Ep. 102 - Burnout, ‘Good Girls,’ and a System Never Built for Women with Sadie Wackett

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I am Meredith Hirsch, and this is Working Healthcare. Today's episode is really personal. I interviewed Sadie Wackett. She is a life coach.

She's not my life coach. I actually met her at a JP Morgan event, and we spoke all about women in business and what she does. And I said, you have to be on working health care. In healthcare in corporate America, high-performing women often look successful on paper while feeling depleted underneath the surface.

And all of you know exactly what I'm talking about. This conversation explores what is broken, what burnout really is, and whether real change starts by fixing the system or having women reclaim power from the inside out. You don't want to miss it. Sadie Wackett, welcome to Working Healthcare.

Hi, Meredith. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to have this conversation because it hits me personally, but I want to give a background about who you are to the audience who's listening. So I want you to start with your story and what shaped you to do the work that you do now.

Yeah. Well, um, I until last year I was a chief people officer. So I've worked in human resources. That's been my professional area for the last 20, 25 years.

And um I came into that, I really think, just because I had the opportunity, I worked for a company called L'Oreal, you know, the cosmetics company, and um started with them in their logistics and operations function, and really realized that that type of work wasn't suited to me. I didn't enjoy it. And so I was grateful and lucky enough to have the opportunity to move within L'Oreal into the HR department. And the more and more I uh grew in the function, I realized that, well, HR is a huge, uh, a huge career opportunity.

There's part of it which I'll be honest, I really don't like. You could talk to me about compliance, compensation management, um, policy, procedure. I'm not interested, I'll switch off. But if you if you talk to me about human development and performance and capability development, I'm there all day.

And um so I I was in the field of HR and I just progressed through it. I worked for a British FTSE 250 um materials manufacturing company for about eight years, and then I was offered the job with my previous company who were uh based in um Palm Beach County. And so uh I joined them about 10 and a half years ago, and they relocated me over here from the UK to uh Palm Beach, and um and I worked with them uh through various different HR roles. I ended up as a chief pupil officer there.

Um we were private equity owned, so we went through um change in ownership. Um, but I think the thread through my career is I've always worked in very masculine environments, very male-oriented environments, um, manufacturing, engineering. And um, I learned a lot through that. I was often the only woman in the room.

Sometimes, you know, there would be a female in the legal function, for example. But generally speaking, I'm I was the only woman around the table when I was at the uh, you know, the senior executive level. Um, but that's not really my whole story. So that's my career.

Well, it isn't really your whole story because you're British. I am and you moved here 10 and a half years ago with your husband and dog. My dog, yeah. Yes.

What did that journey moving overseas teach you about reinventing yourself? Because that's really where your story takes place. Yeah, well, there's a couple of um threads to that. So I was given the opportunity to move over here after I'd been struggling with IVF for a number of years, and it wasn't working out.

And so my husband and I just said, you know what, we're gonna go on an adventure. It might be one year, it might be two years, we'll just see. Um, I've always been somebody who's been fascinated by other cultures, other countries, I've traveled a lot. And um, so I was, I seized the opportunity.

There was like really no question about it. And moving here, I think even 10 years in, I'm still learning what it's like to live and raise a child in a country, in a culture that's really different from the one I grew up in. Are we really so different than Britain? Yes.

What makes it so incredibly different? Well, I often say if people ask me this, I could probably write a book on it and I will do one day. But in a nutshell, what I've grown to realize is, you know, somebody coming from the UK, I was raised with certain values. I was brought up by parents who had certain beliefs about the world, who saw right and wrong in certain ways, but not only in my family of origin, but if you think about the UK and if you think about how Europe evolved after the Second World War, there's a welfare structure in place there.

So we're a society in a country who provides welfare to the to the whole. Um, so you know, look at the healthcare system in the UK, for example. We have the National Health Service, which is funded by taxpayers' money, and anybody who needs it can get treated. Now I would say you're correct in that, and that's this is not what this episode is really about, but I want to say I've had a lot of Brits on working healthcare and Canadians, yeah, and I like to talk about the difference in their socialized healthcare system versus the American healthcare system.

The difference is, are you really getting a mammogram after 65 now in the UK? Are you getting the diagnoses that you may need, or is it like, uh, if they have cancer, uh, they'll die, they're over 65, whatever. There, um, so my point was not to say that that is the best model of a healthcare system. So if we park that for a moment, because I think there are a lot of failings uh in the UK in the healthcare system right now.

But my point really was, you know, how I was raised was um, and I guess the value set that I grew up with was one of um support for the community, some more support for the for the for the whole. And moving over here to the US, um, it's a very individualistic culture. So we we look at things through our own individual lens rather than the whole, if that makes sense. Yeah, not that I want to quote Hillary Clinton, but she liked to say it takes a village.

So do you feel like in Britain it's more of it takes a village and a community to help get people through challenging times or celebrate the positive times in an America were more me, myself, and I? So it's a real, it's a generalization, but at the heart of it, yes, because I think certainly there are exceptions to this rule in Europe, in the UK, and there are exceptions to it over here. But having the sort of the systems and the infrastructure in place from a legislative point of view, from a policy point of view in the UK, it's different over here.

And so the I think the the drivers here are different. It's very much, you know, you you've got the opportunity to live your American dream. It's up to you if you want to make it. I do think that, you know, it it does um it does shield us from some of the realities of the systemic issues over here that doesn't allow you to fulfill your American dream, to achieve your American dream, because there are barriers, there are obstacles, and um I think they exist both sides of the Atlantic.

Uh, but my I guess going back to the original question, my evolution over here is that I've been able to see this for what it is now. I was, it's it's as though I've been taken out of, you know, one um I don't, you know, one swimming pool where I was swimming around in the waters quite happily, and I've been plunged into another pool where the waters are slightly different temperature, slightly different current. I can still swim, but it feels different. And now I can see it quite clearly for what it is, rather than being subject to it.

I'm now, I can see it more objectively. Do you think it's because of where you moved in America? Do you think it's because you're in Palm Beach as opposed to in the Midwest or in California or in any other state? I mean, we're we are a huge country.

Even if you look at Palm Beach versus where my mom lived in the pain handle of Florida, two very distinct areas. Yeah. I definitely, yeah. I mean, I haven't got a benchmark because I haven't lived anywhere else.

But I do know from the amount that I've experienced traveling around the US, working here for such a long time. Yeah, I mean, it could very well have likely been a different experience in a in a different part of the country. Um, but I think there are some foundational elements of being an American, of living in the US, which are consistent across different states. So, what led you specifically to executive coaching and women's development?

Because that has been your secret sauce and your area in which you've wanted to focus your career. Yeah. Um, also that I would go back about five years. Um, well, actually, some I heard somebody talking about COVID this morning and said it was actually six years ago, which blew my mind thinking it was that long ago.

But as we were going through COVID, and I had a, like I said, a little girl. Um, and I was over here, just she, myself, my husband, and I didn't have any friends really, didn't have any family around. Um, and I was doing a very big job and I had a small child. I was just feeling very lonely, like very isolated, I guess, in that stage of my life.

And I really wanted to build my community. And I was looking around and I couldn't find it. And so I thought, well, if I can't find it, I'm gonna create it. And at that point, I started a women's group, a women's circle, if you like.

It was very gentle, very easy. I just invited, I rented a yoga studio and I created an environment where women could come, and we just were agenderless, and I just facilitated the conversation for at that point. There were about 12 women that came, and we met every two weeks for 12 weeks. And that started something for me because when I heard what women were bringing with them, there were just such consistent themes that they were um sharing.

The need to be seen and validated and heard, and the fact that the issues that they were bringing with them were so common to all of us, they felt like they were on their own, but really when they shared them within a group, there was a real power and kind of support in that community with no agenda, nothing, nothing to be solved, nothing to be fixed. And I started to do that, and then um, and then I was also pursuing my certification in executive coaching from the Hudson Institute in California.

And then I started to pair the two together. So I was holding women's coaching groups um kind of quarterly for six sessions, and would take these women in these small groups on a journey from where they were today and what were the challenges that were coming up in their lives, why were they coming up, what was hard for them about that, on a journey of sort of self-discovery, if you like? What was it about them that was that was showing up in these patterns, these um these dynamics in their life, and giving them a uh a way of designing the next chapter of their life in a way that they felt they could have a pretty high level of agency over?

What are the central themes that impact women that you see are impacting women differently than men? So, in the experience that I've had, um there are, I would say, a handful of patterns that come up very consistently. People pleasing, being over-responsible, so feeling like we've got to take care of everybody all the time. Um feeling like we have to be 100% certain and over-prepared before we say anything or do anything in a in a corporate setting.

Um avoiding visibility, so not wanting to put our head above the parapet for fear that we might get, I don't know, found out or uh we might not be able to um stand up for ourselves. The imposter syndrome that people talk about. There's a lot of um self-doubt that has been um conditioned over the years that we've been on this earth. Um and and there's also this real relationship with failure that that I see in women, which is when we experience failure, and this really depends on the individual.

It's again, it's another generalization, but there's a with some of the women that I work with there's this there's this tendency to attach failure to myself and my own identity. So rather than saying, for example, I failed, it's I am a failure. And so it's really women, I think, um, attaching this sense of kind of shame and guilt to this to this notion of failure, which comes up time and time again. Let's go back to the conditioning that you mentioned, and I certainly relate to what you're talking about, but oftentimes I think, well, that could be anybody.

Is it just because I'm a woman? Why was I conditioned differently? Do you think it's my parents? Do you think it's society?

Do you think it's generational and it's gone year after year after year, and it's who we are, just anthropologically? Yeah. So those conditioning factors, I think, come from a number of different areas. First of all, as you said, you know, this goes back hundreds and thousands of years.

If you look to um when, you know, religion and and how we're taught through religious systems to be good and bad and what sin is and how we're meant to behave as women. Um, so you could go back to through a look at it through a religious lens. You could look at it through a family of origin lens as well. So, you know, in um I have two sisters and a brother, and uh I would say we were brought up in a fairly open-minded, progressive family, but still I was certainly raised with this um expectation not to be complicated, not to be too emotional, um, to, you know, work hard and um not complain, not make a fuss.

But were you the youngest? I was the third of four. You were the third. But do you think that had to do with birth order?

Because I was the first of three, and I just think the burden that was put on me by my mom, who was working full-time, got divorced when I was really young, and it was my responsibility. Now, if I was a boy, she may have given that same responsibility to him, but because I was the firstborn, it was just by default I had to take on the responsibility. So I is are you uh the question is that's the way that's a good thing. Yeah, I just don't know.

Is it just birth order or is it really gender-based? Well, let me ask you this. I don't know if you know what you how your relationship is like with your brothers, but what does success look like for you? And what did it look like for your brother?

What what were you rewarded for as a young girl growing up? How was success measured for you when you were growing up? And was it different? It's really interesting you say that because I so first of all, it's really my brother and me, Brian and I are only two and a half years apart.

My other brother's 14 years younger than me. So I'm gonna just take him out of this scenario because I was out of the house before he was four years old. But my brother Brian and I are very similar. We have a lot of the same insecurities and a lot of the same confidence, comfort levels, I would say, um, on where we think we are strong and where our weaknesses are.

I just think personality-wise, I'm just much more outgoing and overt and direct than he is. He's much shyer of a person than I am. So I don't know if he would necessarily say it. But if you look at where he is in life and where I am in life, we're both highly driven, very type A.

My sister-in-law jokes all the time that the two of us would be amazing if we could actually work together. But no, that's not happening, probably because we're the same person. So I don't know if in his situation, in our situation, if it is a male-female thing, but I do know outside of my nuclear family, I do feel that there is a difference in the way my husband's treated versus the way I'm treated, the way my brother's treated versus the way I'm treated. I know what it's like being in a school.

I went to get my MBA, and there were many fewer women than there were men. And I didn't have the issues with men. I actually had the issues with the women. It was the women who were competing against me, not the men.

Yeah. Yeah. And that brings me to um, I mean, maybe we can come back to the original question you asked, but it brings me to an interesting point as well, which is this competitive uh nature of women versus women. Um so one of the, I guess, factors that I was going to mention a moment ago is um, you know, ri in terms of conditioning, is if you think about it, it was only 50 years ago that women actually received financial independence in the sense that women could own a credit card without being countersigned by a man.

So this is a I mean even less sadie. I mean, 1988 was the first year that women could have a business loan without a man cosigning. So if you take this point and then you work it backwards and you say, so as a woman, prior to 1970 or whenever, um, in order to be safe, be secure, be um survive, you needed to be married to a man or you needed to be taken care of by a man. And this isn't me being, you know, overly fan.

This is just what happened. It's the facts. Right. And um and so to do so, what do you need to be?

You need to be, do you need to be strong or submissive? Do you need to be beautiful or you know, can you wear and dress and look however you like? Do you need to be a good homemaker? Do you need to take care of kids?

Do you need to be able to birth kids? So and that's been for hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years until the last 50 years, where things have started to change and we've started to have been told that we can we can do both. We can have our independence, we can live uh an independent life, and we can have children and we can have a career, we can have it all. But I think this is where we get we get caught up because we try, because we want to, because we're ambitious, and we but we've been told that we can, and if we don't, we're a failure.

And then we go, well, actually, what is it that I really want? I've been told I can do it all. Now I'm confused, and I don't really know what I want because I want it all, but I have to sell some of myself if I want to do it all the time. Well, it's interesting you say this because Alison Ferris, Dr.

Alison Ferris, was on a podcast episode uh probably about a year ago for working healthcare, and we had the same discussion, and she said, I do believe we can have it all, but not at the same time. At the same time. And that I would absolutely agree on. But that makes it difficult.

I literally left the working world for several years, and I was scared to get back into it. And I almost had to assert myself or share a different type of story as to not taking a break for seven years when I had three children and I stayed at home with them to. Lift myself to a different level so people didn't look down upon me and say, What do you mean you took seven years off? Right.

What do you mean you're coming back into the workforce now? Are you lazy? What's going on with you? And it just, I felt like I had so much to prove.

Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, these are the, I guess, the power structures or the systems at play here. Whereas we might want to, rightly so, take time to raise our children because we also believe that we want to be a successful mom and we want to give our kids the best start in life. But we have to make trade-offs and choices.

If we want to continue our career path, then we have to say, well, maybe my kids just need to go and spend their early years in daycare and childcare, and I've got to make that choice. So, you know, we I think it's for us for women, it has been um about recognizing trade-offs. And because that's hard for us to do, you know, and we look like look around and think, well, I don't want to trade that off, and I don't want to try, I want to do it all. That's where, you know, we get to a point of burnout, and um, you know, we're setting this bar for ourselves that, you know, who set that in the first place anyway?

Who said that? Why, why do so many people feel like if I look at them outwardly, they seem to be doing great. People have these ideas of who I am because they see the outward persona of what I represent. But internally, a lot of us are struggling.

Yeah. Why is there such a such a discrepancy? I so again, you know, this is based on my experience and my this the clients that I've worked with, but it is linked to this um this sort of message that we've been told as we've grown that we we can have it all. So we we want to be a great.

We got the grades at school, we might have had the uh got the the job, we might have had the kids, got the partner, the house, you know, the vacations. And then we get to this point where we are like, well, I've checked all the boxes on paper. This was what I was told that success looked like, but I actually hear, you know, midlife, whatever that age is, maybe around 40-ish, I just don't feel happy. I just don't feel fulfilled.

There's something missing. And my read on it as in the work that I've been doing is because we've been we've been trying to meet the expectations of everybody else. Um, and we're not listening to ourselves, we're not asking ourselves the question, the real question, which is what do I want if I take everybody else's expectations away from me? Which is hard because, again, society's giving us, and our parents and our bosses and our coworkers, they're setting their expectations out there.

But nobody is ever really asking us, well, Meredith, what is it that you really want? Underneath it all, if you took away everything else, stripped it all away, if I said, here's here's uh I can grant you one wish, what would that be? And we're not asking ourselves those questions. I don't even think I know it though, Sadie.

I don't even know if I can put it into words at this stage. I feel like the giving tree a lot of times, where everyone's hand is always out. Everybody wants to know, what are you doing for me? She didn't say something to me.

She wasn't complimentary enough. I feel like so much is expected of me, and nobody understands that I'm human. And that's where I'm at right now. I feel it from my kids, I feel it from my husband, I feel it from my in-laws, I feel it from friends, I feel it from my employees, I feel it all around, and it's like enough is enough.

I want to just scroll away in a small little remote house in the middle of nowhere and just be myself. And I'm like, would that really make me happy? So, what do people do when they're trying to figure out what really makes them happy happy? Yeah, is happiness even achievable?

Well, so I think the what I like to describe it as it's it's a process of discovery. It's a process of mining for gold. The gold's there somewhere, but if we've put years and years and layers and layers of concrete over the top of it, we've got to excavate that. We've learned so much about everybody else's expectations.

We need to unlearn some of those things and learn about ourselves. So, you know, we I the way I work with my clients is we we spend six months. And six months is, I mean, it's a good amount of time, but arguably this is a life's journey, it's a life's work. Um, I started my journey back in um, I'd say I was probably uh late 20s, early 30s, and um and I haven't stopped since you started it early.

I did because I was forced to, in the sense that I reached a point in my own personal life I was ill and I had to, I had to take a big time out, and that's when I I really dove into um my own personal wellness and my own personal development, and that led me to a lot of different um avenues and learnings. But all that to say is that, you know, this is six months we're talking about, which isn't long, but it is long enough to have women ask themselves some deep questions that start to raise their awareness um not only to what they want and what they value and uh and what they want their future life to look like, but we have to start at the beginning.

We have to look at our life story and um really understand well, how how has our identity been formed today? If you've if your identity has been formed by giving to others, serving others, being an advocate for others, um being an expert in such and such, if that's your identity, then any threat to that is gonna feel like something you want to protect. And so you're gonna naturally kind of close in on that. But if you're allowed to just shed that for a moment and uh and you know, dive into your own world, then that's where you know some of this gold can be discovered.

So maybe it isn't burnout that a lot of us are feeling, maybe it's a quest that we're trying to achieve. Forty-seven percent of women feel burnout compared to men, and it's about 39%. And that's based on the American Medical Association. And so, what is burnout?

How would you describe burnout? And are we using the terminology properly? Um, I wouldn't call myself an expert on burnout, but I think burnout is, you know, a point we reach. It can be physical exhaustion, it can be emotional exhaustion, it can be a sense of just disconnect altogether.

And there's a a sort of a uh a spectrum. And I work with people generally who are before the kind of chronic burnout where we become at that point quite disassociated, just have no sense of enthusiasm for life or for others. We feel very disconnected, and we just I would describe it as a sense of numbness, um, no passion, no no real joy in anything, and we withdraw from from life. Um but at the earlier stages of that, it can feel much more like um feeling stuck, feeling lost, feeling frustrated, feeling overwhelmed.

And it's often not about workload. We think we associate burnout with workload because we think, well, we've got a busy job, I'm working too many hours, I'm burnt out. But actually, it's often how we relate to the environments that we're in that causes the burnout. So you could be in a job where you, you know, you're working 40 hours a week, it's okay, but you're fundamentally misaligned with the values of that company or the leader that you're working for.

And um, and because there's such a big misalignment in your value systems that causes like emotional exhaustion. And it becomes hard for you to uh to muster the energy every single day to be in that environment. Equally, um, if you're a if you're somebody who's a caretaker and you've got kids at home, or maybe you've got aging parents, and you've got the expectations of this uh your job, and your job's demanding 80 hours a week from you, and you'll feel torn in all different directions, you just this this is when overwhelm sets in, and you can't, you know, to use the expression, you can't see the wood for the trees.

Um so why do we stay in roles that no longer fit? Safety, survival, security. There's a lot of it which is, you know, at our very base need is the need to be safe. I think for me it's fear.

Fear. I think if I were to pick one of the four emotions that I was told throughout my years of therapy, you're sad, angry, fearful, so scared. What's the other one? Joy?

Can I have joy? Yeah, yeah. That's the one I forgot. Um, I think for me it's fear.

And I like diversification. I like change, but I also am fearful of the unknown. You keep doing what you do, you know what the outcome's going to be. But when you shift and you pivot and you make a change, you don't know.

And and I thought I'm a I thought I was a risk taker. Maybe I'm not. I don't know. Well, there's, you know, there's neuroscience that will tell you that your brain is wired for uh survival.

So if it perceives this threat of change, like when I was going through my transition to doing what I'm doing now, it was as though, you know, there were fire alarms ringing in my head. Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. Because your brain's trying to keep you safe and it and and survive in this world. And what what do we associate survival with?

Um uh homeostasis. Just stay the same. That you you know what you know then. If I try and embark on this new territory, well, there could be tigers out there, there could be lions out there, and you know, at a very base level, that's how our brain interprets things.

So we need the strategies and the tools to be able to experiment with change. This isn't about, you know, this isn't about quitting your job and you know, going and opening a tiki bar on the beach. It's about saying, what what are my values? What do I care about?

What lights me up the most? When do I become my best self in this world? Not only in my job, but in my life. So with the relationships I have, with my community, when am I at my best?

And what are the ingredients that that that makes that cake as delicious as it is? So, how can I take little experiments and test this and prove to my brain that it's okay, it's safe, that nothing's gonna crumble if I do these things. And so, you know, we work on first of all figuring out what it is that gives us that energy, that lights us up, that brings us as out as our best selves, and then we take micro steps. And because that's how change happens.

It's in small incremental little ways that we test out and we send a signal back to our brains that actually this works, this is okay. And we were talking about what I'm trying to do versus, and you called it the outer game versus the inner game, focusing on making such a huge change and then feeling defeated versus focusing on myself to see if I can actually create the change that I want. How do you describe the outer game versus the inner game? Um, I have a quite a simple analogy that I really like to use because it's dead clear.

So if you think of an iceberg, and the very tip of the iceberg is your outer game. So that is uh how you show up every day, your actions, the choices you make, the behaviors you you demonstrate, um, the skills, the tools that you have. Everything underneath the iceberg is what I describe as your inner game. And so if you think about the amount the number of uh decisions we make every day, tens of thousands, 95% of them are subconscious.

We're brushing our teeth, we're getting in the car, we're having a conversation. We're on autopilot. And we need that. We need to be able to survive in the world because we've got these autopilot systems running.

But that uh submerged area of the iceberg is what's been conditioned over our lifetime. So it's the beliefs we have about the world, it's what bright means, it's what wrong means, it's what threat means, it's um it's how we make meaning of uh relationships with others. But it's all unseen and unknown to us unless we surface it. So that's when I say the inner game, unless we can get clear and aware of what's going on underneath that surface, we will be operating in this reactive autopilot way.

So we'll keep doing the same things. We might be more aware of the things we're doing, but we're not changing them. So unless we start to tap into, you know, take a for you, you know, this fear of change. Well, what's underneath the fear?

What's what's what's it costing you? What would it cost you to change? And we start to sort of really think through what really is at risk for you. Is it identity?

Is it uh being relevant in the world? Is it being of service to others? There's something underneath the surface which it we need to just explore so that you can then make a conscious choice about that next step rather than it driving you, you become intentional and you drive it. If somebody focuses on their inner green inner game, are they able to actually create more impactful changes on the outside?

I'll I will always ask somebody, what is the outcome that you want to create? What is the outcome that you want to create? And if that is I want to be more impactful in my sphere, then absolutely it starts from it starts from within. It yeah.

I think it's being honest with yourself, and I think that's what's so difficult. And I look at all of this external stimuli and see how it can flaw our thought processes because we're watching fake book all of the time, not Facebook, right? We're watching all of these people live their best lives, and are they really living their best life? And we, I think it's a great point because we are as a society and as individuals, we are consuming so much, but we're not metabolizing it.

So we are consuming content, we're consuming, you know, ultra-processed food, we're consuming um whether it's you know through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, well no, not a Twitter anymore. Um what's it called now? Uh X. Oh my god.

Like, what's it called? X. YouTube, whatever. You know, podcasts, books, self-help books, they're everywhere.

So we're consuming all of this content thinking that we should be able to fix ourselves. And yet we're not able to really metabolize all this information that's going in, whether it's true, fake, what um analysis can we can we um put to it? Can we actually digest this stuff? And we have to allow ourselves to process what we're taking in and decide what's waste and what's value.

And um and so I think being able to curate the the content or the the information or the quality of stuff that we bring into ourselves, whether it's food or whether it's information, it's the same thing. You know, it can it can be quite toxic and we can struggle to think clearly, see clearly, everything gets, you know, muddled up, foggy, fuzzy. Um, but being able to stop that and being able to make those choices, we have to be very intentional. So we have to know that in a game, what is the outcome I want here?

I want clarity. I want I want a sense of self-belief, I want a sense of truth that comes from inside me first, and then I can distill what I'm gonna take in. So my 23-year-old son, Dalton, is a winemaker and he's moving out to Napa, California, and we're going apartment hunting in June. I asked him, Hey, can you do some researching on some hotels that we can stay at?

And he's like, Yeah, can I borrow your phone? And I said, Why are you borrowing my phone? And he said, Because mine's getting fixed. I said, How's your get yours getting fixed?

He said, Well, it's getting converted to a flip phone. I go, you're getting rid of your smartphone and you're going to a flip phone. He's like, Yes. I said, well, use your computer.

And he said, I think I left it at grandma's. I said, how do you function? And in my mind, it was so extreme to go to curate your own world to change from a smartphone and communicating with people and being able to search things. He said he was gonna run an errand for me.

I said, How are you going to figure out where it is? He said, I'm gonna look it up. I go, how are you gonna look it up? He goes, I'm gonna use a computer.

I said, your computer's at grandma's. Like all of these things in the world in which we function, I don't know how that's going to work for him. Great, he's gonna go to a flip phone at 23. I think the only person in America who's 23 who's reverting to a flip phone.

But how can we curate this for ourselves? How can we make steps that help us take back the power so we are not constantly struggling with these external expectations? Well, um, so one of the I mean this is a practical, you know, this is an exercise I do with with my clients is um imagine you're wearing a backpack, and in that backpack is a bunch of rocks, and those rocks have been put in that backpack over your, you know, 40, 50 years, however old you are. People have been putting those um rocks in your backpack, and and they're the expectations of everybody else that've been putting in and putting in and putting in.

And then you realize this backpack I'm wearing is really heavy, and so I want to get out all of those expectations, and I'm like literally write them down on a piece of paper. What are all the shoulds? And I should be doing this, I should be uh, I should be getting uh all my uh information on Facebook, I should be, you know, checking in three times a day. I should be um, I don't know, uh checking on my staff the moment I get into the office.

Okay, yeah. Give me a couple more that you are. Like if I asked you to write your so many should have seen. I have expectation of I should go to the gym, I should always eat healthy and unprocessed foods.

I should be checking in with my leadership team daily and walk around my office every day. I should be reconciling uh my financials the way that I need to every single morning the second I roll out of bed. I should be making dinner at night, which by the way, I don't think I've done in a year and a half. Um there are a lot of shoulds.

I should be calling my children every single day. I should be checking on my mother-in-law to make sure she's feeling well. And a lot of what I mentioned is not even the actual work that gets done during the day. Yeah.

So just listening to you. It's exhausting. It is. Well, it it's it feels it.

No, it is because even if you don't do those things that you're telling yourself you need to do, they're still running the your operating system. That's what I call it, your internal operating system is still running the show. So what we have to do then is once you've just brain-dumped all of those things, we need to take a look at them and say, well, first start, which ones do I really want to do? Like it's a non-negotiable for me to call my mother-in-law every day, or you know, whatever it is, or phone my kids every day.

It's that's a that's something I want to do because it speaks to the value that I have, which is the connection and love and relationships I hold in my life. I think I struggle with guilt though. That's probably the biggest challenge I have with not following through, or not following through with ending some of the shoulds in my life. Is the guilt.

I feel. No, that's what a good mother would do. That's what a good daughter-in-law would do. That's what a good wife would do.

That's what a good CEO would do. That's what a good professor would do. That's what a good friend would do. And you hold all of these roles, and then you feel guilt.

And so this takes you right back to that conditioning that we were talking about, because this is what good looks like. But does it really? Does it mean that you're not a good person if you don't make dinner for your kids every night? Does that mean that you're not good?

Because if that's the attachment that you're placing on it, then you'll constantly be living in this state of I'm not good enough. And if you're not good enough, you're constantly having to prove to yourself that you are. So it's a never-ending cycle. Yet to other people, you're probably excellent at your at being a mother, at being a professional, at being a CEO.

So it's these standards that we set as high achievers, because often high achieving women, like we set these bars where we are, um if in order to be seen as good, we have to be checking this box, this box, this box, this box. The one of the biggest tools that I've learned is how to lower the bar for myself. Yes. And that was my own challenge because for me, lowering the bar felt like failing.

It felt like I'm not good enough if I don't do it this way. But as soon as I started to realize it was only me that was judging myself by these standards, then it freed a lot of capacity up for me to be excellent in the ways that I really chose to be. Does this only impact women? I'm sure it doesn't, but I think it's very um it's very present in women because of this notion of being a good dot dot.

So, you know, being a good mother, being a good wife, being a good sister, being a good daughter, um, being a good coworker, you know, being a good leader. We're trying to be good at everything because there's a great book, I'll I can recommend it to anybody on this topic, um, by an author called Elise Lunen. And it's um, she says in all of her research, she's done extensive research, girls are raised to be good, boys are raised to be powerful. And I think if you think about that and you sit with that for a while, that's where this good girl complex comes from.

And the more and more we strive to be good, the more and more we compromise what it is we really want. And that doesn't mean we're bad. What simple change can we make right now before going through the six-month process? Just one thing that would help us feel more centered, feel like we're on the quest to happiness and not having to be on a quest to goodness.

There's probably just one question I would say, you know, to sit with and journal, and it would be if I didn't need to please anybody else, what would I choose next? And so if you can free up that trying to meet the needs of everyone else, and you can allow yourself to, and this is again, list it out. Um, because we're never asked, what do you want? What are your desires?

Get used to writing those things down, just write them out, list them out. I want to do yoga, I want to upgrade my car, I want to spend more time with my friends, I want to up level my career, whatever it is, write it out and get used to listening to your wants and your desires. It's like a, it's gonna take a while for this to start to flow out, but once you start and it starts to come out, you can see yourself more clearly. But we can't be so insular.

We do live in a community. I understand that we discussed this at the very beginning, where in America it's more of a me, myself, and I thought process, as opposed to potentially in Britain, where it's more communal. But I tell my children all of the time, you need to be a productive member of this family. And they'll say, But mom, that's not what I want to do.

That's not what feeds me and makes me happy. So don't we legitimately have certain obligations that we must fill? Yeah. This isn't about standing alone from any other system, whether it's a family system, whether it's an organizational system.

We operate within systems, but we the way I see it, we we have to understand our own system first in order to be the best contributor to that broader system and make choices within that broader system. So if it's a family, you know, well, understand what you want, first of all, but then understand that there are dynamics within this that we have to navigate together. But it doesn't mean that you can't still own what you want. But the way you communicate that, the way you compromise around that, the way you support other people within that, you can still create the outcome that you want without it being just uh um a one-person show.

I think as well, the um, especially, you know, this comes up a lot um in the conversations with women, but there is no word in the English language um that means selfish that isn't doesn't have a negative connotation to it. And so it's very cliched, but think about it like putting your own oxygen mask on first, because if you can do that, you can be your best self for that wider community, for that wider environment that you're operating in. So we've only had women's ability to be our own person, as we talked about in the past 50 years, and I would say it's probably much shorter than that as well.

And some of us would say it's reverting back to that. You have a daughter, she's only eight years old. What do you hope changes for her generation? My hope is that our generation, um, that we're able to do this work on ourselves so that we understand the importance of it for our kids.

My one wish for her is that I can raise her to be a self-confident woman with strong self-esteem and strong sense of self-worth. And that's what I wish for every kid coming up through this generation. I think our challenges are so wide now that there is such a proliferation of social media influencing going on. We have to be, I guess, even more focused on helping them filter out the quality of the information they consume.

And I guess I hope that there is just a pendulum swing back to this more distilled version of uh of information, of communication. I really hope that I can bring her up to have the skills to continue to operate human to human without reliance on AI. And she's an American. She is.

She's growing up within our healthcare system and our mental health care system. If you could create one change within our entire American healthcare system, what would it be? It would be supporting schools. I think if there was an opportunity for us to introduce some of this curriculum at an early age around mental health awareness and call it what you want.

I mean, you can call it mental health life skills. The things that I work with women on are topics that we should be learning in school. And um, you know, emotional intelligence, emotional awareness. If I could do one thing, it would be to equip children early on, like third grade through their school life, to have the vocabulary, to have the skills, just as we're teaching them math, we teach them this as well, to help them be self-sustaining, self-sufficient, resilient members of society.

And that's probably what I would do if I had a magic wand. Sadie Wackett, thank you for joining me on Working Healthcare. If this conversation hit home or made you think a little differently, don't keep it to yourself. Share the episode, tag a friend, or post about it on social media.

Connect with me on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going in between episodes. If you've got a question, an episode idea, or someone you think I should feature, send me a note at MeredithHirsch.com. Thank you all for the five-star reviews.

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