Preventing burnout and achieving success as a high-performing leader requires the conscious integration of self-care, boundary-setting, and sustainable practices. It’s time to unlock the secrets to resilience, balance, and long-term fulfillment in both your personal and professional life. In this episode, Jessica Lueck, PhD, partner of Lueck Group, discusses how to prevent burnout, especially among high-performing leaders. She discusses the impact of psychological consulting and the innovative practice of tapping (EFT). She shares how these help clients and companies uncover the root causes of burnout, effectively manage stress, and cultivate a healthier approach to life. Jessica emphasizes the significance of work-life integration and the importance of establishing harmony between personal and professional pursuits. By prioritizing self-care, setting boundaries, and implementing sustainable practices, leaders can foster overall well-being and long-term success. Join us as we unlock the secrets to preventing burnout, enhancing resilience, and living a fulfilling life in today’s fast-paced world.

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From Stress To Success: Preventing Burnout And Elevating Wellbeing In High-Performing Leaders With Jessica Lueck

Welcome to the show. My name is Jules and I will be introducing our guest speaker as well as our awesome panel of hosts. I also spend most of the time in the chat, so hopefully, we can get that open. If not, you can address it to hosts and panelists so we’ll be able to get any of your questions, comments, and feedback. We’ll make it work.

We are covering the topic of preventing burnout in high-performing leaders. I know that there are so many leaders out there and managers. This is going to be catered towards you. We have Jessica Lueck with us. I’ll introduce her in a moment and introduce everyone that’s here. We have Wendy who is helping us host. We’re here to engage, energize, and elevate your employees and company. Hop on each week. This is always free. We do it live on Zoom. We stream to Facebook and LinkedIn. We always have a different guest speaker as well. We like to keep the variety there. We always try to keep it conversational and fun. We don’t like to talk at you. We like to keep it fun and natural.

To help us, we have a four-panel of hosts. A lot of these guys are regulars, so I’m sure you’ve seen their faces before if you show up quite often here. Normally, we do have Sam helping to run the tech side of things, but he’s flying. We also have Char who is an entrepreneur. She runs multiple small businesses. If we take it back, she had a very long career working in the corporate world, specifically in human resources. She helps talent. She is knowledgeable in talent management strategies. She’s going to have a lot to contribute to this conversation about burnout because I’m sure she’s got many burnt-out leaders in her corporate career.

I always say, “Give me your issue and I’ll give you a tissue.” It’s a hokey HR joke for leaders that would come into my office burnt out.

Sumit has also hopped on, too. Welcome, Sumit. Sumit is part of the CompTeam crew. He also is an HR consultant and people strategist. He helps companies of various sizes utilize better HR processes and strategies. We also have Howard joining us as well. Howard is also with CompTeam. He’s had a corporate career. He is now all things compensation. If you need compensation strategies, he’s the go-to person for that. He knows how to get away from the old way of doing things with compensation and implementing new software so that companies can function a whole lot better.

We also have Wendy. In this episode, she’s Sam. She’s been helping us run the show a lot as well. She is a learning and development professional. She also specializes in talent management and helping companies with their talent processes. That’s our team. That’s our crew. Let me introduce you to our fabulous guest speaker. I know you’re going to have a great time with this. We have Jessica Lueck joining us. Wendy found her because they happened to be in the same coaching program. That’s pretty cool. This is why programs are so great. You meet such awesome people. We’re very happy she’s joining us.

A little bit about Jessica, she is a business psychologist with a PhD in Business Psychology. She is a coach. She utilizes many different methods, from psychological consulting, coaching tools, and even EFT and tapping methods, to help her clients and companies tap into what the root of their burnout is or why they’re stressing out. She helps them live better lives. We’re very excited to dive into this conversation. This is going to be a great conversation.

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Thank you again for joining us, Jessica, through all our tech fun and hurdles in this episode.

Thanks for having me. I am so happy to be here with all of you.

Jessica, it’s so great to have you here. Thank you for joining us. The first question we like to ask our expert contributors is how did you get into this? How did you go down this? What’s been the experience that led you to want to pursue this? 

The short version of the story is that I got burned out. I burned out a couple of times. To get a PhD, you’re in school for a very long time to begin with. It takes a certain personality type, an overachiever, if you will. There is something about people who burn out that we tend to be overachievers, overdoers, and overthinkers. The story for me is in figuring out what all of that was about and finding where my misalignment was.

People who burn out tend to be overachievers, overdoers, or overthinkers. Click To Tweet

I went to school to be a therapist. I knew I was a helper, but that mode of working with people has some limitations. It was a little bit hard for me. I ended up burning out because of a lot of the secondary trauma that I had experienced working in that field. At some point, I had a moment of realization where it’s like, “It’s not that I’m not a people helper, but maybe this isn’t the right venue.”

I continued my search and went back to school. I figured at that time that work is a place where we spend so much of our lives. It’s a side passion for me became this idea of happy people at work because I was searching for it myself. In the process of doing my PhD, working as a consultant for enterprise organizations and doing career transition coaching for people, I was also working on my doctoral research and my study.

I ended up studying burnout and getting intimately familiar with what this is and what it means. Over the course of time and reading and trying different things, I’ve put together a bunch of different tools that helped pinpoint this and get to the root causes. In a different way, a lot of people tend to look at the topic. For me, it was a personal journey that kept me looking, trying to find, researching, talking to people, working with people, coaching, consulting, and all that kind of stuff to come to a point where I’m like, “I can do something with this.” That’s where I’m at now.

For leaders specifically, getting into that level is a big challenge now more than it has been maybe in the past. That is because the noise in the world is more than it has been. We’re coming out of the pandemic. We’re in this endemic phase. I believe that has expedited what’s already going on in society, which is this philosophical change around the world of work and our relationship to work and what it means.

People are looking for a little bit more. In my research, I looked at that idea of more and what it means specifically to burnout. What does meaning, purpose, and this idea of fulfillment mean from an individual perspective when it comes to how we approach work? Leaders have the fun of managing all of that internally but also on behalf of all of their team members when we have such a complex work environment going on.

That was interesting to me to think about it from the leadership perspective and think about the extra impetus for burnout for these leaders because of all the weight and pressure of not only keeping themselves excited about their work but then all these other people on their team, organization, and company if you could speak to even a little bit more about that.

Leaders have the fun of having their own job, and then they have the job of being a leader. They represent, as a leader, all of the company promises and change. For everything that an organization is doing, the leader has to hold that on behalf of the company and be responsible for it and to it to the employees as well as their bosses.

There’s a complicated dynamic that happens. Your leaders may not even be behind the changes going on. They may personally have to get themselves to a place where they’re okay with what’s going on and can walk the walk and talk the talk. That’s the challenge of the leader. It is having to fake it until you make it almost all the time to get the shoes on around the change or whatever philosophy it is your company or you as a leader are trying to drive. You have to get there and you have to get your team there, and oftentimes, it’s at the same time.

 

When you think about people, emotions, processing, how long it takes, and the extra mental and emotional energy to get there, leaders have to do this in a very pressure-cooked short period of time. They have to compartmentalize, which we know we’re not good at as human beings. We’re terrible at it. What happens is we end up in an environment where we’re expected to hold it in, but when people start to burn out, they can’t. Their capacity to self-regulate goes away.

When you’re responsible for the entire culture of your team, the happiness of your working group as well as, honestly, companies hold leaders accountable to whether their employees stay or attrit and leave the company, which is maybe not realistic accountability, those things add a crazy amount of pressure on top of the day-to-day. As leaders, we want our employees to be happy and engaged.

We got to the leadership level probably because we are also those overperformers, overachievers, and people who want to do well to help others and all those kinds of things. Those are some of the susceptibilities that might also put us on the path to burnout to begin with. Leaders have a unique angle in terms of what their job requires, but they also tend to be personality types that may have these markers or tendencies towards burning out anyway.

I 100% agree. In all my years of coaching leaders and working with leaders, it was an interesting position to be an HR person supporting hundreds of leaders. I was really attempting to build that positive trust where my leaders felt comfortable talking to me about things. It was a very delicate position for an HR leader to be put in because often, no offense to my profession, HR is not liked very well in many circumstances.

I found it a struggle because I did have leaders that wouldn’t come in and open their hearts and soul to me and say, “The vice president is pushing down all of this. The organization’s going this way and the change is going that way. My turnover is happening. There’s this new technology with patient health information coming out and I can’t hold it all together.”

When I left the corporate world, I developed something called HR with a heart where I could be the HR lady outside of HR. It is the person that the leader could talk to and say, “This is confidential. I can maybe complain about all the changes in my workplace or complain about some of the things. I might need some solutions or someone to talk to or someone to vent to,” because there wasn’t anyone out there.

Hiring a coach can be very expensive. Oftentimes, leaders don’t have $5,000 or $10,000 laying around to hire someone to help them talk through some of those challenges. This is a real thing. I appreciate that you do that. My question for you is are you finding leaders feeling comfortable going to you because you’re outside of the organization where a leader can be extremely vulnerable and say, “This is the pressure I’m feeling. I think I might leave or need to resign or step down.” What’s your thought on that, Jessica?

Absolutely. People have freedom in a coaching environment. With someone who’s separate from the organization, there is no chance that something’s going to get around. There’s that piece of it. The other thing that happens in coaching that doesn’t happen in the workplace is you get the whole human instead of the version of self that we may put on at work, which is the case for a lot of people. People need to be free to talk about the patterns going on and where they exist at work. Often, work is a mirror of what’s going on in our life, other relationships, and things like that.

Sometimes work is just a mirror of what's going on in our life. Click To Tweet

What I find is that in coaching, being outside of the organization versus being a coach hired in by the organization because I’ve done both, there is a difference in what people are willing to disclose and where they’re willing to go with it. We all want to protect our work entities, and when we’re a leader and struggling, it’s even harder.

I think about leadership, moms, and people who take on accountability for other people. It is hard to ask for help when you’ve voluntarily done that or taken on that responsibility. Part of it, too, is not knowing how to ask for help or where you can go for trusted help. In coaching, you can brainstorm some of that. You can figure out the solutions in a safe environment that won’t get back around anybody connected.

I have an experimental idea that I want to put out to the panelists. Also, we have so many folks joining us. I would like everyone to put in the chat what they think is causing burnout. It could be one or many ideas. What I want is for Jessica to tell us what some of the root causes are because she has such a different perspective on this than what we hear in mainstream conversations. I would love to hear from our participants and also from our panelists what they think is causing it, and then maybe Jules, if you could read some on the chat if anything pops in.

We have a limited budget and resources. We have demands to always be available 24/7. The path to hell is paved with good intentions. Too much change both internally in the organization and globally, and difficulty filling vacant positions. That’s what we have so far.

Anybody else? There are lots more people who are here. We want to hear what you guys think. This is your chance. You might have the winning answer. Did anything else pop in before we turn it over?

Yes. Another one is unrealistic expectations, poor planning, and leadership not listening to business feedback. Another one is the inability to get materials and equipment on time. Another is self-inflicted misery and inability to delegate.

They’re getting closer on the end there.

I feel like too many competing priorities at home and work. Another said recruiting. These are great.

I’m excited to hear from Jessica. You also have an interesting way that you talk about it that they’re like blockers to satisfaction. They are satisfaction blockers. I don’t know if that’s a good time to introduce this, but tell us what is causing this or what’s the root cause of this.

Let me address what’s in the chat a little bit because everybody pointed out and cited causes for attrition. These are real things that people complain about that impact their day-to-day. They can be factors that lead to or contribute to burnout. In terms of the big things, these are the drop in the bucket. These are some of the symptoms, the things that we might Band-Aid and treat with a leave of absence, a change in some job responsibilities, or shifting things a bit.

They would have you believe that it’s an easy equation to solve. This is where my perspective is a little bit different. What I think the core research and initial thinking about this was is that the responsibility is on the workplace because there are a bunch of job demands and not enough resources to meet those demands. That seems like a simple equation and is a lot to what you’re speaking to in the chat here.

The issue is that for people, this is different. For people who get on this path to burnout, there are some internal things or some choices they’re making even before anything goes on in the organization that might put them on this path and might make it a cyclical thing for them. A leader or an HR professional might get involved with restructuring somebody’s role or a leave of absence for mental health or something like that. We’re putting a Band-Aid on probably what’s going on.

Wendy alluded to what I call the six satisfaction blockers. Those are the deeper things that are going on for people who tend toward things that cause them a lot of stress, and they constantly sign up for them. The number one blocker is fear. Those are the I shoulds. Why did you get into work to begin with? Why do you do what you do? Why do you work where you’re working? For a lot of people, it’s like, “I have to provide for my family. What would I be doing if I didn’t do this?” There’s some sort of fear that is driving their overdoing, overachieving, and that kind of thing.

 

They are like, “Will people love me? Will people still want to work with me if I don’t show up in the ways that they expect me to?” I’m not talking about being a jerk face at work. I’m talking that we are all humans with unique needs. The equation here is a bit different. You have to get to individual value sets or individual paradigms around existing in order to understand where somebody’s going to best fit in an organization. If someone hasn’t gotten around their fear and why they’re doing what they’re doing in the day-to-day, that’s an epically important place to start.

Stemming off of fear comes where most people think they need to start, which is their anger. We all have anger. Anger, when it comes to burnout and people who are on the path to it, looks like someone who is on edge. It is someone who doesn’t have control over what they’re saying in the ways they normally would. You might feel it when you’re in the car. Your road rage gets a little bit higher. You’re losing patients with customer service people. That is because you’re trying to keep it together at work and at home.

These are some of the things that come up for people who are on this path where they’re on edge. They’re drained, and they don’t have the capacity. Dealing with the root causes of the anger that people are having as a blocker dissatisfaction or the why do they keep choosing a path that isn’t right for them is the other key piece.

Number three is misalignment. This is where all my HR professionals will go. Char, you and I talked a little bit about this before we went live. It’s the misalignment between who I am, who the workplace is, and what the job needs me to be. If those things are out of alignment, it is hard to not get yourself on the path to burnout.

That speaks to many of the things that came up in the chat where there are environmental and cultural factors when it comes to picking a workplace, a boss, and stuff like that. The bigger piece was also alluded to here, which is a misalignment of all of our life domains. We don’t compartmentalize well. We are people who have demands from work, family, kids, loved ones, and recreational activities. We are whole human beings. If we don’t address the misalignment to the whole person outside of the workplace, we’re not going to get there. Someone’s going to end up repeating the cycle again. That’s the third one.

 

The fourth one is self-sabotage, which is a little bit related to my fifth one, which is the inner rebel. Once you get through your root of like, “Why am I blocking myself? What am I afraid of?” and you look at your motivators and values, you get yourself aligned and you’re still not finding the fulfillment, a lot of times, that’s people in their own way. They’ve figured out the fear, but they haven’t taken the steps to make the change yet. Their inner rebel will enjoy the safety of not stepping out or not existing in a more authentic place, which is a hard thing to do in the workplace.

When you’re searching for the right type of work environment or the right type of boss or team, this is where you have to know yourself. You have to pick the right kind of organization to work for. Not everybody needs to be an entrepreneur or be a leader either. Not everybody needs to do X, Y, or Z. It’s important to know that every position has value. It is part of a team.

There’s something here, too, with the self-sabotage and inner rebel where people have to ask themselves whether they want to be leaders and what is that serving them. Is it, “I should,” and to anything? Insert being a leader. Insert doing this type of work. Insert showing up in X, Y, or Z way here. People need to be asking those questions and not relying on the workplace to tell them or dictate what they can have in order to be fulfilled or happy.

The last one is limited resources. Here’s the caveat to this. This is real or perceived. It doesn’t matter. That’s the thing you have to realize as a leader. There may not be winning here with direct reports sometimes because their perception of what was promised to them when they signed up for the job is reality. You can’t fight that.

You have to do your best as a leader to balance the reality of what you know you can do and the expectations of an employee. Equally so, as a leader, you want to keep your good employees on the boat, but you also need to recognize this equation and where people are not going to fit no matter what you do. Sometimes, it’s mutual torture to keep the wrong people for too long.

As a leader, you want to keep your good employees on the boat, but you also need to recognize this equation and where people are not going to fit no matter what you do. Click To Tweet

As leaders, we have a complicated dynamic with attrition. Sometimes, we need to have it. It’s healthy for growth and forward momentum, but we also feel shame, guilt, and other things when people get off our bus that way. That limited resource, as a leader, you are just one person. If there’s one piece of little advice I can give there, it’s the QTIP, Quit Taking It Personally. Much of this is not about you. Most people haven’t taken that time to do the deep dive to realize what in fact is about them and how much control they have over their overall fulfillment, happiness, satisfaction, and situation.

I want to ask a two-part question. That was perfect. What came up for me while you were talking as a perfect lead-in is who’s responsible for my individual happiness, my team’s happiness, me as a leader, and them as individual contributors. First of all, that’s the first part. From your perspective, who’s responsible? What amount of responsibility do I need to take as a leader?

The second part is what can we do about it? How do we prevent these blockers and treat them if they’re in full force? That’s my two-part question. As a leader, if I know one of my employees is struggling, do I say, “You should work with Jessica,” or is it up to them to take that initiative? I want to get your advice from that perspective. 

With who’s responsible, it is like any relationship. To be completely fair, I believe in reciprocity. It’s both. People have to show up willing to do that work and take personal accountability, which is in and of itself a blocker for some people. They’re not at that place where they can do that. In which case, that’s a different performance conversation, probably.

It is up to leaders to be available, to be a trusted source like Char was talking about, and to address some of those things head-on. Before, in the workplace, we might not have asked those questions. It’s very fair in a gentle and empathic way to say, “I noticed things had changed a little bit here. Is there something going on?”

If you’re having your one-to-ones with your direct reports and you’re having your performance reviews, there should be no surprises in terms of some of this stuff. This is a company’s responsibility to do some of those things to manage people’s performance. If you’re doing those things, you have a relationship with your employee and you should be having these conversations. If this is truly an A-player who’s in the wrong role, advocate for them, but as a leader, make sure it’s not your bias because you love working with them. There are a lot of role shifts, growth opportunities, or things that can help people on this path. Organizations can do that.

When people are dealing with cyclical burnout or chronic stress, and this is a pattern of behavior for them and you’ve noticed it maybe over a period of time that it ebbs and flows a little bit or they get on the edge, then you may suggest finding some outside help to support. A lot of companies will use their EAP arm in order to facilitate the process of what is needed. I find that coaching is a little bit more palatable for people who don’t want to go get therapy and don’t want to be treated for depression when they’re having a life balance issue.

To me, it is equal responsibility. If you are that leader who over-gives and over-does, you have to watch that on your own behalf when you are looking at trying to retain an employee or something like that. That’s where your HR professionals, sounding board, and all of that around these plans make a lot of sense having someone to be able to support things within reason that way.

Here’s my thought as working in HR, particularly 160,000 employees or even 89,000 or whatever. I remember when one of the executives came into the room and talked about VUCA, Volatility, Uncertainty, Chaos, and Ambiguity. If you remember, that was a big word. It is so true. It’s like working in a hurricane of change.

In my view, the big challenge, particularly in my healthcare background, is our executive team always turned over typically every five years. I know that my statisticians here, Howard and Sumit, could probably pop up some statistics on how quickly leadership is turning over all the time. It’s every day. The entire culture of that department or that organizational unit is completely disrupted. Not only do you have your voluntary and involuntary resignations happening with your team, but you also have your executives changing their priorities.

You have your leader running around trying to catch up and say, “Which direction am I going? What are my priorities this week? What’s the new vision?” The vision changed overnight. I got to adjust everything from an organizational strategy. It’s very uncomfortable for that talent management strategist to try to incorporate the organizational vision into all the change to help the people be on board so that we don’t have an explosion in our culture.

I saw this problem constantly. Every day I woke up, I was like, “What’s the new priority for today? Why is this organization so inconsistent?” Oftentimes, the senior leaders, no offense, some of them, didn’t understand the chaos that was created at all levels of the organization. I’m curious about what you think about that type of VUCA and what it does to an organization.

I see it all the time. What I used to do is enterprise-level change management. Living and existing in that chaos with leaders, helping them get around what was happening for the organization, and then this idea of having to lead through it when you don’t even understand it, it is hugely challenging. It is near impossible with big change initiatives to not have some attrition happen. The quit taking it personally thing is true. It’s not every change. Everybody is going to make it through. I want to put that out there with some empathy because I know that’s a hard thing as a leader.

As a leader, you are a human being who has those choices to make, too. Every time a change comes down the pike, you think, “How is this impacting me? What’s in it for me?” You go through those things and you’re like, “Here’s one more. Can I make it through this one?” That’s where you, as a leader, have to think about your own health, burnout level, and all of that kind of stuff, too, and address those in the same way.

As a leader, you have to think about your own health and burnout level too. Click To Tweet

I’m of the mind that if you can’t be a good leader or you don’t have the capacity for it, then don’t be. You don’t have to. It’s something that’s glorified in our culture and society to move up the food chain in Corporate America. High-level individual contributors are super valuable to organizations. We need people to feel good about the jobs that they’re in. They’re going to do a better job that way.

It’s complicated. There’s not a one-size-fits-all answer to it. Leaders have to be asking themselves the same questions. If you can’t answer why you are going to work day after day, you should be talking to someone to help you figure that out, too. If you are hating Mondays and getting out of bed day after day but on the weekends, you’re fine, that is a good sign that maybe there’s something out of whack in your relationship to work there.

Howard found a statistic for us. I want him to share that. I want to focus on the solutions because that’s what’s cool about you, Jessica. I want everybody to hear some of your out-of-the-box solutions that we might not normally hear. Howard, give it to us.

I saw an article in Fortune this 2023. It said CEO turnover hits a five-year high as companies for continued disruption. The peak was in 2022. It’s starting to settle down a little bit this 2023. The stories are yet to be told for 2023.

That’s pretty powerful. Char should know not to challenge Howard and Sumit to some statistics because they’re going to find some even if they don’t have anything ready.

We have all kinds of talents on this team.

Jessica, I want you to take us through how it would be to work with someone like you. First of all, figure out those blockers, which are the ones that are the big issues and which ones you start working on. Take us through if you’re willing to share a little bit of your secret sauce on some of the different techniques that you use. In our corporate world, we try to leave our personal life behind. You bring to the corporate world some woo-woo things that are pretty effective. Why should we, in the corporate world, be open to those possible alternative approaches? I’ll let you go for it.

It is scientifically validated, I will add. It may be a little woo-woo for some people. I’ll get into that in a second. My methods and the way that I work with people are certainly an amalgamation of things that I have learned over the years. I do not believe in a one-size-fits-all approach for every single person. You have to get to know an individual and what makes them tick.

The first thing I do with all of my engagements is assessment. I use four different ones. I use the Myers-Briggs because people usually have taken it. I use a social leadership-style inventory. I use a career values inventory. I also use a motivators and life satisfaction inventory. This inventory will identify this combination. I call it a protocol. It will help me to identify where there are consistencies and inconsistencies. With the motivations, I look at what types of jobs people would naturally do well in because their day-to-day is going to align with that.

Thinking about those things that are true for an individual and then being able to map them once you have that data is a lot clearer and easier to make a map. It takes a few hours of time for someone to do the assessments and a couple of hours for us to go through them. Wendy, how many soul-searching programs have you signed up for to figure out what’s going on? If you’re a lifelong learner like us, probably a good handful, if not, too. We do this quickly. As part of this, it looks at your life domains. It looks at where you’re putting your energy around them. In having a discussion about that, you look at where people are dissatisfied.

People might tell you that it’s work. Someone might say, “I’m so stressed out. I hate going to work,” but then, you find out that they had some personal emergency in their family and they’re grieving or there’s something else going on. Starting with people on the, “Let’s figure out where you’re suffering,” is step one. We’re like, “Get to know yourself. Let me get to know you. We’ll do this quickly.”

We then make a roadmap about where the biggest bang for our buck is going to be. If I get a sense from our conversations and doing the assessment that you have those big satisfaction blockers and that you’re doing things because you think you should and you don’t know why, then we’re going to get deep pretty quickly and try to manage some of those “limiting beliefs” and where they come from.

The treatment plan, if you will, for me, looks like a variety of different things for people. It’s traditional coaching methods. I will pull in a little bit of my therapy toolbox from time to time around some cognitive, thinking, restructuring, and that kind of thing. Understanding where emotions come from and trying to reframe some of that self-talk are all things that I use.

The other piece that I have come into what Wendy was alluding to is stress and this type of chronic issue. Managing the symptoms and treating them in a holistic way is important. We’ve been talking about all the life domains and the whole human, but the other piece of that is mind, body, and “soul.” Whatever that means to you where you derive your meaning, your purpose, and your why from, those pieces of you.

There are different techniques that you can use to get people in their bodies. One of them is EFT or Emotional Freedom Technique. It’s also colloquially known as tapping. What this technique does is allows people to use the same meridian points by tapping on them. It is that acupuncture, acupressure, massage therapy, tai chi, and all these other things we actively participate in. It uses those same energy meridian points to help to alleviate stress to move the energy in the body. People use it for very quick treatment of anxiety. I get a little bit of stage fright, so I was tapping a little bit before this session to help me get centered and clear and get rid of some of those icky feelings.

The deeper stuff we do is around memories and things that come up. The way that we’re conditioned and the way that we approach life has so much to do with how we learn, too, as a child. That’s where this becomes “trauma treatment” a little bit. It’s how we learn to react to stress. Often, we are doing that and playing out those things we learned in our family home growing up in the workplace.

When it comes to my philosophy of treating people and helping with burnout and stress issues, you need to use some different methods. For an overthinker, you’ll stay here. Eventually, you’ll outsmart therapy coaching. Whatever tool is addressing your mind, you’ll be able to out-think it. Your practitioner, whoever you’re working with, will think you’re probably doing great, but you’re still in here stuck and struggling. That’s where tapping or something that is body-centered helps you get out of your own head. It lets your body do the talking. It’s going to tell you where the stress is coming from.

When you integrate these types of methods, you can get to success faster. Since you’re addressing the root cause, it’s longer lasting. People will learn through this process how to never make the same mistakes again. They’ll know instantly when they’re on the path to it because you get in touch with your body. Stress is a body issue. We know that it causes heart issues. It’s killing people faster than they need to be. It causes all kinds of issues.

I know you’re having somebody talk about the neuroscience stuff of some of this, so I won’t reign on their parade in terms of that. Those are pieces that are important to address in the treatment of what’s going on for someone. That’s where other practitioners with other methods for addressing burnout missed the boat a little bit. They’re not getting deep enough. They’re looking at surface matching and not why a person may be continuing to choose something that wouldn’t fit them anyway.

Jessica, since you mentioned that, I want to take a quick pause to talk about the next guest. When we come back, I’m wondering if you think you could lead us in a little sample of the tapping. Your technique is not the standard technique that’s out there. I was wondering if maybe you could show us how you apply that. Think about that, and I’m going to go ahead and tell you about the next speaker.

You guys know that the People Strategy Forum is sponsored by TMA USA. That’s a tool similar to what Jessica was talking about using with her clients. We also use something to measure people’s talents and passions. We also think about their career interests where they have a job interest assessment and cognitive as well. We’re grateful for TMA USA to sponsor the forum every week. If you’re interested to know more about that, you can email us at [email protected]. You can have a chance to take one of the assessments, have a dialogue, and see how the tool works. I’d love to talk with you more about that.

Jessica, back to you for our last few minutes here. We want to hear if you would take us through a little sample of the tapping or any other techniques that you want to share. It could be whatever you want to share with us. Also, how would people find out more about you, your group, and what you do in case they want to get ahold of you after the forum?

I did drop, while you were talking, a couple of free views so you can see what I do. I put my six satisfaction blockers in there. This will let you read a little bit more about that. If you’re sitting here going, “Am I blocked?” this is going to help you go, “That’s me. This is where.” You can get a little bit deeper there.

You can also go to JessicaLueck.com/StopFoodCravings. I get asked about stress eating all the time. When people get stressed out, they find themselves in the bottom of a bag of chips, a gallon of ice cream, or something like that. This is an EFT demo on a technique to stop food cravings. We won’t have time to go through that, but for people who are interested in what this technique is, to give it a little bit of a try or a sample if you haven’t, that’s a good thing to give a try. Who doesn’t struggle with the occasional food craving? You can get rid of those nasty things for good using this technique.

What I’ll do is show you the basics of EFT for anybody who doesn’t know to take away a little bit of the wondering of what this woo-woo thing is and what the technique looks like. I will show you the basic form of it. I’ll give you an example of what I did for my stage fright before I got on to talk with you guys. The way that tapping works is you have these endpoints on your energy meridians in your body. We utilize a combination of these points in the same order every time we are processing or experiencing an emotion. It does help to verbalize the things that you’re experiencing to move it through. Also, if you are in a private place or something like that, you can think it hard, and that will help you out.

The basic points are the karate chop here. When you go through, you tap on them 5 to 10 times or so before moving to the next one. The next one is the eyebrow. Either side will work. You have the inner eye and then you have the outer eye, and then the under eye. The next one is right under the nose, under the lip, and then the collarbone. This works on either side. You’re lightly tapping on these. This one is under the arm here. It is a few inches under your armpit. For ladies, it’s right where your bra is usually going to sit. The last one is the top of the head.

As you tap through these points, in about three minutes of tapping, your body’s nervous system is going to calm right down. All you have to do to get yourself to calm down is to tap. A more effective way is also to put words to what you’re feeling. Give yourself a setup statement and allow yourself to express and help the energy move along.

I may start with a setup statement on my karate chop and say something like, “Even though I have this anxiety, I accept myself completely. Even though I have this debilitating stage fright, this feeling in my stomach, and this anxiety, I accept myself completely. Even though I have this anxiety, I completely love and accept myself.” You do it three times. You get that feeling worked up in your body. Even as I was doing it, I can feel it start to creep up when I think about it too hard.

From there, you start focusing on that feeling and continuing to tap through the points. You can put words to it. You can be like, “This anxiety that I have, I know it comes from this one time that I messed up when I was competing in public speaking when I was sixteen. I forgot my line. I’m carrying this fear and I know where this comes from.”

I’ve done deeper tapping on that fear. When it comes up before a session like this, I can do my three minutes of like, “I’m good. I’m in my body. I’m present. That anxiety is there for me. It’s excitement. I can use it.” In a few minutes of tapping, I feel better. I can end my session either on the top of the head or you can close off your meridian points by grabbing your wrist gently. Take a couple of deep breaths. Hopefully, if you are tapping along with me, you also are feeling calm and ready to go on with your day.

It is super simple. The techniques get deeper into things. Memories will come up and things like that. The basics of the technique and why and how it works so great for stress is calming down your nervous system in a couple of minutes. Not much can do that other than an Ativan or something like that. I encourage you to give it a try.

Reach out to me at my website. I set up a page for you all as leaders. It is JessicaLueck.com/Leaders. If you want to get in touch with me because you have read what we talked about, go ahead and use that page and that link. I’d love to chat, connect, and have some feedback. The question here is, was I tapping all along?

I was asking whether they were tapping as you were going along. We had a few tappers.

They said they were tapping. I feel better. I feel more relaxed about your anxiety. I feel relaxed for you. That was great. Thank you for sharing that. If there are any other comments, I’m curious, from our participants who maybe that’s your first time experiencing that or maybe you’ve used it before and found it effective for what your experience was like, please put that in the chat.

If you have any questions, we have another minute or two if you have something for Jessica. Otherwise, thank you for sharing that. I do feel better going through that exercise. I was thinking maybe we should tap on that for all of our speakers before the show. Getting the group centered would be a cool way to get it started.

That’s a good idea. Let’s put that into practice.

We all fly in from wherever, and then it’s like, “How do we get in the moment for this?”

We’re all joining at different times, too.

Even if you don’t have anxiety around speaking, there’s other stuff going on that you can get in your body and get more present and focused. I love that.

Thank you, Jessica.

I like that you are naming what’s going on as well. I’ve heard of tapping and I was always like, “What is this tapping?” I’m glad we got a demo. Thank you for that. I was secretly hoping for one, but I didn’t want to be selfish, so I was like, “Let’s see what happens.” Labeling it and vocalizing it, I was like, “I can see how it works together.” It’s awesome. Thank you.

What you said, Jules, about reframing it like, “I have this, but it’s also because I’m excited.” You reframed it from fear to excitement. I liked how you said that in the chat. Go ahead, Jessica.

That’s great. That’s key to making tapping effective. If you go down a rabbit hole on YouTube, you’re going to get a lot of people who are trying to tap things out. They tap away the pain, whether it is their physical pain, their emotional pain, and all that kind of stuff. It’s equally important to tap what you want. You can tap to be grounded for clarity for all that kind of stuff and remove the blocks that way. Part of the secret sauce to making tapping effective is to be able to flip that paradigm. What taught me how to do that was CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and that kind of restructuring stuff. Thinking about what you want instead of what you’re experiencing or how you want to interpret what that signal is, is something that you can work on with tapping for sure.

 

Thank you so much. We’re out of time. We could keep going, so it’s hard to say adios. Adios, amigos. Thank you for joining us. Thank you to everyone who stuck around and asked questions and put in comments. Thank you, Sumit, for joining us all the way in India. It’s late there. Thank you for jumping on. To everybody around the world, thank you for joining the show. We’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you, Jessica. 

Thanks.

Bye, Jessica.

 

Important Links

• Jessica Lueck
• Facebook – CompTeam
• LinkedIn – CompTeam
• [email protected]
• JessicaLueck.com/StopFoodCravings
• JessicaLueck.com/Leaders

 

About Jessica Lueck

A skilled business psychologist and change practitioner with ten years of experience consulting for a range of organizations, including start ups, non-profits, and Fortune 500 companies, addressing culture, talent, and other transformation needs and delivering customized, practical solutions (both cloud based and on premise) for business and talent challenges. Leverages expertise in talent development, change management, facilitation and instructional design, and coaching, coupled with great communication skills and a track record for partnering with a range of client organizations, to drive change and sustainable practices in the workforce today.

Passionate about the relationship between people and their workplaces, fostering wellness with individuals and organizations. Doctoral research utilized a mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) approach to understanding the relationship between spirituality and burnout in the workplace, looking at mediating behaviors or practices that improve the experience of workplace stress.