37. Gaps in MPH Education
If you’re a few years out of your MPH degree, love public health, but find yourself unhappy at work and maybe even thinking about quitting your job, this is the episode for you. So many people feel defeated, hopeless, and resentful at work, and on this episode, I’m outlining what might be going on.
As someone who is extremely passionate about the public health field, I also take a critical view of it. I’ve spent a good chunk of my career fighting to improve the experiences of its workforce, and I’ve identified four challenges that most of us aren’t prepared for after finishing our MPH degrees to help you realize you’re not alone in the obstacles you might be facing in your day-to-day.
Listen in this week as I guide you through what to do when you encounter any one of these four challenges. I’m showing you why we find these hurdles so draining, and where to focus your energy on instead to support yourself and create the emotional experience you want at work.
If you’re struggling at work, burnt out, overwhelmed, hate your boss, or at the end of your rope after a year-and-a-half of dealing with a pandemic, I have an amazing free course beginning in 2022. It’s packed with simple, direct content that you can easily consume over your lunch break to help you feel better and less stressed in 2022. Join the 2022 course waitlist here!
What You Will Discover:
4 challenges you weren’t fully prepared for going into the workforce after finishing your MPH degree.
What these 4 challenges have in common.
The unhelpful messages we’ve adopted about productivity and rest.
How the public health field is guilty of having practices of putting profits over people.
Why being a star performer doesn’t equate to being a good leader.
How to navigate these challenges in a new way so you can feel empowered at work.
Resources:
Sign up for a Curiosity Call to find out more about coaching
Get The Burnout Recovery Resolution mini-course by signing up here!
Follow me on Instagram!
Download The Year’s Three Emotions worksheet here.
Full Episode Transcript:
If you're two to five years out of your MPH degree, love public health, but find yourself secretly unhappy at work and maybe even thinking about quitting your job, then this is the podcast for you. I'm Marissa McKool, host of the Thoughts Are Your Root Cause podcast. Join me each week as I share tips, tools, and resources to help you have the career you've always dreamed of without any of the stress you are experiencing right now. Come along.
Alright, y'all, today's the day! If you were on the waitlist for the Burnout Resolution Recovery mini-course, check your email. Today is the day! The course is out, and you have exclusive access for the next month to this course. I'm so excited. I can't wait to hear from you all, and what you think, and how it's been useful, and if you missed it, didn't get on the waitlist, that's okay. I'll share at the end of this episode how you can make sure you don't miss the next time.
So, today we're going to be talking about four things you are not fully prepared for going into the workforce after finishing your MPH degree, including the organizational bias in inequity, the toxic productivity culture, unsupportive and ill-equipped leaders, and dealing with challenging team members. So, today is not about saying that MPH programs need to prepare you for these things. I am also not saying that they shouldn't. That's not the purpose of today's episode.
The purpose of today's episode, I'm going through these areas, is to one, help you realize you're not alone in these challenges. And two, give you some tools so you can navigate and deal with these challenges. So, each of these four areas could be their own episode. So, I'm just going to do a broad overview to get your wheels turning a bit. Then, after that, I'm going to share what they have in common and what you can do.
I also want to say you all know; I love public health, and I'm super passionate about it, and because of that, I am also very critical of the field of public health. It has its issues and its downfalls, particularly with the workforce. Which I think it's overlooked a lot, like how public health treats its workforce.
I spent a good chunk of my career fighting internally to improve experiences for public health staff. CDC, I helped with some of my colleagues develop a fellow's professional development collective because we felt there was no specific fellow support, particularly around career development.
At the school public health I was recently working at, I led a new internal sexual violence, sexual harassment prevention committee for our internal organization, thinking about how internally we treat each other and our policies and all of that to prevent harm within our organization. Public health's role is to protect and fight for the health of communities. But I strongly believe it also needs to do the same for its own workforce, and I believe it can, but there are issues that need to be worked through.
So, I wanted you all to know that, but today's episode is about you and what you can do when you encounter these challenges. So, the first is organizational bias in inequity. So, just like bias inequity, public health is trying to change in the world; it exists within the walls of public health. It exists within organizational hiring and firing practices, the way resources are allocated and distributed internally, position title, function, and pay structures for staff, as well as the policies or lack thereof policies related to addressing harmful behaviors like microaggressions.
Sometimes the bias in inequity occurs because there are no thoughtful structures or policies to prevent it. And sometimes, it actually occurs because the structures and policies and processes in place to try to prevent it actually make it worse or make it harder to be equitable. Often, the people who end up having to champion the change internally are folks who are experiencing the harms of that bias in inequity themselves. Just like out in our communities.
So, for example, we learn in our public health programs the importance of including communities in our work in an equitable and fairway. Then, we get into our public health organization and encounter so many barriers to pay community participants or community partners, pay them fairly, right? So, whether it's you have to fight and advocate to get the appropriate amount of money or resources allocated to a community partner, or the payment process in structure ends up taking three months to pay them. Not only is this inequitable and unfair to those communities, but to you, to have to navigate that, and advocate, and hit barriers, and push and really have that be a larger component of your job than it should be.
And then toxic productivity culture, so in society at large, I talk about this a lot; we have adopted and internalized unhelpful messages about productivity and rest. And public health promotes this within its own workforce. The idea is that rest comes after productivity. We may think of the field, or the field may think of itself as a sector that promotes self-care. But there are so many organizational barriers and challenges to practicing it that aren't addressed. Organizations' expectations that work comes before the employee's needs. Like, for example, having a culture where texting a staff member on vacation is accepted, let alone expected, right?
Then, toxic capitalism, listen, y'all, I criticize capitalism, and I talk about it from thinking about it as the way it is structured. But, capitalism, right, the means to make revenue and make money and distribute it like, that is important. It's just the way in which capitalism has functioned in our country and how it stemmed, like where it stemmed from and how it's developed, can be very toxic, and that needs to change. Same with how it functions within public health, right? Public health needs funds to work, right? Maybe it's not a traditional business where it makes revenue, but it gets grants or donations, right, and we all know public health needs that funding.
But the field is still guilty of having practices, intentionally or not, of putting profits over people. For example, organizations or teams where it's just accepted or even common to decide to apply for a grant that's due in a week, even if that means the staff are working nights and weekends. And not just the immediate staff, other staff, unpaid, right? The last piece around this is around failure. In public health within the workforce, failure is seen as a problem, and it's not spoken about that way. Still, there's a lot of indirect messages that promote that. So, staff do not, and the workforce do not feel comfortable talking about mistakes or errors or failures because it's seen as a problem, something to avoid, rather than something to expect, embrace and learn from.
Then, the third piece, unsupportive and ill-equipped leaders. So there's this often-unconscious view in the large workforce, but especially in public health, that the purpose of leadership is to drive productivity, right? We have team leads, our supervisors who focus on what we are or aren't doing in our actions, the outcomes we are or are not achieving, rather than how we are or aren't doing.
What support do we need? How to actively listen. How to advocate for us. How to fill our gaps. We also have this belief that the best leaders are those who are experts at what they do. So, in the field, largely those who are promoted are put in supervisor positions are those who are the four most experts in that knowledge area, that content area, that skill, that methodology, and then they're experts.
So, we have folks who maybe are in positions of power, and the decision-making structure is such that they get the final say. So, either they don't ask for input from others, or they do, but they don't really take it into consideration. The final decision is still left up to that leader or that expert. The idea that not everyone is an expert to contribute to those decision-making factors. The truth is, a lot of people in positions of power or leadership roles or manager, supervisor roles are star performers, but it does not mean they are star leaders. There's a difference between having a high level of skills to execute a task or project or type of project and having high level skills to manage people and support people.
The last piece is dealing with challenging team members. So, there aren't great processes or even trained leaders to address situations where a team member isn't contributing or is even engaging in harmful ways. And we're not taught how to address situations where a team member is crossing a professional boundary. Or how to simply deal with people who have different work styles or approaches.
So, one example, I used to work in an office where it went from being a space where folks had actual cubicles or had actual offices to open space. And when I say open space, I do not mean cubicles. I mean, there were not even dividers between me and the person next to me. And I and other staff were absolutely not prepared to deal with this and address coworkers who would come interrupt us. And actually, more importantly, address folks in different positions of power who would come up and talk to us and interrupt us.
So, being in a situation where someone's constantly interrupting us, whether I feel unable and ill-equipped to tell them my needs and set a boundary because they're in a position of power, or because their coworker or colleague that I have to continue to work with regularly and I don't know how to manage that relationship and set boundaries.
They constantly come to interrupt me and chat and not leave for an hour. And the truth is, I probably was that annoying coworker, too, to someone else. None of us were taught how to manage this. There wasn't forethought in this change of how it would affect relationships, right? So, those are the four challenge areas. I'm sure there's more, but those are the four I am covering today. What do all of these challenges have in common? They all have one very important thing in common. They are all challenging because they are things that are completely or largely out of our control. That's why they are so challenging.
So, when we think about the systems that function within public health or the workplace norms, everyone contributes to this, right? Systems and norms are made up of people who take certain actions. But because it is an outcome of many people acting a certain way, you do not have 100% control, right. It takes a good number of other people to change their behavior, to change the norm or the system or the structure. So, we could say it either takes like a decent majority of the staff, let's say 30% of the staff, to start that change bottom-up or a few key people in positions of power to do it from the top down.
And with dealing with challenging leaders or team members, that's basically completely out of your control. How your supervisor or colleague acts, what they do, or say, or don't do, you can't control them. You can't force them to change. So, the fact that these four challenges are largely out of your control that is why they're so challenging and frustrating. And you have not been taught how to deal with that. That is why you feel so defeated, so helpless, so hopeless, so resentful. We are not prepared to handle these things, to handle things out of our control that we feel are directly impacting us. And what you need to do is change your mental focus.
It's like you're a bird watcher, right, and you're looking through binoculars. Those of you who never used binoculars, when you put them on your eyes, it's just like a narrow view that you see. And you're only watching a stubborn bird who won't get out of the nest. And you're getting frustrated, and you want it to get out of the nest. There's nothing you can do. It's not listening. But if you turned your head a little bit to the right, you'd see a bunch of birds flying, and they'd be different colors, and it would be fun to watch. Now, I'm not saying ignore the problems and pretend everything's cool and, you know, happy go lucky.
The whole point of that metaphor is to say stop focusing on what you cannot control and focus on what you can control. Stop and consciously recognize what do you have control over, and what don't you? And I know many of you think you do this, but you don't. Because what you are actually doing is focusing on what you cannot control in order to try to control it while ignoring what you actually can control. And that is absolutely not what I'm saying you should do. I'm saying notice what you cannot control so you can stop focusing on it so much and shift and recognize what you can control, so you can focus on that way more.
For example, instead of constantly complaining about your project co-lead, like, you and someone else is co-leading a project—Instead of constantly complaining of their behaviors and focusing on what they do or don't do, tell yourself it would just be better if they changed. Stop, recognize you cannot change them. You cannot make them change and shift your focus on you. What can you do to make the situation better for you? Maybe it's asking to be taken off the project. Maybe it's finding a whole new job. Maybe it's letting go of your expectation that they will ever change. Maybe it stops thinking about them 80% of the time. There's a whole host of things you could do. None of which are right or wrong, but you're not focusing there, and that's where all your power is.
Maybe you don't like any of those options. That's fine, but don't lie to yourself and tell yourself you don't have options. You do have options. You have things in your control. And I guarantee you focusing on your options even if you don't love them all and focusing on that and doing something from a place of your control and what you can do is going to feel so much better, so much more empowering, than continuing to focus on someone else who you absolutely have no control over. What you don't have control over is other people, their behaviors, their actions.
When you focus all your time thinking about that other people what they're not doing, what they should be doing, you will never see a solution. You are telling your brain by only focusing on what other people should be doing that the only solution for you to feel better is for them to change. Which you cannot control. What you do have control over is how you are going to show up for yourself. How are you going to show up for yourself in a challenging circumstance? How are you going to show up for yourself when the system is putting up barriers? How are you going to show up for yourself when you're dealing with someone who you find difficult?
If you focus your energy here, you will get so much farther in changing your experience. If you spend your time focused on how you're showing up for yourself, how you're reacting, what you want, you will feel empowered. Your brain is a solution machine, but the problem you set your brain to solve matters. If you tell your brain all day the problem is other people, and you have to solve other people. Your brain is only going to see a solution of other people changing. That will never work. You have to tell your brain to solve a problem you can actually take action from.
So, instead of asking, why don't they change, whether they are a boss or like the whole organization, which will just result in the answers of they should change. They should do it this way. Ask yourself what do I want to do about this? This is a much more useful question that will get you out of resentment, frustration, and hopelessness. Those feelings don't get you anywhere; they keep you stuck.
When you ask yourself questions like, what do I want to do about this, how can I better support myself? Your brain will go to work figuring out an answer to that. Maybe your answer is quitting. Maybe it's advocating for something different. Maybe it's just letting other people be messy and not spend time worrying about it.
All of the answers your brain will find when you ask those questions are answers that are in your control. You get all your power back. You get to feel empowered and confident, and centered. Your brain, of course, is probably going to go. Well, I don't like that answer. I don't like that option.
Of course, it doesn't, because your brain likes the idea of other people having to do the work and change. That, of course, feels easier. I don't have to put in the hard work, but that's never going to happen. You can either wait for other people to magically change, or you can wait for enough people to change in order for the system or processes to change to feel better. Or you can put your brain to work to helping yourself feel better right now.
You have to spend more of your mental energy asking yourself better questions. You've been focused on the wrong problem. The problem for you to solve isn't what other people need to do differently. The problem you need to solve is what you want to do, how you want to spend your energy. This doesn't mean you no longer have opinions about other people or ideas of what your organization can do differently. It just means you don't focus all your energy there and get stuck there and require that to happen in order for you to feel better. You don't rely on those things changing other people changing in order to feel better. It means you focus your mental energy on solving the problem of what you want to spend your time doing. How you want to feel. What do you want to think?
Stop asking yourself these dead-end questions all day; why are they doing that? When are things going to get better? Why can't they stop? When will they change? Those will get you nowhere. Start asking yourself more empowering questions; what do I want to do in this situation? How can I make this easier for myself? How do I want to spend my energy? What level of energy am I willing to give to this? How can I let go of this and move on? What can I do to make sure I stay content? In what ways can I better support myself? Do you see the difference?
The first set of questions leaves you like a dog chasing its tail going in circles, driving yourself nuts, thinking there's an endpoint, and you're going to get there, but you never get there. The second set of questions, where you're focusing on you and what you can do, gives you the power to make sure you create the experience you want. No matter the circumstance, no matter what other people are doing.
And listen, y'all, this is not selfish. I know some of you right now are like, well, it sounds really selfish; how do I give up on fighting for this because if I give up on fighting for this, my other colleagues will continue to be burdened by this. You putting all the responsibility on you, and you're also getting confused because asking yourself better questions that are focused on what you want to do and what you can do does not mean that you automatically choose to no longer advocate for change, to no longer fight for things to be different, no.
When you ask those questions, you get the choice do you want to keep advocating for change? Do you want to fight for change? If so, how would you like to do it? If not, that's okay, right? Some of the best ways to initiate change to advocate for change is to learn how to show up for yourself first. Model what you want to be different in other people or in the organization you serve. You cannot do that if you just focus on other people and the organization and how they need to change rather than focusing on what you can do and how you want to support yourself.
This is absolutely not selfish at all. Okay? So many of us have been socialized, especially in public health if you have a giver's heart or if you've been socialized as a woman, like, the patriarchy plays a big role in this. That there's this idea is we have to do all of the work to make changes, right? We have to like burn all our energies and work ourselves to the bone because if we don't, no one else will.
I think so many folks have that in their mind. If you have another marginalized identity, whether you're a person of color or immigrant or identify as nonbinary or have a disability, you also have been messaged about this. That you have to fight for your rights and other people's rights. And then if you don't do that, or you change your focus, or you put yourself and your needs first, you're selfish. Right, you're not showing up for your community.
No, that is absolutely not true. All of that messaging is designed for you to internalize it and burn yourself out. For you to internalize it and not support yourself and not meet your own needs, it is absolutely not selfish at all. Supporting yourself, giving yourself what you need to have the emotional experience you want to have at work when you encounter these challenges you can't control is the most important thing you can do. Not only for yourself, certainly for yourself, and most importantly for yourself, but secondly, actually for everyone around you. This is not selfish at all.
This is the most important work you can do for yourself, for the field, and for your colleagues. Your work as you navigate these challenges you are not prepared for by your MPH is to recognize what's in your control and what's not in your control. And ask yourself better questions, so you can create the emotional experience you want. So, you can take the actions you want that you feel empowered by. So, you can spend your time thinking in a way that serves you. When you do that, it does not mean that you give up. It does not mean you no longer care at all. It means you are able to get the rest to get the energy reserve to get the intention to get empowered to focus where you believe you want to focus. Where you want to spend your time. With how you want to feel. It is the most important and empowering work you can do.
Okay, y'all, as you can tell, I feel strongly about this. So, as you navigate these challenges, they're going to keep coming up, right? I want you to practice this. Practice what's in my control and what's not. Ask yourself better questions. Get your brain to work with higher-level thinking to questions that get to you answers and results that actually improve your experience. Okay?
So, to wrap up, if you are not on the burnout recovery resolution waitlist and you are not getting the course today, you need to sign up to get it when it comes out in February. We dive so much further into this, particularly there's a whole mini-course video on dealing with bosses or leadership who you find difficult. It takes us to a whole new level, right. And so, sign up at McKoolcoaching.com/courses, you can sign up, and when it gets released to the public in February, you can get that release, okay? You're not going to want to miss it.
Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. If you found this helpful, please share it with a friend, share it with a colleague, post it on Instagram, LinkedIn, review and rate, anything you can do to help everyone else get these tools and get these messages so that we can all start changing our experience at work and make it a better place to be. Have a great week. Love y'all. Bye.
Are you ready to make a change? Whether that's learning to love your job, making a career move, or anything in between, I can help. I'd be honored to coach you through figuring out what's next and navigating the steps to get there. So, head on over to mckoolcoaching.com/consult that's mckoolcoaching.com/consult to set up a time to chat and talk about how you can achieve the career of your dreams.
Alright, y'all, today's the day! If you were on the waitlist for the Burnout Resolution Recovery mini-course, check your email. Today is the day! The course is out, and you have exclusive access for the next month to this course. I'm so excited. I can't wait to hear from you all, and what you think, and how it's been useful, and if you missed it, didn't get on the waitlist, that's okay. I'll share at the end of this episode how you can make sure you don't miss the next time.
So, today we're going to be talking about four things you are not fully prepared for going into the workforce after finishing your MPH degree, including the organizational bias in inequity, the toxic productivity culture, unsupportive and ill-equipped leaders, and dealing with challenging team members. So, today is not about saying that MPH programs need to prepare you for these things. I am also not saying that they shouldn't. That's not the purpose of today's episode.
The purpose of today's episode, I'm going through these areas, is to one, help you realize you're not alone in these challenges. And two, give you some tools so you can navigate and deal with these challenges. So, each of these four areas could be their own episode. So, I'm just going to do a broad overview to get your wheels turning a bit. Then, after that, I'm going to share what they have in common and what you can do.
I also want to say you all know; I love public health, and I'm super passionate about it, and because of that, I am also very critical of the field of public health. It has its issues and its downfalls, particularly with the workforce. Which I think it's overlooked a lot, like how public health treats its workforce.
I spent a good chunk of my career fighting internally to improve experiences for public health staff. CDC, I helped with some of my colleagues develop a fellow's professional development collective because we felt there was no specific fellow support, particularly around career development.
At the school public health I was recently working at, I led a new internal sexual violence, sexual harassment prevention committee for our internal organization, thinking about how internally we treat each other and our policies and all of that to prevent harm within our organization. Public health's role is to protect and fight for the health of communities. But I strongly believe it also needs to do the same for its own workforce, and I believe it can, but there are issues that need to be worked through.
So, I wanted you all to know that, but today's episode is about you and what you can do when you encounter these challenges. So, the first is organizational bias in inequity. So, just like bias inequity, public health is trying to change in the world; it exists within the walls of public health. It exists within organizational hiring and firing practices, the way resources are allocated and distributed internally, position title, function, and pay structures for staff, as well as the policies or lack thereof policies related to addressing harmful behaviors like microaggressions.
Sometimes the bias in inequity occurs because there are no thoughtful structures or policies to prevent it. And sometimes, it actually occurs because the structures and policies and processes in place to try to prevent it actually make it worse or make it harder to be equitable. Often, the people who end up having to champion the change internally are folks who are experiencing the harms of that bias in inequity themselves. Just like out in our communities.
So, for example, we learn in our public health programs the importance of including communities in our work in an equitable and fairway. Then, we get into our public health organization and encounter so many barriers to pay community participants or community partners, pay them fairly, right? So, whether it's you have to fight and advocate to get the appropriate amount of money or resources allocated to a community partner, or the payment process in structure ends up taking three months to pay them. Not only is this inequitable and unfair to those communities, but to you, to have to navigate that, and advocate, and hit barriers, and push and really have that be a larger component of your job than it should be.
And then toxic productivity culture, so in society at large, I talk about this a lot; we have adopted and internalized unhelpful messages about productivity and rest. And public health promotes this within its own workforce. The idea is that rest comes after productivity. We may think of the field, or the field may think of itself as a sector that promotes self-care. But there are so many organizational barriers and challenges to practicing it that aren't addressed. Organizations' expectations that work comes before the employee's needs. Like, for example, having a culture where texting a staff member on vacation is accepted, let alone expected, right?
Then, toxic capitalism, listen, y'all, I criticize capitalism, and I talk about it from thinking about it as the way it is structured. But, capitalism, right, the means to make revenue and make money and distribute it like, that is important. It's just the way in which capitalism has functioned in our country and how it stemmed, like where it stemmed from and how it's developed, can be very toxic, and that needs to change. Same with how it functions within public health, right? Public health needs funds to work, right? Maybe it's not a traditional business where it makes revenue, but it gets grants or donations, right, and we all know public health needs that funding.
But the field is still guilty of having practices, intentionally or not, of putting profits over people. For example, organizations or teams where it's just accepted or even common to decide to apply for a grant that's due in a week, even if that means the staff are working nights and weekends. And not just the immediate staff, other staff, unpaid, right? The last piece around this is around failure. In public health within the workforce, failure is seen as a problem, and it's not spoken about that way. Still, there's a lot of indirect messages that promote that. So, staff do not, and the workforce do not feel comfortable talking about mistakes or errors or failures because it's seen as a problem, something to avoid, rather than something to expect, embrace and learn from.
Then, the third piece, unsupportive and ill-equipped leaders. So there's this often-unconscious view in the large workforce, but especially in public health, that the purpose of leadership is to drive productivity, right? We have team leads, our supervisors who focus on what we are or aren't doing in our actions, the outcomes we are or are not achieving, rather than how we are or aren't doing.
What support do we need? How to actively listen. How to advocate for us. How to fill our gaps. We also have this belief that the best leaders are those who are experts at what they do. So, in the field, largely those who are promoted are put in supervisor positions are those who are the four most experts in that knowledge area, that content area, that skill, that methodology, and then they're experts.
So, we have folks who maybe are in positions of power, and the decision-making structure is such that they get the final say. So, either they don't ask for input from others, or they do, but they don't really take it into consideration. The final decision is still left up to that leader or that expert. The idea that not everyone is an expert to contribute to those decision-making factors. The truth is, a lot of people in positions of power or leadership roles or manager, supervisor roles are star performers, but it does not mean they are star leaders. There's a difference between having a high level of skills to execute a task or project or type of project and having high level skills to manage people and support people.
The last piece is dealing with challenging team members. So, there aren't great processes or even trained leaders to address situations where a team member isn't contributing or is even engaging in harmful ways. And we're not taught how to address situations where a team member is crossing a professional boundary. Or how to simply deal with people who have different work styles or approaches.
So, one example, I used to work in an office where it went from being a space where folks had actual cubicles or had actual offices to open space. And when I say open space, I do not mean cubicles. I mean, there were not even dividers between me and the person next to me. And I and other staff were absolutely not prepared to deal with this and address coworkers who would come interrupt us. And actually, more importantly, address folks in different positions of power who would come up and talk to us and interrupt us.
So, being in a situation where someone's constantly interrupting us, whether I feel unable and ill-equipped to tell them my needs and set a boundary because they're in a position of power, or because their coworker or colleague that I have to continue to work with regularly and I don't know how to manage that relationship and set boundaries.
They constantly come to interrupt me and chat and not leave for an hour. And the truth is, I probably was that annoying coworker, too, to someone else. None of us were taught how to manage this. There wasn't forethought in this change of how it would affect relationships, right? So, those are the four challenge areas. I'm sure there's more, but those are the four I am covering today. What do all of these challenges have in common? They all have one very important thing in common. They are all challenging because they are things that are completely or largely out of our control. That's why they are so challenging.
So, when we think about the systems that function within public health or the workplace norms, everyone contributes to this, right? Systems and norms are made up of people who take certain actions. But because it is an outcome of many people acting a certain way, you do not have 100% control, right. It takes a good number of other people to change their behavior, to change the norm or the system or the structure. So, we could say it either takes like a decent majority of the staff, let's say 30% of the staff, to start that change bottom-up or a few key people in positions of power to do it from the top down.
And with dealing with challenging leaders or team members, that's basically completely out of your control. How your supervisor or colleague acts, what they do, or say, or don't do, you can't control them. You can't force them to change. So, the fact that these four challenges are largely out of your control that is why they're so challenging and frustrating. And you have not been taught how to deal with that. That is why you feel so defeated, so helpless, so hopeless, so resentful. We are not prepared to handle these things, to handle things out of our control that we feel are directly impacting us. And what you need to do is change your mental focus.
It's like you're a bird watcher, right, and you're looking through binoculars. Those of you who never used binoculars, when you put them on your eyes, it's just like a narrow view that you see. And you're only watching a stubborn bird who won't get out of the nest. And you're getting frustrated, and you want it to get out of the nest. There's nothing you can do. It's not listening. But if you turned your head a little bit to the right, you'd see a bunch of birds flying, and they'd be different colors, and it would be fun to watch. Now, I'm not saying ignore the problems and pretend everything's cool and, you know, happy go lucky.
The whole point of that metaphor is to say stop focusing on what you cannot control and focus on what you can control. Stop and consciously recognize what do you have control over, and what don't you? And I know many of you think you do this, but you don't. Because what you are actually doing is focusing on what you cannot control in order to try to control it while ignoring what you actually can control. And that is absolutely not what I'm saying you should do. I'm saying notice what you cannot control so you can stop focusing on it so much and shift and recognize what you can control, so you can focus on that way more.
For example, instead of constantly complaining about your project co-lead, like, you and someone else is co-leading a project—Instead of constantly complaining of their behaviors and focusing on what they do or don't do, tell yourself it would just be better if they changed. Stop, recognize you cannot change them. You cannot make them change and shift your focus on you. What can you do to make the situation better for you? Maybe it's asking to be taken off the project. Maybe it's finding a whole new job. Maybe it's letting go of your expectation that they will ever change. Maybe it stops thinking about them 80% of the time. There's a whole host of things you could do. None of which are right or wrong, but you're not focusing there, and that's where all your power is.
Maybe you don't like any of those options. That's fine, but don't lie to yourself and tell yourself you don't have options. You do have options. You have things in your control. And I guarantee you focusing on your options even if you don't love them all and focusing on that and doing something from a place of your control and what you can do is going to feel so much better, so much more empowering, than continuing to focus on someone else who you absolutely have no control over. What you don't have control over is other people, their behaviors, their actions.
When you focus all your time thinking about that other people what they're not doing, what they should be doing, you will never see a solution. You are telling your brain by only focusing on what other people should be doing that the only solution for you to feel better is for them to change. Which you cannot control. What you do have control over is how you are going to show up for yourself. How are you going to show up for yourself in a challenging circumstance? How are you going to show up for yourself when the system is putting up barriers? How are you going to show up for yourself when you're dealing with someone who you find difficult?
If you focus your energy here, you will get so much farther in changing your experience. If you spend your time focused on how you're showing up for yourself, how you're reacting, what you want, you will feel empowered. Your brain is a solution machine, but the problem you set your brain to solve matters. If you tell your brain all day the problem is other people, and you have to solve other people. Your brain is only going to see a solution of other people changing. That will never work. You have to tell your brain to solve a problem you can actually take action from.
So, instead of asking, why don't they change, whether they are a boss or like the whole organization, which will just result in the answers of they should change. They should do it this way. Ask yourself what do I want to do about this? This is a much more useful question that will get you out of resentment, frustration, and hopelessness. Those feelings don't get you anywhere; they keep you stuck.
When you ask yourself questions like, what do I want to do about this, how can I better support myself? Your brain will go to work figuring out an answer to that. Maybe your answer is quitting. Maybe it's advocating for something different. Maybe it's just letting other people be messy and not spend time worrying about it.
All of the answers your brain will find when you ask those questions are answers that are in your control. You get all your power back. You get to feel empowered and confident, and centered. Your brain, of course, is probably going to go. Well, I don't like that answer. I don't like that option.
Of course, it doesn't, because your brain likes the idea of other people having to do the work and change. That, of course, feels easier. I don't have to put in the hard work, but that's never going to happen. You can either wait for other people to magically change, or you can wait for enough people to change in order for the system or processes to change to feel better. Or you can put your brain to work to helping yourself feel better right now.
You have to spend more of your mental energy asking yourself better questions. You've been focused on the wrong problem. The problem for you to solve isn't what other people need to do differently. The problem you need to solve is what you want to do, how you want to spend your energy. This doesn't mean you no longer have opinions about other people or ideas of what your organization can do differently. It just means you don't focus all your energy there and get stuck there and require that to happen in order for you to feel better. You don't rely on those things changing other people changing in order to feel better. It means you focus your mental energy on solving the problem of what you want to spend your time doing. How you want to feel. What do you want to think?
Stop asking yourself these dead-end questions all day; why are they doing that? When are things going to get better? Why can't they stop? When will they change? Those will get you nowhere. Start asking yourself more empowering questions; what do I want to do in this situation? How can I make this easier for myself? How do I want to spend my energy? What level of energy am I willing to give to this? How can I let go of this and move on? What can I do to make sure I stay content? In what ways can I better support myself? Do you see the difference?
The first set of questions leaves you like a dog chasing its tail going in circles, driving yourself nuts, thinking there's an endpoint, and you're going to get there, but you never get there. The second set of questions, where you're focusing on you and what you can do, gives you the power to make sure you create the experience you want. No matter the circumstance, no matter what other people are doing.
And listen, y'all, this is not selfish. I know some of you right now are like, well, it sounds really selfish; how do I give up on fighting for this because if I give up on fighting for this, my other colleagues will continue to be burdened by this. You putting all the responsibility on you, and you're also getting confused because asking yourself better questions that are focused on what you want to do and what you can do does not mean that you automatically choose to no longer advocate for change, to no longer fight for things to be different, no.
When you ask those questions, you get the choice do you want to keep advocating for change? Do you want to fight for change? If so, how would you like to do it? If not, that's okay, right? Some of the best ways to initiate change to advocate for change is to learn how to show up for yourself first. Model what you want to be different in other people or in the organization you serve. You cannot do that if you just focus on other people and the organization and how they need to change rather than focusing on what you can do and how you want to support yourself.
This is absolutely not selfish at all. Okay? So many of us have been socialized, especially in public health if you have a giver's heart or if you've been socialized as a woman, like, the patriarchy plays a big role in this. That there's this idea is we have to do all of the work to make changes, right? We have to like burn all our energies and work ourselves to the bone because if we don't, no one else will.
I think so many folks have that in their mind. If you have another marginalized identity, whether you're a person of color or immigrant or identify as nonbinary or have a disability, you also have been messaged about this. That you have to fight for your rights and other people's rights. And then if you don't do that, or you change your focus, or you put yourself and your needs first, you're selfish. Right, you're not showing up for your community.
No, that is absolutely not true. All of that messaging is designed for you to internalize it and burn yourself out. For you to internalize it and not support yourself and not meet your own needs, it is absolutely not selfish at all. Supporting yourself, giving yourself what you need to have the emotional experience you want to have at work when you encounter these challenges you can't control is the most important thing you can do. Not only for yourself, certainly for yourself, and most importantly for yourself, but secondly, actually for everyone around you. This is not selfish at all.
This is the most important work you can do for yourself, for the field, and for your colleagues. Your work as you navigate these challenges you are not prepared for by your MPH is to recognize what's in your control and what's not in your control. And ask yourself better questions, so you can create the emotional experience you want. So, you can take the actions you want that you feel empowered by. So, you can spend your time thinking in a way that serves you. When you do that, it does not mean that you give up. It does not mean you no longer care at all. It means you are able to get the rest to get the energy reserve to get the intention to get empowered to focus where you believe you want to focus. Where you want to spend your time. With how you want to feel. It is the most important and empowering work you can do.
Okay, y'all, as you can tell, I feel strongly about this. So, as you navigate these challenges, they're going to keep coming up, right? I want you to practice this. Practice what's in my control and what's not. Ask yourself better questions. Get your brain to work with higher-level thinking to questions that get to you answers and results that actually improve your experience. Okay?
So, to wrap up, if you are not on the burnout recovery resolution waitlist and you are not getting the course today, you need to sign up to get it when it comes out in February. We dive so much further into this, particularly there's a whole mini-course video on dealing with bosses or leadership who you find difficult. It takes us to a whole new level, right. And so, sign up at McKoolcoaching.com/courses, you can sign up, and when it gets released to the public in February, you can get that release, okay? You're not going to want to miss it.
Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. If you found this helpful, please share it with a friend, share it with a colleague, post it on Instagram, LinkedIn, review and rate, anything you can do to help everyone else get these tools and get these messages so that we can all start changing our experience at work and make it a better place to be. Have a great week. Love y'all. Bye.
Are you ready to make a change? Whether that's learning to love your job, making a career move, or anything in between, I can help. I'd be honored to coach you through figuring out what's next and navigating the steps to get there. So, head on over to mckoolcoaching.com/consult that's mckoolcoaching.com/consult to set up a time to chat and talk about how you can achieve the career of your dreams.
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