Mindy Thomas

Career Chat – Mindy Thomas Interviews Beth Kennedy

Mindy Thomas interviews Beth Kennedy about how Covid19 has impacted the levels of stress on the American public. 

Mindy Thomas :

Hi everyone. I’m Mindy Thomas and this is career chat and we air every Monday at 11:30 AM and Tuesday nights at 8:00 PM. No one is immune from stress. In fact, there was a recent Gallup poll that surveyed nearly 8,000 people, 23% said they were burned out or over the top. Another 43% said they experienced high levels of stress. So it’s, it’s now with the Covid 19 on top of regular workforce drama and suffering, if you will. We have a ton of stress put on our backs and bringing you an expert today, Beth Kennedy coming in from Boston, Massachusetts. She’s the CEO, of Benatti Training and Development. Beth, Welcome to Career Chat.

Beth Kennedy:

Thank you Mindy. Really excited to be here.

Mindy Thomas :

Excited to have you. Beth, you’re known as a resiliency coach. I call you the burnout coach. Where did you find this passion for helping people through burnout and stress? Where does this come from?

Beth Kennedy:

So it comes from my own personal experience of what I call down the burnout escalator. So many years ago after graduate school, I received my dream job offer working in the Boston public school as a school outreach counselor. And I loved it. I thought I’d retired doing that kind of work. And one of the things that used to drive me crazy was there were so many burnt out teachers. And I’m like, that’ll never be me. Year seven, I started going down that burnout escalator. I was exhausted. I was losing my excitement. But the worst thing happened and that was, I became a clock watcher. And that used to drive me crazy. The teacher should still leave and make it to their cars before the students would leave their lockers. So I was so frustrated when I started watching the clock and realizing I was going through some of those burnout symptoms and decided I needed to make a change. So I’ve always studied stress management since college. And my mission now, or my organization is to prevent burnout and to have every professional, every individual focused on resiliency.

Mindy Thomas :

Well Beth, you are a recent author. You just published this smash success in my eyes called career recharge and you talk about the resiliency strategies, how to prevent burnout. Can you walk us through this little model so we can get an idea of what this is about and if people could really be successful at deflating the stress and the burnout in their lives?

Beth Kennedy:

Sure. So the cornerstone of the book is what I call the Benatti resiliency model and it’s named after my dad because he was the most incredible resilient entrepreneur. He owned his own moving company, family moving company in New York. And as I walked through the model, I’ll share some other little tips as well. So, the first strategy is wellbeing. And what I mean by that is focusing on your physical, emotional, and spiritual health. The second is self awareness, being aware of what is your purpose, what’s that true or, and it might be professionally, but it also might be personally. And do you have a growth mindset and are, do you have awareness of your personality type and how that affects you? And your stress level. The third area is what I call brand and resiliency experts. Don’t focus on brand, but it’s really important because this is your unique attributes and this is what makes you stand out, the impact that you make in your career, but also what is your reputation? And the fourth area is connection. And that is cultivating relationships personally and professionally and bodily innovation. How do you challenge yourself? And I don’t mean just at work, but also in your own hobbies and your own fun activity.

Mindy Thomas :

Well, that model sounds all well and good, but how do we put that into planning and executing on this type of, these types of strategies? So when you’re looking at wellbeing, what kinds of strategies do you have that would help us with our wellbeing?

Beth Kennedy:

Great question. Mindy, I think really important about my book, career recharge, is that the goal for everyone to have customized strategies for you? So actually as people go through my process, they’re a unique, what I call resiliency boosters. And these are customized for you. So you read through when you decide, Ooh, I think this could add impact or I think that could add impact. I think it’s important for me to mention where this came from. I was a coach for the Gillette company for many years and when P and G purchased them, it was a huge transition. How did the people that are losing their jobs, and I’ve worked with many of these people and one of the things I found was there were key ways that people were moving forward, really moving forward, really being resilient. And I noticed there were five common areas and these were these five areas, wellbeing, self-awareness, brand connection and innovation.

Beth Kennedy:

But to go back to your question what I want to do is just share with you how it works. So for example, for wellbeing somebody, this might be, you might just decide, Oh, I need to focus on my wellbeing. This is a booster that I have in my book. When dealing with work and personal stresses, ask yourself, what is in your control? Focus on what you can change rather than stressing out over what you cannot control. So it’s really taking a step every day and asking yourself three questions. And I called this my Friday five, and what I mean by that is only takes five minutes. It started by my clients doing this every Friday. But I would encourage you during this transition for all of us to ask ourselves these three questions. The first question is, what would my resiliency wins this week or today?

Beth Kennedy:

So what did I do? Did I go for a walk at lunch? Did I go, you know, do I call a friend? What did I do to move myself forward? Resiliency. Does it mean we just let ourselves be clobbered and we just survive? Resilience means we arrived. The second question is, what is my resiliency goals for tomorrow? And the third question is, how am I going to make this happen? So that’s that key about these resiliency strategies, scheduling it into our calendar, especially times like the third. So much stress. We’re on a roller coaster ride. So we need to be practicing small resiliency strategies like deposits in a bank account. They need to be happening all day long.

Mindy Thomas :

I see. So, there must be a real uptick right about now. Yes. In your business, you’re coaching nurses and doctors and first responders and essential workers right now. And so are the methods and the strategies that you are talking about, are they working for your client base right now?

Beth Kennedy:

I’m working with a lot of scientists and doctors. And I think what, what has made me feel really great is that one thing that keeps saying is that word reached out. They said that it is so helpful to think simple and to have strategies so that I can get through that next day because we forget all of the things that everyone’s stressed. It’s so different. So I have clients that are working with all the different time zones in Europe and around the world because they want to be available to other doctors and that’s exhausting. So we need to have strategies of disconnecting. But realizing right now, some people are involved in really important projects that they have to be giving a lot more than they sending normally are.

Beth Kennedy:

So it’s been great to hear three things from my clients that my strategy has been enhanced, enhancing their resilience. They feel like at the end of the day they’re making an impact and they’re, they’re having influence over others because it’s so important these days to be making sure we’re connecting with colleagues, we’re connecting with close friends. Again, we need to keep recharging ourselves because it’s so easy to run on empty. And I think we’ve all been feeling that. And to remember there is not just one magic answer that we all have to be responsible for ourselves. We have to look out for others. And we have to really focus on this idea of our resilience.

Mindy Thomas :

Well, it is, it’s very difficult to get yourself up out of the rabbit hole. A lot of people are going dark right now. They’re isolating. There were people that suffered from depression and other mental illness Pre Covid. Now we have Covid layered on top of this. So I’m just wondering, could you tell us a little success story about one of your clients that used implemented and executed on your strategies? Do you have anyone in mind that you could tell us about?

Beth Kennedy:

Yeah, for some reason a woman that I coached, her name is Lee, just popped into my mind just because I’m thinking about the transition that we’re all going through. I just a little background, she had her MD and PhD degree in and her passion was accurate cancer and I was hired to help her be more impactful at meetings because she had a very quiet temperament and we were working through the model. It was about five and a half months. We were working together. She only had two weeks left and she started having some serious medical issues. So, I get this call from her and she and I knew something was going on, but I had no idea if that’s specific. And she said back, I have some good news to share with you, but some really bad news to share with you. So, she shared with me the bad news first.

Beth Kennedy:

And it was that she’d been diagnosed with brain cancer was less than six months in the left. Oh my goodness. And I was in a shock. So my 25 plus years of coaching, I’ve never had anyone just come out and share this today. And you know, one of my typical coaching sessions, but then she said something that made me really fall off my chair. And she said, well, the good news is I spoke with my HR manager and with my own manager and I can continue to have coaching for as long as I can continue to work. And I said to her, Lee, you know, is this really the best use of our time together? And she said, there’s something I want you to know. I’ve been in, I’ve been through school for so many years. I’ve been studying and I’ve been trying to cure cancer.

Beth Kennedy:

And what I’ve learned through working through your resiliency model is how important, not only resilience is, but knowing our purpose. And she said, I am so clear that right now my purpose is to cure cancer for as long as I’m on this world. So I am so supportive that my company is providing me with coaching so that I can continue to move forward. And one of the things she said that I still I just always remember is she said, and it also makes me think about what’s most important to me in my life. What matters most? So I think at these times of transition, and you were talking about, you know, people going through challenges with depression, with cancer, with all these things, there’s so many layers in what’s going on today. I think one of the things we all need to think about is what matters most. And sometimes some of the stressors that we’re facing, there are so many other people with more intense challenges going on every day. So I feel really grateful when I think about Lee and I was able to coach her for the next six months till she passed. And it’s just a nice legacy that I feel like I’ve been able to leave with my Benatti resiliency model,

Mindy Thomas :

Heartbreaking story. That but what a tribute to your coaching and your expertise. It’s really important to know your purpose and the why behind what you do. Simon Sinek speaks up and wrote a book about the why. Right. And so I, I’m wondering about you and, and what kind of strategies you use on a daily basis to cope with the stress because your job is full of talking to stressful people. All you’re coaching them day in and day out. How do you handle that stress yourself?

Beth Kennedy:

Yeah, great question. Thank you. So one of the things that I do is I’m definitely, and again I don’t recommend what I do is necessarily the best method or strategy for everybody, but it’s, I will share with you kind of what my schedule looks like because I am scheduled person. So the first thing I do is exercise. I’ve been really appreciative of all the different YouTube videos that are out there, the yoga, weightlifting. We also have an elliptical in our house. I try to do 20 minutes on the elliptical every other day and that’s how I kick off my morning. And then my favorite to get my favorite cup of tea go to my office. And then I do a 10 minute meditation and I use the calm app. And if people aren’t familiar with that, it’s calm.com and they offer a pretrial period.

Beth Kennedy:

I would highly recommend it right now. And again. One of the things about meditation, which is so wonderful is we all have that monkey mind. It’s mind right now. We’re making so many decisions. We’re getting so much decision fatigue and meditation is the chance to press the pause buttons and we’re still gonna have monkey mind, but it gives us a chance to press pause, recharge our brain, which is so important at a time like this. So I do that. That’s something that I do every morning. 10 minutes and then I get into my day. So to start my day I, I take out a posted note and I write down three things. What is my resilience going to look like today? By am I going to go for a walk in the afternoon? The second thing is impact.

Beth Kennedy:

I need to get done today cause it’s so easy to kind of get all over the place with everything going on. And the third is influence. You know, who do I need to reach out to? Is there a company that I need to follow up with? Is there a webinar I need to finish? So that provides me the best structure for my day. And then at the end of the day, it’s really important for me to figure out a way to recharge. It’s so hard working from home. I’m used to being in Boston, so it’s easy for me to keep checking emails and keep, you know, working. So by five 30, I sign up to go for a nice walk with our dog, Naples, who’s been a life saver. And then I kind of transitioned to the evening, really try to be mindful making dinner, but remind myself, it’s like everyone else is going to be ups and downs. There’s going to be grumpiness. But recharging is so important.

Mindy Thomas :

It seems a part of the success to this program as attaching very concrete and tangible concepts to it to attach that to the, the program. We have to take a short break. I’d like to come back in just a few minutes after our commercial break and talk about how important it is to have tangibles attached to each of those things you spoke about. We’ll be right back.

Beth Kennedy:

Okay. Sounds good. Thanks.

Mindy Thomas :

Hi everybody. Welcome back to Career Chat. We are with Beth Kennedy, the CEO of a Benatti Training and Development right out of Boston. She is known as the resiliency coach. I call her the burnout coach because she is all about helping people work through the stress of burning out in their given careers. Beth, we talked about the Friday five. What is that?

Beth Kennedy:

Okay, so I not mentioned it real quickly in the beginning. So one of the strategies that I do with all my clients is that an all of you can do it right now is you take out your phone and you plan five minutes, you put in your phone, recharge in all caps and you do it at a time in the morning. So when you have your cup of coffee or a cup of tea and then you’re get, like Mindy said, I like to be very have very smart goals, specific, measurable action oriented results, timely. You set a timer for five minutes and during that five minutes you are going to ask yourself, what is my resiliency goals for today? How am I going to do that? Cool. What’s my action item? And then the third part is what is my goal for the next day? So basically by spending five minutes every Friday, you’re planning your goals out for the week. But I’ve been recommending to people during this transition to do it every morning. So five minutes of resilient planning a day can add impact, influence and recharge.

Mindy Thomas :

I love it. I love it. Let me ask you this. What do you think you’ve learned the most as a result of working in this area of resiliency? What, what’s coming up for you as a result of your learning?

Beth Kennedy:

What, what has been the biggest shock to me is how much you can love your career and still burn out. And I think we’re seeing that a lot with healthcare professionals, doctors. One of the things I’ll, I’ll never forget one of my corporate clients and, and I was interviewing this individual and everything she said was, I love my job, but she was so glad she had no assets. And I kept on giving her examples and finally I said, is everything okay? And she said, I’m just exhausted. But I really liked my job. And I think the part that’s so important for me to work for everyone to realize is at different times in our career, we’ve made to go on down that burnout escalator and we need to pay attention to that. And the most exciting news is that we can go right up the escalator and I call it pressing the button up the elevator and we can recharge ourselves.

Beth Kennedy:

So and the reason why I call myself the resiliency coach is…. I’m about preventing burnout. And I feel like this needs to be a competency that all organizations need to be adding to their toolbox. I’m thrilled right now that I have a full day class that goes with the book career recharge and I’m thrilled right now I’m offering to companies in webinar format and all employees are getting the books. So I think organizations throughout USA are starting to realize, you know, resilience is a key competency and it can help all of us move forward.

Mindy Thomas :

Interesting. Beth, are you saying then that someone could love their job, be burning out and not know they’re burning out?

Beth Kennedy:

Yes, yes. And in my coaching, I can think right now of three or four people just from the last six months that when I did their intake, I ask a very crucial question. I asked them what keeps them up at night. And also when I ask this question, there’ll be a lot of very painful things that come up about their career. So they love their career, but there’s so many aspects that are pushing them down that burnout escalator. And sometimes it’s because they work so hard that it’s hard for them to have boundaries and sometimes they’re not other areas of their life to focus on.

Mindy Thomas :

In other words, they have no personal life. Right. And they are really focusing in on their work. What kind of issues when you ask them, what are you staying up at night and what’s bothering you? What are the pain points? What are some examples of what’s bothering them? Maybe our audience can relate with that.

Beth Kennedy:

Yeah. one example that actually someone just said to me yesterday, was she, every, every time she has a meeting with their manager, she put on another new project because she’s the one that gets it done. So she said, isn’t this unbelievable? I’m the one who gets it done and I’m spread so thin. I don’t want to say no because you know, I’m a high achiever. So I think, I think we have to also kind of think about that we should all think about our definition of success. And I gave her that as a homework assignment. So success is not for me. It’s not just achieving my goal, it’s about having time for what’s most important in my life. So for some of these high hardworking professionals, I had them think about what does success mean to you? And maybe it does mean at 5:00 PM or 6:00 PM turning off that computer and getting disconnected, but also having some hard conversations with your manager that we can’t be everything to everybody.

Mindy Thomas :

So Beth, you’re really defining values. What’s near and dear to your heart? What makes you happy on the job? I think probably these folks, when you actually define those values, maybe none of them are getting met.

Beth Kennedy:

You know what? You nailed it, Mindy. One of the exercises that I have in my book is called the purpose my map. And I take the reader through it step by step. And the first step is I have them determine their values. So for all of these employees that I work with in coaching, they also do this purpose mind map. And often the first thing that comes back is, these are my values. These are my top seven values, but I’m only getting two of them and we know that’s what we need to start working on. I think at time like this, we all need to take a step back and think about what is working in our career. It’s never going to be perfect. But is there something that can be tweaked a little bit?

Beth Kennedy:

This is an opportunity for reflection and it’s an opportunity to have the courage for some of these conversations. But also I think we have to remember our careers can, can’t be a hundred percent everything. So how can I get some of these volunteer, some of these values outside of work. And what I wanted to share was I just had a client on email me to incredible volunteer work she’s doing for the rotary club and I’m going to actually feature her next month in my blog because you can actually be involved online with E rotary clubs and be making a difference all over the world. So volunteer work is a huge value that helps prevent

Mindy Thomas :

Part of what’s going on. Beth and you know this better than anyone that people are running the 50 yard dash all day long. They don’t have time to reflect, they don’t have time to take a breath. Some people like the pharmacist can’t even go to the restroom, eat, launch. I mean there are occupations that are really struggling where people, I should say people are struggling and occupations where they just can’t take a breath. You said, listen, let’s go with five minutes on the calm app today. Just five minutes. That’s what I asked my client to do. I use insight timer. That’s my favorite. But like let’s just do one five minute meditation and let me let, let’s listen to it so you can hear what that sounds like. I’ll tell you what, when I listened to insight timer and I take whether it’s five minutes or 22 minutes on a meditation app, I’m telling you, it does something really magical for me. And I know that you agree, Beth, that you know you’re doing the meditation and the yoga. We do a lot to support our mental health as practitioners out here in a very chaotic world. So we have to close in just a minute. I really like you to tell the audience they want to get in touch with you. If they want to buy your fabulous book called career recharge, where do they need to go and how do they get in touch with you?

Beth Kennedy:

Okay. So I would just want to thank everyone for listening today and for Mindy for this opportunity. My book is available on Amazon. It’s called Career Recharge : Five Strategies to boost resilience and beat burnout and it’s available as an ebook. It’s still available as an audio book. If you would love to hear some resilience tips, you can find out I have a monthly newsletter and you can find that on my website@www.bethkennedy.com and if you’re on LinkedIn, send me a little note to say that you saw me on Mindy’s career chats and I would be happy to connect with you on LinkedIn cause it’s a great way for all of us to kind of share our wisdom and also just to continue to move forward with our resilience.

Mindy Thomas :

Well, Beth, thank you so much for this valuable interview and all the resources that you shared with our audience. Thank you so much. I want to say to our viewing audience, especially our healthcare professionals, please be safe. Thank you for your service and sacrifice, especially our essential workers, our medical teams, and everyone else that is out there trying to fight the Corona virus for us, the American public, to the rest of my audience. A lot of things are changing, but one thing that won’t be changing is you can count on career chat. We’re here every Tuesday at 8:00 PM and Mondays at 11:30. I will see you next week. Be safe, be strong.