Taking Control And Reducing The Risk of Burnout: Emma Kell (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Emma Kell’s talk titled “Taking Control And Reducing The Risk of Burnout” at TEDxKingstonUponThames conference.

In this TEDx talk, educator Emma Kell addresses the critical issue of burnout among professionals, emphasizing the importance of self-care and setting boundaries. She shares personal anecdotes and experiences to illustrate the dangers of neglecting one’s own needs in the pursuit of professional success. Kell encourages her audience to ask themselves three powerful questions to assess their life’s balance and fulfillment: what they need to live a good life, what ‘good enough’ looks like, and what legacy they wish to leave behind.

She stresses the significance of recognizing one’s limits and the value of drawing clear boundaries between work and personal life. Through humor and relatable stories, Kell highlights the common struggle with perfectionism and the societal pressures to overwork. She advocates for a more compassionate approach towards oneself, suggesting that acknowledging one’s vulnerabilities and asking for help can be liberating.

Ultimately, Kell’s talk serves as a gentle reminder that taking control of one’s well-being is essential to reducing the risk of burnout and leading a more balanced and fulfilling life.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

“Mum? Mum? Mum, can I just… Mum, I can’t find my… Mum, will you stop leaving me on read?” I was just checking a couple of things. By the time I closed my laptop, the teenagers had left the room.

Misunderstandings and Reminders

“Em? Emma? Em? Don’t forget Thursday’s three marmosets.” What? “Thursday’s three marmosets.” Oh, right, yeah, okay, thanks. Yeah. Hang on, marmosets? What are you on about? Don’t worry. I’ll sort it. To this day, I have no idea what my husband was talking about. Something to do with the thermostat? Anyway, he sorted it. Thank you, husband.

I live a crazy, busy life. I have a noisy, hungry job. I have loads on. Is it really reasonable to expect me to be present in a room in mind as well as in body? I mean, so what? Professional purpose, protecting your flame, so what? It’s a question my doctoral supervisor used to ask me a lot. And it was actually quite an irritating question.

But once my hackles had lowered again, I learnt to ask it on a regular basis. And indeed, so what? You do you, as my students would say. If you work an 80-hour week, and you love it, go for it. That’s none of my business. If you’re working a 20-hour week and coming home feeling jaded and exhausted, maybe it’s time for a change. So, so what? Like many things in life which seem so complicated, it’s actually really simple.

In my 26-year career and half-century and two days of life, I’ve seen too many brilliant, passionate, principled, inspirational people burn out. In the words of Jennifer Nias, I’ve seen them implode, explode, or walk away from glittering careers, sometimes with the most tragic of consequences. And some of those people are on my shoulder today as I speak. They’re the reason I’m here.

The Importance of Being Whole

Bring your whole selves to work. Kim Scott gives this wonderful advice in her book, ‘Radical Candor‘, doesn’t she? And so many of us are so good at bringing all of our energies, all of our passions, all of our values into the classroom, the office, the lab. But do we sometimes forget to bring our whole selves home again?

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We leave bits of ourselves back at work, so we’re in that room and we’re a little bit of a shell, not quite there. So, so what? Mary Myatt, the educator, reminds us that we’re human beings first and professionals second. And if we forget that, then the danger is that the fire in our bellies becomes a furnace which threatens the very foundations of what matters most.

Let’s look at that flame of professional purpose, that fire in our belly, in a little bit more detail. It’s vital. It’s precious. It gives us resilience. It allows us to focus our values on the things that really matter. Without it, there wouldn’t be much point in getting out of bed in the morning. But the danger is that our own needs fall to the bottom of the pile. ‘I have to be there for everybody else, all of the time,’ said one headteacher I worked with. ‘There’s nothing left for me.’

I shared a couple of darkly humorous anecdotes about my family with you earlier. But the truth is there have been much darker times. ‘You remind me of a phoenix,’ said a friend who worked with me during that period. That was a period in which I’d lost all sight of boundaries and perspective. I’d frequently go from Monday to Thursday without seeing my children, who were tiny at the time. Because I thought that I had to prove my dedication by working crazy, crazy hours.

I almost hit rock bottom. And I’ve worked with many people since who have. And it is simply not worth the cost. In fact, all of my work, my teaching, my coaching, my writing is founded in a conviction that we can and must look after ourselves and one another in order to be able to give more to people over a longer period of time.

Reflection and Action

Now, as I’ve established, I am no guru in this area. Those stories I shared with you at the beginning, I’d love to say they were from years ago, but actually they were from last week, or their equivalents were. So what I want to do today is offer you, as a coach, three really big, powerful questions. But before I do, I just want to get a sense of where we are in the audience.

You’re quite dim, but I can just about see you. Now, I’m a teacher, so I’m going to ask for hands up. Okay, old habits die hard.

So, could you raise your hand for me if you love your job, if you’re proud of the job you do, and you love it. So you bump into someone on a dog walk or in a pub, and they ask you what you do, and you feel that fire, you feel that pride. Lovely, quite a lot of hands up. Beautiful.

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And could you keep your hand up if sometimes you feel that your work muscles in a bit on your life, your time alone, your precious time alone, your time with your loved ones. Does your work sometimes take up a little bit more emotional energy and time than you might ideally like it to? Thank you. I can see quite a few hands up out there in the dark. Thank you. Oh, we have light. Quite a few hands. Let there be light. Thank you.

Beautiful. Right. So, ready for three big questions. I love a big question. What do you need in order to feel that you are living a good life? We’re here talking about living a good life. What do you need? Second question, what does good enough look like to you? And third question, what do you want your legacy to be?

So, the first question, what do you need in order to be able to say I’ve lived a good life? When I ask people this question, they often jump straight away to academic achievements, accolades at work, the ultramarathon that they ran. These things are all amazing. But when I probe a little more deeply, as I like to as a coach, those moments of tackling with an old friend, a quiet sense of belonging, standing on your own in a field without your headphones on, just listening to the birds. Those are the moments where people feel that they are truly living a good life.

Boundaries. Draw your boundaries. Literally, I get my coaches to draw their boundaries. What belongs where? Where are you willing to give your time and your energy? And where are the red lines that you are not willing to cross?

I just heard our previous speaker talking about asking for help. As professional, accomplished people, ‘Can you help me?’ are four of the hardest words to utter. But if you do it, it can be so liberating. And everyone likes to be asked for help. So those are the things that come up most often when you ask the question, ‘What do you need?’ It will be different for each of us in order to say you are living a good life.

Embracing Good Enough

Second question. Donald Winnicott. Good enough. A few moments of recognition there. This has been a talisman for me for most of my life, but particularly since I became a mother. I have a distinct memory. We’re talking about 12 years ago here. They were very little. I’d hung the whitewashing out on the patio. The sun was shining. The day was beautiful. And they decided to take a bottle of ketchup outside. You can imagine the rest. There was swearing. I’m not proud to admit. There was swearing.

I phoned my friend in floods of tears to admit to being the worst mother ever to walk the face of this earth. ‘You’re human,’ she said. ‘You have limits too, and that is okay.’ Let’s think about good enough in the context of our day-to-day lives and our work. We strive for perfection. Perfectionism is like a drug. But I’ve never worked with anyone who was perfect in every possible way. I’ve never known anyone who was perfect in every possible way.

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And as my dad taught me, not everybody is going to like you all of the time, and that’s okay as well. And when we’re at work, and we’re dragging ourselves in with limbs falling off and spluttering and coughing and vomiting and saying, ‘It’s because I’m dedicated to you.’ I’ve tried that once with year nine, and they said, ‘Why are you here, miss?’ When we’re doing that, what are we modeling to our youngsters, to the colleagues who look up to us, who are coming up behind us?

Legacy and Self-Care

And my final big question to you, what do you want your legacy to be? When you reach the end of your life, this is the biggest coaching question of all, and you’re sat in your comfortable chair with your cup of tea or your gin, and you’re looking back over your life, what do you want people to be thinking and feeling about you?

I’m going to be prepared to bet that the stories they’re telling are more likely to be about the time when your kids ambushed you and shoved you fully clothed into the swimming pool on that holiday in the south of France than that merger over which you were the boss. And I’m going to say now that nobody has ’employee of the week’ chiseled onto their gravestone. I don’t think. It’s possible.

So what do you truly want your legacy to be? I hope that I’ve given you a little gentle nudge, the kind of nudge I need to give myself on a regular basis. The truth is that you will give more to more people over a longer period of time if you pay attention to that basic self-care. It should be straightforward. It should be common sense. It isn’t because work is like an anesthetic.

It’s easy to get feedback at work. We know when we’re doing a good job, a happy client, a brilliant sale, a great lesson observation. Life is messy. Life is complicated. There’s no rule book for how to be a decent daughter, a decent partner, a decent friend, a decent parent. And I wonder whether that’s why we sometimes retreat into the performativity of work.

Ask yourself these three questions. What do I need in order to live a truly good life? What do I want my legacy to be? And what does good enough truly look like for me? “Mum? Mum? I’m here. My work here is done.”