165: How Leaders can Beat Burnout by Leveraging the Whole SELF Lifestyle™ with Sarah Argenal

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Ep165 Sarah Argenal How Leaders can Beat Burnout by Leveraging the Whole SELF Lifestyle TalentGrow Show with Halelly Azulay

Burnout is one of the biggest enemies of productivity and success, and many experts today are calling it an epidemic. So what can we leaders do to help eradicate burnout in ourselves and our teams? Speaker, writer and facilitator Sarah Argenal, MA, CPC joins Halelly on this episode of The TalentGrow Show to share her philosophy and practical framework for beating burnout: The Whole SELF Lifestyle™.

Burnout is one of the biggest enemies of productivity and success, and many experts today are calling it an epidemic. So what can we leaders do to help eradicate burnout in ourselves and our teams? Speaker, writer and facilitator Sarah Argenal, MA, CPC joins me on this episode of The TalentGrow Show to share her philosophy and practical framework for beating burnout: The Whole SELF Lifestyle™. Using her own life experiences as examples, Sarah walks us through a four-step process aimed at helping us blend and improve all the seemingly separate areas of our lives and ultimately eradicate the underlying causes of burnout. You’ll also learn how, as leaders, we can utilize The Whole SELF Lifestyle™ to help our teams thrive. Tune in and be sure to share this episode with others!

ABOUT SARAH ARGENAL:

Sarah Argenal is on a mission to eradicate the burnout epidemic that's crushing working parents so they can finally enjoy these precious years of their life. With over two decades of experience in areas such as psychotherapy, professional coaching, and complex project management in global law firms, she offers a sustainable and long-term approach to personal fulfillment for working parents. She's the founder of The Argenal Institute, host of the popular Working Parent Resource Podcast, and creator of the Whole SELF Lifestyle™, a framework that addresses the logistical and psychological challenges of working parenthood. She has been published in publications such as Thrive Global, Working Mother, and PsychCentral, and is a frequent guest on business and parenting podcasts around the world. She lives in Austin, TX with her husband and two sons.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

  • How does Sarah’s framework, Whole SELF Lifestyle™, help us escape burnout for good, and what inspired her to formulate it? (5:54)

  • What is Whole SELF Lifestyle™? Sarah describes the three aspects of her unique philosophy (10:47)

  • Sarah walks us through her four-step process using her own story as an example, starting with step number one: System Inventory (14:31)

  • Step number two: Evaluate (19:31)

  • Step number three: List of Solutions (21:12)

  • Step number four: Familiarize (23:00)

  • What is something leaders can do to support their team using Sarah’s framework? (26:57)

  • Halelly summarizes Sarah’s advice for listeners (27:19)

  • What’s new and exciting on Sarah’s horizon? (32:31)

  • One specific action you can take to upgrade your leadership effectiveness (33:29)

RESOURCES: 

Episode 165 Sarah Argenal One of the reasons I think it’s not working is because we’re not looking at our lives at a holistic level. This is kind of the Whole SELF Lifestyle™. We have all of these different systems that are operating in our lives, whether it’s our marriage, our friendships, parenting relationships, our work, our volunteer commitments, whatever is going on in the outside world, but also within us. We have kind of our sense of identity, self esteem, emotions, things that are kind of going on in terms of anxiety or depression or some other sort of mental issue. We have all of this stuff going on both internally and externally all the time. We’re getting so distracted with thinking we don’t have enough time, but really our lives are an ecosystem and we need to find a way to kind of look at that bigger picture of what’s going on in terms of solving the problem that we’re seeing on the surface.

Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.

Hey there TalentGrowers. Welcome back to another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow, the company that I started in 2006 to develop leaders that people actually want to follow and the company that sponsors this show ever since 2015. We are actually coming up on our five-year anniversary, can you believe it? I would love to hear from you, actually, what has been your favorite episode or what episode or episodes really struck a chord with you or were ones that were very meaningful and memorable to you? I’m trying to do kind of a special episode about listener favorites and I would love your input. So, let me know. Halelly@talentgrow.com is my email, or of course you can make a comment on the show notes or send me something on social media or leave me a voicemail on the little voicemail tab on my website, talentgrow.com. On each page of the website it’s the little black tab on the right and it’s available on all of your devices.

This week we have a guest who is going to help you overcome burnout. How is that for helpful? All of us are experiencing greater demands, lots of competing priorities, and especially if you are a parent – but not only if you are – and also as a leader, you are probably leading others who might be dealing with parenthood. Sarah Argenal is the guest today and she will help you learn about how to overcome it by really going inside first, thinking about your system and we’ll walk you through a step-by-step process, a framework, that will help you manage your multiple priorities and all that stuff that’s causing burnout. Also help you lead better by teaching this to those you lead. So I hope you enjoy today’s episode. Without further ado, let’s listen to my conversation with Sarah.

Welcome back TalentGrowers. I am so glad to be here with Sarah Argenal. She is on a mission to eradicate the burnout epidemic that’s crushing working parents so that they can finally enjoy these precious years of their life. With over two decades of experience in areas such as psychotherapy, professional coaching and complex project management in global law firms, Sarah offers a sustainable and long-term approach to personal fulfillment for working parents and, as you’ll discover today, those who lead working parents. She is the founder of the Argenal Institute, host of the popular Working Parent Resource podcast and creator of the Whole SELF Lifestyle™, a framework that addresses the logical and psychological challenges of working parenthood, which we will discuss today. Sarah has been published in publications such as Thrive Global, Working Mother and Psych Central, and is a frequent guest on business and parenting podcasts around the world. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and two sons. Sarah, welcome to the TalentGrow Show.

Hi, thanks so much for having me.

I’m glad you’ve stopped by and I really look forward to our conversation today, but before we go any further, I always ask my guests to introduce themselves briefly and tell us about their professional journey. How did you get started and get to where you are today?

I feel like I’ve had a dual track career for about 20 years now. I started back in the day, I finished college and my plan was to go to law school so I got my paralegal certificate early on and joined a law firm in San Francisco and worked as a paralegal for about 13 years and then moved into something called litigation support which became a specialty after the digital era made evidence all electronic. It kind of merged the legal aspect of what we did in litigation with the technology aspect. I was doing a lot of consulting and project management with some of the biggest law firms in the world. I was doing that, but also over the last 20 years I got my Master’s degree in marriage and family therapy and adult development back in 2003, and then in 2005 became certified as a professional coach and started a coaching practice kind of on the side while I was working in law firms. Over the last 20 years I’ve just kind of harnessed all of that information, all of that personal development training in different ways. I was a counselor for a nonprofit group who worked with women in crisis, I taught college-level psychology and communications and strategies for success. I’ve just kind of done all kinds of different things.

And back about seven years ago, when I became a mom, I was working in a law firm and I was very overwhelmed and I thought I would go into this being like, “Hey, I’ve got the time management and project management area of my life, I’m really good at that,” and then also I have all of this child and development training and family training. And I thought it would kind of be like not as big a deal as it ended up being. By the time I became a working mom myself, I was completely overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do. I was looking for resources and information that would help me kind of blend the two areas of my life that were both really important to me and I wasn’t finding much at the time. So I started a program and a business that helps working parents to do that sort of thing.

I love hearing about people’s stories – TalentGrowers know that I have a love for the meandering path and the side hustle – so you exemplify many of those things because careers are rarely just a straight path. Different seasons in life and different circumstances lead you to insights and needs and ways in which you can add value. That’s great. And so I definitely know that a lot of people that are listeners of the TalentGrow Show – I call them TalentGrowers – are parents themselves, and even if they are not, they are working with a lot of other parents. So I think this should be really insightful and helpful. Tell us more about this philosophy and framework that you have developed called the Whole SELF Lifestyle™. How does it help us escape burnout for good by addressing the underlying causes of burnout that we each experience?

This has really evolved over the last five years or so. I became a mom about six and a half or seven years ago, and at first I was just doing a lot of research on how do I do this? Everywhere I go, every book I read, everything out there is telling me that I can’t really balance being a mom and being a professional. I kind of would have to choose. I just decided I wasn’t going to accept that. I said, “I know enough about a lot of these different things and I know there are solutions, but I’m not seeing them out there.” So I started looking for myself and I kept finding all of these little nuggets that were working for me. At first, the work that I was doing, I started a website and I really just had one page of my favorite books and resources that I was finding that were actually helpful to me as a working parent. But over time, and working with more people and hearing more stories and connecting with other parents, definitely parents – and I chose that population to work with because it’s such a complex phase of life. You really are dealing with identity issues and marriage and family issues and parenting issues and time management issues. So much of our lives kind of get upended in those first few years of parenthood, and I really wanted to give people a source of support if they didn’t want to quite their jobs or careers that they had worked so hard to build. I really focus on that population, but everything I talk about is really applicable to anybody who is feeling overwhelmed, whether they have kids and they’re raising little ones or if they are helping an aging parent or if they’re training for a marathon or just have a lot of work. Everybody has these very big, complex, busy lives these days, and so everything I talk about really is applicable to everybody else as well.

The Whole SELF Lifestyle™ has evolved because when I was working with these people, so many of the solutions that are out there and the advice that’s out there is so much around time management and self care. What I’ve discovered is those are really just kind of scratching the surface in terms of the problems that we’re seeing, not only in individual lives and in families and communities, but certainly in companies as well. For me, I was working in the biggest law firm in the world when I became a new mom, and I would go to these stress reduction workshops, these lunch and learn one-hour workshops, or a mindfulness seminar or I would go to the yoga class that they had in our office a couple times a week or the massage therapist that they had brought in once a month. So many of these things were helpful in that moment, but the results of that moment, that class, that lunch and learn, never really lasted. I’d go right back to my desk and I’d have 100 emails sitting there waiting for me and the stress would go right back up. What I was discovering was, and we also know now from studies, that the physical challenges that a lot of companies are promoting or the physical wellness that they’re doing, and even some of the mental health initiatives that companies are putting into play, they’re just not working. If we look at the statistics, they’re not creating less burnout. They’re creating more. Even to the extent where World Health Organization has now classified it as a syndrome. For people across the globe. This is not a problem that’s getting better. We’re not fixing it by focusing on stress reduction techniques or even mindfulness seminars or time management or productivity.

This is something that goes a lot deeper. That’s what I started really exploring and understanding on a different level and also kind of bringing in my mental health and personal development work. What I’ve created is this framework that allows all human beings, really, the individuals who are out there trying to apply all of these different techniques to their life and are failing, it gives them a framework to work through so that they can find the answers really within themselves, versus trying to take a book or an article and apply that to their life on a surface level and just not really seeing any results.

I’m just dying to know what it is, so what is the framework or the philosophy? Which is it?

It’s a philosophy. I help working parents in particular, but it really applies to everyone. If you look at a lot of the advice that’s out there or the resources that are out there, a lot of what they’re doing is kind of focusing in on one problem. So a lot of people I talk to, like I don’t have enough time. That seems to be one of the biggest complaints from most people these days, especially parents. But I think any of the leaders who are listening to your show right now will understand that everybody seems stressed out, they’re stretched thin, they don’t have enough time. The solution to that has been, “We’re going to help you save time. We’re going to give you these time management hacks. We’re going to help you basically fit more work into less time so that you feel like you have more time.” But that’s not working. One of the reasons I think it’s not working is we’re not looking at our lives in a holistic level. This is kind of the Whole SELF Lifestyle™.

We have all of these different systems that are operating in our lives, whether it’s our marriage, our friendships, parenting relationships, our work, our volunteer commitments, whatever is going on in the outside world, but also within us. We have kind of our sense of identity, self esteem, emotions, things that are kind of going on in terms of anxiety or depression or some other sort of mental issue. We have all of this stuff going on both internally and externally all the time. We’re getting so distracted with thinking we don’t have enough time, but really our lives are an ecosystem and we need to find a way to kind of look at that bigger picture of what’s going on in terms of solving the problem that we’re seeing on the surface.

If you don’t have enough time, it’s not just necessarily that you need to save time. That’s not always the answer. Instead, what I’ve discovered is, we need to look at our lives as these whole frameworks. These whole big ecosystems. And then start approaching our problems in that way. When we do that, we’re able to identify the problems that are happening really underneath the surface, and I bring in a lot of my therapy training and experiencing and coaching and training experience to help people really dig deep and understand, “This isn’t about time at all. It’s about not setting boundaries or this fear I have or some other sort of psychological issue that’s going on.” That’s kind of the whole piece of it.

The self piece of it is, instead of taking all of this advice or all of these opinions from outside experts or gurus or even your best friend or your mom or whoever, instead of doing that, what we really need to do I think, and in our modern day and age where we have information at our fingertips all the time, is really start to understand ourselves, understand our own strengths, understand our own weaknesses, understand our own goals, our own values, understand our tendencies. All of those things happen with inside of us. We’re so busy and we’re so distracted that we’re kind of losing track of that and trying to apply other people’s solutions in our lives, rather than finding our own solutions from within. I’m kind of helping people shift their lives from the outside in to the inside out. That’s kind of the self piece of it.

The lifestyle piece of it is understanding that this is not something to be achieved. This isn’t something that you’re going to one day get and then you never have to think about it again. This is really kind of shifting the way we approach our life. The way that we approach, the way we’re doing things, the way we’re solving problems, the way we’re improving ourselves, all of that comes from just having a deliberate practice. I really help people through my framework, which is a four-step framework. I help people walk through those four steps in order to make this part of their lifestyle. To make working parenthood, for the people I work with, but just really kind of life in general, more enjoyable. More fun. Seeing it as an adventure rather than just something to be powered through everyday.

Of course I want to learn about the four-step framework. I know that listeners, I mean, obviously they can learn a lot more by working with you and reading your resources on your website and we’ll link to all of that, but just to give us a broad overview of it, is it possible, Sarah, for us to maybe use some kind of a case study or an example as you walk through it so you can breathe life into how a person would use it, with an example storyline?

I actually like using myself as an example. I work with a lot of clients, but I don’t have the whole picture of their lives. I have the whole picture of my life and so I can really understand the contours and the nooks and crannies of this process in a way that I can’t with any of the people that I work with because I’m kind of part of their lives for a specific period of this growth process for them. But for me, this is something that started when I became a parent and I started doing all of this research. This is the process I went through to go from somebody who was completely burned out and exhausted and frustrated and my relationships weren’t going well. I just was really unhappy about my life. I didn’t like who I was. I didn’t know who I was. I was just kind of out at sea, and I felt like I was at the whim of everything around me, whether it was my work responsibilities or my personal obligations, trying to keep my household running – all of that stuff just became so overwhelming for me and I became, as an employee in a big law firm, I saw my work. I wasn’t producing the same quality of work. I was not as focused. I wasn’t as happy about going to work. Everything felt like a burden to me. That’s kind of where I started and over the course of a few years, and now obviously I can kind of help people streamline that process, but over the course of a few years I really learned how to do the things that I talk about in these four steps of my framework so that I can enjoy my life. Now I wake up and I’m happy. I have energy. I enjoy all of my relationships. I don’t feel like somebody is pressuring me to do something everyday. It’s really more of a collaborative process. All of my relationships, both personal and professional. I really like to kind of use myself as a case study and that’s where I started and where I ended up.

Awesome. Let’s do it.

Okay, there are four steps. The first step – and they call kind of go along this acronym that I call SELF. The first step is the system inventory. This is what I was talking about before where we have all of these internal systems happening as well as all of these external systems going on in our lives. There are all of these things that we’re kind of having to focus on in different points throughout our day, and what I’m finding is that a lot of people are really feeling fractured. They feel like they have to move their focus from one area of their life to another, pretty much constantly all day long. This is a recent development for humans. Up until about 10 or 20 years ago, we would go to work, we would focus on our work, be there, do our thing, and then we’d come home and put on our parent hat. Or a wife or husband hat. We were able to turn off our work life and just get home and be in our personal world. That’s just not how our world works anymore. For so many professionals, we’re connected all the time, 24/7. There could be things that come up at 1:00 in the morning, at 10:00 at night, at 4:00 in the morning … there’s always a demand on our time and on our attention. We really, I think, have to understand all of the different things that are going on in our life, because otherwise we’re just going to continue to be so distracted. I really help people get a very big picture of you, of the things that are going on in their lives, because a lot of people will say, “I don’t have enough time for self care,” or something like that. If you just focus on that, you’re not really taking into account all of the other areas of your life, both the things that are happening inside of you as well as kind of all the external demands that are on your time.

So I help people go through this system inventory. For me, what that meant was kind of going through and asking a bunch of different questions about kind of what I was expected to do from the outside, whether it was commitments I had made to my husband, whether it was parenting responsibilities, whether it was commitments I had made at work, whether it was people who were relying on me and I was relying on them and my colleagues, or volunteer commitments in my community. All of these things that I was accountable to other people and at some point I took on too many of those things and I was being overburdened. I was burned out. That had a big impact on me. But what was going on inside of me was equally important, but because I was so busy on the outside I wasn’t paying attention to anything on the inside.

When I really started kind of answering a bunch of questions about what was happening, both on the outside and the inside, I got a much clearer view of, “Oh, okay, if I can figure out this internal thing, that’s going to solve these four external things.” Or vice versa. If I make a change over here in this area of my life, that’s really going to help fix a lot of things that are going on internally for me. Really getting a bigger, broader picture of the context of my life became kind of the key to moving forward in my life. That’s step number one.

Step number two is evaluate – that’s the E. For evaluate, after we kind of go through this process of identifying all of the things that are happening in my life right now and kind of just a snapshot for this moment in time, since things evolve and change, once I can go through and get that observational picture of things, then I can start to really drill down and go, “Which areas of my life are working and which are not working? Which areas are depleting my energy? Which areas are giving me energy? Which areas go really good for who I am right now? Where do I feel like I am passionate and excited about what I’m doing? And where do I feel like I'm just doing this because I feel like I have to or I feel like it’s expected of me or I’m afraid of disappointing someone else?” I can kind of go through and ask questions, again, both on the internal side of things as well as the external side of things. Really get a much clearer picture about where those problem areas really are, because I think if we don’t do kind of this drill-down process, it’s really easy to kind of hit on the surface level thing that seems to be the big problem. And then we try to solve that surface-level problem and we never really get down to the meat of what’s happening in our lives.

For me, I kind of went through and asked those questions of myself to understand where I needed to make changes in my life, and doing that also helped me really feel like I could focus my energy and my attention on those specific things. I didn’t need to make all of these big, grand changes in my life. I could just focus on one or two things and that made a huge impact, so I was able to really utilize my energy level and my attention and my focus in a more effective way. That’s step number two, E.

Step three is list of solutions. Once I was able to do that evaluation process and really had a big picture view of things, then I knew what I wanted to change and why I wanted to change it, where I was going to focus my attention, and so I started brainstorming a list of the things I could do to make changes in my life. At this point I’m still not even making changes, I’m just still kind of brainstorming ideas around the action steps that I could take to make changes in my life. I feel like this is where a lot of people are kind of stuck in our day and age is they’re not really doing those first two steps. They’re just sort of consuming information and consuming information and I think what that’s doing is contributing to this feeling of, “I need to be doing all of these other things basically better. I’m never measuring up. These are the expectations. This is what I should be doing. This is basically what a perfect person would be doing and if I’m not doing all of these things, I’m bad, I’m wrong, I’m not measuring up, I’m a failure.” So a lot of the feelings that we’re having about ourselves I think are coming from having so much information but not really having any sort of method or framework to filter out the stuff that just doesn’t matter.

Because I was able to go through those first couple of steps, I knew it wasn’t about time management for me. I’m really good at that, actually. For me what it’s about is having conversations with my boss to come up with a couple of alternatives about how I can arrange my schedule in a way that would work for my lifestyle today. That would even change for me over a period of time. I got to be a lot more creative about the solutions that I implemented in my life. And I wasn’t just kind of getting sidetracked by all of the advice that’s out there that didn’t really apply to me. I could kind of just let all of that go and really just focus on creating a list of things that would be uniquely helpful for me in that moment in my life. That’s step three.

Step four is the final step. That’s familiarize. In this step, that’s where I actually put that stuff into practice. I would pick one or two small things and try them for a week or two or a month and see what feedback I got from that. See how that worked for me. See if that solution really was effective for me. Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes all of the best advice out there might help so many other people but if it doesn’t work for me, what’s the point? That means it’s not helpful for me and that’s okay and I think a lot of what happens for people is they’ll get a book or they’ll get advice and try it in their life and it won’t work and then they’ll feel like they’re doing something wrong, so they’ll try harder. Having the understanding of the first few steps of this process really helped me implement stuff in a way that worked for me so that I could really understand very quickly, “This is working for me. Now I want to then create a habit around it.” That’s the other thing I see is a lot of people will read a book about habits and decide, “I just need to go get a habit that’s working for other people and integrate it directly into my life and start doing it,” and it won’t work for them and they don’t know why. It’s because it doesn’t really work for you and so you’re kind of forcing something into a habit that probably doesn’t need to be a habit.

For me, it really was a process of getting very clear evidence that something worked for me and then looking at who I was, looking at my energy levels throughout the day, looking at my current habits, everything else I was already doing, and kind of fitting it into my unique life, versus just kind of papering something over the top of my life as it existed. Once I understood that, I could also, then, if I didn’t find something was working, I could let it go and I didn’t feel guilty about it. I didn’t feel like I had to measure up to that thing or become a person who does that thing. So it really gave me a lot of clarity and a lot of peace around the life that I was living. It also helped me set boundaries in terms of, “I’ve tried this. It doesn’t work for me. I know why it doesn't work for me and I’m okay with that.” So I can communicate that clearly to other people. Just in every area of my life, if I go through all four of these steps, I was able to kind of refine all of the different systems I had operating in my life at that time. I could kind of go into all of the different areas of my life, both internally and externally, and just kind of get a read for myself on what’s working and what’s not and kind of continue repeating this process for myself. Where can I make changes? How can I make changes? And then when I do make changes, how does that work for me? That fourth step, people aren’t doing that a lot either. They’re kind of taking in this information and then if they do apply it, they do it for like a week until life kind of becomes overwhelming again and then they let it go. I found there was a lot of advice out there, a lot of information out there, but a lot of people kind of needed a way to filter all of that into their life in a helpful way. So that’s what the Whole SELF Lifestyle™ framework does for people.

Great. Thank you so much. That’s helpful and I got a really good idea of how it works. Let’s just put ourselves for a moment in the shoes of the listeners who are leading others already. What is something that you think is – I know there are probably a million things you can tell them – but let’s focus on one thing you think will be helpful as a leader that they could do to implement this framework to support their team or to support the people that they’re leading?

I think this can be applied in two ways. Number one is kind of individually, for the leader themselves. I think it’s hard to assist other people in doing something if you don’t have a personal experience with it. I think if they go through this process themselves, they’ll get a much deeper understanding of how hard it is. Change is messy. Change is hard. Even understanding this process, this one-two-three-four process, that can be invaluable alone. Even if you don’t intentionally try to implement anything else with your team, just kind of understanding the process of change and development and taking ownership of the things that are happening in your life and taking responsibility for making improvements or making positive changes in your life, letting go of things and habits that used to work for you in the past and now no longer help you. I think kind of going through this process on their own first is a really kind of important first step, because it sets a foundation for understanding what your team would do if they also went through this process.

Plus it makes you a lot more credible if you’re going to suggest anyone use something that you’ve done it yourself and you can share the story as you just did. This is where I struggled with it, this is how it helped me, this is what I tried, this is what worked, what didn’t, and so it makes you vulnerable because you’re sharing something personal about yourself that makes people be more probably likely to want to try it too and also feel closer to you and also find you to be credible and authentic rather than just somebody else who is coming with some extra “should” for them when they already have too many.

Exactly. Kind of deepens the conversation around this process, because a lot of what’s out there is surface level for a reason. It’s a lot easier to give that advice – do this, do that and you’ll be fine – but what we know is that doesn’t work and humans are very complex human beings and we need support as we go through this messy process. This really difficult and complicated process, and frankly it’s a process that we naturally resist because it’s hard. It really can unearth a lot of things that we’ve spent our entire lives kind of pushing down or suppressing or avoiding or being afraid or whatever. A lot of that stuff can and needs to come to the surface, but if somebody is trying to kind of help other people implement this, who hasn’t gone through that process, I think you’re not going to be equipped to respond to those sorts of ups and downs as they happen. I think that’s what we’re seeing right now is there are a lot of well-being initiatives out there. There are a lot of wellness programs. There’s a lot of that stuff, employee and company culture, employee engagement – these are all kind of buzzwords that I think some companies do a really good job of integrating comprehensive programs that will help people through the tough parts of change, and then there are a lot of other people who just kind of give lip service to those words.

They just check the box.

Like, “Hey, we’re really focused on employee engagement,” but number one, it gives you a container or a structure to work with. But it provides a lot of freedom within those four steps for each unique employee that you’re working with to really come up with their own answers. You’re not giving them any answers. What you’re doing is giving them a place where they can explore their own answers and find their own solutions. So it really kind of shifts the model from, “Here is the advice, go do this, implement this in your life and when you do you should have this outcome and if you don’t, you’re a failure.” It kind of shifts that process, which is I think a lot of what I see out there in general. I do think there are a handful of companies that are starting to move away from that and moving more into this, “Let’s look at these human beings as holistic human beings. Let’s acknowledge the fact that they have personal lives or they have marriages or their parents or they’re caring for an aging parent or whatever it is. They have responsibilities outside of this one little role that I see for them and I’m acknowledging that for them and accepting that and then not only that, I’m helping give them a space where they are supported in exploring that and understanding how they can bring their whole self to their life,” which is again, kind of the philosophy of it. You can show up with all of these different areas of your life and that provides a richness for the experience you’re going to have at work. That’s what employee engagement is, kind of seeing people as human beings with really rich and very complex lives and saying, “I see that. I don’t have the answers for you.” No one can have those answers for you, but instead I can help walk you through process. I can support you as you go through this process in exploring and finding your own answers. That’s really what it’s more about.

Gotcha. I think what you’re saying, because you said a couple of things you want leaders to do, but let me make sure, what you’re suggesting is that they should first do it for themselves and then help by teaching it to the employees as a resource?

Yes, so number one for sure I would say is, “This can be harder than you think it’s going to be.” I think as we go through these four steps it’s like, “Yeah, yeah, sure.” But, this is a hard process. This is not always as straightforward as we think it will be, so going through the process first for yourself to understand what it’s like I think is kind of an important first step, and then secondly, being there for people and not expecting that their process is going to look like yours did. Really, really acknowledging and honoring the fact that people are all going to have very different experiences going through this structure and going through this framework. And I think that’s what can be really cool about being a leader who goes through it is you get to really drill down into the humanity of the people that you’re working with. You get to see them as real people and start to really elevate their strengths and really help them understand their weaknesses or their struggles that they’re having in any area of their lives so that they can be really effective. They can come to work and they’re not quite as stressed out or overwhelmed or whatever.

Awesome. Good. Well, of course I would want to talk to you a lot longer about this, it’s very fascinating. We will make sure that everybody knows how they can learn more from you. Before you share one specific, super-actionable tip, what’s new and exciting on your horizon Sarah?

I am writing a book right now about this. This is something that I do work with people privately and I do trainings for companies and industry association groups and things like that, but I really want this just to be something that people can take and implement in their daily lives. I think that we could all be enjoying our lives a whole lot more and I really have found that these four steps really can help people achieve that. So I’m in the kind of final stages of editing and kind of cleaning things up. It’s all written, so I’m hoping to publish that early next year.

That’s super exciting. Congratulations. A lot of people talk about writing a book but very few actually do.

I understand why!

It’s hard work.

It is, very hard work.

I know, I’ve written two. So, good for you and we will look forward to hearing about when it’s released and reading a copy. So what’s one very specific action that TalentGrowers can take today, tomorrow, this week, that can help them upgrade their own ability to lead themselves or others, from your perspective?

What I always recommend to people is just doing a system inventory for yourselves. Just that very first step of the framework I was talking about. Even just taking a moment. Step back for 30 minutes of your week or an hour of your week and just get really clear about what’s happening in your world today. What is going on, both internally and externally. Get a real clear, big picture. Even that can provide a lot of clarity around some of the struggles or frustrations that you might be having on a day-to-day basis. I offer a free workbook for people if they’d like to download that. It’s on my website at ArgenalInstitute.com/library. If they want to do that, they can, but they don’t really even need that. It’s just going through what are all of the different areas of my life? What’s happening in my world? And what might I be missing? What might be kind of controlling what’s going on in my day-to-day life that I might not have seen before. I really think that’s kind of a first, a good first step, for a lot of people.

Great. That probably will kick in the Zeigarnik Effect which is if you have an open loop somewhere, your brain wants to close it. It’s a good trick for getting yourself further down the four-step process just by starting it. I hope that people will do that. I will do that too. You just mentioned the place where that tool is and we will link to that in the show notes. How else can people learn more from you or stay in touch online or on social? Where should people follow you?

Everything is at ArgenalInstitutde.com. You’ll find my library of resources there and that’s where that workbook is. My podcast is there, I have a blog there, they can connect with me on social there. It’s all online at ArgenalInstitute.com.

Cool, one stop shopping.

A hub.

Sarah, thank you so much for taking time and making time for the TalentGrowers. I’m sure everybody has benefited from your insights here, so thank you for that.

Thank you so much for having me.

Our pleasure. Thank you. All right, TalentGrowers. That’s it for another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I hope you found it beneficial and I hope that you will answer my call for favorite episodes and please take the time. I know if you’re driving right now or running on the treadmill, washing the dishes, whatever it is that you do when you’re listening to podcasts, you might not be able to do it right away but I hope that you will remember that I am here for you, every single Tuesday, and I will really love to have you let me know what is your favorite episode or what’s a memorable episode for my five year anniversary special show. I hope that you’ll take action based on what Sarah suggested, because only when you begin to take action will change happen for the better. I look forward to hearing from you about what you thought, what your takeaway was, and if you take action – which I really hope that you do – what action did you take and how did it work? Thanks so much for listening to the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow and until the next time, make today great.

Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.

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