Hello. It's Anthony Chadwick from the Webinar vet welcoming you to another episode of Vet Chat, the U K's number one veterinary podcast. And I'm super pleased and honoured to have Karen meagre on the line today.

Karen is the CEO COO of, the Monkey Puzzle training and consultancy and is also the author of Rest Practise and Perform. So we're gonna be talking a little bit about the book, and some of the issues that the book brings up. But first of all, Karen, thank you so much for giving your time today to go and speak to us.

Perhaps, Karen, just for the benefit of listeners, fill us in on a bit of your backstory and background and history. Yeah, sure. So I mean, my back story is really, I started off my career in industry and then, got involved in psychology through that.

So I, I used to, sort of use psychology in my work. And then I basically became trained as a clinical psychologist at the time, with every intention of coming out of industry and being a clinician. And then once I came out of it, I kind of missed it.

So So I sort of used those skills to get back into it. So my, so, like, I've got a an MB a. But also a master's in health research and psychology And my interest, really in the last five or six years has really been researching burnout, which has been fascinating with the global pandemic, and everything has have had a huge impact on on people's attention around the the the subject of burnout.

So, we I met John through sort of my work, and John and I have set up monkey puzzle, really to take sort of practical psychology back into industry and to make it a bit less scary a bit less, theoretical and prac and make it more practical, particularly for leaders and teams, working in non non-standard organisations. So innovative organisations Science, tech, that kind of thing. Excellent.

But the the book, I think has just come out. You came to my attention on LinkedIn. I spend quite a bit of time on LinkedIn.

I find it a fascinating platform and a very much a business platform, isn't it? For those who perhaps aren't using it as much obviously read about the book, the book seemed really interesting. So perhaps tell us a little bit about it.

This whole concept of rest practise perform It sounds very much elite athletes as well as a business person. Yeah, well, it came from we when we were doing our masters in health research we had in intended to research, but I me individually burnout and John, my business partner, organisational performance. But when he started to dig around into academic the academic world in terms of what there was around performance, it was the literature was just so vast.

Performance in organisations wasn't very well defined, so we got a bit lost really in. How are we gonna help organisations with performance? And that's really where we stumbled across the field of, elite sport.

So he's focusing on performance, and I was focusing on burning out burn out. And the thing about elite sports is that they they seem to have the best model available for performing at the top level of your game for a long period of time without burning out. And, of course, burnout does happen in sports, but it's a lot less common potentially than it is in organisations.

So we went and studied Formula One and tennis and football and three very different sports. And, by listening to a lot of interviews examining particularly some of the, sports people that have been in the field for a long time, like how have they managed to sustain performance? And then then we took the principles from that research and put it into organisations.

So some of the clients that we worked with we sort of tested our theories with them. So we've come up with something that, and that's how we come up with the rest practise perform because all the sports seem to have a rhythm whereby the performance is the match or the game itself. And then there's a rest period where they do some recuperation and some rejuvenation.

Then they start to practise. And the one of the key differences is that in sports, people practise a lot more than they actually perform. So they, you know, tennis player might, might practise for four or five hours a day for a for a 1.5 hour match.

Unless you're Andy Murray and then you have a very long match. That's because you like pain. But but the in the main like there's a lot of investment in that kind of practise phase and and getting the skills that you need and and also training a little bit outside of your own, field.

So practising more general sports that rather than just your specific sport. And we just, felt that a lot of organisations could learn a lot from that because particularly in the organisations that we work with, people are very technically brilliant in their area of expertise. But they you know, you go to university to study your area of expertise that doesn't really teach, teach you how to how to run a business, how to, how to run a team, how to keep the team motivated, how to like, basically, do all the peripheral things around that.

And that's what sports people are increasingly doing a lot better than organisations. And so if you do those things, then your performance is better and also more sustainable, and I think it's, it's a big problem, you know, within the veterinary world, we talk about burnouts a lot We have a big drop out of people leaving usually somewhere in that first five years. And it's been fascinating, actually, for myself, following people who have got past that stage and then 10 years qualified and actually often much more satisfied and happy that they stayed within the profession because they had those difficult times.

And it might have been, you know, working too hard. Or it might have been not having a very nice boss or whatever. But if they were able to get over that hump, it is a fantastic job to have, so I think that practise side is definitely part of the burnout, isn't it?

If you get good at the job, if you are enjoying the job, you're much less likely to burn out. Yeah, and I think that particularly a problem for sort of the veterinary industry is that there's so much. There's so much that you can lose of yourself into your into your job, because there's a There's a like a technical element so you can kind of get mentally worn out.

There's also an emotional element. So you're dealing with you're dealing with animals, but also their owners and the amount of emotional burden that quite often drives people into that kind of profession in the first place because they care can then become, too much and overwhelming very quickly. And I think that people that can be in those kind of professions for a long time I kind of learned to come out and go back in rather than, rather than be all in all the time.

And, I mean, I remember when I was training as a psychotherapist. I was horrified because my my, my teacher said to me, some of the best therapists I know don't really care about people. They care about the mind and they care about their thinking and they feel they about the cognition.

But that, of course. And I was horrified at the time because I thought That's not why I'm here. I'm here because I care.

But they, but what that meant was that they could they could look at it very clearly and stand back from the problem rather than getting overly involved in the person's emotional, being. And I think in a lot of caring professions, that distinction or a variation of that distinction that works for you is a bit of a key to avoiding burning out. I think it's a really good point because I would say that when I was doing clinical practise I, I always empathised you know, II.

I like people I like the animals love. But I also understood that if I was weeping when the dog was getting put to sleep and I was doing that, then that would probably affect my performance of a very important task, which is making sure that that euthanasia consult goes really well. I was able to keep that distance, which I think is is important because otherwise you go home in emotional wreck every day, don't you?

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, And that's what partly what we, when we when we studied the sports people, the obviously for sports people, the main thing that they have to sort of rest from is their body from whatever exertion is in the sport. But often as well.

A lot of the people we interviewed said that they have to rest from the pressure of the competition so they may still even actually play the sport that they were going that they do it to perform, but they might do it with less pressure, just for fun. So, so there's that, You know, if you think about some of those key moments like the one you described in terms of your work, if that's like a key moment, what do you exert in that moment that you then need to rest? So it's like, You know, if you think about your day, I don't know how much you know you can realistically see what each appointment might be or or what's coming your way.

But I know that my my vet has certain clinics for certain things, and I think that helps her to stay in A This is like my vaccine warning, and this is my, that helps her, I think, to stay in a certain mindset because if she's doing boosters, she just can like she can do her process. But she knows that there are probably gonna be some things where she's gonna get curveballs and she's gonna have to be a bit more on her game, which, in terms of the book is what we would call the performance window. So It's the thing where in your profession you'll have to be really focused.

You need all of you need everything to be able to get that done well. And that's probably also the bit that makes you like better than others about your work, so that whatever your speciality is like, that's the sort of the window of work where you're really at your best. But you just can't do that all the time.

So the more that you can take aspects of your work into, like a good rhythm, it means that you actually have more available for those moments, if if that makes sense, yeah, and it's interesting if you are vaccinating puppies, which is lovely to do because it's a puppy and you can cuddle them and play and have a chat with the owners and the owners are obviously really pleased. And then the next consult is a euthanasia. There's a whole different sort of, emotion to that, so it's a really good point, and in fact, I tend now with my week to have you know, my Monday is is like a, internal meeting day Tuesday is tending to be more strategic Wednesday is producing content like this podcast Thursday is external meetings, and then Friday is kind of bringing that all together.

And of course, that doesn't always work perfectly. And sometimes I'm on a course or whatever. But I think having a rhythm to your day and your week is really useful, isn't it?

Yeah, for most, I think for most people or even if they have a day where you don't really have a clue what's going to happen like it's an anything day. But at least you're like you're switched on for that particular day. Whereas if you know, for example, that your Mondays are fairly routine, things that kind of often helps people just to mentally get themselves into the right place for their work.

But I think you know, I always feel for, people that work, for example, like in ER for, how how they kind of cope with that. Because often everything is very unpredictable for them. So, you know, still, whilst I think this best practise performer that works for an awful lot of professions and everybody could probably get a little bit better at resting well and practising some of the things that help them to perform better.

There are some professions where I think it's inevitable that you're gonna face those kind of, like burnout crisises just because the work is unpredictable, quite stressful, very high stakes that tho those kind of roles are like, That's just the reality. I think of that kind of work. I was, I took a week off last week to do the Camino so sort of pilgrimage.

You know, again, doing something like that is so important to build up the the stock of energy, the emotional energy and and everything and and actually, it's fascinating. I was I was on the boat that we took, and I was sitting next to a South African farmer, and his two Children were vets, and one of them was an ultra runner. And, of course, we just had, Jasmine Parish, finish a very famous race that no woman has ever finished before.

Who's also a vet? I used to run a lot when I was a bit younger. So obviously, people see that as a way of relaxing and of of bringing the energy levels back again of I I found at the end of the day going out for a run.

I could process a lot of stuff during the run, and then get back home and be much more relaxed than if I just got home and immediately, you know, eaten or whatever. So that kind of time on my own, having spent most of my day with people, although I think I'm quite, extrovert that time on my own was really important to just get me to a state where I could, you know, function in the in the evenings as well. So exercise sport is is obviously a really important part of preventing burner, I would guess.

Yeah, and I think that for with the athletes that the interesting thing is, they all had something they did like in the transition out of performance before they rested. So they didn't come straight. You know, straight off a party or straight off and go home quite often, like tennis players will cool down.

There's like there's a transition of some different type of exercise that kind of moves them out of their performance phase, and that seems to be quite important for a lot of people, and I think when you know there's a lot of there's a lot of bad things about commuting. But one of the things about commuting that people have reported that they used to quite like was it provided quite a seamless transition. Like where you'd come out of your work headspace and into your home.

We, headspace, whereas now if you're online, you have your meeting and then the kids are at the door and like after their dinner and stuff, so you don't get to kind of do that that sort of switch that people had built up before. And it's important, I think, for people to find a way to whatever works for them, because running is great for some people. But for other people, it's a it's a walk or it's a workout, or it's a phone, a friend or speak to your parents or, like, do something that kind of just breaks you out of your, out of your normal kind of work or performance headspace.

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It's really interesting again with the running theme. Laura Muir is a veterinary surgeon, qualified a few years ago from Glasgow and is an Olympic medallist. And I remember interviewing her and she'd come forth in the Olympics.

I mean, just to get anywhere near the Olympics is, you know, truly amazing. And she'd gone for Madeleine and then faded back and ended up in fourth or fifth. And what really impressed me about Laura was that she'd already kind of moved on from that because that was something she couldn't impact anymore.

And I see that also, I'm a big Liverpool football club fan. As a fan, you can hold on to a defeat for you know, I. I try not to do that, but I certainly see people doing it.

Whereas you listen to people like Klopp or some of the footballers and they know that they can't impact that result anymore. And it's gonna impact their next game if they've still got their heads down so they can move on from failure. Probably a lot quicker than mere mortals, can't they?

Yeah, yeah, it's It's interesting, because when we did a book launch, we had, two Paralympians came and joined us because the they were what some of the people that we talked to when we were writing the book and they were wheelchair rugby Olympians. And, and they were talking about the difference between what they called a hot debrief and a cold debrief. So you'd come out of your out of your, match if you particularly if you had lost.

And you just basically let all the emotion out like you might even have a go at each other like it was. It's quite she. They were saying it can be quite kind of rough in some ways, but that is in the boundary of what you call a hot debrief, which I think if you do emotionally pent up type work, sometimes that's useful.

And then the cold debrief is OK Strategically, what could we do better next time? What have we learned from that. So you're not trying to do the two things to together which often in businesses and organisations they try to do that.

But you've got to get people's emotions moved out. Like you say. You're not holding on to the thing before you could really do that.

Analytical. OK, so what would we do better next time? Because you don't make good judgments in a hot moment.

But you do need to still get the emotion out somehow. Yes. Yeah.

Punch bikes are useful as well, aren't they? Yeah. Yeah, just, maybe talking a little bit outside of the book now around team performance.

Because I know you do a lot of work with with teams around that. And how do you feel that teams are performing in this kind of, hopefully end of pandemic period? Working from home, people being pushed back into an office.

People working hybrid. What? What's your sort of thoughts?

Where are we up to in that kind of from what you're seeing in the in the work that you're doing? Where are people at? You know, Are we getting to the point where people are saying I don't want to be at home all the time and actually being with people is important or have we really converted into, You know, our home and our office are the same thing.

Yeah, I think it's a great question and it's really confusing, so because in a way, we've never We've never been through, like a period like this, where the world of work has shifted quite so quickly and sharply as well. But what we're finding is that teams that had already had were already strong before the pandemic have moved into a hybrid world a lot easier than teams that weren't so. It's like if you it's all.

There were some studies that I read about it just over the pandemic that if the If the face to face team had been built properly at the start, then Actually this kind of work is fairly straightforward and can work very smoothly. People know each other, they know each other at quite a deep level. There's one organisation we worked with who actually didn't they formed in the pandemic, so they've never for over 18 months, none of them had ever met.

They recruited everybody online and it was the strangest experience, Anthony, because when we ST we So we were running team days and stuff to get them back together. But it was it was odd because the reaction that people had was like, I know you, but I don't really know you like I know you as a face on a screen. So I think I know you.

But I don't actually know you. So you almost had to sort of start again. So some of the T some of the organisations that, we've worked with that I think have got it right is they bring together people together for a reason.

So they're not really They're not forcing people to come back to the office to three or four days a week because because that's what they want. They'll bring them together for things like team meetings or or like, where the where the interaction is meaningful and therefore you're building the relationship, and I think that makes the working from home where you can be a bit more transactional. But so there are some types of people that have really enjoyed the have actually like it's benefited their mental health to be working from home Cos people who are a bit more socially anxious that don't really like the sort of the people in the office.

People are a bit more introverted. Actually, the distance of the online has helped them to contain themselves. But in some ways it hasn't been helpful because it's not stretching them to do a little bit more of that.

So it it's like, you know, in a way it's retreated some people into their comfort zone. For some people, it's been quite depressing if you really like to be around people. So I think to some degree the key is really in the strength of managers and leaders to to know their teams, to know what kind of rhythm works best.

And also to be able to, like, assess performance without having to be with people all all the time. That's quite a different skill. Often, you know, the the old fashioned way of is someone doing a good job, usually because I'm seeing them do the job rather than like being attached to measuring other performance measures like outcomes, for example, So it it is very confusing, and big organisations I think are finding it very hard because people are people are having a different experience.

Teams are having different experiences. But But I think the key, the key is like bringing people together face to face for a meaningful reason. It then gives you a lot to go on when you are then working in the hybrid, situation.

No, that makes a really good point. People don't realise I'm 6 ft six because they only see my head and shoulders. They say you're taller than we thought you would be.

And of course, that's the thing you don't I think Zoom and we've been using Zoom, you know, well before the pandemic for our webinars. And we would have initial meetings with clients on Zoom because we wanted to show them what we could do. But it's very transactional.

And actually, you know, I enjoy the getting to know clients as well, and I think if you like and trust people, you develop relationships quicker than on this more transactional sort of setting that we're in at the moment. Yes, yes, and it's It's a funny one, with the way that the brain processes something like a like zoom like you say your mind also almost a automatically fills in the gaps, like just looking at you there, like my brain's probably already worked out an idea of how tall you are and stuff, even though like that's not important. And it's like, But it's natural for us, like our brains to fill in those things.

So then when people encounter people, their mind's going, Oh, no, this is like not what I thought, So it sort of it sends people into. I was reading something in The New Scientist last week about how anxi anxiety levels have gone through the roof, worldwide and that, you know, various scientists are attributing it to the pandemic, but some of it probably is because we've made some assumptions and then actually, they're wrong. So when we actually experience the world and stuff, we get, like AD, cognitive dissonance that that causes us to feel like, Oh, we we could trust our judgement.

But now I can't trust my judgement. So there's lots of quite complicated things that are kind of going on. I think, behind the scenes for people overall, we're working our way through it, but it's not.

It's not easy I have a lot of empathy with organisations that try to get that balance right. I think you made a good point, though, about we We do have to stretch ourselves because there could be a tendency to almost become a nanny state. Whereas actually we we grow when we often when we have a troublesome thing, we grow more in those difficult periods than we do when everything's going swimmingly.

Well, don't we? Yeah. And I think that's the thing you've got the in a way, the sort of conventional way in which people used to go to work almost forced everybody to stretch a little bit into their area of discomfort.

But now, in a way, you can You can sort of retreat into your comfort zone, which actually can actually make you more more anxious because then everything that's unfamiliar is is like a big step. And I know I mean, I remember going back into London the first time after the pandemic, and I could feel my nervous system was just like, really kicking in. And it was it was quite unusual, cos I was going back to a place I was familiar with that.

I knew the people. It wasn't. It wasn't all kind of brand new, but it was new enough.

My nervous system was completely adjusted out of it. So people must be experiencing that, like, all over the place. And I if anyone can remember when you first went back into a crowded room or you went to a concert or something afterwards and I could see people around me, like, kind of checking out how far they were, like we we had adjusted into a different place.

And in a way, all of that is just symptomatic of what your brain does when it gets used to something. And, and so you like you say it is useful to just just to keep stretching yourself a little bit, rather than, retreating into your comfort zone. Yeah, I was getting a vaccine yesterday, and actually, I didn't cos it was two hours.

I had to walk out in the end. But there was somebody who was snuffling and coughing and, you know, I was sitting quite close to him, and I actually just got up and moved away. I was actually quite keen to give my handkerchief, but I my British has stopped me doing it.

So we have changed. Our whole attitude towards germs has probably changed. Some people very sort of have a phobia about it.

Obviously, I'm I think I'm just trying to avoid not getting something because I'm going away in a few days. But it's, It has changed our way of thinking, hasn't it? The the pandemic?

Yeah, it's all switched on a part of our mind that we didn't really realise. Had to had to be alert for something. Well, for some people, actually, who have, like, who have phobias around those kinds of things, they always are switched on.

And it's almost like more of us became switched on to something that some people always have had. Yeah. No, fascinating.

I do hope, Karen, that the book continues to sell. We will put it underneath here at our, in the podcast. Charlie will put it in the descriptions and things.

I, I must admit, I, I do have some books that are for self development, and some books are for shelf development. So I have I haven't got round to yet, But I, I will, keep it on my list of ones to, to go and have a look at. And, it sounds a really useful book, even for the veterinary profession with this problem of burnout.

So I I do recommend it to, to people to have a look and let me know what they think. Thank you. Appreciate that.

Karen. It's great to speak to you. Always good to find such interesting people on LinkedIn and then becoming LinkedIn useful for that.

Thanks so much, Karen. Thank you. Thank you.

And thanks everyone for listening. Anthony Chadwick from the Webinar Vet. This has been another episode of Vet Chat.

The U K's number one veterinary podcast Hope to see you on a podcast or a webinar very soon. Take care. Have a great rest of the day.