Pump the brakes on your week and take 10 minutes to make your life as a surgeon just a little better…
This week on the mini-podcast we are welcoming back Karla McLaren, where we talk about empathy and how it applies to burnout for healthcare professionals. We discuss the difference between compassion fatigue and empathic burnout. Here are a few ways to identify whether it’s fatigue or burnout:
- Do you have control over your work product?
- Do you have a healthy work environment?
- Are the relationships you have, and management healthy?
If you have Empathic Burnout, it usually comes down to communication processes and skills in the workplace. How do you improve your control of your personal work environment?
By reviewing the processes you have in place for these 3 types of communication:
- Process to request attention from a busy person
- Process to admit you made a mistake
- Process to communicating a problem up, without danger
Empathic Burnout is a perfect example of how surgeons can improve their effectiveness inside and outside of the OR.
Most importantly, start by reviewing your own processes for these 3 types of communication and PRACTICE doing it this week!
Guest: Karla McLaren, M.Ed
If you’re not familiar with Karla, she is an award-winning author, and social science researcher. Her lifelong work focuses on her grand unified theory of emotions, which revalues even the most “negative” emotions and opens startling new pathways into self-awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy. She is the founder and CEO of Emotion Dynamics, LLC. Karla is also the author of The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential Skill(2013), The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings are Trying to Tell You (2010), and the multimedia online course Emotional Flow: Becoming Fluent in the Language of Emotions (2012).