Hello, everybody, and welcome to another installment of Caring Through COVID. I am Piper Harris. So who is feeling stressed? I know right now a lot of us are, and right now, more than ever, there is an absolute clear and present danger, not only found around the globe through this COVID virus, but also with burnout. We're seeing it already with our healthcare workers, but how about you? There are stressors and strains. So are you starting to fray at your edges? I want to introduce to you today the demand control support model. So essentially, what this model shows is that when there are high demands in combination with low decision-making ability and low social support, there is a higher risk for health problems and burnout. However, we can fight emotional exhaustion by decreasing demands, increasing support and control. But you're probably rolling your eyes at this point, right? How am I supposed to decrease my demands? How am I supposed to increase my support while I'm in social isolation? How am I supposed to increase my control? Hold on just a minute. First, let's take an inventory. Right now, I want you to consider a scale of one to 10. Okay. I want you to ask yourself, how is my social support currently? One is being not great. 10 is fantastic. I'm making this work. Okay. One to 10. How is your social support currently? Second, how are your current demands on your time? Whether that's working if you're still out of the office and you're not in isolation, or you're newly remote working, or you've got children at home while you're working. So one is it's I'm not great. And 10 is I'm cruising along. So how are your current demands on your time? Lastly, how is your ability to make decisions that are directly related to your work and life? How, how is that ability? How are you able to make these decisions on your own? One is not great. Ten is I have complete free reign. So when you're looking at your answers, first thing I want you to do is I want you to throw away the original scale I gave you. We are in unprecedented times. And the scale of one to 10, typically I think of that as one to 100%. That's just not going to happen. So I want you to reimagine your scale with all you're faced with, with what's going on in the globe and what you're faced with in your personal professional life. What should your scale be on? So for me, for example, I've scaled from a one to say 100% scale, one to 10, 1 to 100, and I've scaled to 60%. I've chunked out 40% on the highest end. Why did I do that? Because I recognize we are in unprecedented times and that I will fray faster and faster with burnout if I don't reassess my scale. So now, where do you land on your new scale? On your new scale in relation to the social support, how are you feeling there? Uh for your current demand or your load, what you have coming on to you, and your decision-making abilities. Where are you on your new scale? What does that scale look like? Now, if you're taking my scale, say the one to six or one to 60%, if you're halfway up on the scale, so about a four, a three and a half, four, you're actually doing pretty darn well considering what you're faced with. And if you're lower than that, you're not alone. All of us are feeling the burnout already. And we need to take a hold of this so that it doesn't get worse. So, number one, number one, how can we help this? We can reduce the demands on your job. I know again, you're rolling your eyes. So talk to your boss about the load that you're seeing. Brainstorm some strategies for your remote work. Maybe there's less video conference calls and more singular streamed emails. How can you reduce the demands of your job? Could you stop with, you know, 15 reports and do just one at the end of the day? Consider how you can reduce the demands of your job. And I understand as a healthcare worker, you definitely can't reduce the demands of your job. And with that, you can strategize with the other two areas. Number two, how can you increase your control over decision making? Okay, decision making. Again, strategize with your boss on how to segment out your work or teams. Also, you can control your emotions right now. Maybe you can't control these tangible decisions you have to make for your workload. I understand. But you can control your emotions. You can do this two ways through reprisal or reframing and distraction. So with reframing, if you're feeling overloaded as a work at home, homeschooling parent, working parent, whatever it may be, you can look at this as an opportunity to teach my children rather than, ah, I can't believe I'm stuck doing all of this. Or distraction. Distraction is a very helpful technique, but you do have to be very cautious with distraction because it can pull away and not allow you to be in the moment with your mental health. So distraction might be go for a quick jaunt down the hallway, go for a walk up and down the stairs, uh, you know, look out the window for a couple minutes. Give yourself some time to distract yourself. Use the Pomodoro method. You know, give yourself, you know, 10 minutes out of your 30 minutes of distractive time. Number three, the last one, which I believe is so very important right now, is how can you increase your social support? This is so important. We have technology, we're reaching out to one another, but how can you increase that social support? You know, I talked about this this week in my newsletter that last week I became a hermit. I refuse to reach out to my family and friends and express to them that I was needing support. That stops this week. So, how can you increase your social support? How about if you're at the office, you can create a help seeker. Designate someone within your organization that is the help seeker for the week, that everybody knows this person is there for you. They are there to help you with whatever you're faced with. They are the seeker that you, the person that you seek out. And then you swap this role with other individuals. Maybe it's not weekly, maybe it's daily. Here's the good thing about this: one, you know somebody is always going to be there if you're feeling alone, especially in your organization with all the upheaval and all the new things going on. The second great thing that can happen with this is that you are giving the people within your organization something else to focus on, giving back, helping others. This is going to buoy their emotional state. It's going to be very helpful. So you can increase your social support. You can increase your control over decision making, even if it's just deciding how you're going to react emotionally. And you can try to strategize and how you can reduce the demands of your job. These are some steps that you can take to help ward off burnout, to stop fraying at the edges. When you're thinking today about the stressors in your life, think about the demand control support model. How can you affect change in all three of those areas? How can you help individuals in your organization do the same? How can you help everybody in your household? Again, we're in unprecedented times. We have to come together, strategize, and come up with ways to hold ourselves together and fight this enemy together. I hope you found this helpful today. I know you're stressed out. I am too. But we can fight COVID and we can fight burnout as a global community. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'm Piper Harris with Poyamo Women's Success Coaching. I'd love to hear from you. Please head on over to PiperHarris.net, send me a message, and let's chat about coaching, how I can work with you and your organization, or even with yourself in the midst of this crisis. Thanks so much for joining me today, and I'll talk to you again very soon.