Latest / Glovisor Podcast / Ep. 24: Burnout Isn't the End: The Surprising Way to Recover Your Life | Dr. Andre Walton
Transcript
- Joe Abreu - Glovisor: What if the thing that's burning you out? It's the same thing that holds the key to your greatest breakthrough. What if the thing that's burning you out is the same thing that holds the key to your greatest breakdown? Welcome to the Glovisor Podcast, where we explore leadership, communication, business growth, and personal development through real conversations with people that make an impact. Our guest resolves burnout, anxiety, exhaustion, while also helping organizations become more innovative. He is an international best-selling author, two times TEDx speaker, keynote speaker, and social psychologist, known for his groundbreaking work on creative thinking and innovation. Creator of the Banish Burnout Framework and Spherical Thinking. He helps individuals and organizations rewire stress into resilience and creative flow. He is a visiting professor at Newport Business School and created executive development and created executive development programs for the Smithsonian, Virgin Group, NASA, Lloyd's Bank, and the Welsh Government. With two decades of research and entrepreneurial experience, He inspires audiences to embrace creative thinking, strengthen emotional intelligence, and unlock human potential. Glovisor welcomes Doctor Andre Walton. Hello. Andre Walton: Hi Joe and thanks very much for having me on your show. Great to see you again. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: ⁓ it's a pleasure. Looking forward to the conversation. So let's begin with the first question that I'm dying to hear the answer to. You went from being a research physicist to inventing a microphone used by Frank Sinatra in Abbey Road Studios to medical instruments used by national standards institutes globally. That is not a typical career. How did you turn one crazy idea into something so massively huge? Andre Walton: Well, no, you're right. That's not a typical career path. In fact, that little rumbling you can hear in the background is my old high school ⁓ career advisor turning in his grave. I am not his poster child. It's a strange combination, isn't it? But in my early 20s, I got my master's degree in medical physics and my focus was ultrasound. And specifically, the measurement of ultrasound imaging. People started to get a little worried about, you know, we're shining this stuff into pregnant mums all over the world and nobody really knows how safe it is. So that was the goal there. that's, I'm also a musician. I've been playing since I was four years old and a friend of mine was having trouble micing his hand drums. He's a world-class Latin percussionist, bongos, congas, all that kind of stuff. And they're very difficult to mic. You your feet and your hands are always in the way of where your people want to stick microphones. So I designed him a strange microphone that's kind of a flexible ⁓ device that goes inside the drum. It has the capacity to deal with the sound pressure in a drum. And a little bit of tweaking here and there, and it really produced a stunning sound. And so that basically became my first entrepreneurial exercise. I realized that this was not just good on drums. It was actually very effective on other instruments from, you guitar, violin, and the piano. And it became huge on the piano. As you mentioned, Frank Sinatra and Elton John, the Moody Blues. I mean, it was, you know, My user list was like the who's who of the music industry. And that kind of real passion for inventing things took me into the global business arena. Both those inventions became global and... ⁓ I was living in England, course, at that time. England's a relatively small country for things that are, particularly for selling things that are a little bit obscure. you find a lot ⁓ of businesses in England get into the export market. And I love to travel, so that really satisfied that desire as well. Eventually, though, being an entrepreneur for me was just a little bit like owning a sailboat. You know, the two great days are the day you buy it and the day you sell it. And so, you know, I wanted to move on and do other things. And so after about 15 years building this business, we had offices in Europe and here in the States and ⁓ distribution in like 37 different countries. And so, you know, that was. My role in that business had changed dramatically. I was no longer the owner inventor. I was now expected to be a very different kind of person. So I needed to move on and do other things. And that was very rewarding. But before I did so, ⁓ in the last year, I was ⁓ really doing ⁓ a lot of stuff. I mean, I was burning up ⁓ a quarter of a million air miles a year going around doing trade shows around the world. And I had 150 salespeople here in the US and, you know, in keeping close contact with my dealerships globally. And it was exhausting. So very exciting, very exciting, but very exhausting. And then right at the beginning of a trade show in Chicago, just literally waiting for the doors to open. ⁓ I had two phone calls and the first one was from a weeping mother in England and my stepfather had died and then ⁓ an hour later I got a call from my secretary in Florida saying that my general manager hadn't showed up for work for a couple of days and he had I'd forgotten actually he was an alcoholic but he'd fallen off the wagon and it was back to rehab for him And so all this was happening in the first trade show of a six week global tour of trade shows. So the timing was not great. And sometimes the timing isn't great for this kind of thing. Anyway, that we managed to make all that work. The business survived. Nobody really could tell the difference except me. And I was plunged into burnout within within the next few weeks. And so that experience really stuck with me. ⁓ know, people talk about, are you feeling today? ⁓ I'm feeling burnt out, you know. And if you've had real serious card carrying burnout, you'll know that that's a little bit of an under exaggeration. I mean, that's just trivializing what it really is. And that experience, which I ⁓ had some very positive aspects to it. I learned to meditate during that time and that was a key really to my getting over burnout. It helped me get back to sleeping again and that kind of thing. But that whole experience really stuck with me and one of the ways in which I got over burnout was to get back to doing things that were creative. I got back to doing my photography. I picked up my musical instruments again and focused on them. And that all kind of stuck with me. And after I sold my businesses, I actually went over to Portugal and designed and built a house. That was one of the things on my bucket list. And after that, I did some consulting work and went back to school and got a PhD in social psychology. and my focus was organizational creativity. And that really takes me back to where I am now. The next two decades I spent researching creativity. ⁓ And in the last ⁓ five years I've been developing programs to use creativity therapeutically and specifically to help people with stress, anxiety and burnout. And it's been a really fascinating and very, very productive journey. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: It sounds like you've been extremely productive, or you have many more hours than the rest of us do. Because you see you seem to have accomplished so much. ⁓ that's great. ⁓ so one of the things I I do want to go back to is that that you were touching on how sometimes people say, ⁓ I'm burned out. Life, ⁓ it's too much. And as you mentioned, sometimes that trivializes the feeling of burnout. So, how would someone know? Andre Walton: Yeah. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: what burnout really is. And what is that feeling? And then are and for you at that moment when you were going through it, d were you self aware? Were you did you realize that's what's happening at that moment? Andre Walton: That's a really great question. ⁓ And for me, I didn't put a name to it very early on at all. ⁓ I just was suddenly plunged into a state of not sleeping. ⁓ And that was, mean, pretty quick, really, within sort of three or four weeks of beginning to feel, trying to recover from those events that had sent me in this direction. ⁓ Just that, a number of things, the inability to sleep properly, I really didn't want people around me. I pushed away those very people who could help me. I didn't have any kind of sense of real optimism, being able to see anything positive in the future. And I think the biggest thing was that all those things in my business that have been so exciting, you know, watching it, watching it, the products of all my work and energy and time, you know, watching it grow, watch the things actually happen. All that stuff was no longer exciting. It was exhausting. It was stressful. And so it was kind of like, you know, the edge of a razor blade. On the one side, you've got this high energy adrenaline excitement. And then just over the edge of that razor blade, you've got the crevasse, which is burnout. So I think people who are in a position where they feel as if something is not working the way it was and the symptoms, those symptoms I've described to you are very typical of my burnout clients. ⁓ know, sleep certainly goes pretty quickly and for nearly everybody that I've talked to and coached, the ⁓ kind of gradual, well sometimes quite quick dissolving of relationships. both at work with colleagues and especially at home. And it's rather strange that our medical profession doesn't define burnout as a specific entity. They subsume it under the heading of work-related stress. And it's really a terrible definition in my book because Burnout doesn't know any boundaries. You can be ⁓ burnt out at home. You can be going through a terrible divorce and then something happens at work. if you're suffering from burnout, you're suffering from burnout. You don't suddenly switch. The switch doesn't move when you open the front door and go home. I mean, it's there. So you can be wandering around. your place of work with a magnifying glass trying to figure out where the source of burnout is for you. And it may not be there at all. It might be, you know, in part at work, at part at home, you know, and you know yourself, I'm sure that if you get up in the morning and three things go wrong, you know, you, you're in a bit of a rush because you've got an early meeting and you've just got dressed, you go to the coffee and you know, something, you know, your kid's toy or your dog trips you up and all the coffee ends up in your shirt. and ⁓ god so you've got to go back and put a new shirt on you get to the car and it's like ⁓ car won't start you know and then you've got this meeting that you just arrive as it's about as it's winding up you know none of those three things taken individually are a disaster they're a nuisance but you add them together and it can feel as if they're a disaster they don't just add they go up kind of exponentially. And that's very much a function of what happens in burnout. Things just, you know, there's no realistic proportion to what you're going through. Small things can become a really negative event. So the notion that it's ⁓ work-related is bogus. Burnout just is. And the other thing is work-related stress implies that its burnout is to do with something outside of you. And that's only partially true. Of course, are are stressors all around us. And but the crucial thing here is I redefine stress. I redefine stress as when an individual does not have the resources to deal with a challenge. And what that does is that shifts the kind of locus of responsibility away from your place of work to yourself. So you share in that responsibility. So another way of saying that is that burnout is in part the way that we think. And you can talk to somebody, quite often if I get a new client, I say, now why are you coming to me now rather than a year ago? And they'll think about it. And when you really sort of break it down, the amount of stress they're going through now is not that different than it was 12 months ago. But 12 months ago, they could cope with it. Now they can't. So, you know, that means that it was really nothing to do with the external stress. It's to do with how they're dealing with it, what they're thinking and that kind of thing. it's not really appropriate to say, well, my life at work has suddenly got very stressful and therefore I'm getting burnt out. There may be a relationship there, absolutely, but there may also be the factor that's going on in your mind. What else is going on in your mind that makes it difficult? for you to gather the resources to deal with this current situation. And so that's where it all gets very interesting. And that's where we have to start looking at the way that we're viewing the world. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: ⁓ that's a great insight. ⁓ but here's a question that I've been dying to dig into, which is people think that burnout just kills creativity altogether, but your work suggests that there is a deep connection between the two. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Andre Walton: Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ I think the first thing to think about is that we have more than one way of looking at the world. can specifically fMRI imaging, which is just a staggeringly interesting thing that came up in the last couple of decades, where we can actually see neural images in somebody's brain. change as they think about different things. So you could ask, so tell somebody, you know, I'm going to give you an analytical problem. I want you to think about it. And you give them that sort of a problem. Certain certain passages show up in the brain, which is that the neural paths they're using to think about that problem. And then you can go and you can say, I'm to make you give you something else to think about. And you give them a creative thinking task. and different neural pathways light up in the brain. So one of the things that ⁓ my work has shown is that there are two distinct ways we can look at the world. We can look at it through a creative thinking lens. Now, it's not necessarily anything to do with painting pictures or making music. That's the way we think. All those things that we think of in terms of creativity. whether it's the iPhone or the internet or the jet engine, we don't have those things just because we've got opposable thumbs. We have them because we've spent hundreds of thousands of years thinking creatively. And that creative thinking process is very broad, it's very divergent. It's a big picture view of the world. And it's the view of the world we all had when we were like two, three, four years old. Now, the other way of looking at the world is analytically and deductively. And in business, that was my main problem when I was an entrepreneur that led to burnout. I realized decades afterwards. And it's the kind of thing that entrepreneurs have to do to some extent. It's everything to do with, you know, analysis, deduction, logical thinking. And it's a sort of thing that You know, we're thrown, we have things in that category that thrown at us from all sides, from the TV. You switch it on and somebody's trying to tell you that unless you get this type of water main insurance, you you get a burst water main and it's $10,000. you know, you're doing in your mind, you're being sent to analyze what the chances are. Yes, but my house is only two years old, so I don't care about it. You know, this is all analysis. This is all. sort of pros and cons kind of thinking. And that's very convergent. We talk about drilling down and focusing in. And that kind of convergent thinking has a major pitfall. Now, if you've ever been with someone who's very stressed, maybe you've had a very stressed time in your life, you'll notice a kind of what I call the hamster wheel effect. and people get stuck in a hamster wheel where they cannot think of anything other than their stress, their pain, their lack of sleep. And because it's so convergent, they can't find a way out. They can't see all the options because looking at options is a very divergent process. And so this kind of racehorse with blinders on, view of the world, is what we get. when all we do is think about deductive analytical processes. Our mind gets trapped in that neural pathway. So when that happens, we just don't have the ability to think creatively. And so one of the ways that I help people with burnout is I help them reintroduce that creative thinking process, because that helps their mind open up. they can start to see the future, they can start to see the possibilities for the future and the possible ways in which they can get out of what they're in at the moment, know, that mental framework that's so negative for them. You know, as an analogy, you can kind of say it's a little bit like stepping back and looking at the big picture, which is a little bit similar to having somebody come in. and talking to a therapist or a coach and they say, yes, but you're not looking at the big picture here, Andre. If you step back, you'll see that your life's got lots of options. That's the kind of thing that you get when you reintroduce creative thinking into people's lives. So in a sense, you're absolutely right in saying that burnout strips us of creative thinking, but it's not that way round. The way around is that we get trapped in this convergent way of analytical deductive thinking and we see anything creative we used to do disappears. We see recreations disappear. We see relationships with our friends and family disappear. We get ever more focused on the very thing that is actually having a negative impact on us. So it's an interesting relationship. But because we all once did think creatively, when we were two, three, four years old, it's actually quite easy to help people get back into thinking creatively. And I'm not talking about never thinking about the deductive analytical processes again. We all need that. But what we need is the balance. We need to be able to see the big picture and we need to be able to focus in. And that balance between the two is crucial for our mental health. And there are a couple of things I'll just throw in very quickly. One is that my research and that of others has shown that when people are doing things involving creative thinking, we're actually more likely to be happy. There's a positive correlation between creative thinking and happiness. And the other thing that neuroscience has taught us is that the neural pathways related to creative thinking are also those related to emotional intelligence. And emotional intelligence is related to resilience. It's related to relationship building, and it's related to a lot of the things that I'm talking about people losing when they get to burn out. So it's a very interesting kind of field. And when I first started talking about this and publishing my first book, for instance, in 2011, know, fMRI imaging wasn't really there. So it's kind of interesting to see how that research has really shown validity in this process. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Absolutely. So one of the things that since you brought up the neural pathways, ⁓ you had created this spherical thinking framework which combines the intuitive and the logical neural pathways. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Andre Walton: Yeah, absolutely. It stems from the fact that we've got, as everybody knows, we've got two distinct hemispheres of the brain. And in the old days, people used to think of the left hemisphere as being logical, deductive, and the right hemisphere being creative. Well, that's been debunked by fMRI imaging. That's not the case. But what is the case is that those two hemispheres are still joined by something that is a really poor transmitter of data. I mean, in the days of broadband, this is like a piece of string with two cans at the end. But there's various things that actually increase the data flow between the two hemispheres of the brain. One of them is just simply going for a walk. There's something about doing physical activity that requires no thought. that actually increases the efficiency of the corpus callosum, which is the bit I'm talking about, between the two halves of the brain. And suddenly you're able to communicate across those two hemispheres much better. And that really means that our brain is working much more efficiently and we're able to ⁓ balance the way we think. And I'm not suggesting in spherical thinking that we... use one particular process over another. I'm not suggesting that we ⁓ use creative thinking as opposed to deductive thinking. I'm suggesting that it's possible to hop between one and the other as the situation dictates. And I think of it, I happen to be a jazz musician. I play jazz flute. And one of the beauties of jazz to me is that you can play with a number of people And when you start playing a song, it's going to be a fairly structured event. We need to play in time. We need to play in key and all that kind of stuff. Otherwise, we've got no audience. They've decided they'd rather wander off and come back later when the next act comes on. And then there comes that magic moment when it's your turn to improvise. And that's when your creativity comes to its full. That's when you create your musical brand. And there are people who can improvise by equation, but it's not generally terribly convincing. But when you get in that position where you can genuinely play in a way that is, it sort of crosses all boundaries. You might have little riffs from other songs come into your improvisation. You might change into more obscure keys, but do it in a way that is musically interesting. So that ability to switch between, you know, a structured process and a much less structured process is really what I'm talking about. And so, you know, if we're on holiday, vacationing somewhere where we've got the family there, And there might be times when we want to think, what are we going to do today? And you've got a whole array of interesting things that you can do. But in there, somehow, you've still got to figure out when you're going to sit down and eat. You've got to figure out, you've got to travel to this place to do that, travel to this place to do that. How long do you want to spend? So you've got a mixture of creative thinking. What can we do today? All options are open. This is brainstorming. The logical bit, yes, but we can't do that because that's going to take 10 hours and the kids are going to get bored by then. So we have to do, you then there's this logical kind of process that comes in and says, you know, OK, they're all great ideas, but let's be practical. And this is a combination of those two processes. you know, in it's so healthy to be able to make decisions based on both the analysis, which is also the sort of practicality. and the creativity, which if you like is dreaming. And where those two come together is where you really have successful decisions because you've got the practical versus all the options. And you have really the contentment that you have developed this system. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Interesting. So now we have a little understanding of the spherical thinking framework that you've provided us. So now what do I do? Do I relax, take some time off, and just say, you know, let me rest a little bit more and be a little more creative, be a little bit more logical, create some systems, or do you have another framework that probably debunks that as well? Andre Walton: No, I don't have anything that debunks that, but they are all very positive processes. What I do have though is a way of speeding that up in the sense that I call it the three Rs. ⁓ if clients come to me to help with burnout, then this is a custom designed program. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Mm-hmm. Andre Walton: for them, but it's around three hours. that is the three hours are recreation, relationships and responsibilities. And the key is to work on those three. Those three are crucial to recovering from burnout because those three are the really sensitive areas when we get burnout. I've already talked about recreation disappearing, relationships disappearing. And the responsibilities part of it is also important because in burnout, people will quite often just feel they need to take on all the responsibilities. Somehow or other, things are falling apart because they're not doing enough. And so, so basically I take those three and I say, let's let's have a look now at recreation. Let's put back into your life some of the recreations you used to do. I don't care if you played tennis 10 years ago. just pick up the racket again and let's go and do this. Or simply let's just put an hour aside per day ⁓ to go for a walk and find somewhere nice that is preferably in nature. There's something very relaxing about walking in nature. And I've already mentioned that there are physical ⁓ positive positive aspects of going for a walk in the sense of the brain being able to coordinate its thoughts in a better way. And a lot of people, as you know, have aha moments when they go for a walk. The ⁓ challenges they've been thinking about for weeks can suddenly be, okay, this is the answer. And as with meditating, by the way. That's another thing that some people are conducive to meditate, some people meditate already. But that's another kind of aspect of just calming the brain down a bit so it can take a think. But then in terms of relationships, relationships that are sort of drifting away and as we talked about, people with burnout tend to push others away. That doesn't just sort of re-accumulate. mean, we have to work on that. You take relationships and you say, okay, well, yes, I haven't been spending as much time with my kids. I've just been too busy. Okay, well, forget the just being too busy bit. We'll just work on the fact that you haven't been. What can you now be doing? Perhaps you can make sure you go to their soccer games at the weekend. ⁓ Perhaps you and your wife or you and your husband ⁓ can have ⁓ a date night. Maybe, you know, you can every month you can have one weekend where you just go away for the night somewhere. So, you know, there are ways that you can work on relationships, even at work. You know, those people that you pushed away, perhaps you make an active effort to suddenly take a little bit more of an interest in their life. You know, ⁓ if they've got a birthday coming up, if they've got, you know, they their kids are doing something, they're going on vacation, they've just been on vacation, just be a little bit more involved in their life. And then in terms of responsibilities, you know, there are a lot of people around you that could be helping, doing some of the things and have a think back, you know, when I was doing that, did somebody say, can I help with that? If they did, then go back to them and say, you know, I really appreciated you asking me if I could. if you could help me and the answer is yes, I really could do a little bit of help here. And you're not just relieving yourself of some duties. That is another way of making a connection. If people offer to help, it's generally because they actually want to. And so those three hours are really crucial ways that you can very specifically address those issues without just sort of hoping that they happen. really promoting, ⁓ catalyzing the positivity in those three areas. So once again, recreation, relationships, and responsibilities. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: That's great advice for anyone listening. ⁓ but I wanted to ask you if any of the listeners are want to contact you and start the process of coaching or maybe helping them go through the three hours together, ⁓ what does it look like to work with you? Is is this something that they can expect to start to see some shifts within the first month? Is this a multi-year process? How does that work? Andre Walton: Well, obviously, everybody's experiences with burnout are different. ⁓ And sometimes within the context of burnout, there are other things that arise. And so I want to make it clear that, for instance, if somebody is feeling burnt out, but they've also had PTSD, for instance, then that would be ⁓ outside of the scope of myself as a coach. But assuming we're talking about stress, anxiety and burnout, it can take a number of different forms. ⁓ My two flagship programs are quite intensive one-on-one and people typically, I don't think there's anybody that hasn't had a significant positive impact within four to six weeks. A client actually that ⁓ went through this program last year, but I still keep in touch with my old clients ⁓ because if for any reason it's about 50 % of people who have burnout have it recur within 18 months. So the last module of my burnish burnout programs are really to focus on resilience to prevent that and ⁓ Touchwood, none of my clients have actually had that recurrence. But one of the clients from last year, he said to me after about five, six weeks, something like that, he said, Andre, I've been in therapy for 18 months because I know something's wrong. And I've got more out of the last six weeks with you than I have in 18 months. I really, this is the first time I can really say that I'm beginning to feel happy for literally years. And that's the kind of sentiment that makes me really say, okay, now I know ⁓ why I'm doing what I'm doing. And so not everybody will have such a dramatic effect, but it's, ⁓ I don't think I've had anybody that hasn't increase their wellness level. I do a questionnaire that actually quantifies your wellness level, mental wellness and to some extent physical as well. I don't think I've ever had anybody that hasn't increased that from well below 30, well over 50 percent, typically about 30 when people are in burnout and that's gone up to 50%. So, I mean, realistically, nobody's ever at 100, no matter what. you know, if you're really on the top of your game in terms of mental wellness, in terms of looking after yourself, you could well be at 85, 90. But to go from 30 to 50 is a major ⁓ shift. And that typically happens in a month. something like maybe four, five, six weeks, something like that. And then by the end of my program, I expect people to be at least at 70. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: That's great. But to just to know that you can make a shift in within your life in just a few weeks, that's that's amazing. And for you, I mean just to see that shift where people are coming back to you and saying, I'm happier now because I'm following your steps. ⁓ that's I'm sure you're extremely fulfilled by your work. Andre Walton: ⁓ that stuff is enormously satisfying. And it's satisfying on several different fronts. one of them is really this whole process, this whole approach to burnout and stress and anxiety using creative thinking ⁓ is unique. so it's satisfying. to see that this is not just a kind of a ⁓ snake oil. We're genuinely talking about neural processes. the satisfaction of seeing what was going on in the world of ⁓ imaging, neurological imaging, was the first step in that direction, to see things that I'd conjectured from experience, from social science. to actually be seen to be reality. Yes, this is what's showing up, was very satisfying. And then to see that that reality translates to ⁓ a reality of well-being is a very powerful combination for me and the reason I do what I do. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Excellent. If a listener wants to continue this conversation with you, where should they go? Andre Walton: Well, they can leave me a message on ask Dr. Andre, A-S-K-D-R-A-N-D-R-E dot com, and they can actually just talk a message into the website and I will get back to them. If they want to learn more specifically about the burnout programs, they can go to theburnoutfoundation.co and that there is. ⁓ There are two freebies on that. One is related to ⁓ building your business and the other is related to sleep, recovering from poor sleep. And that will also tell you a lot about my third Burnout program, which is really a do-it-yourself program that comes with it's nine modules, ⁓ each with a video, each with text, each with ⁓ a lot of information and the ability to get feedback from me also. So all of that is on the Burnout Foundation program. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: definitely going to download those today. Well, Dr. Andre Walton, this has been a remarkable conversation. The idea of burnout and creativity, not opposites, but deeply connected is something that I think a lot of us are going to sit with and think about. And I want to thank you for being our guest today. Andre Walton: Well, thank you so much for having me on your show Joe, and it's been really great to talk to you. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Likewise. Thanks everyone for listening. If this episode inspired you, share it with someone who needs it. And don't forget to follow Glovisor Podcast for more conversations on leadership communication, resilience, business growth, and personal development. Till the next time.