In this episode of the MGMA Insights podcast, we’re joined by Sara Ross, a keynote speaker, a leadership strategist and the Chief Vitality Officer at BrainAMPED. Ross is set to open MGMA20 | The Financial Conference with a general session presentation titled “Welcome to the Energy Revolution.”
Still need to reserve your spot at the conference, March 5-7 in Nashville? Tune in to this week’s episode for an exclusive $200 discount for podcast listeners. For more information or to register, visit mgma.com/TFC20.
To browse Ross’s blog, visit saraross.blog.
Don’t quite have time to listen to the entire episode? No worries. We’ve compiled a handful of highlights from Ross’s interview for your convenience:
- (4:52) “The conversation that just kept occurring again and again was great leaders who knew what they were supposed to do but then would kind of whisper to me, ‘But I’m just too tired to do it. Like I just feel exhausted.’ So, I knew that there was this place where we need people to expand their learning capacity. We need to be building skills and to be agile. We need to do it with people in a collaborative way. We need to work in more effective ways with people.”
- (6:45) "That sometimes means then that the people who deserve the best of us end up getting the leftover us. And that includes us, like just in being able to engage in the things that we want. The way the world's lines have blurred between work and life and with technology, we need to build different skills just like we're learning in the workplace for how we're going to manage our energy and our capacity."
- (15:37) “I’ve seen leaders create environments where they’ve inadvertently made themselves indispensable. And that I think is a very, very dangerous place for people to be, because that means that they have to be a part of every decision. They have to attend every single meeting. They have to respond to every single email. There isn’t a capacity or an ability to kind of take a step back and do that strategizing, do that energy refueling, which we can’t outsource to anyone else. It actually requires time.”
- (16:57) “The word ‘self-care’ comes up, and we have a very narrow view of what that is. Sometimes we thinking that vegging out in front of Netflix is going to be the way to do it and not working is going to be helpful, but we just sit there and we scroll through our emails. Actually teaching people strategies to disconnect from the work that they’re doing and be present where they are is the second side of things that we don’t learn about because we’re so busy trying to work out of all the overwork that we’re experiencing.”
- (26:11) “If one meeting just happens to end three minutes early, the first thing people do is they pick up a digital device. They jump on an email instead of just slowing down for that moment and saying, ‘I’m going to take these two minutes to breathe.’ … When we are in that constant go mode, we are constantly engaging our stress response naturally. We’re constantly loading cortisol through our system, and one of the ways we actually manage cortisol, better metabolize cortisol, is to add oxygen back into our system.”
Here are some links and reference related to this week’s show:
- Hope Won’t Change Things, but this Simple Exercise Will…
- Insights: Finding time and avoiding burnout – life lessons from a pediatrician and father of 5
- The ROI Of Leadership Development In The Rapidly Changing Healthcare Industry
- Beyond burnout: The path to vitality
- Helping Medical Professionals Avoid Burnout and Suicide
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We love hearing from listeners about the show. If you have topics you’d like us to cover or experts you’d like us to interview, email us at podcasts@mgma.com or reach out to MGMA Sr. Editor and podcast host Daniel Williams on Twitter at @MGMADaniel.
MGMA Insights is presented by Decklan McGee, Rob Ketcham and Daniel Williams.
