Ep 15. HR Leaders at the Brink: Banishing Burnout with Kelly Swingler
Trina Sunday: In this episode, I’m speaking with burnoutologist Kelly Swingler, who is empowering leaders to banish burnout in the changing world of work for themselves and their people. And I’m talking to you, HR. When we live and lead from our truer self, we can enjoy being successful on our terms and in our own way, as Kelly says, without guilt, exhaustion and burnout. Welcome to reimagining HR with Trina Sunday, the rule breaking podcast where we challenge our thinking and our current people cups. This podcast is for time poor HR teams and business leaders who are feeling the burn, lacking laughs and not feeling the love. I’m Trena, your host, and I’m here to cut through the B’s, explore different ways of thinking and create high impact HR functions because happier, healthier organisations are better for our people and our bottom line. So if you are keen to flip traditional HR on its head, hit the follow or subscribe button. So you’re the first to know when new episodes drop. I’m, um, here to help and also to shake things up. So let’s get started.
Kelly Swingler is a burnoutologist helping leaders banish burnout
Welcome. I’m really excited today to be joined by Kelly Swingler. She is a burnout ologist who’s empowering leaders to banish burnout in the changing world of work for themselves and their people. And that includes you, HR, when we live and lead from our truer self. Kelly talks about the fact that we can enjoy being successful on our own terms and in our own way without the guilt, exhaustion and burnout. And today, Kelly’s helping leaders all over the world to succeed without giving up their careers or jeopardising their wellbeing and recognising that they are people too. I’m talking to you as well, HR, which in turn creates better places to work for everyone. So welcome, Kelly. Thanks for joining me.
Kelly Swingler: Thank you very much for inviting me. It’s lovely to be here. I’m very excited to see where our conversation goes.
Trina Sunday: Me too.
I know that you are known for being a bit of a rebel and a rule breaker and you’ve been throwing that rulebook out since, oh God, it’s over 20 years now, isn’t it? After realising that the way we’re working isn’t working right and how we’re taught to define success is also not working and pretty outdated. You’re a burnout ologist. Talk me through kind of your background a little bit, if you don’t mind, and what shaped where you are now and the work that you do. I’d love to hear more.
Kelly Swingler: How long do we have? Okay, kind of short version, I suppose, then. So when I was at school, I wanted to go into law, I wanted to be a solicitor. I don’t know why. I think there was. I’ve just. And I’ve still got this kind of fascination, I think, from a, like a psychology perspective, right, what makes us tick, what makes some of us act in certain ways. So initially I wanted to go into law, and here in the UK, we. I don’t know if you have similar, but we used to have work experience. Yes, we did in the lead up to our GCSE’s and then again whilst we were doing A levels, and I did two lots of work experience at two different legal firms, got to go to court, I got to work with a whole host of different solicitors and I hated it, right? And some of the reason for that, there were some of the people that were in court whilst I was. There were people that I knew, some of them were people that I’d gone to school with, was at school with, some of them were people that kind of lived in my area. But I also think from the workplace perspective, it wasn’t so much that these people were kind of all being found as not guilty. And I was like, well, you are right. You know, even like, they talk about it openly and it’s like, how are they not guilty? So I think, firstly, there was kind of a bit of a broken system, but it was the workplaces that really kind of turned me off, right? This was legal firms where you could still smoke in the office, you could still drink, right? There were overflowing ashtrays on desks and filing cabinets in every single room. They were like half drunk whiskey bottles. Like on top of these. Remember those huge metal filing cabinets that we used to have full of whiskey bottles, overflowing ashtrays, and the piles of paper all over the floor, like, you could not move. And it was just like the environment turned me off instantly.
And I was like, what am I going to do instead? And I found HR, right? My mum had qualified with CIPD, she worked for acas at the time. So advisory, conciliation and arbitration services. So basically, if you hadn’t eat, like, if you had a tribunal, my mom was like part of the person that would be involved with that or some of the kind of union negotiation stuff. And she used to get this people management magazine. I cannot believe that I used to even think it was amazing, but she used to get this people management magazine and all of the jobs, all of the salaries, look quite cool. But my driver went into HR because I wanted to stop. What I kind of coined is, like, the Monday to Friday dying that so many of us go through. Like, Monday to Friday, right? We hate the week. We hate our bosses, we hate our pay, we hate the work. We’re just like, all week, I thought, I’m going to change that, right? I’m going to make workplaces brilliant. And in a lot of ways, I did.
But I think then, quite ironically, when I myself, burnt out, in 2013 as a result of a toxic workplace, and found myself dying in this Monday to Friday dying, right? Trying to fight toxicity, trying to show up for other people, wanting to put other people first, really, really struggling with this toxic environment and toxic leaders and some of the immoral and unethical work that I was being asked to do. And so I burnt out 2013, didn’t know it was burnt out at the time, didn’t think anything of it. And I went back to work. I had seven months of being rushed in and out of hospital, seven months of pain. Nobody really knew what was wrong with me. Nobody could kind of put a diagnosis on it. I was passing out from the pain. I was working from my hospital bed. That’s what we do.
Trina Sunday: That’s what we do, right?
Kelly Swingler: So I was an HR director. I was down, I was the main breadwinner. I had, you know, sons that were looking up to me in terms of, like, this is what great looks like, right? This is what hard work looks like and all of that sort of stuff. And then in July. So physical symptoms really started in January 2013, in July, I ended up having to have two operations in 48 hours for two then severe conditions, two different hospitals, two operations, 48 hours, two anesthetics, two different consultants, two everything.
Trina Sunday: Wow.
Kelly Swingler: Um, it was when I’d gone back to see these two consultants, like, for my checkups afterwards, and they were both talking to me about this thing called burnout, and I was like, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Right? Because they were talking about stress. I’m like, I’m not stressed. There’s nothing wrong with me. So I was absolutely convinced that these two medically qualified people didn’t know a thing. Doctors didn’t know anything about stress, didn’t know anything about my body, had no idea what they were talking about. But it was actually, you know, whilst I was recovering from that, I had a day of, like, mind numbing chat show tv, because in the nineties, you could watch chat shows, literally 24/7 especially in the UK.
Trina Sunday: Right!
Kelly Swingler: And we had Ricky, Jerry and, oh, we had all of them. All of them all over the world, from all over the world. Like, you could be back to back, like 06:00 in the morning. So I’d had a day, like, recovery. You don’t recover with daytime chat shows, but I had had a day seemingly recovering, watching all of these really toxic chat shows. And my sons came home from school and this, for me, I think was. And m, I think the more that I processed it over the years, my response to my sons, because I could see literally, like, the panic in their eyes as they kind of took a look at me. And so it was like, clearly I don’t look good today, but my response to my sons, Washington, don’t worry. Like, mum’s going to be back at work soon and everything’s going to be okay. And that’s a measure for a lot of us, right? If we’re well enough to work, we are well enough.
And that’s kind of what I had. But my sons came and sat on the coffee table in front of me. They were twelve at the time. I’ve got twin boys. They sat on the coffee table in front of me, took one look at each other and said, we don’t want, like, we don’t want you to go back to work. Your job is killing you.
Trina Sunday: Wow.
Kelly Swingler: Like, that was the gut wrench. Like, that was more painful and more shocking than the seven months of pain and hospital admittances and everything that I had been through.
Trina Sunday: I can feel it, I’ve got it.
Kelly Swingler: It was like, it was hard. Yeah. And I mean, my mum had been telling me for ages, I mean, at one point, the week before, I had to go for these operations again. I’ve been admitted to hospital again like that. I mean, the pain, literally, I was passing out constantly.
And my mum had come to see me in the hospital and she’s like, what I’m about to tell you, you’re not going to like it.
Trina Sunday: … that’s always a good start, isn’t it?
Kelly Swingler: No, but it’s like, there’s nothing you can say that’s going to be any worse than the situation that, I mean, but I still carried her working. So I was a 32 year old HR director, my son’s twelve years old. I had worked my ass off to get this kind of top level role, right? I was the senior HR person, 32 years old, leading a team of 43, like, multi million pound budgets, huge organisation, my seat at the board, I had worked my absolute ass off. And my mum sat there next to my hospital bed and said, you’ve got 30 minutes. And then your IT access is being turned off because I’ve been on the phone to your CEO. And I was like, what? Like, it was literally. I was like the incredible Hulk. Like, I went for her, huh? Everybody in the hospital is, like, turning around. There’s, like, nurses running in. I said, literally, wow. Because all I could think of was, I’m a 32 year old HR director who has worked her ass off to get to this point. And my mom’s called the office, my CEO.
Kelly Swingler: To say, Kelly shouldn’t be working at the moment, and she doesn’t seem to be listed. So I went absolutely mad. That still wasn’t a turning point, right? It was this stuff with my sons. And, um, so I knew that something needed to change. I said, this was the short version, and I get really passionate about it, but, like, I knew something needed to change. And, um, that was, I think, really, I don’t, I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if it was like an epiphany or journaling or something, but I realised I had lost my cell within that organisation. Like, I had. The toxicity had just sucked the life of me. It had drained the hell out of me. I knew I wasn’t working aligned to my values. I knew I wasn’t being myself. I knew that I had been changing a lot within that organisation. And so I was just, I’m not like, if I’m going back, I’m going back as me. So cut all my hair off, bleached it, blonde. My hair at the time was, like, black. I was kind of used to it because I was like snow white because I was like, super pale skin with, like, black hair and, yeah, it was just like, cut it all off, bleached it, went back in, like, funky style. Because again, I’d been told, you must wear black. You must wear professionally. You know, you must be professional. HR do not have personality. This is how you must. And I was, I’m not doing it. I’m going back to being me.
Trina Sunday: No more funerals.
Kelly Swingler: And that became the start of everything, right? And I knew from literally day one back in that organisation, I was like, I do not belong here. Like, doesn’t matter how long I stay, I’m not going to be able to influence change. I can’t do anything about this. Toxicity started to look for a load of other jobs. They all looked the same. Like, all of the HR jobs looked exactly the same in every organisation. They all said the same things on the job specs and the personal specs. I was like, I just. I don’t want this. I heard myself say, going to start my own business, started my own people and change consultancy, was making amazing money, doing the rebellious stuff, right? Ripping up handbooks, scrapping annual performance appraisals. People over policies, people over profits. I was, like, doing some amazing, amazing, amazing stuff with incredible companies, incredible HR teams, incredible HR leaders.
And then I got a phone call to tell me that my replacement had died in her sleep whilst away on a leadership residential.
Trina Sunday: Oh, my goodness.
My replacement died while away on a leadership residential
Kelly Swingler: And I was kind of a bit numb because she had been a consultant in the organisation a few months before I left. And in my view, like, at the time, she was a gorgeous person. I absolutely loved her. Ah. But she was also contributing to a lot of the toxicity that I was having to deal with, with the kind of senior leaders. Like, I knew she was a lovely person, but there was also some backstabbing and some bitching and some stuff that. And it just became really untenable. And she took the job. So I was really numb at first because not even just sad, right? It was horrific. But there was also part of me that’s like, you’ve bought this on yourself, right? You were part of that culture, you were part of this. And I know now that that was because I hadn’t healed or recovered from what I was going through. So I was projecting a lot of that onto her. But I also then received a phone call two days later. And I call this again for those of you in HR, right, you’ll know this, right? I call this the Harry Potter syndrome, whereby those of us that live under a cloud or under some sort of agreement, right, our names must never be mentioned again.
Trina Sunday: Never.
Kelly Swingler: It would become a bit like Voldemort. Just don’t get spoken about. Right? You just do not get spoken about. We can’t talk about you.
Trina Sunday: We cannot mention your name never existed.
Kelly Swingler: Kelly never existed.
Trina Sunday: You were never here.
Kelly Swingler: It is like a lot of us in HR, we kind of get. Oh, yeah. Like, they must have been the issue. And I got this phone call two days after Alison died. And actually, it wasn’t. It was like, the reason that we couldn’t talk about any of these people was because they’d all become serious. You were the fourth HRD to become ill in this organisation.
Trina Sunday: Wow.
Kelly Swingler: My replacement has died.
Trina Sunday: Basically, like you’re literally killing people.
Kelly Swingler: Holy, uh. Shit, right? What do we do about this? This is not normal, it’s not moral, it’s not ethical. It’s like, what’s going on? So I reached out to the CIPD here in the UK, basically to say, what are you doing to support HR? And I got told, contact your eap so your employee assistance provider. I was like, standard.
Trina Sunday: That’s standard!
Kelly Swingler: Thanks very much for caring about all of your members that pay you millions of pounds a year. And that kind of became my quest for, I’m not putting up with this. Right. Something needs to change for HR. So I learned everything I could about stress and toxic workplaces. And I mean, everything. I was consuming it. I was doing qualifications in hypnotherapy, psychotherapy. I already had my kind of psychology, obviously had my HR and some odd stuff, but I went kind of full into things like hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, neuroscience, yoga, reiki breath work, energy work, and, um, like, what causes toxicity in workplaces? What causes fear in leaders? Why do we stay in toxic workplaces about our self worth? There was nothing that I wasn’t doing, but in that, I think I was then, like, okay, this is how we stop. It created this kind of ridiculous list of like 20 self care things that I must do every day in order to be a happy, healthy human and reach burnout for a second time. Because actually I’d read all the books and done all of the work, but I’d not done any of the work on myself.
And I now, I mean, I’m here, but that first burnout made me seriously ill. Like, I live with like, three invisible disabilities. I’ve got two physical health issues, one, mental health, and lifelong conditions. Now there’s no cure for them, nothing’s going to fix them, nothing’s going to take them away. That first one made me really seriously ill. Again, I think that the period between kind of burnout one and burnout two, I didn’t know that I had these illnesses and conditions. I didn’t really know until kind of almost, I got to burn out two. But burnout one quite literally, you know, made me seriously ill, and burnout two quite literally nearly killed me. And, I had to, I think, go through the second one to realise that like, just ticking stuff on a tick box, right, is not what makes a difference, but we’ve got to live it, we’ve got to breathe it, we’ve got to experience it. And really that’s what I’ve spent kind of the last decade doing initially that was fully focused on HR. Like, got to get to grips of like, who are you, right? Why are you allowing yourselves to stay in these toxic situations? Why are you putting yourselves in these situations? Why are you here? Why are you doing all of this? But really, since the age of 20, well, 2019, 2020, that’s widened much more than just the kind of HR. You know, I work with, you know, kind of leaders, coaches, varying, different people in, I don’t know, every sector, every level, every organisation, you know, kind of on the stages and two audiences around the world now. And like, burnout has become my passion.
And so I think it’s ironic that kind of 20, however many years later, my desire, my. My mission, if you like, to stop this Monday to Friday dying whilst I was doing it internally in an HR perspective, like, that’s what I’m doing. I don’t think anybody should have to compromise their well being, jeopardise their health, jeopardise their life, or an employer that will literally replace them if they die in sleep whilst we’re in leadership residency.
Trina Sunday: Wow.
Kelly Swingler: And then you never get spoken about again. Like, that’s my mission, right? That’s why I do what I do. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. That’s what keeps me showing up, that’s what keeps me talking about it, that’s what keeps me going. I just know that there is a different way, there is another way, and I’m going to keep talking about it until we start to see some of that change.
Trina Sunday: So powerful.
Kelly Swingler: And my quick summary was not a quick summary!
I have about 3421 questions coming out of your short story
Trina Sunday: Quick summary, or your short story, but I think it’s more a thank you first. Like, I think just thank you for being vulnerable, of sharing. Because I think part of the challenge with this, in my experience of, you know, I work with predominantly HR leaders, right, and typically work with HR teams to transform them so they can show up better for their people. Right. and in turn, that makes money. You know, productive people, drives profit. So business will be looked after if we look after our people, of course. But I’d say typically, 80% of the clients that come and work with me now, I would say, are on a path to burnout. And I’m so passionate about people thriving and not just surviving.
Kelly Swingler: Right!
Trina Sunday: Um, I think. But they certainly shouldn’t be dying. And it’s happening. And it’s funny because I was even having a visceral response when you’re talking about your law firm start. Because I know that law firms and some of the toxicity there is where I do my culture work and my consultancy work. There is some hardship in that industry and I’m speaking with remarkable. So there’s just so much that resonates in, you know, in your story. But I think part of it for me may be trying to unpack as well, where stress stops and burnout starts.
So I guess I’m having a lot of conversations around stress. We talk about healthy stress, unhealthy stress, and there’s chronic stress. But there’s a path, right? There’s a path, you know, to burnout. And I’m curious to know kind of how you talk about stress in the context of burnout as you’re living and breathing it.
We talk about healthy stress, unhealthy stress and there’s chronic stress
Kelly Swingler: Yeah, and I think that’s an interesting one. So. And um, I’ve been doing this kind of question of the day videos actually in today’s ears. Like we always reach burnout if you work in a stressful organisation or something along those lines and like stressful organisations or if our work is stressful is not always going to lead us to burnout. We, and again, I think many of us misunderstand stress. You mentioned a kind of healthy stress there, right? We all need stress. We need stress to get outside of bed in the morning. We might not call it stress, right? We might call it adrenaline, we might call it drive, we might call it passion, we might call it something. But we all need stress to get us out of bed, to get us across the finish line, to get us training for whatever sporting events we might do, to get us on the school run, to get us through interviews for jobs.
We all need a level of stress.
We’re probably not calling it that, but it’s all a stressor and we can all deal with that, right? Our stress comes up and goes down at ah, varying different points throughout the course of the day, the week, the month, the year. Okay? With that, we kind of move into burnout territory when that stress becomes chronic stress. So chronic stress is high levels of stress, like really high levels of stress over a long period of time. And it’s that that can kind of get us closer to the point of burnout. But for me, the kind of missing piece in that. And I kind of alluded to this in my very long introduction.
At the beginning, I had lost myself within that organisation, that toxic workplace. I had lost myself. I don’t think it was just in that organisation that had been being chipped away at m me really since the very start of my career. Like, you know, we love what you do, but could we do a bit, you know, could we have a bit less passion, a bit less personality, a bit less colour, a bit less curiosity, a bit less inquisitiveness, a bit less energy, a bit less enthusiasm. And every single time, somebody’s like, be less, be less, be less, be less, be lessen. Yeah. And it chips away at you. So I don’t think it was, like, just that one workplace that made me got there. I think it’d be going on for a really long time. But for me, I have this burnout equation, right? Which is toxicity minus our sense of self equals burnout.
Toxicity, minus our sense of self, equals burnout
Kelly Swingler: And so I think we can deal with, manage, survive toxic workplaces if we still know who we are. I think we can strive for periods with toxic levels of stress as long as we know who we are. Because I think ultimately, if we know who we are, there will become a point where we’re just like, I’m not. What am I doing this for? Yeah, right? Why am I staying here? I had a conversation with somebody a few years ago. Um, I’m sure the podcast was called, like, the toxic workplace pod or something like that. And the whole podcast was about toxic workplaces. And one of the hosts, there were two amazing women that kind of interviewed. But one of the hosts was like, yeah, I walked out my first week, right? Because she was just like, I’m not fit for this. So she was in a toxic workplace. She lasted a week. She’s like, I’m not doing this stuff.
And yet, on my first day, my gut was saying to me, Kelly, you need to get the hell out of here. And I stayed until I got to the point of burnout becoming really seriously ill. Because there was something in me that was like, I need to be the one to change this, right? I need to be the one to do this stuff. I’ve got to modify it. I’ve got you. But I think because I was already less than myself going into that toxic environment, because I’ve been chipped away at for so long, um, that, I think is what contributed to that burnout. And so I think for a lot of us, we can all deal with stress. We are built for stress. Our bodies, our brains, every single part of us is, like, inbuilt for survival. We can survive stress at any level. And, um, there might be for some of us, right? I don’t know. The toilet seat being left up might be enough to tip us over the edge on first thing on a Monday morning. But actually, if there’s a real crisis like we are there.
And I think again, for the majority of us in HR, we are amazing, right? In a crisis, we thrive. If it is buildings burning down, this is happening. We’ve got this huge issue, we’ve got this happening, we’ve got this. We absolutely thrive in that. And again, that’s part of our inbuilt. So we deal with stress every single day, whether we realise it or not. We can deal with toxic stress to a point and still continue to thrive into everything that it is that we need to do. But in the more than a decade now that I have been doing this work and working with people individually, organisational, wide, and all of the learning and training, what gets us to the point of burnout, is that loss of self when we are in those really toxic, high stress, really stressful, ongoing situations.
Trina Sunday: That really resonates with me because I think a lot of the work that I do where with coaching clients, you know, there’s a lot of work we do around, well, who are you and what lights you up and what’s important? And, you know, not just the values alignment, I think we get caught up in the language sometimes, but just, you know, what the non negotiables are and what the things are that you kind of need to deliver, you know, have delivered to you from that workplace. Like, is it serving you? I used the question I asked. It’s like, because at the point where it’s no longer serving you, then you are getting nothing out of it and you are just being used and you’ll be spat out. And so I think there’s something in practises around mindfulness and obviously you’ve done a lot of work in this space. I can tell you about all the techniques, right. And it’s different for everybody. Like, I’m not a journalist. I will never be a journaler, but I’ll scribble stuff and draw pictures and like, rant on, um, podcasts or, you know, do lots of different things. But I think that sense of self is really, really important because that’s when, you know, if you’ve lost yourself. And I think I did, obviously, as you know, but for listeners, I did Kelly’s burnout academy recently and had this fundamental personal epiphany over the fact that I was on a path to burnout. But instead of ending up in hospital, I ended up in Cambodia. That’s what I shared with my peers as part of that two days in your academy. And it’s like it’s stuck with me ever since because it’s kind of, you know, one of the things that you mentioned was, you know, you can’t think your way out of burnout.
You can’t think your way out of burnout
Kelly Swingler: Uh-huh.
Trina Sunday: And as someone who’s a thinker over a feeler.
Kelly Swingler: Yep, same.
Trina Sunday: I was like, oh, shit, what do I do then? What do I do, Kelly?
Kelly Swingler: We run away to Cambodia.
Trina Sunday: I did. Kelly.
Kelly Swingler: Yeah, you go to Cambodia.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Kelly Swingler: Maybe we’ll need to do it right. We go to Cambodia. I mean, I think this is, again, like, another light bulb moment for me. So I have always called myself a dot joiner, right. And I think this is why when I started to kind of really want, like, wanting to get under the skin of burnout and stress and. And all of. All of this stuff was happening, it was like, okay, so that’s what’s going on in my brain, but why am I having, like, these gut issues? Why have I got pain in my back? Why are my joints hurting? like, why is this stuff happening? So, for me, it was, okay. That’s what’s going on. Like, mentally, emotionally, how is that impacting physically? How is that able to impact my, like, why is that impacting my emotions? Right. So, for me, it was kind of all of this dot joining, but it was somebody that said to me, and then they were like, we’re going to prove it. And I was like, I don’t think so. And they were like, you’re an analytical thinker. And I was like, I’m not an analytical thinker. And I really kind of, like, rebelled against the fact that I could even be remotely an analytical thinker. but I am. And actually, I’m also really intuitive. But I think coming through that first period of burnout, my intuition, it was almost like it just ran away. It’s like, if you’re not listening, like, m. I’m here when you’re ready. Right. But until then, see you later. yeah. And I think then that’s where this kind of analytical stuff really had to come in, because actually, it was the thinking. Right?
Burnout affects our brain, so we need to move through it differently
Okay, so if that impacts that, what then happens with this? How do we impact this? What happens? And so, joining all of those, it was an analytical thinking perspective. But we can’t think our way out of burnout because of the impact that burnout has on our brain. Right. We need to feel it. We need to move through it in a different way, because our brain is inbuilt in our, like, fight, flight, freeze mode. Right? Our amygdala kicks in, and he’s just like, I’ve just got to keep you going. And if we are constantly trying to battle our thoughts, we’re going to lose. We’ll probably end up in burnout again. We’re not, probably not going to get any of the answers. We’re not going to do any of that stuff. It is literally like we need to feel it. We need to feel what isn’t right. We need to feel ourselves in a different situation. We need to get back to our intuition. But of course, when our brain is taking over to keep us safe, it literally is like our intuition has run off to hide. It’s like, well, I’ll come back when you stop fighting with yourself, I’m here, but I’ll come back afterwards because we just don’t trust it anymore.
Um, you know, and I think that’s the thing. So lots of, you know, talking therapies, coaching, counselling, again, I think they all have a place and they will work very differently for very different people. But I think if we are trying to think our way out of burnout, all we’re going to keep on doing is repeating the same patterns and behaviours over and over and over again. Because again, our brain is trying to keep us safe. And our brain is saying, even though we’re pretty much running on empty, we just do the same stuff as we did last time. Right. If working 16 hours a day helped you yesterday, let’s do the same again today. If drinking a bottle of wine helped you when you came home from work last night, let’s do the same again today. Because we just do not have the mental capacity to get creative, to be solution focused, to solve problems. We do not have that capacity in our brain at all. We spend all this time in our primitive brain. Our primitive brain just wants to keep us safe. And so we need to almost default the brain for a period. Like, literally give it some thinking space and be like, okay, go take some rest, do what you need to do. But we feel into it.
And that’s why on day two of the burnout academy, I take everybody through an activity that is about putting you into different spaces and just asking you to feel what’s going on. What’s going on for you physically, what are you feeling? And again, it doesn’t always, I, did another Burnett academy last week. They’re like, I’m not a visual person. I was like, I didn’t ask you to be visual. I just said what the physical sensations that are going on within your body. But it was quite interesting because as soon as I said, this is what we were doing, their brains heard, I’m taking you through a visioning exercise. And I had three people on last week’s academy that were like, I can’t do visioning. And so they’d almost shut themselves off beforehand. So m when we were kind of doing the recap afterwards, like, but did I say anything about being a visual person? Did I say, I need you just to see anything? I said, I didn’t say that at all. So I wanted you to connect with your body and feel what was going on for you physically. So explain to me, and as soon as I started, like, how were you standing? What was going on with your shoulders? What was going on with your jaw? Every single one of them could tell me because, again, we take their head out of the equation that initially said, I’m not a visual person, I can’t do visioning, and this stuff is rubbish. I took them completely out of that. What was going on for you physically with your body? And every single one of them could give me an answer as to what was going on for them.
Trina Sunday: Were they also wearing their shoulders like earrings? Like, yes. All my stress is in my shoulders.
Kelly Swingler: That’s what we do, right? And that’s one of my favourite sayings. Like, are you wearing your shoulders like earrings? And everyone goes, no. And then it’s like, yes, yes I am!
Trina Sunday: But I think because it’s having. We don’t have the space to think. I did a podcast episode with Donna McGeorge recently, and I’ve had conversations with her about space being the new rich. And if you have space, it feels like such a gift. You feel so wealthy with your time and your energy when you have space. And it’s one of those things like creating that chronic stress environment and not putting techniques in place to create space to give us time to think. It’s not healthy. Right. It’s nothing helpful, but I think.
I’m seeing an increase in burnout across the HR community
Are you seeing more? I’m seeing an increase in terms of burnout, across the HR community. We know Hr carried a lot through Covid. I don’t think there was any decompression time before going into the next onslaught. You know, massive economic issues, there’s geopolitical issues, there’s supply chain issues, just issues on issues, on issues that HR are trying to remedy. I’m curious to know where you see HR in the burnout lineup of sorts, for want of a better term, in terms of prevalence. I’m curious to know what insights you’ve got.
Kelly Swingler: Yeah. And you’re absolutely right. I think I say a lot. I think during 2020, it was like, ah, a lot of HR professionals couldn’t even acknowledge that they were also in the pandemic. That sounds like a really weird thing to say, but it was like you said about space, there was no switch off, there was no downtime, because actually you were dealing with redundancies, or you were dealing with working from home, or you were dealing with cutting, or you were dealing here in the UK, we were dealing with furloughs or waiting for government restrictions, or are, people back to work? Not back to work, doing our own homeschooling, doing all of those things that were going on. And it was like there was no letter, no letter. And so I think there was also almost like a complete disassociation from a number of HR, not just HR. I think it was going on in some other sectors as well. But it was almost like there was this complete disassociation between this global pandemic that was having this life changing, life threatening, in some cases, life ending situations. And HR did what they just do in lots of situations. Right? Head down, get on with it. We keep going. There was no time to even acknowledge, how am I feeling as an HR professional amidst this world closure in the global pandemic? I think that was the first thing you’re then absolutely right. We’ve gone through political changes, we’ve gone through government changes, we’ve gone through, you know, wars starting. We’ve gone through a whole kind of different landscape in terms of, like, race and religion and like, every single, like, gender and sexuality and identity. There’s all of that stuff that’s going on for people. All of that’s impacting people in the workplace. We have got a cost of living. There’s really nothing that has not been touched for people. And of course, our workplaces are made up of people. Right? So every single thing that’s impacting our people is impacting us within HR. And we can, you know, wear our shoulders as earrings and we can grow our shoulders as wide as we need to, but ultimately, we still only have so much capacity to deal with the stuff that we want to help other people through. So I think there’s all of that stuff that’s been going on. Burnout can tape years to kind of until it hits that peak point. And I think if we look at it from 2010 to, we’re kind of nearly five years, I suppose, into that now. But I think kind of 2020 was the start of almost that burnout cycle for lots of people. And it was last August as, August 23, I was seeing just a completely changing landscape with HR. And again, I kind of speak to and work with HR audiences from around the world. And some of the groups I was working with, some of the audiences that I was speaking to, I could hear in what they were saying that many of them were on the brink of burnout already.
And last August, I continued to hit, just got to make it through to Christmas, right. Just got to get through to the end of the year. Because we get through to the end of the year, we’re going to be fine. If you are running on empty in August and you are having to somewhere dig really, really deep somewhere to find another four months of energy to keep you going, that’s an issue. Um, and I think now kind of a year and a bit later, ah, I am seeing HR literally falling off that cliff.
Because, like, I’m seeing people make commitments that they’re not showing up for. Like, there’s an army of us, right, that are out there trying to help and support HR, and it’s like tumbleweed. HR are not seeing it, they’re not hearing it, they’re not reaching out for it. They’re not getting the help that they need. They’re not showing up for events, they’re not showing up for training. They’re paying for stuff and not turning up for it. And they’re cancelling things last minute. They’re doing all of this stuff. Every single one of those things tells me that they are teetering and they’re really, really close to the edge of that cliff, about to fall into that point of burnout. And I’ve been seeing it for a year. Like, I put warnings out last August. Like, this is what I’m seeing. This is what you need to be changing. And it still carried on and I’m still hearing now, just got to make it through to the end of the year. I’m, um, like, there’s nothing left in the town. Like, how much longer, literally, can you survive like this for another three months? I’ve got choice. Just got to make it through to Christmas, right. I don’t want anybody to be in that hospital bed or worse. Yeah. And like, imagine like, your mom, parent, best friend, husband, child, whatever. Literally, getting to the point where they have to contact your CEO to say, this is the point that my loved one is at. It’s beyond ridiculous. Something needs to change. How would you feel if that were you? How would you feel if you and, or a loved one, your best friend a member of your team, goes away in a leadership residence, and doesn’t come back.
Burnout isn’t a fuzzy, fluffy buzzword. And we’ve all got to stop thinking that we’re totally immune to it. The closer we get to it, the less we see it. But there has to be a change. Because I know I don’t say this lightly, if we want HR to survive as a function, something has to change now. Because I will guarantee you, when all of these people that are close to the edge fall off it, that’s kind of in house HR quite literally at risk of extinction because there will not be the people internally to continue to mop up all of those pieces. And when we get to the point of burnout and we just can’t do it anymore, and maybe we do become then external consultants, maybe we do start our own businesses, maybe we become retrained, something completely different. But then there’s no HR, doing the job that so many of us are so passionate about. Like, you don’t go into HR to, like, make millions of pounds, right? You’re there because you want to make a difference. You’re there because you want to create better places to work. it’s true. Right? We’re not like, I’m going to be a millionaire as an HR director.
Trina Sunday: No, not happening. We’re not the CFO.
Kelly Swingler: And even if all of your colleagues are being paid like ten times more than you, right, you’re HR, you’re not worthy of any decent pay rise. Like, don’t be so stupid. So there’s all of that kind of stuff that we’re contending with, but that’s the stuff that needs to change.
There is a huge crash coming for HR, I see it coming
Like, if we want HR to survive as a function, we have to be the role models. We have to be saying, enough is enough. We have to set the boundaries. We have to say, this toxicity is ridiculous. We’ve got to start saying all of this stuff. And I’m literally, I am waiting now, I think, for the big crash because I saw it coming last August. We’re recording this, what, end of September?
So, yeah, like a year and a bit later. Ah, there is a huge crash coming for HR because I see it and I feel it and it’s coming.
Trina Sunday: Mhm. And I’m seeing it, too, in spades.
And I think, you know, the question comes down to, and you’ve touched on it a little bit from my understanding of your work and burnout, especially. But it’s that, why don’t people leave? You know? And there’s part of it. Where it’s, you know, our brains hijacking us. And you spoke a little bit about, you know, what that looks like. But people are stuck, right? They feel like they can’t go forward. Or if people have had burnout, they don’t feel like they can go back. People are then leaving and starting their own businesses, which are starting their businesses potentially, at a time where they are, um, the most depleted confidence, energy. And then they’re going to fail.
Why don’t people leave when they’re experiencing burnout or anxiety?
Kelly Swingler: Yeah. And then they just think that they’re failing because they can’t run a business. Yeah, yeah.
Trina Sunday: they’re setting themselves up to fail because they don’t have that awareness. And there’s so much in that, but it’s like, why don’t people go? Like, why don’t people make the change? What does that look like in the work you do?
Kelly Swingler: So I think there’s a couple of things before that initially. Why we stay, why we don’t leave is because it’s not an option. Again, because our brains aren’t thinking. Right. The closer we get to burnout, our brains are not thinking. Let’s get you into a nice, safe space. It just is. Keep going. Like, literally, right? Head down, carry on. Right? Keep calm, carry on. Just keep going.
Trina Sunday: Do what we know.
Kelly Swingler: That is, again, your inbuilt safety mechanism. Just keep going. Right? We can’t deal with change. We haven’t got space for change. We can’t think about it. We just got to keep going. Going. This is, again, why we can’t think a way out of it, right? We have to find a different way.
But I think if we look back even before that, and if, like, specifically to HR, again, this might be for many other sectors, but I’m talking to your HR audience here, how many of us in HR, right, if I say to you, Trina, I want you to come in, right, I want you to be HRD. Ah. For this job, right? The culture’s amazing, the leadership team are fantastic. There’s nothing at all that you need to do, right? There’s no issues. There’s just nothing.
How many of us in HR thrive on crappy cultures, crappy leaders
Trina Sunday: I call bullshit.
Kelly Swingler: Yeah. Right? But I just want you to come in, take your time, have some nice chats with people, and off you go, right? And you’re like, uh. Like. So, firstly, you’re like a red flag.
Trina Sunday: So… I’ve done this before, yeah.
Kelly Swingler: Like, what’s going on here? But also, none of us in HR, literally, if we think about it, right, none of us want the bloody, really boring job where there’s no issues, right? Loads of us thrive on crappy cultures, crappy leaders having to go in and change it and fix it and problem solve and do all right. That’s what the majority of us that go into HR want. If I said to you, Trina, here’s this amazing organisation, firstly, you’re like, red flag. But you’re also like, well, what would I do? Like, there’s nothing for me to get my teeth into, there’s no challenge, there’s nothing for me to change, there’s nothing for me to fix. But if I could present the world’s perfect HR job, we’d all be, like, boring. Yeah, like, how boring is that? So I think for a lot of us, we go into the organisations. I mean, they’re probably not saying we are a toxic workplace, but actually, if you are watching, there’s a post going up, I’ve scheduled it. I’ve got what I think is a genius LinkedIn post going out in a couple of hours on LinkedIn this morning.
Trina Sunday: I’ll give you some feedback.
Kelly Swingler: Have a look. So 25 September, depending on where this date is, the 25 September, go and scroll. It’s like a bright yellow post, you can’t miss it. That will have been scheduled around lunchtime, UK. Like, this is the stuff that we like. We get bored. So we want the toxicity, we want the broken processes, we want the broken systems, we want the managers that don’t listen or that don’t manage. We want the leaders that don’t lead. We go into those organisations either thinking or being told that we need to be the ones to fix it. And then when we realise we cannot single handedly fix it, we then think we’re the problem because we were bought into that role to turn it around.
So I think there is part of us in HR we refuse to give up because otherwise we have failed. Right? You brought me in to fix this. I haven’t fixed it. I’m the problem. And so that is what causes, I think, a lot of us to stay. It becomes burnout when we lose ourselves in the process of trying to fix the stuff that is unfixable and we then chip away at our own selves thinking, okay, so what have I got to do differently? Okay, so let’s not focus on my own values today, right? I’m going to start being equally as toxic when I go into the board. I’m going to start doing a bit of backstabbing because clearly that’s the way that we need to do it in this organisation. Right? I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. I’m going to start working 16 hours a day because clearly that’s the only way that you get any recognition. So we start to do all of that stuff because our drive to like, I’ve got to turn this around, I’ve got to fix it, I’ve got to make the difference.
And then when we’re so in the thick of it and it’s so toxic and we’ve lost ourselves, we don’t have the confidence or the capacity or the thinking space or the headspace or anything to then be like, I need another job.
Because it’s just not there. And so I think it’s that. So I think we’ve got to look at why we’re going into these broken organisations in the first place. Um, and then what’s causing us to stay.
Trina Sunday: I think for those of us as well who’s. Although I think my mum would show up in the exact same way that your mum did.
Trina Sunday: Parents and children have a way of humbling us in the moments when we think anything else matters.
Kelly Swingler: Yep.
Trina Sunday: But I think the power of community is really big in this for me. Like, I’m listening to kind of what you’re sharing and I think I have actively surrounded myself with some people that challenge me because I’ve asked them to. And that’s because I did lose myself in the work that I was doing in that really toxic organisation where I was banging my head against a brick wall and I lost confidence in my capability because I just could not cut through. I was never going to cut through that organisation. It’s just the same. And gone through many iterations, just quietly. But I learned from that, the power of having people around you that can call you out on things that are not visible to you. And I nurture some of those relationships. It could be quite painful at times, to be honest, because I’m a straight shooter, right? So I give people cup lunch to just hit me straight between the eyes. Just tell me if you think I’m being, you know, an arsenal or tell me if you think I’m absolutely kind of misrepresenting, kind of where things are at. And they’re tough conversations, like, I’ve had some, you know, Trina, what the hell are you doing? Type chats. And I think. But those things have saved me, I think in terms of keeping me strong in terms of who I am. But I also acknowledge that I feel privileged in terms of the upbringing I’ve had. That’s given me a really good foundation there as well.
Burnout can leave people feeling isolated and lonely
What do you say to HR, and our community in terms of what they can practically do? And it might be prevention, it might be recovery. Everyone’s on a different journey with this. Right. Or just being educated. So part of me wanting to really lean in to understand burnout is to really understand how I can help my coaching clients to be more aware, to be more educated, how they can support themselves, how they can keep their sense of self, not be ripped apart in that toxicity, to avoid burnout. But some are in recovery, they’re on the other side of it, and that’s a journey as well. But I mean, and so it might be on both sides of the coin, but what kind of practical things would you share with people who might feel like burnout is something that they are facing or coming out of the other side from?
Kelly Swingler: I’m getting quite emotional as you’re talking about that because again, I’m thinking, like, some of the messages that I’ve had, even just over the last kind of few days, I’ve got my next book launch coming up and I’ve been kind of reaching out to some amazing people, some of which I haven’t spoken to for quite a long time, but, like, sending out and just sending these invitations out to people. And I had some responses last night that quite literally, like, nearly bored me to tears. It was like, you do not know this, but I’m, um, having to leave the organisation, or you do not know this, but I’ve become really seriously ill as a result of this organisation, or you do not know this, but, you know, this has happened to me. And the response is like, even if you don’t think you’re making an impact, you have been making an impact. Right? One woman was like, you, like, you literally, like, you do not understand the power that you have. Because just seeing your posts every day has given me the strength to realise that I’m not alone going through this. I’m getting quite racial. I think about it because I see this repeatedly and I said at the beginning, right, I do the work that I do because I do not want anybody to have to go through what I went through. And yet it’s still happening.
And I think when we’re in it or we’re coming through it, we do think that, like, we are alone, I still get, you know, I’ve got. I don’t know how many, like, just clients. Not, you know, I say just clients. I don’t mean just clients, but the clients that I’ve worked with, who I’ve had life changing messages from. I still get updates from them like, oh, like I did this and you know, thank you. And I’m not the one doing the work, but I think it was the first time that they actually had the space held for them to felt seen and heard. But it is that feeling of loneliness. I do what I do because I don’t want anybody to have to go through it. But I think when we are in it or we’re on our way, we do disconnect from people.
Because we can’t believe that anybody else is going through it. We can’t believe that anybody else has been through it. We can’t believe that we’re not the problem. We can’t believe that we’re not the failure. We can’t believe that we’ve allowed ourselves to get to that point in the first place. It’s like we disconnect from everybody again because we’re disconnected from ourselves. And I think, but what I want to say to each other is we can start building that community around us now.
Like whether we’re coming through it, whether we’re going through it, whether we don’t think, you know, it will ever happen to us, whether we’re not in the bridge, like find those people that will challenge you, support you, lift you up, the ones that you can say anything to and the ones that get it right. Because I think if we’re not in this profession, lots of people don’t get it. And even like, with the stuff that I do now, if I’m talking to family members or friends, they’re like, all right, you just like, stop. It’s like, but you don’t get it. You just don’t get it. And so I think we need people around us that will not just call us out on the b’s or challenge us or kind of do anything, but the ones that get it right and they’re not giving us a solution, but they can genuinely say like, Trina, I see you, right, I get it. I appreciate you.
Validate the ones that we can share that stuff with. And actually if you share, and I then share, like, I’m not sharing to outdo you. I’m not sharing because I think I’m better, but I share because I want you to know that you are not alone. Right. This was my story. I see what you are going through. They’re the people that we need. And I think we’ve got to stop thinking that as HR, we are like the islands that can do everything right. That our shoulders just keep getting wider and wider and wider, that we have to be more resilient, more focused, more this, more that, more the other. We’re human and we cannot give the humanness that is needed by the people in our organisations or in our communities or anything when we are running on empty, right? If we’ve lost our compassion, our empathy, our understanding, our ability to connect, we cannot do anything with others. And so I think my plea to HR is like, don’t feel isolated. Don’t feel alone. Find your people, find your community, start sharing, start talking about it and just start to be really honest. This is how I’m feeling and it’s crap. This is how I’m feeling and I cannot cope anymore. We have to be able to say that, instead of continuing to mask. Well, yeah, we’re HR. We just have to get on with it. Who said we’re HR? And we just have to get on with it? We did, but we have to stop it, right? And that’s part of the toxicity in the bloody sector. Right? Stop it.
Trina Sunday: Yeah, stop it.
Kelly Swingler: Everyone stop it. We are human, right? We are people. We can only connect on a human to human level, people to people level. Person to person level, when we are connected to ourselves. I can’t connect with you on a deep, meaningful level if I’m only at that kind of really artificial, superficial space with myself. I need to know who I am so that when you do feel that you need to come to me or you do need that ass kicking or you do need that support, or you do need that shoulder to cry on or that ear to listen or whatever, um, I need to know who I am. So I’m not making it about me in that situation.
Kelly Swingler: If I share with you in that situation because I am showing I genuinely want to connect with you on the deepest possible level. I’m not trying to outdo you. I’m not trying to make it about me. It’s about you. And this is the connection that we are building. And I think a lot of us in HR have lost that ability because we’ve been told we cannot be human, we cannot be people, we cannot show personality, we cannot show emotion, we cannot do anything. And, um, by the way, can you then go and pick up these 10,000 things that everybody around the organisation has dropped? Right. We’ve lost our ability to connect. And if we’re not in it for the people, we’re not in it.
Trina Sunday: M such good advice. If you think about HR generally as we close out this chat. I could talk to you for such a long time about this. Depressingly, though, right? Because we both got so much that we could say we don’t want to be talking about burnout again in September next year in the same way that we are, especially for me in terms of supporting my HR community.
But I’m curious to know, Kelly Swingler, what does reimagining HR look like to you?
Kelly Swingler: What does reimagining HR look like to you?
Kelly Swingler: I think everything that we’ve talked about, right, it is. I think we’ve got to unlearn, right? I want HR in terms of reimagining. We need to unlearn. We need to unlearn the toxicity and the rubbish and the B’s and everything that is getting us to the point of not having the time, not having the space, not having the energy to create these people focused, people centric workplaces. But ultimately, it’s causing us to disconnect from ourselves, right? All of that needs unlearning if we’re reimagining it. I want an HR function, sector, people, leaders, whether you want to be HR or people, I don’t care what you’re calling yourselves. I just want you to get back to that human level, right? For me, re imagining HR is about people connecting with people, people understanding people, people listening to people, people hearing people, and then creating solutions that are people centric, people focused. No b’s, no toxicity, no red tape. It’s about people. It’s a human to human connection, not a. Here’s a policy we created earlier, and please refer to, you know, two, 1.3.4, and then come back to us. If you haven’t followed everything that you need, I’m done with that. Right? I’ve been ripping this stuff up for years. That’s where we need to get to. So for me, reimagining HR is about bringing us back to that human to human, person to person contact and then seeing the level and depth of the change that we could create.
Trina Sunday: I love it. Thank you so much, Kelly, and I am so supportive of the work you’re doing in banishing burnout, and you’re a gift to the world. So thank you very much.
Kelly Swingler: I love talking to you. Thank you so much for having me. I hope it’s been a useful conversation for your listeners.
Trina Sunday: I want so many questions coming out of this conversation, and we promise that we’re going to respond to all of them. So thanks very much.
Kelly Swingler: You, too.
If you’re experiencing burnout in your workplace, please seek out support
Before you go, if this chat’s thrown up anything for you that’s made you feel really uncomfortable and you’re trying to process where you are emotionally in terms of stress and burnout and what’s happening for you in your workplace, then, I really encourage you to seek out some counselling support services in the locations that are around you and the people around you that can help support you as you work through and process it. But Kelly and I are both really genuine about understanding your questions and really being able to support you, being more educated about burnout in this space for you, for your team, for your organisations and ultimately for your family. So if there’s any questions that you’ve got, please send us a DM because we’d love to answer them for you.
Thanks for tuning in and leaning in to this week’s episode as we look to reimagine how we show up for our people, organisations and community, reach out to us via our website at, reimaginehr.com.au with your HR horror stories or suggestions of people you’d love to hear from or topics you want to explore. It’s all about people, purpose and impact and we are here for all of it.
Until next time, take care, team.
