perfection. But more than that, she discusses the tools to reclaim our sense of self, emphasizing the role of mindfulness, grounding techniques, and finding our joy.

Find Hiba here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-hiba-khaled/
And her business here: https://www.emberscc.com/

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Cyndi:

I am excited to welcome Hiba Khaled to the Intentional Leaders Podcast today. Dr Hiba Khaled is a co-founder of Embers, which is a consulting and coaching firm. She helps individuals and organizations recover from burnout very important topic and achieve healthy high performance, so welcome.

Hiba:

Hi, thank you so much, Cyndi. I appreciate you. Thanks for having me on.

Cyndi:

You and I got connected through our marketing director, Selina. She reached out to you because what you don't know about Selina is she's very conscientious of mindfulness and stress and managing our well-being. She does a great job of bringing in and drawing us towards resources and helping leaders to be mindful of all those things. So when she brought you into our space and our universe, I was thrilled to hear about your background and your topic. Again, thanks for taking time from your busy schedule to do this.

Hiba:

It's wonderful to be here with you. Thank you, and thanks to Selina for bringing us together.

Cyndi:

I want to know a little bit about your story, because you started out as a doctor. Now you have transitioned into this consulting and coaching firm. I know we're going to talk about burnout as a specialty area of you and how to think about it, how to prevent it, and I know folks will be super excited to hear that. But I want to know a little bit about your story and I'm sure my audience would be fascinated to know what brought you here today, from that start in the medical community and now being a consultant in this space.

Hiba:

I started out in my anesthesia residency. So after medical school I decided to go into anesthesia. I like different specialties around the hospital and really loved learning so much as part of just who I am as a person, lifelong learner, who's always curious and trying to learn more and advance their knowledge in many ways. For me, when I went through medical school and was going through the different specialties as part of my training, I fell in love with quite a few specialties and had a really hard time making a decision as I was going along. But in my fourth year of medical school, when I did my anesthesia rotation, that's when I realized that a lot of the things I love about science and the things I love about medicine came together in that one specialty. It brought together physiology, which was probably my favorite science, with pharmacology, a little bit of physics and then also the interface that you had with every other specialty around the hospital. So I got to work with surgeons all the time and I absolutely loved surgery because it was so practical. But I had a lot of practical skills within anesthesia that made the specialty alluring. It also gave me the intellectual stimulation of having to think about each patient case and coming up with a plan. And then I also loved the fact that there was so much control in the specialty, which that led me to burnout eventually. Actually, this hunger for control, where I felt like I had control over the patients that I was managing during surgery or in the ICU or in obstetrics, was definitely a draw to the specialty, where I knew that for every drug I gave there was an action or a reaction. If something were to go wrong, I had another drug that would reverse that symptom. And then to be able to control the ventilator settings on a ventilator when a patient's intubated and be able to control how much oxygen is getting in, the pressure that I'm delivering to the lungs and everything like that, was also part of that draw to the specialty.

Hiba:

Everyone knows that doctors are stressed. Anyone who's watched Grey's Anatomy or House or any other medical show on TV has been exposed to the kind of stressful atmosphere or culture of medicine. It wasn't a surprise to me when I became a resident that that was my reality, but I think what I didn't anticipate was that it would get to the point where I just felt apathy or like I was questioning my sense of purpose. I wake up every day knowing that I'm making an impact in someone's life and my work is important, but the cost feels way too high for my personal life or how I want to actually live my life, and that became a really prominent question for me. That made me take some time away from training to go reconnect with my sense of purpose.

Hiba:

In Uganda, I did some volunteer work and tried to connect with my sense of purpose there, be more resourceful in resource-constrained hospitals and try and be a bit more creative in my practice and just learn a different way of practicing medicine from people who did it very artistically. The thing that I realized while I was in Uganda was I brought my burnt-out self along. My personality was the same, if that makes sense. Some of the things that reinforced my burnout were still with me. I had different frustrations, but I was still the same person and I was looking for another escape mechanism.

Hiba:

Okay, maybe I'll take a sabbatical for 10 months, get a job in New Zealand, which is what I ended up doing but simultaneously I ended up reaching out to the program director at Harvard Medical School for medical education because I had been looking at doing that program for years. I thought it would be something I would do in the future is get a master's in medical education, because I absolutely love teaching. I really thought that my frustrations during residency could be fixed by fixing the way we were trained, which was one of the motivations for doing that program. When I did get into the program, I had to make a decision of whether or not to go traveling around South America, learn Spanish and surf for 10 months before going into a job or going to Harvard and getting a graduate degree.

Cyndi:

And you chose the latter.

Hiba:

I used to talk about it as being like a break from medicine.

Cyndi:

Getting a master's degree was a break from medicine.

Hiba:

Master's degree at Harvard, Right yeah.

Cyndi:

Break from medicine. You really know how to settle down.

Hiba:

That's starting to give you an idea of the type A personality of overachiever, highly functional, under stress, constantly needing to achieve and produce and be productive. And even that decision making process started illuminating some of that stuff for me. Because how is that a break? I didn't have life or death decisions to make. The focus was on me and my own learning and growth. In that sense, it felt a lot lower stakes, because it was just up to me to take away what I learned and the only thing at stake was the cost of the degree at the end of the day, which is not someone's life.

Hiba:

Okay, it was through grad school that the reflective process really started happening. When I took my leadership classes at the Kennedy School, I realized how certain identities that I hold whether it's being a woman or being a doctor or being a Middle Eastern woman have shaped and continue to shape who I am. Some of those identities reinforced my burnout and how some of them were protective of it. But how I was leaning in to certain identities at different points really mattered to how my burnout was either reinforced or I was protected against it. So then, when I started understanding that a little bit more, it was really enlightening and destabilizing, because then I had to make changes that were challenging beliefs that I held for my whole life. That felt like a really hard process and it took a few years for me to do that. Now I've decided to make a career out of it, to help people do that work and not have to five years to get there, let's speed up the process, because that's what an overachiever also does.

Cyndi:

Yeah.

Hiba:

I think one thing I struggled with through my own burnout experience is it felt like I always had to make a choice between my personal ambition and professional ambition versus my wellbeing, and I was like, why does it have to be either or? And I think that comes from the narrowed capacity that a burnt out person has. We tend to think in binary when we don't feel well or we don't have the capacity within ourselves to see more options. So I'm helping people build the capacity so that they're able to see more options for themselves. That was a really long-winded answer.

Cyndi:

That was a fantastic answer. Over the weekend I was having dinner with my brother and sister-in-law. We were talking about all the surgeries I've had over my life, which has been a lot. I always love the anesthesiologist. That was my favorite person. Oh, you're going to put me to sleep? Excellent, cause I don't really sleep well and all I wanted to ever do is sleep. It was my favorite role.

Cyndi:

But what I didn't know is, as you said, what is all the combination of interests that you had that led you down that path? I've never known an anesthesiologist to even understand. What was it that was intriguing about that to you? The combination of specialties. So I think that's really fascinating.

Cyndi:

Also, when you're in a high pressure service role, which you were obviously, I mean as a physician, making, as you've said, very important decisions, it is a strange phenomena to say how do you balance that with your own wellbeing when you're there to serve someone else's care? How do you not get into that position where you're putting everyone ahead of yourself? And, as you said, it's hard, because that's the reality that a lot of physicians, a lot of doctors, a lot of medical profession face, but it's not helpful for them, for us as patients. So, really working through that, I think, is very courageous for you, very important, and it also sounds like part of that thought process led you down a lot of paths about what you needed to think about for yourself and your identity. As you said, I think that is a fascinating journey that a lot of people don't take. We don't take that journey into what is my identity at the core and why do I process this way, why am I believing the things I believe and how am I showing up because of that?

Hiba:

It's hard to do that process when you don't have space for it. Yeah, healthcare workers are working over capacity so they're overworked. They are constantly on call or switching shifts. There's a lot of administrative work in healthcare systems. That is actually one of the biggest causes of burnout that work burden that's outside of the clinical work actually, which, if you think about, if you're working 12 to 14 hours a day, or sometimes 24, 48 hour shifts and then having to do administrative workload, of course you have less time for yourself to take care of yourself. Having to do patient notes or billing or things that could be a little bit better automated, which I know some of those solutions are in the process of happening right now. You really need space and support in processing some of the work that I've done. I've also had support in doing that because a lot of it is deep down subconscious beliefs that we're not even aware of. How do you bring the subconscious stuff up to the conscious field where we can actually become aware of it and then do something about it?

Cyndi:

I was mentioning to you, before we started recording, that I did a session today at a local healthcare company and it was 150 leaders, and we were talking about exactly that, that the subconscious drives so much of what we do every day. We get into these automatic patterns of how we operate, how we think, how we problem solve, but also how we take care of ourselves, or don't all of those choices matter in terms of our resilience, in terms of our capacity? We were talking today specifically about being collaborative and innovative. And how do you do that when you don't have the mental or physical reserves to really lean into what it takes to collaborate and collaborate effectively? I think that is just so common. So when you think about grad school and that was a pivotal moment for you and you said you started reflecting on your identity and your beliefs how did that transition then into you essentially leaving your medical profession behind? In a way, you never leave it behind, but you set it aside to start consulting and coaching. So how did that happen, for you?

Hiba:

Even though the whole process of really identifying why it burnt out was enlightening, it was also very destabilizing because it made me face really hard truths. It made me realize, first of all, if I go back to medicine, I two years and it was in the second year that I started that process right before I graduated the real work started happening of the inside out, looking at myself as a system. So what are my identities that I hold, the roles, the hungers that I have for validation and belonging and significance, what are the loyalties that I have that make me show up in the world in a certain way? Once I started digging into that, it just became a destabilizing experience because I was coming to the end of grad school and my plan was to go back to medicine. I had applied for jobs at this point but felt this huge fear of I can't go back just yet because I'm not well-equipped not to burn out again. I know what's going on, I just don't know how not to do this again. How do I go back into a system that's guaranteed to burn me out? Because I really truly believe, and from our experience, the reflection of the capacity of the organization is a reflection of the capacity of the individuals working within it and the health of the organization is a reflection of the health of the employees. Because I had stepped out, I was able to zoom out and see more clearly just the landscape of the system in which I was working and to realize that people in the system with me were also stressed, and that's why it was hard to recognize my own stress, because I was working with a lot of people who were highly functional under stress. I completely belonged to this group of people and I was just one of them. It didn't feel abnormal at the time but for me to have zoomed out, seen the landscape a little bit more clearly from a place of groundedness, seen the landscape a little bit more clearly from a place of groundedness, I know if I go back into the system like this without having a plan to do it differently, I will not have a different experience. And that's what it was really needing in order to feel safe enough to go back into the system and really honor my desire to have a life that felt fulfilling Not just about fulfilling in terms of work, but fulfilling in terms of my life goals, in terms of having a family and having the freedom that I desire.

Hiba:

I interviewed for the job, I got the job my first choice and then I ended up telling a lot of people before my interview, whatever happens, like make sure I don't take the job because I'm not ready. And so when I got the job, all those things that I identified with the shiny carrot or validation that we all crave as human beings of like, oh, I am good enough for this job, of course they would pick me. Look at all my achievements. That feeling of, oh, I'm significant, I'm important and they want me to work for them were temptations to take up the role. Oh, they really want me to work in this place, and it was a very competitive year. I got my first choice, so of course I should take it. Of course it validates the ego. I thankfully had a lot of good friends who were like, remember what you said? I was like no. They were like, no, no, we need to remind you. And I was like, yeah, you're right. And at the same time, another job opportunity had come up from Harvard that I hadn't even applied for. They just offered it to me because I'd been working with them part-time during grad school. It felt like I was given two options, even though I didn't even apply to any other jobs after grad school and I did want more options, but I didn't even know where to start. I ended up taking the Harvard job just to buy myself time.

Hiba:

I would say that I only truly quit medicine a year and a half ago when I stopped paying my licensing fees. I always had that backup plan of, okay, I'll keep paying my licensing fee because one day maybe I'll go back then realizing, okay, I'm keeping this door open. When I started my meditation practice two years ago and things started becoming a lot more clear to me, listening to that kind of inner voice, that's when really I started to see the path a little bit more clearly. And then that's when I decided OK, I'm going to commit to starting a business. I'm going to commit to following these nudges that are coming my way and my intuition and see where it takes me.

Hiba:

If I fail, my backup plan is pretty solid. I can go back and practice and it'll require me to retrain and everything else, which is fine. You want to have a safe doctor at the end of the day. But I really just want to give this everything I've got and I'm going to just make this really difficult decision of leaving this profession behind, because, if I think about my sense of purpose, it's to help people heal.

Hiba:

Yeah, that can be done in many different ways. It doesn't have to be just done through the role of being a physician. I thought about the meta impact of, actually, if I help doctors and nurses heal, if I help people in leadership positions heal, then the impact on their organization and their clients and their patients is much larger than what I can do one on one with patients. So that was my thought process. But again it comes with a lot of disappointing others, like my family, who couldn't really see my vision in the way I was seeing it, and my mentors in medicine who really wanted me to come back. There were losses that were sustained and I had to be the one to hold people through the disappointment.

Cyndi:

Which is challenging to do when you're making a scary and courageous move for yourself. Absolutely, there's the irony.

Hiba:

Yeah, exactly, really. I think that's part of leadership that I learned is how do you hold people through disappointment and loss and how do you make sure that you are also being held, not by the people that you're disappointing? Of course I'm a daughter at the end of the day and I want the validation of my mom, for example, but I can't seek her validation when I'm disappointing her and the dreams she had for me as a doctor. I had to find other avenues where I felt held and cared for by other people that I trusted like confidence, so that I could hold her through the disappointment that I've guided her through.

Cyndi:

It's a very challenging experience and takes a lot of emotional, psychological and physical fortitude. Absolutely good for you for understanding that and recognizing it, because you're going through something and you're caring for those around you, which says a lot about your character and your core that you understood that enough to find what you needed for you and still be there for others along the way.

Hiba:

The journey itself. It hasn't been easy. It's come with a lot of challenges and a lot of reward, as many people who have taken big risks in their lives know. It requires a lot of faith and trust in the vision that you hold, and it's important to have other people be vision holders with you, because you are going to face doubt. You are going to face times when you're like am I making the wrong decision? You are going to face really tough challenges. It will test your emotional and mental strength to keep going on that path. So I think it's really important to identify people who are going to hold the vision with you so that when you do start to doubt and face some of these challenges that someone else is like, I still believe in you. I'll hold the trust when you can.

Cyndi:

That is a beautiful thing and it's a beautiful relationship when you have people in your universe who can do that on your behalf and, as you said you were thinking of, your calling to heal people has always been present. You're doing it in a different way, as you said, and that purpose is going to be at your core, regardless of what role you're playing in it. It's interesting that you're looking above, like, okay, I can help heal patient by patient, or I can help heal a system that is broken for many people and they don't even realize the system is broken. How can I help heal that and them and have a bigger, more strategic impact? And I think that's a beautiful part of your story, which takes a lot of courage to do.

Hiba:

Thank you. The thing about purpose, too, that I want to highlight from my journey because it is one of the protective mechanisms against burnout actually is to be connected to a sense of purpose and to realize that your purpose is not fulfilled by one single role and to realize also my identity as a doctor is just a role I play. Realize also my identity as a doctor is just a role I play. I have the training and the skill set as a physician and I'm going into a role that requires me to have a specific set of skill set to do a specific job. There are expectations from that job in how I perform that role.

Hiba:

What I have often seen not just with doctors and nurses, many people who are passionate about the work they do is they internalize that identity. This is who I am, and actually it's not who you are. You're many things, but you're not this identity that you've internalized. This is just a role and a job specification that you can do and it brings you a sense of fulfillment in some ways. If you lose that, it's not like you lose who you are as a person. We can fulfill our purpose in many different ways and we should absolutely have many different ways in which we fulfill our purpose. I can do that through being a physician. I can do that by being a kind neighbor. I can do that by being a good daughter or a helpful friend. I think it's really important to discern that your identity is not who you are, or your role is not who you are.

Cyndi:

I agree, I don't think anyone teaches us that. In our family it was very. You will graduate from college, you will get a degree, and you get a master's degree and you work and that is important. So who's teaching us in the world what our purpose is? Who's teaching us to think beyond our job and our career, as our identity, and thinking bigger and broader? And that's what I love that you're bringing that perspective into the work that you're doing and you're seeing the connection of purpose to burnout. What do you see as some of the major causes of burnout? And then, what do you think people can start to do about it actions that people can take. So tell me what your mindset is and your practices around that.

Hiba:

I would categorize this and maybe this is the doctor in me that's studying in a certain way but I would categorize things as individual level causes and then organizational level causes of burnout, because they're interrelated. It's not one or the other, it's both. At the individual level, i f we look at the individual causes, some of the causes of burnout are beliefs, and that tends to create extreme work ethic. For example, I will prove my worth through my work or I can do this on my own. I don't need help or no matter what I need to get this done at any cost. Or I can't show my vulnerabilities at work, or I grew up in such a poor environment I must do whatever I can to get myself out of it, to ensure my safety and security through financial security and gaining financial freedom so that my family doesn't suffer.

Hiba:

I grew up thinking that after college I'm going to get a good job and that's kind of the path to success in life. That's another belief. I also grew up with something similar like education, and getting a good job was an important part of my belief system and values that I grew up with in my family, because I come from a family of refugees, so your sense of security and safety is always threatened. I'm one generation removed from the actual refugee experience. My father was a refugee but I myself wasn't. But I still inherited that refugee identity and the insecurity of what being a refugee means because it comes from a place that's close to me. For me, inheriting that refugee experience meant that, no matter what I must endure, I must keep my head down and do my job and not complain, because at any moment your whole life can change and you have to make sure you are safe and you have enough money in the bank and that you're always going to be okay. So that belief system can reinforce that overworking and not complaining.

Hiba:

The other thing with the individual level is misaligned values with the organization or the role that you're doing. A lot of people will take jobs because they pay the bills and they provide the sense of security versus feeling connected to the actual work that they're doing, which is totally fine. But how do you find other ways to connect to your values and align with your values and your sense of joy if work is not providing that for you? And then the other things on an individual level people can't switch off after work and that became a huge thing with COVID and working remotely. There was no boundary between work and home, so then everything started to bleed into each other. There was a lack of recovery period between work and home life and that caused burnout too. And then lack of boundaries is another one.

Hiba:

And then perfectionism is also a big one. I know myself as a recovering perfectionist and I still uncover layers of that every day, even though I've been working through letting go of control over the last few years and surrendering. A lot of magic has happened in my own life when I've done that, but the sense of perfectionism I just noticed it last week actually, when I had the minor family thing happen and I just wanted to be the best aunt ever it was something to do with my niece and then I need to be the best sister to support my brother and his wife, and I need to be the best daughter to support my mom and the best, the best, the best. And I'm like, actually, what does it look like to just be mediocre? What does it look like to just be an okay sister, like an okay, and not be a hundred percent all the time? Maybe last week I needed to show up fully, but other weeks maybe I can show up less and that's okay and like being okay with that.

Hiba:

At the organizational level, some of the biggest causes from research and experience is an unsupportive or a bad working relationship with your boss.

Hiba:

Another big one is an unrealistic workload.

Hiba:

So people often complain about having the work of two or three employees put on them and then unrealistic expectations to meet that demand when the capacity of one individual is not to work two or three people's jobs and then a toxic work culture or not having friends at work is also another cause of burnout.

Hiba:

Another big one that I actually had a conversation with an executive director of a bank this weekend. He said to me one thing I underestimated is if you publicly recognize an employee's contribution, it makes a world of a difference to how they feel at work and how well they show up at work. He was like I started doing that. I started very specifically recognizing things that they are doing publicly in front of other people. So I'll pick out what this person has done and say it in a meeting where it recognizes their effort. And not only does it recognize their effort but it shows them that I actually care about the work that they're doing. Even though I'm not micromanaging them. I'm still paying attention to what they're doing so that their work matters. That's a huge, huge thing that he's noticed in his own practice, but it's also what the research and our experience has also shown.

Cyndi:

The things that you said around individual, around our limiting beliefs, but then you also said our need for safety, our values, our ability to switch off our boundaries, our perfectionism. I mean there's so many things. I'd be hard pressed to think of people that I know that wouldn't have one of those that they're pressing up against. Much less when you think of the bigger organizational system around unsupportive bosses and I get to work with leaders all the time who may believe they're more supportive than they actually are due to a little bit of lack of self-awareness and, as you said, those subconscious habits and processes and practices that we adopt that we don't even know. But capacity, toxicity, friends all of those things make a huge difference as you work with leaders and organizations because I know you do both and as you think about coaching. If you had to think about just a couple of practices that can help people prevent burnout, what would they be?

Hiba:

One of the first exercises we do with all of our clients is really identifying your grounding techniques. I can tell you what mine are. If I try and impose them on you, they're not going to work. So what we try and do and this is our step-by-step coaching process, and what makes it unique is that it's customizable to the person. Everyone is authentic in who they are.

Hiba:

People often ask me what is the solution to burnout? I'm like I don't know. It's not a one size fits all solution. In order for me to give you a good answer to that question, I have to have integrity in my diagnostic process. I have to ask you the right questions and I have to also understand your specific situation and your specific organization. So people are often coming to me being like you're the burnout expert, what's the solution? And I'm like I don't know. Tell me more about you. And then I come back with a lot of questions and that can sometimes frustrate people because they're like why are you asking me all the questions? I'm like I'm trying to understand what your specific needs are and what your specific problem is and I think that's where a lot of people make a mistake at the beginning is not having diagnostic integrity in the process, whether it's a leadership problem or a burnout problem.

Hiba:

The first thing I say to every single person is identify. What is it that keeps you grounded personally? And then I categorize that in three different areas. Who are your people? Who are your confidence? Really, I start identifying who are the people that don't care about your job title, who don't care about your status, who don't care about how much money you make, who just really love you and care for you unconditionally and who are going to be honest with you and who are going to support you, no matter what, really identifying who are your confidence that you can open up and be safe with.

Hiba:

If I say to my confidants I'm really struggling, I am not doing well today, this whole week has been really difficult. I feel like I'm breaking down. They will just catch me and hold me and recenter me. People are important. We're human beings that need a sense of connection to other people and so really identify who are your confidants, and for a lot of people it's usually their partner or their family members or a very close friend. You can't go to every single confidant for the same reason. For example, one of my favorite stories of this is one of the professors I taught with and learned from. He talked about how he went to his wife to complain about how he didn't want her sister to come for the weekend.

Cyndi:

Never a good idea.

Hiba:

Yeah, exactly, he was just like she's, my confidant, but it was a big mistake. She wasn't the right confidant for that problem. I needed to go vent to my brother about this, not my wife. I love that story because it's just really clearly recognizing which confident to go to for which problem.

Hiba:

The second thing for the grounding is what practices do you do? And those are your hobbies. What are the things that really really bring you joy or de-stress you and really ground you and balance your nervous system? For me in medical school it used to be running. I don't do as much running anymore, but it was a really good way for me to just go and be with myself and then if I'm mad or frustrated or stressed or anything, I could really bring myself back. With running I could do that anytime, anywhere, most of the time. Now I walk every day outside, rain or shine, and I need to go for a walk every single day, and so that's one of my practices that I do. The other practices for me are meditation. I meditate at least twice a day and they're my bookends of the day, so I don't get out of bed until I've done my morning meditation and then I do my nighttime meditation before I go to sleep, and those are things that keep me grounded, really identifying what are the practices that work for you. And for some people it's playing tennis, for some people it's playing the guitar. Research has shown people who have other worlds that are completely different from their day-to-day job tend to be more protected against burnout than people who lack hobbies or only put all of their time and energy into their work.

Hiba:

The last thing that is grounding that we make people identify at the beginning of our coaching process is what are the places that make you feel grounded? For me it's a bit random. I live in New York City, but I love walking across the bridges. And it's random because it's chaotic, like it's completely chaotic. There are trains and cars and people and bikes, but for some reason going from Brooklyn to Manhattan and then back or the other way around doesn't matter. Just walking across the bridge somehow grounds me. So then I know that if I'm particularly stressed today, I'll go out and take myself on a walk across the bridge and back, and then somehow my nervous system will calm down.

Hiba:

In Boston, when I was in grad school there, I had a particular bench in the park where I used to go sit and people watch or journal or read a book. Another place for me is going home to my family in Canada. When I'm there I tend to sleep better. It's completely dissociated from my work environment and so then I can feel a bit more relaxed there. It's just identifying what are the practices, people and places that keep you grounded, and then really committing to engaging with at least one of those things at least once a day.

Cyndi:

Oh, I love it. I'm reading a book right now called Peak Mind. It is all about our attention and our mindfulness and getting into a meditation practice, which I absolutely want to do, to just be more present, more mindful and be more self-aware of all, as you said, the things that are really going on with us.

Hiba:

For me. I'm a huge proponent of mindfulness, because if we're in the present moment, we can't be worrying about the future or ruminating on the past. That's usually the source of our anxiety comes from rumination on the past or worrying about the future. So when we're mindful and being completely present in this moment, we can only be in this moment. I'm only here with you right now, cindy. It's not like I'm thinking about the rest of my to-do list for the rest of the day or my upcoming appointments or what I'm going to have for dinner, or the rest of my to-do list for the rest of the day or my upcoming appointments or what I'm going to have for dinner, or I can't think about, oh, that one time I embarrassed myself because I said the wrong thing at the wrong time in front of the wrong people. I can't be in that space of future worry or past rumination if I'm here with you fully.

Cyndi:

I love that. I do. I think it's so important in that as a practice as you said, people, practices and places. I think that mindfulness and being able to find that for all of us is core to our well-being. In a way that I haven't understood, I think, ever. I'm understanding it more deeply because I'm more in touch with my purpose than I have been. You said that kind of anchors us and I think, as that anchors me, I keep trying to figure out okay, how do I fulfill my purpose and make sure that I'm adopting healthy practices that will get me there? It's inspirational that you found that at at your age.

Hiba:

I've made a couple of career transitions already where most people my age are now trying to assert themselves as experts in a particular path. I had a taste of medicine. I did my residency in medicine, but I didn't continue down that path. So I'm not an anesthetic expert because I haven't had many more years after training to prove that I am. So in that sense, there feels sometimes and it's part of my own work and my regulating my own thoughts and beliefs about that of no, just because society tells us that this is a way that we should be working and living. And going against the grain feels hard, it doesn't mean it's wrong. I've always felt like a black sheep in my family, but even more so after having made these decisions because I'm now a black sheep in my own profession. Absolutely like you said, it takes great courage, but it also takes a lot of regulating my own nervous system.

Cyndi:

I've done the same thing. I made some really interesting life choices and a lot of what I believed the perception of other people would be helped me back from making them earlier in my life and once I realized that I'm putting other people's limitations on what I want to do and letting go of those voices and those beliefs is very difficult. But I think I recognize that in you too, and so do admire it right now, as we're having this conversation.

Hiba:

I love what you just said there, because if we hold ourselves to the expectation of other people, we will always disappoint somebody else. We might meet the expectation of our parents, for example, but disappoint our siblings or our co workers. People will always come in with a set of expectations and usually they're contradictory to each other. If we're constantly chasing validation by meeting the expectations of others and creating resentment within ourselves because we don't feel like we're connecting to our authenticity or our purpose or our sense of joy, and where we draw joy from, Again, joy is very authentic.

Hiba:

What brings me joy is going to be different to everyone else on the planet. We might have some shared joyful markers or experiences or benchmarks, but they're not going to be exactly the same. I think I've discussed this with you before. I really do believe that joy is the antidote to burnout, because when you're feeling happy or joyful, it's hard to feel stressed, and when we're laughing and when we're connecting to our sense of creativity and flow and joy, we can't be burnt out at the same time. And most of us, when we are stressed, we let go of joy because it feels luxurious and it feels extra and it it feels unnecessary because we have so much on our plate.

Cyndi:

I don't have time for joy. I'll do joy next week.

Hiba:

Exactly, I don't have time to play, but actually that's another really protective measure against burnout. Against burnout, and that's another thing that we do with clients is help them identify their authentic sources of joy so that they can connect with that more at a very broad level. So it's not like always I have to go see a funny movie. It might be that, but it's like laughter is really important to you. How can you laugh more through an exercise that we do with them to really help each person identify what are the at least five things that bring you joy from your life's history. And we take an inventory from your life. Most people, when they come to me, they're usually pretty stressed. They're usually like I'm not happy at all, I'm completely disconnected from my sense of joy.

Cyndi:

What is this thing you call joy? I don't know what it is.

Hiba:

I met someone a few weeks ago who said to me I'm just exercising because I know it's good for me, but actually I feel so disengaged from life. I just feel like I'm so overworked that there's nothing good going in my life. But I know I'm exercising because it's helping me keep my stress levels under a little bit of control and I felt sad because I know what that's like. I know exactly what you're talking about. I've been there and it's really really hard place to be and it sucks. I'm sorry but, like a lot of people will just go on vacation for a week or two and then hope that things will be better and they are temporarily.

Hiba:

But what I used to find is it took me a few days to unwind, really allow myself to be on vacation, and then you get to the end of your vacation and you're dreading going back to work and within a few weeks of being back at work, it's just back to the same old story. So our work is really to just break that cycle of no, it doesn't have to be the same old story, it doesn't have to feel burdensome to be at work. And actually how can we make you happy at work so that you're productive and doing all the things that you love doing, and giving your best, because all of us want to be feeling like we're achieving something or making a difference or an impact in the world, also taking time and feeling fulfilled at home and loving your life at the same time. It doesn't have to be either or.

Cyndi:

It's a great summary of all the things that you've shared today, Hiba. We have a choice to make about how we all want to live our lives, and we don't have to live a life of suffering and misery. That's a choice, and I think a lot of us don't realize that there is a choice involved in there because we don't know that there are other options available. We're very binary when it comes to stress and being able to even envision a life that's different. So I want to honor and appreciate everything you've said today about your own journey to find that purpose. That's very different from maybe what you thought it was initially going to be and how you experienced all of these life, let's say, transitions and life questions that you were willing to ask and answer for yourself.

Cyndi:

And, as I mentioned, I keep saying courage, because I know it takes a lot of courage to do that. You've done the work and now you get to help people to do this. So for the studio audience, anyone who is burnt out or feeling, let's see that they have lack of boundaries, they have perfectionism tendencies, they work in a toxic environment all of those things. You can be a source and a resource for them and I love that about the work you do. I appreciate you taking the time. In the show notes I will put a connection to your website for people to be able to look up embers and what it is you do and how you do it. So thank you so much for your time today.

Hiba:

Thank you, Cyndi. It's been a pleasure talking to you too.