Timestamps

00:00:00: Announcement

00:01:12: Introduction

00:03:03: Defining burnout

00:05:28: Impacts on burnout through the pandemic

00:08:32: Root causes of burnout

00:12:37: How to start to address burnout symptoms

00:18:34: Reaching a tipping point and lack of confidence

00:25:48: Optimism for a solution to burnout

00:34:42: Jennifer's career advice

00:36:49: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hello everybody, it's Sarah here from the Squiggly Careers podcast.  Just before we dive into today's episode, I just wanted to borrow you just for a minute or so to let you know about a new programme that we're launching, all about Squiggle and Stay.  Some of you might have listened to that episode a couple of weeks ago, or maybe you've read our new HBR article on Reimaging Retention.

As part of our commitment to making careers better for everyone, we're looking for ten organisations to work with, who are really keen to experiment with how they can support people to progress and develop in different directions in their organisations.  So hopefully, we'll bring lots of ideas and collaboration, and we're looking for people all over the world to join in with this programme. We're looking for about ten organisations, and if you want to find out more, you can email me at sarah@amazingif.com; or, if you go onto my LinkedIn page, you'll see a Squiggle and Stay post, which has a PDF all about the project, and we've got two calls set up on 20 July and 1 August where your organisation can find out more.

So, I really hope that feels relevant for some of you listening, and we'll now get started with today's podcast. Hello, I'm Sarah Ellis, and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, where each week we talk about a different topic to do with work, and hopefully give you some ideas for action and tools to try out that are really going to help you to navigate your Squiggly Career with that bit more confidence, clarity and control. I'm not joined by Helen this week, because this is one of our Ask the Expert episodes, where we see someone who we think is doing some really insightful and useful work in the area of careers; usually, they've got a really deep-dive perspective on a certain topic, and we really want to talk to them to find out more, to get their words of wisdom to share with you.

And so today's guest is Jennifer Moss, and Jennifer has a great new book out, called The Burnout Epidemic, and I first came across her work because I read a deep-dive, I think they're called Big Idea Article, that she wrote for Harvard Business Review, which we will link to in the resources, and I would really recommend taking the time to read the article; and then, if that sounds interesting, you can learn more by following her on LinkedIn and looking at her book and the work that she does. What I really like about her perspective on burnout is that it feels more nuanced than just saying, "We're all stressed and we're all working really hard".  I feel like she has really taken the time to bring together the science of the topic with then her experiences of what really helps, but also what she's seen work really well for individuals and for organisations.  So, I hope you find this episode helpful, and I'll be back at the end to let you know how you can learn more. Jen, welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast.  I'm really looking forward to our conversation today.

Jennifer Moss: I'm so glad to be with you today, it's going to be a great conversation, I can already tell.

Sarah Ellis: So, we're going to dive right into the topic of burnout, as it is everywhere at the moment.  It is on the front of magazines, I see people writing loads of articles about it, and it is certainly a term, I think, that feels increasingly familiar for all of us.  I think we hear the word in conversations much more than we used to, but I'm not sure that everyone means the same thing when they use this phrase of "Burnout". So, I'd really be interested to start our conversation today with, what does burnout mean to you, and what's a useful definition that we can work with, as we progress through our conversation together?

Jennifer Moss: So, I think that's a foundational question, because I really strongly believe that the reason why we haven't treated it as well, we haven't had the right tools to prevent it, organisations and leaders themselves, they’ve been lost and we've pressed burnout on the individual to solve, is this lack of definition, this nebulous way we think about burnout. I really tend to lean towards what Dr Maslach, Dr Michael Lieter, Dr Susan Jackson, all three of them really have been promoting, 40 years in the making until 2019, where the World Health Organisation defined burnout as, "Institutional stress left unmanaged", workplace phenomenon.  It is a condition of micro-stressors over time building up until we hit that wall of burnout, and it's serious.  In that same year, the ILO put out that overwork was the cause of 2.8 million deaths annually.

So, that was in tandem, they wanted to say, "Okay, this is serious, we have to pay attention to it", and it shows up in these three major signs: so, high levels of depletion, just feeling exhausted at the end of the day, in the morning you feel like you can't get yourself out of bed and you're still depleted, you're losing track of your work, you need stimulant sometimes to stay awake during the day, and then you need ways to then relax at the end of the night, which feels impossible; we also see it show up in a lack of emotional connection to our work, we stop feeling like we're good at our jobs; and then, that cynicism piece, which we really saw grow in the pandemic, just this feeling of hopelessness and unable to actually make change to our situation. You put those together, you feel that over time frequently, and then you hit that wall that we call burnout.

Sarah Ellis: I might be making assumptions, so you can correct me if I've not gone down the right path here, but certainly from everything I've read, it feels like we are in a worse position than we were, certainly pre-pandemic.  So, I was reading some of your research, which described, I think we can all associate with this, that basically in the last couple of years, most of us have had this "always on" experience when it comes to work. We sometimes describe it as these blurred boundaries where, and I think the stats were, we now have 12% or 13% more meetings, our days are elongated by 45 minutes to an hour, which actually, that's just a day, and you can imagine how much then that adds up; and, it feels like the expectations on us, in terms of what we need to deliver and how productive we're all meant to be, almost feels overwhelming in terms of when you really start to paint this picture. So, I would just be interested to hear your reflections on how the last couple of years have either changed burnout, or perhaps accelerated some trends that you were already observing?

Jennifer Moss: Absolutely, the pandemic exacerbated a whole bunch of existing problems that were already there and getting to a boiling point, and this just sped up the boiling point really.  What we saw in the research and data, and I've been researching this for a while, and looking at the number of people that were experiencing symptoms of burnout in the workforce was around 40% to 45%, which was still significant pre-pandemic.  And you saw that in fields like healthcare, even more at risk at burnout, and then you see it in tech and production-focused environments like finance, etc.  So, there were certain industries that were already more burned out and at risk before the pandemic. But then, in the pandemic, we started to see numbers like 90%, 77%, in various sectors.  Right now just in Canada, there was a recent study of nurses, and 92% of Canadian nurses are female, and 90% of them said that they are hit-the-wall burned out.  The numbers are really quite catastrophic, and the culture of always-on was leading up to this. 

I mean, the technology and the social contract had changed already leading up to the pandemic, where it was, "Here's your technology, you can answer now at 11.00pm at night in your home", so there was already an intrusion. Then we saw, I mean Microsoft Trends data that just released the 2022 Trends Report, said that we have increased our meetings by 252% in the last two years.  It was about 167% before, now it's 252%.  So, there are these other aspects of the pandemic that led to flexibility, which was great with remote work, but it also became a bit of a curse, in that we have no bifurcation between work and life.  There's other factors that are playing a role in why the pandemic has increased burnout so much, but a lot of it just has to be that fact; we're dealing with the macro-stressor, and then you have these increased workloads and meeting fatigue, and all those other factors that are making us increasingly at risk of burnout.

Sarah Ellis: And, one of the things I found really fascinating, when I was delving a bit deeper into the work that you've done, is I do think there is an automatic assumption, or certainly I think I approached your work thinking, "Burnout equals I've done something wrong.  I get that it's bad for me, but almost maybe I have made some bad choices, and this is something that I need to take control of", and almost beat yourself up. 

You beat yourself up, because potentially you've got to burnout. If I think about some of the people that I have worked with and talked to over the past couple of years, that's certainly the narrative that I hear from people.  They're giving themselves a really hard time, and they're having a very hard time, because they're definitely in burnout and they're blaming themselves.  And I think what your work has shown is that firstly, that's not the complete picture, and we need to think about both what is happening in organisations, and from an individual perspective. So, I wondered if you could talk to us a bit more about that dynamic, that difference in terms of who owns this challenge, and who solves this problem, because I don't think it's as simple as, "This is my fault, and therefore I need to sort this"?

Jennifer Moss: I think that when I wrote the book, and why it was "provocative", it was pushing more accountability to leadership, to organisations, even policy and government and global expectations and societal expectations.  And, it was saying we need to look at this in a much broader way, we need to tackle burnout prevention with solutions that are much further upstream.  We'd been placing it on the individual to solve with self-care alone, "Here, you just breathe better, or just say no to work".  I mean, that's a privilege that very few people can have access to, "More yoga and sleep better", and all those things will just impact your burnout. That felt so frustrating to me and disingenuous, because when you look at the root causes of burnout, there's no way that listening to rain on an app for 15 minutes is going to eliminate systemic discrimination and lack of fairness inside of organisations, which is a root cause of burnout. 

So, I wanted to look more at understanding where it starts, and there are these root causes of burnout, and they're very institutionally based. We do need to still, especially as leaders, model self-care, we do need to have self-care in our lives; that's really important.  We, as leaders especially, have to say, "I'm going to take my weekends and not connect, I'm going to not look at my emails and text and communicate with you after work hours, I'm going to take an actual vacation", these are things that we still need to do.

But a lot of why we blame ourselves, not only because expectation is all that has been squarely placed on our shoulders for the last however long we've been talking about burnout, but also what happens when we experience chronic stress over time, we develop these symptoms of chronic stress that include brain fog, which is this sense of not being able to focus, feeling like you have to work harder to get to those same goals; you make more mistakes; you're more irritable, so there's more conflict, so less conflict-resolution; you're more likely to just want to be heads-down in the work, and your productive relationships start failing. All these things that get misdiagnosed as underperformance are actually chronic stress, so you start to question, "Well, I must just be underperforming, I must just be disengaged, I guess I'm not good at my job and so I deserve this" or, "It's my fault that I am now burned out", and we don't track back to say actually, these things, this overwork, these unsustainable workloads, feeling passed over for promotions because of, whatever, racial bias or prejudice exist in my workplace, or feeling bullied or lack of psychological safety at work; all these things have created this chronic stress, which has then forced me to not be as good at my job.  So it's easy to say, "I'm bad at my job, I don't deserve to be here", and ignore the burnout piece of it.

Sarah Ellis: Any other examples that you've seen of either things that individuals have done well, or organisations?  So, particularly if you're someone listening to this right now and they are thinking, "What Jen has just described is absolutely me", so you're thinking, "I am that person, I've got all those characteristics that you describe, I am feeling depleted, I do need something to get me through the day", where would you encourage or support people to start?  If you've got the awareness that you recognise the burnout feeling, where do I go after that?

Jennifer Moss: As you know, inefficiencies are just the bane of every organisation's existence, and why can't we reduce meetings, have guidelines where we assess who should be there; who's the attendees; who are necessary?  How do we get people to feel more comfortable about politely declining a meeting and create cultures of being able to say, "I don't think I'm going to be able to offer as much value to that meeting", and not feel like that means that you're not a good employee, or a dedicated employee; and make people that are organising the meeting not worry so much about overlooking or hurting someone's feelings by not inviting them, saying, "Hey, I'm going to give you some time back". Also, if you're going to host a meeting, have expectations on that host that they set a very strict agenda. 

So, if someone can come in at 10.15 and leave at 10.25, you give them a time slot where they're going to add value, and then they can be off.  These are important things that we do.  We should do an audit; how much time are we spending in our salaries on not just meetings, but time theft, when we go over and we think it's okay to steal people's time?  When you look at those modes of actually meeting, we've fallen victim to, "It has to be video-conferencing", and I think we can get on walk-and-talks, and we can use different modes of communication, because this by nature now has become boring; we lack novelty to it, so people are disappearing.  How do you create asynchronous meetings? These are all tiny tactics that we can start to practise, and that's what a manager or a person, an individual inside of an organisation, can just start doing today, saying, "Hey, guys on my team, girls on my team, we're going to now be much more respectful about our stealing time from each other.  There's going to be penalties on going over", and make it fun, like a swear jar, right?  You put 25 cents in per minute that we go over a meeting.  Find ways that are novel to keep them short.  Have stand-up meetings.  All these are very simple tools to give people time back. When you see this in that 32-hour, 4-day work week, you're very efficient with your time, you're very careful with other people's time, you are not worrying so much about process, you're more focused on just getting to the goals, having shared goals, all meeting those without it being an individual's job to have to get to their goal by the end of the week. 

Again, these are things that we can start immediately, tomorrow when we go back into the workplace, and start to create some structure and have dialogue about, "How do we get our time back?" The more we can get our time back, the more we can get our work done in the day, the less urgent needs knock us off of our path, the more respected we feel.  And then, that gives us time to actually do some of these other things that we think are frivolous that aren't, like creative thinking time and innovating, and being a competitive company that actually might increase their revenue and growth, without burning their people out.  So, there is a possibility ahead, and it's not an overhaul for us to get there.

Sarah Ellis: And I think, what's so interesting is often when I talk to teams about maybe some of their current ways of working, or behaviours, and I'll sometimes be a little bit provocative, and give them, I like to think of it as a nice nudge, but I'm testing a little bit, I'll often say, "Tell me why you do that?"  A why question always feels more challenging certainly than a what question.  I'll say, "Tell me why everybody has to be in those meetings; tell me why you have all those notifications turned on that are interrupting you all the time?" I think so often, we have fallen into working in certain ways that we didn't choose, or that we didn't co-create.  So, I will often, just at a small level, if I'm doing a programme for a team, I will say, "So, what is stopping you from trying a 15-minute meeting, rather than a 30-minute meeting?"  I think often people's answer is, "It's just always been that way". 

And, we're creatures of habit, so you go, "Well, that's comfortable, we've got used to not challenging or asking those questions". I actually think though, as you describe them as, yes, they can be small and simple; but I do think they can have a really big impact, even in our team.  Like this morning, I did a walk-and-talk with someone in my team.  So, every quarter, we do walk-and-talks, where we're zooming out, we're asking questions about, "What are you really proud of at the moment in terms of the work you're doing?  How are we getting in your way?"  I'm always interested to know how am I getting in the way of my team, "What am I missing; what do you need me to stop doing, or what do you want me to do less of?" those sorts of unlocking questions. We didn't need to sit and write anything down for that conversation, and actually being on the move was a good thing.  Look at your week, where are the opportunities to, like you say, gain some time back, or give some time to someone else or, "Are you clear about that meeting?  If you're not, why are you in it, or what is it for?" 

Priya Parker's work on gatherings is really relevant in this area, because she talks a lot about, "The single thing you've all got to do is just be purposeful about why you're getting together", like why are you meeting?  And if you've not got that purpose, it all falls down quite quickly. I was thinking actually very relevant to somebody I was talking to very recently, often I think when you are experiencing burnout, it feels really hard to help yourself.  Perhaps you don't feel like you can go and talk to your manager about it, because probably if you could have done, you already would.  If you've got that psychological safety, you'd probably already have had that conversation.  And you've reached a point where often, people feel quite helpless and they've lost a lot of confidence, has certainly been my observation, exactly as you've described, you don't feel like you're using your strengths.  You lose that sense of anything that I'm good at. For me, we talk about in careers the moments that matter, and I see that as a high-risk moment that matters, because that could be a moment when somebody then makes a decision that doesn't mean they're going to limit their potential, or limit their learning, because they are in this burnout state, because you've got brain fog. 

How can you make good decisions for you and your career in that moment? So, when you see people go from burnout to, I guess, that tipping point of them not being as burnt out, what are some of the tools and tactics that you see that we can do individually, if you do recognise, "I'm in that state, so I don't want to make big decisions about my career, because that feels like a real high-risk moment", but equally maybe they've tried in their organisation, and they feel like that help or that support might not be there, because that's a very tough experience, isn't it, for people?

Jennifer Moss: It is a really interesting sort of pathway to becoming burnt out, and some people have different experiences as they get there, and I think it's really interesting.  So, in the book, I interview Dr Marie Åsbert, and she's based at a Stockholm university, and she talks about this path to hitting the wall.  So, it's important for us, especially in the ecosystem of preventing this big problem inside of an organisation, we have to play a role in understanding and labelling where we're at.  A big part of it is just now, over the last couple of years, because we've been in this state of emergency for a really long time; we still think it is an emergency, but by definition emergencies are unexpected.  So, we need to take pauses in our own life and recognise what are the habits that we've taken with us through the last couple of years. We are so much more responsive and we think everything's urgent, and it's also a personality of high performers. 

We've seen a lot of people who tend to be at risk of burnout already, because they are perfectionists, and it's good to have perfectionist strivings where we have a desire to hit goals.  But when that turns from perfectionist concerns, according to research what it means is that we start to see all-or-nothing results, and one mistake is definitive of who we are as individuals, and we're getting very attached to our work to the point where it threatens our confidence. So, we need to pull back right now as individuals and say, "What are some of the habits that I pulled through, and how can I try to figure out ways to get out of those bad habits?" and it needs to be that we ask more questions of our stakeholders when they ask us for things.  When someone says, "I need this thing", do you just expect it's right now, or do you ask?  Do you respond to emails as if they are 911 calls all the time, or do we have to pull back and assess? Can we use our "out of office" in a much more valuable way?  We assume we're supposed to use them for just vacations or time off.  We should be using our out of office to get work done in the day, set up an out of office that says, "I'm just going to be heads down for a couple of hours working on some pressing matters.  Please email me, and I'll answer emails at this time". If you have emails pinging constantly while you are working, you can't focus, you can't concentrate.  So, managing expectations is one way to give yourself protected time. 

We need to also recognise that we're in a rest deficit, so we don't just need sleep, we need other types of rest.  And this is based on Dr Dalton-Smith's work, and she's really been saying we're really lacking rest.  But we need creative rest, we need social and emotional rest.  We're on all day, and we've depleted our relationships that actually fuel us.  We're spending more time with relationships, or even just work that drains us, instead of finding time, which happens when we're burned out; finding time for those people that give us that effortless state of belonging, that sense of comfort, where you can be yourself with that person. So, there are these other aspects.  We need spiritual rest, which doesn't necessarily need to mean that it's organised or faith-based. 

It really is just sometimes having moments of awe in nature and realising that a lot of our stresses are myopic.  So, there's things that we can do and recognise that because of this state of being, and because of the demands of work and all those other reasons that are not in our control, that we can control the controllables.  And so, that's how we take some of that power back, and we re-engage what matters. The final thing I'll say is, I've been, really through my own burnout experience, and this was actually pre-pandemic, so I was fortunate in the pandemic to have some of these tools, but before the pandemic, I created this schematic of my life that was death-bed regrets.  And if this thing -- and I'm a big FOMO person, because I love my job so, "I want to do that project.  I'm going to say yes to this, I'm going to say yes to that", and it isn't because I'm a people-pleaser, as much as I --

Sarah Ellis: Get excited!

Jennifer Moss: So, I've decided that this project seems great, but is it in my absolute place of strength; is it within my priority schematic?  If it falls away from that, I need to give a lot of validation for why that has to happen.  If it doesn't meet the priority checklist and it means that I'm not going to eat dinner with my family, or I'm not going to be able to take a vacation this year, or I'm going to be working so many hours that I'm going to be depleted, well that is going to impact whether I'm thinking, "Did I live my life to its fullest?", on my deathbed, "Did I have really healthy relationships with people?  Did I nurture my best friends that make me feel complete in my life?"  If it doesn't match, then it ends up being a no. So, I think there's things that we can do; we cannot solve for a lot of those real causes of burnout, but can we solve for some of the things that we tend to add to our burnout?  Yes, those are things we need to work on too.

Sarah Ellis: Actually, that kind of takes me onto my next question, which is zooming out a little bit, just before we finish together, which is I'm interested in how hopeful you feel and how optimistic you feel, given that you've deep-dived into this subject, which is not an easy thing to read about?  A lot of the time, you are reading things that you think, or certainly as I was reading your work, I felt really bad for individuals, I felt bad for organisations, for whole sectors, where you think, crikey, the people who really care for us, because they care so much, whether that's people in healthcare or other industries like that are also the people most likely to experience burnout, and there's lots of things that will feel quite confronting as you get to grips with the work. You feel like, "I want to feel that sense of, 'Can we make this better?'" because the consequences of not doing that, as you're very clear about, almost the business case for burnout, you can see how if everyone keeps doing this, it's not going to be good for individuals, for communities, for organisations; I'm interested in where you are at the moment in terms of just what you're seeing, the conversations you're having.  How optimistic do you feel?

Jennifer Moss: I'm a cautious optimistic.  I think as a journalist and researcher, you're looking at the flaws in your work and you're also looking at the edge cases.  There's a healthy level of scepticism, but at the same time, and maybe this is where my cynicism is actually proving true, in that when it is, like I said, that bottom-line issue, when it is impacting the workforce so much, and organisations are feeling that impact of bleeding even their highest-performing folks. The latest survey Dan Sharbel actually put out, and it was in tandem with Deloitte, but what he put out was that even 72% of C-level executives are claiming to be burned out.  So, if you start to look at that layer, who have sort of been buffered, I mean they do burn out too.  There's loneliness, there's other factors, but typically the more agency you have, the more tenure, the better paid you are, those other factors, it tends to make you less likely to burn out.  But even at that level, those numbers are saying, "Okay, we really need to be careful about how we move forward". So, for whatever the reason is, it is creating a new way, a paradigm-shifting way of thinking about the future of work.  And even just the fact that more conversations around mental health are happening, bringing in this type of support, these support tools, that I don't see them clawing back.  I see that they've already thought about it, and there's areas where I see real potential. 

There's other areas where I'm worried. I mean, you see hospitals shutting down, because they cannot staff up and resource their hospitals, so communities are going to be impacted by that in a big way.  We're also already in a teacher and a nursing shortage.  If we lose those, it's a problem already, so that means again, those that are vulnerable in our communities are the most impacted by that.  So, that really has to be fixed.  In healthcare, there's such a legacy of overwork that it's been very difficult to solve for that.  So again, I'm hoping that something changes, but I have some fear around that. Then, one thing that I feel is this great opportunity that we can't waste, is this shift from working in office to having that flexibility.  We went from 4% of the global workforce to 35% within two weeks, I mean just dramatic change, and we're at 28% still.  So, that's a good number, and I don't want people to think we have to jam the toothpaste back in the tube, send people back.  But we also need to reimagine what being at work looks like, and it isn't just the same way that we used to work.  We should not ask people to commute into work to be on Zoom.

Sarah Ellis: No.

Jennifer Moss: We need to ask them to come back and work, and look at this as leaders, you have this power to really change the way that we use our office space and our time together, and it should be about team building or work sprints, or bringing fun back.  I said, "Work is like going to school with no recess these days, just maths and science all day long", and for some that's really exhilarating, but for most of us, we want some fun. So, I think finding the use of the office space and retooling and rethinking what that is for people will draw more people back, instead of just saying, "You have to be back, because that's what productivity looks like", when that's not true; that's a myth.  So we need to think, "Okay, how can we make this Goldilocks Zone that isn't just thinking about the office in the same way.  And that for me, and seeing some of that shifting, you know, Hewlett Packard is a great example where they're giving meals to people to take home, instead of asking them to eat on site. Sarah Ellis: How nice!

Jennifer Moss: They have a maker space, so when people go there, they can go and just build things and make things and be creative.  They're really investing in nature, so that people can spend more time working outside, and with their campuses being less about the building, but more about nature. 

So, thinking about what that looks like. Also, understanding that we do need to have some formula to that.  We're saying, "Just come in anytime to work", and if you go into a ghost town, I don't think that's healthy either.  Let's come up with guidelines that feel right for our team, for our organisation, and come to that place where it's really our most optimal experience of work.  We know that we can do that now. I do see that if more leaders think that way, and large organisations are showing that shift and their belief in it, that there is a real opportunity for us to make work really fun again, and this idea place between work and life. 

And if we can get there, work is fuel; you and I know this.  When we love our job and our work, it doesn't mean that we aren't at risk of burnout, we have passion-driven burnout all over the place, but it does feed us and an inspiration and love of work is a buffer, is a prophylaxis for burnout. We need to get more of that thinking, and I think that's the opportunity there, if we jump on it, and not see this potential recession or this change as being, "Okay, now we have all the control back as leaders; too bad for employees".  I'd like to see this as, this was a moment where we faced our mortality.  Everything changed, the social contract changed with work; let's do something really cool with that.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think that, as you said, I probably share your cautious optimism sentiment.  But the thing I feel hopeful about is that the leaders and those organisations who do create the environments exactly as you've described, they don't need to get everything right first time, but they're experimenting, they're committed to keeping the changes that have actually been a good thing from the past couple of years, but also challenging some of the things that we probably had to get used to quite quickly, but were never designed to be ideal in the first place. I hope that if those places, those organisations and those leaders become celebrated and showcased, and then they're re-enforced by people's experiences of whether that's working in a 5-person company or a 5,000-person company, they're the places that people want to go and work, they're the places that you recommend to your friends that people go, "Yeah, it's a brilliant place to work.  I've got autonomy, I've got accountability, I can do great work that I'm really passionate about". 

Yeah, there's some things we've obviously always got to be careful about, but that is a different kind of conversation to those ones where you're just going, well -- where burnout at its worst is such a big risk to both individuals and organisations. So, I think one of the things that's really brilliant also about your work is, yes, it's a provocation in terms of responsibility, but you do also share lots of stories about individuals and organisations doing it well, and just what that looks like.  And as we've said today, it's not necessarily massive strategic changes that are going to take years to put into place.  Lots of them are simple tools to try out and to see what works and to give teams that autonomy to figure out, "Well, what works for us might be different in one industry versus another".  So, I still left your work feeling hopeful, even though like you say, it's quite a tough topic at times!  I still came out going, "Oh, it made me reflect on myself, but also on the environment that we're creating in our team, on the organisations we work with", which I think was brilliant. Just as we get to the end of our conversation together, we always ask our guests the same question just to finish with, which is, what is your favourite bit of career advice?  So, this might be career advice that you just want to share, some words of wisdom; or, it might be some advice that someone has given you that has been really useful for you in your career; or, it could be something based on the work that you've done in burnout, but just something that you want to leave our listeners with after today's conversation.

Jennifer Moss: My saying about life is, "You can have anything, not everything".  And, it really is this idea that everything is about choice, and also just remove the ego.  I think when I was young and I wanted to do everything, I wanted to be in charge of everything, and I was doing things that I was really bad at, I had to relinquish, if I want to have anything, I need much more bandwidth to do that anything really well and have a sustainable experience of work and life, and that means bringing people in that are way better at that thing than I am, even if they get to do some of the cooler stuff, or, "I want to do that"! 

But they get to help me do what I'm really good at, so I can have more of that anything in a better way; that's what I came to learn, and letting go of the ego that you should be doing it all or get to do it all, or you're protecting doing it all. That has been huge, after the burnout piece, and just you have to be really scrappy as a start-up founder anyway, so a lot of that sort of fell to you, but then you were so worried about something failing that I wasn't delegating, or I wasn't supporting other people's growth.  Sometimes that takes time, and when you're moving really fast, you don't realise that that upfront time gives you so much more space in the end.  That "you can have anything, not everything" piece has been really helpful, and it changes the way I think about myself, the people around me, and the way that I can have my cake and eat it too.

Sarah Ellis: A bit of learning to let go, it sounds like.  Jen, if people want to, our listeners will no doubt want to read, watch, listen to more of your work, where would you like to point them too, and we'll include all of the links, as always, as part of our show notes?

Jennifer Moss: There's everything that you would need, social and blogs and information and research, it's all at jennifer-moss.com.

Sarah Ellis: Brilliant.  So, we'll include a link to Jen's website so you can get everything there.  We'll also include a few links to a couple of the Harvard Business Review articles that I found particularly useful.  That's actually how I discovered Jen's work and just got in touch with her, and hope she didn't think I was too strange being, "Hello, I've got a Squiggly Careers podcast!" but she responded very positively, to which we're very appreciative. Jen's also got a brilliant new book out, which I'm very lucky that I've had an early proofread of, and I think by the time this conversation comes out, certainly you'll be able to pre-order it, but again, we'll make sure there's a link.  But, Jen, I've really enjoyed our conversation today, and thank you so much for joining us on our Squiggly Careers podcast.

Jennifer Moss: It was such a pleasure, thank you so much, that was a great conversation.  And I love that you added so many insights too; I learned a few things on the way, so thank you for that.

Sarah Ellis: Thank you for listening to today's Ask the Expert episode with Jen.  If you have any experts or topics that you would really like us to cover, people that you think will be really interesting for us to talk to, you can always connect with us on LinkedIn, or on Instagram, or we're helen&sarah@squigglycareers.com, and we love to hear your ideas.  Maybe you've read something from someone that you just thought was brilliant. 

You don't have to know them or be able to introduce us, we can always do that bit, and we can always ask the question.  Loads of people say no to us, so we've got very used to just asking lots of brilliant people if they can spend some time with us! So, if you have got any ideas, please do let us know.  And as I mentioned at the start of today's episode, have a look and read Jen's Big Ideas Article on Harvard Business Review, because that was really where I discovered her and her work, and then really enjoyed diving deeper into what she's doing.  So, that's everything for this week. 

Thank you so much for listening, and we'll be back with you again soon.