Show notes
Hear how you have a huge say over how and when you work. I just love the fascinating people I have the pleasure of bringing to you. One of them is Marcey Rader. She first appeared on our podcast in March of 2020 as pandemic lockdowns were just beginning (doesn't that seem a long time ago?) and I found her insights on wellness and selfcare so important that I had to have her back. What struck me during today's conversation was how companies need to reexamine the overwhelming workloads and abundance of tasks they're giving their workers without the resources to do them. Yes, it's great to have wellness apps, fitness benefits, meditation rooms, and all of that, but in truth, what's better for employees is not to need them in the first place because they're not all stressed out. For all who work, listen in! Watch and listen to our conversation here For more on rethinking wellness and work, we recommend these 3 podcasts: Podcast: Diana Wu David—Are You Truly Happy With How You Work, Not Just Where? Podcast: Maura Carlin and Christie Derrico—Isn't It Time For Us To Solve The "Balance Dilemma" For Working Women? Podcast: "Work PAUSE Thrive" with Lisen Stromberg Additional resources for you My two award-winning books: Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Business and On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights Our website: Simon Associates Management Consultants Read the transcript of our podcast here Andi Simon: Welcome to On the Brink with Andi Simon. I'm Andi Simon, and I'm here to help you get off the brink. And I love doing that by bringing you great people to hear so that you can see, feel, and think in new ways about yourself, your business, where you're going, the world around you. Remember, everything is in context. I learned as an anthropologist many years ago that out of context, data has no meaning. And so now the question is, what is the context of the world we're living in today? And how is it changing and changing fast? And I often teach in my leadership academies how to adapt to fast-changing times. It's just the times they're all moving and you might as well hold on tight. It's going to be fun. So today I've brought back to hear from Marcey Rader. Now, Marcey was on our podcast back in 2020, and I love talking to her. She opens my mind to all kinds of things. She has a great podcast that you should listen to, and we'll put her information on the blog when we're done. But Marcey, thank you for joining me today. Marcey Rader: I'm so happy to be back, Andi. Andi Simon: Well, let me tell the listener, or the viewer, about Marcey, and I'm going to read her bio and then let her tell us about her own journey. It makes it come alive better than words can. So who is Marcey Rader? I believe she says that "health powers productivity" and the answer isn't work-life balance, but tech-life balance. And I think that's just a brilliant opening for what we're going to talk about today. She had a case of high stress, high performance, and corporate burnout which triggered severe health issues in her thirties. It was an early burnout, and she founded RaderCo to rethink and revitalize productivity for leaders, teams and organizations at RaderCo. By the way, they take off Fridays, so don't try and reach her on Fridays. Our little email comes back and says, "We believe that you need a day for yourself," and I love it. She founded Rethink, Revitalize Productivity for Leaders, Teams and Organizations. And she helps the executives and their teams banish burnout. What a great idea! Now keep good people and move forward through coaching, consulting, training, and speaking. And her speaking is centered on practical tailored tools, health, sustainable habits, and accountability. She's one of only 850 certified speaking professionals worldwide, a certified virtual presenter, and a certified digital wellness practitioner. I'm going to pause there because while I enjoy reading it, it really is nowhere near as interesting at what's Marcey's going to tell you about a post-burnout person who thrives by helping people never burn out, which is a strange thing for us to do. Burn up and burn out. Marcey, thanks. And tell us about your journey. Who is Marcey? Marcey Rader: Andi, I am celebrating my 10th business anniversary this year. Woohoo! So I am very excited about that because when I came from the pharmaceutical and biotech clinical research industry, and when I started my business, I had no idea what I was doing. I was very naïve, which in some ways is very good. I didn't know that I wasn't supposed to be a spokesperson my second year of business. I didn't know that I wasn't supposed to have this business model that other people hadn't thought of before. But then, those things turned out to be good. But then there are also, of course, other things, many, many mistakes that I learned, many lessons from along the way. But the burnout piece is really important to me because I was very young. I was in my mid-thirties. I lived a very high-stress lifestyle. I traveled up to 48 weeks a year for about a decade. I was an athlete and I competed in triathlons, Ironmans, ultra-marathons, and so on. I was very high achieving. Every promotion was not enough. Every step up was not enough. I just kept making the goal higher. And I triggered, for lack of a better term, a functional menopause for 12 years. It was related to stress and that is not, not, not good when you are 35 years old. And also I have Hashimoto's disease [autoimmune disorder]. All of these things. And when I look back, those are things that could have been fixed. Those are things that I could have prevented. And so much of it was about not realizing what I could say no to, or not feeling empowered to say no. And striving for what I look back now to see as the wrong things. And when I'm speaking with, especially with women, but also with men, when I talk, especially when I talk about that every goal I just kept setting higher, they can almost always relate. Andi Simon: Yes. But, you know, nobody was making you set higher and higher goals, were they? Marcey Rader: Oh, no, it was all me. And I do think, I emphasize that when I'm working with people, whether as a coach or in training programs, that nobody's making you do anything. The question is, how do you want to live your life? And how do you take charge of it in a way that feels comfortable? Andi Simon: That point about not saying no or saying no…No—it's not a four letter word. And how does it fit into, and remember, we live the story in our mind. So the question is, what story do you want to live? Because nobody's framing that story. You've created it, you believe it to be true. My favorite quote is, "The only truth is there is no truth." And so once you understand that, you realize, oh, that there's another way. You discovered another way, and now you're helping others do the same. Tell us a little bit about that transformation you went through starting a business, figuring it out, and now it's at a really interesting time. Where is it? 10 years into it, you have really hit your stride. Marcey Rader: We have. It's really exciting. We are a combination of speaking, training, and coaching/consulting, and we are productivity focused, but always with health centered around it. So it doesn't matter how many boxes you check, Andi, if you're staying up all night to do it, it doesn't matter how many emails you answer if you're answering them at dinner with your family, and so it's always with the health focus, but we have different subject matter experts that we pull in. So productivity is the umbrella. But we have people, leadership experts, mindfulness, cultures of belonging, communications, presentations. We have these different experts that we can bring in so we can be more of like a one-stop shop. And we've worked with companies as small as one person tech companies to Delta Airlines. We have seen many iterations of what works and definitely what doesn't work, and what we're about at is 50-50 training and coaching/consulting, and we like that. I like having that split because like when Covid happened, it worked out very well for us. Our business didn't suffer at all. We actually had more business than we can handle. That was already a specialty of ours. I've worked remotely since 2001. So I've been training individuals to work well remotely for about 15 years. So when the pandemic hit and everybody was going out of their minds, how are we going to do this?, you know. We have so many, so many people that would contact us and say, I don't know how we found out about you, but we need training tomorrow. And so, that kind of transition as a country that we are shifting into now, we're kind of figuring out how we work hybrid. How do I work differently at home three days a week and in the office two days a week? And so it is always shifting. I am never what our director of marketing…she started with us a couple years ago and is very new to all of this…and she said, "Every time I feel like, oh, you know, we can kind of cruise, then something changes." There's not a lot of cruising. There's always going to be change. Andi Simon: Well, and her point about we're going to cruise, not with Marcey anyway, maybe not the company. But if you have a fixed mindset, you're in the wrong place. This is a time for growth. In fact, your job is to bring innovative ideas in, because people need them and you need them as well. But the interesting part is that we have a good relationship with Washington University. We were out there last weekend for a reunion, and the athletic director and his team were very concerned about their athletes competing to see how little sleep they could get. And he started then putting them into meditation, yoga. And we have a room that we have dedicated in the athletic facility for study, and turned it into a wellness center. And he said, "You have to start early because their whole value is on an unrealistic life where it's not good for their athletics or their academics." But when he said that, I went, "Man, I didn't imagine that it goes right down into elementary school where the ability to balance the different demands on us are trained." But this is interesting for people in business. You know, you and I both work among very successful business folks who can't quite figure out how to balance all of the options that they have in their day so that it is a doable day. And, the number of young people when they faced the pandemic, asked the big question, If you only live once, how do I want to live it? And they have now started to draw a line among companies to say, No, I'll only work with you if… And they're not quite sure what the if is, but they know that it isn't what it was. You know: "I drive to work, I spend an hour in the car, I work eight, nine hours, I drive home an hour in the car, and I'm supposed to have a life." And I have one client whose employees all said, "Nope, we're perfectly happy working anywhere and we'll be very efficient." So now we have an interesting time of rethinking what comes next? What do you see coming next? Because you are out there watching, talking, and helping them really design the future. And someone once said, the future is here already, it's just not widely distributed, and you're trying to distribute it. What do you see? Marcey Rader: Well, first I just have to comment that that makes me very sad that they're wearing that sleep badge, that lack of sleep badge so young. I wore it as well. But, I'm hoping that it's becoming less and less of a thing, that wearing that badge that I get such little sleep, but also, I work x amount of hours and bragging about that. I work 60 hours, 70 hours a week. I used to do that too. It's not anything to brag about anymore. What I see is that more people looking for jobs are going to be looking at companies that don't have an "always on" culture. Because as you said in the intro, it's really not work-life balance. It's like a teeter-totter work and personal life, and your work is part of your life. So I don't really like that term. It's really when people say they want more work-life balance, a lot of times they're talking about tech-life balance. And because it's our technology that is infiltrating our personal lives, it's that we're getting emails at night from our boss or our team members. We're getting pinged on the weekends, and we have this always-on culture. And part of that came from Covid, you know, and it wasn't our fault. A lot of companies didn't know how to work remotely. They were thrown into it without policies. There were parents that were just working whenever they could, when their kids were asleep or when they had two hours of babysitting a day. It was just people working whenever they could. And, you know, it's hard to untrain yourself from bad habits. And we've gotten into really bad habits as a culture. And so these companies that have this always-on culture, what they don't realize is that it creates micro-stresses for their employees. And these micro-stresses build up over time. And even if you are a boss and you say, "If I send you an email at night, I don't expect you to answer it," that doesn't matter if you are in a position of hierarchy, most people will feel compelled to at least check. And there's actually a stress called anticipatory stress. And when people are just expecting, "Maybe I'll get an email," they're anticipating that stress. And what we've recently learned is that anticipatory stress actually filters into your family. So it's this digital wellness, which is kind of a new term, but not in my world, but for companies to think about investing in a digitally well culture. And actually, I'm certified by the Digital Wellness Institute and I'm one of the few practitioners that have partnered with them in their digitally well workplace certification. I mean, there's actually certification now. And what I am promoting to the companies that I work with is that you could be one of the first to be a digitally well workplace. And while it may seem like it doesn't matter as much now, a few years from now, it's going to matter a lot because it's going to be one of those things that employees look at, just like when they look at the B Corp symbol or things like that. Is this company that I'm going to invest part of my life in, do they care? Do they really care about how things are for me outside of work hours? Andi Simon: You know, to some degree, the companies themselves should be talking and working with those employees to create a company for the future, because nobody really knows. The youngsters are trying to devise something that makes some sense. But you have so many variables coming in and the elders have been there a long time. The habits are the way we do things. Every time I get hired to help a company change, we start with, "Well, no, that's the way we do things. That's the way it's done." I say, "I know, but it's not working anymore." "But I don't know what will work." And I say, "That is the interesting question. It's a time for exploring, experimenting, collaborating, going out and seeing what others are doing that might work. But most of all, think about the customer and t…
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