Mental Health Meets Career Hustle with Dr. Geena Guerrido

It comes up a lot in coaching conversations that it sometimes feels like you have to choose between prioritizing your mental health or crushing it at work. We’ve definitely felt this way at times, and know that sometimes the work environment and company values really make it nearly impossible to have both. In this episode, we talk to Clinical Psychologist Dr. Geena Guerrido about how to maintain strong mental health while chasing your career goals and discuss strategies for how to:

  • Understand your personal values and how they align to your workplace

  • Identify the root cause of work stress and manage it in a way that works for you

  • Set boundaries at work in a thoughtful way

Actionable Tips & Takeaways

Understand your personal values and evaluate how they align to your workplace.

We often don’t consider whether our personal values align with our work until something feels off and we can’t quite figure out why. Perhaps the work we’re doing is different from what we expected. Or, maybe the industry you’re in isn’t one where you feel a lot of passion. Maybe you don’t feel the work you’re doing is helping you get closer to the person you want to become, or worst case, it’s pushing you farther away. 

Identifying and understanding the root cause of that feeling isn’t something you can put on your weekly to-do list. When there’s ongoing discomfort without clarity, it often builds quietly until it becomes overwhelming and that’s when we’ve seen people make risky decisions like quit their job without a plan. Or, jump to the next job and quickly find themselves in the same situation because they didn’t fully understand what was actually out of sync.

To avoid these risky moves, carve out space to reflect on your personal values and make a thoughtful plan to align your professional life to them. Here’s what we recommend:

Create space to reflect and identify your personal values:

  • Find a setting that puts you in a creative, big picture headspace.  Go on a walk, go to a coffee shop and get your favorite snack, go to the place in your home where you feel most relaxed. Find a place that makes you feel calm and you’re able to think about  the future, your feelings and what matters to you in life. 

  • Identify your values. Use a worksheet from Therapist Aid, such as this one, to reflect on your personal values. It’s ok if you start to feel anxiety as you think about abstract ideas or begin to identify parts of your life that are not aligned to your values - don’t panic, this is normal! Understanding your values is the first step to making changes over time that help your best life.

  • Write down what you believe your company’s values are. Companies often write down their values or have a mission statement. Start there. However, it’s also important to look at how leaders at the company demonstrate these values. What seems to be most important when making big decisions? How does leadership respond to questions from employees about changes? Do they prioritize work outside of their core business priorities like employee resource groups or cultural events? If so, what do these look like? 

  • Write down how an average work day feels like. Reflect on why you feel positively some moments and negatively other moments. This can help identify the areas where your values are aligned to your company’s and where they are not. 

  • Compare your personal values to your company’s. Once you have written everything down, you can compare the lists and see where there is overlap and where there is a lack of alignment. In our experience, very few jobs are going to 100% align to someone’s personal values (late stage capitalism, amirite?). However, looking at these lists side-by-side can help you identify the ones that are most important to you, whether your current workplace aligns with enough of them, and if not, find another job that is in better alignment with who you are.  

Identify the root cause of work stress and manage it in a way that works for you.

Stress is a normal emotion that every person experiences, and actually, a certain amount of it can drive us to prioritize what is important to us and make intentional decisions that help us live our best lives. Think of stress like an upside down U where too little stress can lead to lack of motivation and too much stress can lead to burn out, poor health and mental blocks.

The reality is we all vacillate across the curve at different points of our life and career. For example, there should be times in your life where you should aim to live on the calm side of the curve - think: beach vacation or an extended period between jobs.  The key is being able to easily locate where you are on the curve when you feel out of sync, knowing your stressors, and quickly identifying when you start to dip into distress so that you can make adjustments before you find yourself there.

 Common root causes of work stress we often hear include:

  • Feeling way too busy (check out our make your work schedule work for you episode).

  • Feeling disconnected to coworkers because the majority of the company have a different identity (Race, gender, political identity)

  • Values misalignment

Find and use the stress management tools that work for you:

  • Identify what is on the dinner plate: When you’re feeling overwhelmed or anxious during your work day. Write down the tangible experiences that are causing you stress and write as much detail as possible, including examples.  

  • Identify what is controllable and make a plan for the circumstances that are in your control:  Ask yourself what is in your control and be honest. For the things you identified, remove them from your plate by delegating tasks, asking for help from a team member or manager.

  • Set boundaries (see more below!)

  • Personalized self care that puts you on a path to a solution. Self-care may not outright fix your problem, but it can provide the temporary relief you need to find the headspace to think about a problem differently or even have a breakthrough.

  • Celebrate small wins:  Positive reinforcement, even from yourself, can help encourage behaviors you want to promote in yourself.

  • Therapy (use your mental health benefit at work if it’s offered): Every person is different.  A therapist can help you determine what works best for you and give you practical stress management strategies. A lot of our coaching clients share that it can be difficult to find a therapist that works for them and often lose hope when they have an initial meeting that doesn’t meet their expectations. Here are some potential questions to ask a therapist in a first meeting to evaluate how they may fit with you:

    • Ask if they’ve worked with clients who have similar goals or stressors as you

    • Ask how they evaluate a person’s progress or success dealing with a specific theme or topic

    • Ask if they have worked with clients who share your identity (race, gender, socio-economic background). In our experience, this is especially important if you do not share the same race or gender.

After the initial meeting, reflect on whether you felt heard and respected in the conversation. Most importantly, ask yourself if you feel hopeful that you’ll make progress in the areas you discussed. Remember, therapy is a service and it should work for YOU.

Thoughtfully set boundaries to reduce or remove stressors.

We often talk to coaching clients who initially believe they do not have control over any of the factors that have pushed them to a place of burn out. This is where they sometimes consider making a drastic decision to remove all of the stressors by quitting their job without a plan or setting extreme boundaries that quickly result in them losing trust with their manager, damaging important work relationships or creating a setback in their career. It is okay to set boundaries as a way to reduce or remove key stressors from your work life and here are some tips for how to do it thoughtfully.

  • Reflect on whether you are prioritizing work outside of your job description. We rarely recommend removing all work that falls outside of your job description as this is the primary way you learn new skills and grow in your career. However, we often see that people take on additional work and become quickly stress because it is framed as a core expectation vs. a growth opportunity. If you are consistently operating over capacity, reflect on any work you are doing that is outside of your job description and lead a discussion with your manager to align on which responsibilities are a core responsibility vs. the work you are doing that is not. For the latter, ask whether you can delegate or reprioritize some of that work and make sure to align with them on how the additional work you take on will lead to career growth like a promotion or raise.

  • Understand what is driving urgency and timelines for your work. A lot of companies have a culture of urgency, often conflating urgency with productivity. However, in our business advising work we often help entrepreneurs see that driving false urgency can lead to less productivity because it removes all prioritization (i.e. if everything is urgent, no one knows what is important). If you find yourself feeling behind on projects all the time, you may work at a company or a boss that drives false urgency. Look at your project list and tasks and ask “why is it important that this get done by x date?”. If the answer is because we have an internal meeting coming up to discuss, or “that’s the date my boss gave me”, lead a conversation with your boss about how to prioritize your work and come up with solutions that enable you to prioritize what’s actually important like delegating less important or urgent work to other team members or creating deadlines that better align to the priority of the project.

  • Block your calendar to have solo work time and communicate what this block is for to your manager. Many times people are stressed by constant context switching and do not have time to focus on one project to complete it. For example, maybe you consistently find yourself with four 30 min blocks throughout the day vs. a 2 hour block. Talk to your manager about how you want to improve your productivity by carving out focus time in your calendar and align with them on the days and times you plan to do this. The strategies we discuss in our make your work schedule work for you episode can also help with this. You can also use tools like clockwise which will automatically optimize your calendar throughout the week. Talking to your manager is the key here, as we sometimes see people take this action on their own and this can lead to managers not understanding what the time is for. In the worst case, your manager can assume it’s not actually working time.

  • Communicate about the boundaries you are putting in place and why. Most importantly, it’s important that you communicate about whichever boundaries you plan to put in place and why you are doing so. It can also help to share details of your personal life that may be driving some of your needs. Sharing your plans and how you expect them to improve your productivity and focus can help you get what you need while ensuring you stay on track with your career. Most people have some level of empathy, and once they understand your plan and how you have factored in their needs or concerns, they are happy to support it.

Pro tip: We know boundary conversations can be difficult, especially when they are with your boss, and we are here to help! reach out to The GLASS ADVISORY to discuss your specific situation and manager relationship and we will build a script for you to use and practice the conversation with you.

Tips for managers

The main takeaway we encourage you to remember is that if you allow your team to implement strategies that help keep their stress in a manageable place, you will ultimately keep productivity high and avoid needing to constantly hire new employees.

  • Plot your team members on the performance / stress curve above to understand who may be at risk of burnout. Reflect on recent performance of each team member and the signals they have sent you in 1:1s on how they are doing. Identify any team members who may be at risk of burnout and open up a conversation with them about this in your next 1:1.

  • Be open to boundary conversations, communicating what is important and why and leaving room for flexibility. If a team member comes to you and asks for a change in their work schedule or meeting structure or cadence, be open to it and do not approach it from a binary yes vs. no standpoint. If there are logistical reasons a particular boundary cannot be accommodated, understand the root of the request and brainstorm another solution that may work.

  • Don’t fall into the trap of false urgency and help your team members prioritize. When setting deadlines for projects, base it on the impact of the work vs. what seems like a reasonable amount of time to complete the task. This enables team members to prioritize their work to ensure the most important and impactful work is completed first. If your team members struggle to determine what is most important, help them to develop this skill. You can walk them through a basic prioritization framework like plotting projects on a matrix where the x-axis is urgency and the y-axis is importance.

  • Redistribute work to support team members at risk of burnout. Many times we fall into patterns where the same person does a specific task because they’ve always done it or always offer to help. Think strategically about how to leverage your team members to do the tasks they are best equipped to complete vs. who raises their hand first and if you notice someone is going through a period of time where they are consistently over capacity, redistribute the work to create more space for them.

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