SHOW NOTES
Guest: Dr. Haley Perlus
Haley Perlus’ official site: drhaleyperlus.com
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From Burnout to Breakthrough: Resilience & High-Performance Psychology with Dr. Hayley Perlus
- 00:00 Intro: Burnout & performance psychology.
- 01:15 Haley’s ski story → passion for psychology.
- 05:40 Burnout = exhaustion, detachment, low performance.
- 10:00 Recovery is essential, not optional.
- 12:45 Mindset drives resilience & performance.
- 22:00 Tool: swap “but” with “the truth is.”
- 26:30 Champions embrace pressure & responsibility.
- 33:40 Leaders must model recovery at work
- 38:50 Life as sprints: stress + short recovery.
- 45:10 Biggest challenge = confusion; find clarity & commit.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:05:93)
Welcome to Unstress Health. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Well, today we’re going to dive into something that affects so many of us, burnout, but also explore this world of performance psychology with rising demands in both our personal and professional lives. The pressure to perform can feel relentless. And my guest today is Dr Haley Perlus, and she is an internationally recognized performance psychologist. She’s an author.
She’s been featured on Oprah and ESPN and is a leading voice in mental resilience. Now, together, we’re going to explore what high-performance strategies mean to overcome burnout and sustain wellness. This is a conversation that’s particularly relevant for business leaders, for health professionals, for sporting people. In fact, as I often say, we are all the executives of our own lives, and we are all performing. So, performance psychology is something that is relevant to each and every one of us. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr. Haley Perlus. Welcome to the show, Haley.
Dr Haley Perlus (00:01:14)
Thanks, Dr. Ehrlich.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:01:19)
Dr. is fine, or Ron is fine, please let’s not be too formal here. The whole subject of burnout and resilience in the workplace for individuals and the workplace is something that we’ve explored on this podcast often. But I’m intrigued to know what led you into the field of performance psychology and mental resilience. mean, was there a defining moment or how did you end up where you are now?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:01:41)
There is a defining moment and it was when I was 12. My first experience was stress and performance psychology. I grew up in Canada and I was a competitive ski racer and a decent one at that. And I was asked to go and compete and represent Canada at the world championships for my age group. And long story short, just before I was about to go and compete, my coach pulled out a hundred Canadian dollar bill placed in front of placed it in front of my face and told me that he had bet on me to win.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:02:18)
No pressure there.
Dr Haley Perlus (00:02:19)
No pressure. And then he basically sent me on my way. And in that moment, I now know that I was at an emotional and a mental fork in the road. On one hand, fear, anger, frustration, worry. How could a coach bet on their athlete and then tell them right before she’s about to compete? What if he’s wrong? What if I make a mistake? On the flip side, though, I can feel passion, challenge, competent, excited. If my coach believes in me so much that he’s willing to bet on me, why shouldn’t I believe in myself? Now, I can’t tell you, that
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:03:00)
This will go through your mind as a 12 year old. If you did, you’re impressive, even more impressive.
Dr Haley Perlus (00:03:03)
Right. was going to say, can’t tell you that at 12 years old, I stood there and I said, okay, Haley, you were at an emotional and a mental fork in the road. But I do remember thinking if my coach has high expectations, doesn’t that mean I’m doing something right? And so I did go down that race. did win, which was wonderful. My coach congratulated me, kept the money for himself. But right then and there, he said, it’s amazing what your performance will be like when you get your head straight.
And that was the tip off to this thing called performance psychology and how our minds impact, how we regulate our emotions, how we work through stress. And so I went home at 12 years old and I told my parents I wanted to be a sports psychologist when I grew up.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:03:49)
Fantastic. mean, you know, we’ve spoken to quite a few organizational psychologists and we’ve spoken to many psychologists, but I love that. You know, that really got my attention performance psychology and I wanted to explore it a little more. And I mean, you’ve used it in in your sport. You’ve used it in sport, but it has relevance to each and every one of us, whatever we’re doing.
Dr Haley Perlus (00:04:16)
Absolutely. To be honest, I only thought that I would work in sports until I became an adult. And going through all the trials and tribulations, both at work and beyond work, I very quickly realized that this is not just for athletes. And a lot of sports psychology is based on what we’ve learned in industrial psychology and organizational psychology. So there is a great deal of overlap and learning.
So it’s really just how you apply the tools so that someone can actually use them, right? How to apply them so someone can implement them. That’s my main focus. Let’s just do it in a way where someone can use it so that it actually works for them.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:04:57)
Hmm. I mean, it’s a theme that we follow on this podcast often. And that is the while you may not be able to change the people around you or events in the world, the thing you have most at your disposal is how you think about things. And that is a really powerful tool we we all need to, you know, start using more of. But this is what this is all about. I know people talk a lot about burnout, too.
And it’s a term that’s bandied around a lot. I think it often gets confused with stress. From your perspective, and I know you deal with this a lot, what exactly is burnout from your perspective? And how do you differentiate it from stress or exhaustion?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:05:41)
So my education taught me and what I like to think about burnout is characterized by three things. So the first is emotional and physical exhaustion, as you mentioned. But if that’s all we have, then we’re not burned out. We’re just tired. And that’s actually a good thing. you know, that’s a good thing, but emotional and mental, but not physical.
The physical exhaustion comes later. And a great example would be, you if anybody’s listening or watching right now, if they’ve ever thought, because I know I have, I want to exercise after work today, but I’m too tired, right? We’re not really physically tired, because if you’re doing what I’m doing right now, we’re sitting, recovering, resting all day. But the truth is we’re emotionally and mentally exhausted. So we tell ourselves that we’re too tired to move our bodies.
We then don’t move our bodies, we atrophy, and then the physical exhaustion kicks in because we’re not moving, we’re not using our body. But burnout, from a psychological and emotional standpoint, it starts just there. The second characteristic of burnout is depersonalization. So a person, a community, a project, and a company that you once felt really connected to, there was that intrinsic motivation that I call heart motivation.
You once wanted to contribute, you wanted to belong, you wanted to make a difference. That’s now being overpowered and you just don’t feel that connection anymore. So now it’s all about, I just got to get the results. I just have to get that trophy. I have to just finish the job and, and reach the, the end, but there’s no sense of belonging and wanting to contribute from an intrinsic perspective, so depersonalization.
And then the third characteristic is low, big word here, perceived performance. So even though you may be checking off all the boxes and everyone around you is saying that you’re doing a good job, you don’t believe, you don’t feel like you’re doing a good job. Put those three together, emotional, mental exhaustion, depersonalization and low perceived performance. Now you’re on the spectrum of burnout and it can vary, you know, from a from just dipping your toe into burnout to having severe burnout.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:08:03)
And what does the statistics say how common this is? Because it feels like it’s becoming very common. What’s the science telling us?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:08:15)
Yes, the term is being used a lot. so I believe we all are maybe experiencing at some point burnout because it’s just being talked about a lot. But here’s what I know in the world in which, not the sport world, the more of the corporate everyday life world.
I don’t really know the statistic on how many of us are truly experiencing burnout, but I do know the primary correlation or causation of burnout. And it’s not what we might think. A lot of us think it’s because of these excessive stressors. You know, these stressors that are either acute, a illness in the family or a death in the family, going through a divorce, a new baby, building a new home, a new job. So all of these like…temporary, really acute, they’re acute, they’re severe, they’re excessive. Or you could have chronic excessive stress, which is, here’s the difference between acute and chronic. Chronic is actually the buildup of normal stressors without adequate recovery. And that is the main cause of burnout in the daily lives that you and I lead.
It’s the wash, rinse and repeat without adequate recovery. It’s not the excessive stressors. We’re actually quite capable of having those survival instincts and taking care of business when we have the energy to do it. But it’s the chronic excessive stress, which is the accumulation of just the normal stressors in our lives without adequate recovery. And that is the main cause of burnout.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:10:00)
Mm It’s music to my ears to hear you say that because we kind of view on unstress health, our daily cycle of challenges, mindset and importantly, recovery. And I don’t think people actually focus on that recovery part. Take it seriously enough.
Dr Haley Perlus (00:10:18)
To me, so in the world of sports, recovery is a mandatory component of your performance routine. And often we think, well, recovery is something that we need time for. So when I have the time, I’ll recover. Or we think of recovery as a reward. Let me get all of these things accomplished, and then I’ll reward myself with recovery. Professional athletes do not look at recovery as something that they have to wait for the right time or if they have time or and it’s not a reward, it is a mandatory component. And I look at recovery as I look like drinking water. I drink water. We all drink water so that we never need water. We need to recover so that we never need recovery. We’re always staying on top of things so that we never get dehydrated. We never get de-energized.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:11:13)
Hmm. And I think the metaphor is an interesting one because listening to your body is an important thing. mean, we know we hear eight liters a day or whatever the sum is. But if we drink when we’re thirsty, our body is telling us. And similarly, when we focus on recovery, when we need to not ignore it. But coming back to I’m actually interested, how do you in your professional life is most of it in sport? Is it? is what’s the proportion of sport to corporate to individual? How do you divide your professional time up?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:11:51)
Yeah, ask me every day because it’s different. Okay, know, today… Yes, yes. Today was more sport oriented and I was in my private practice today. Last week, I was at a sport event doing some speaking and being on some panels with experts. The week before that, I was on the road delivering a six hour presentation to a corporate company on resilience.
That makes for a full day.
So just ask me every day and the answer might change, but that’s what I love about what I do. And that’s something that prevents me from experiencing burnout is one, I recover, which is really the primary treatment and prevention of burnout. But variety is also a nice key. And you don’t have to have variety in everything, but variety does keep things new, exciting, different.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:12:48)
Coming back to performance psychology in action, how does performance psychology give us tools to better understand and manage our day and also prevent burnout?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:12:59)
So performance psychologies, in my humble opinion, starts with your mindset, psychology. And every story that we tell ourselves, every thought that we have influences an emotion. Now our emotions then subsequently create different stories and other thoughts, but our thoughts impact our emotions. Those emotions alter our…biology or chemistry, muscle tension, heart rate, skin conductance, neurons and hormones and chemicals. And then that influences our behavior, especially stress behavior. So if we can get the story right, I call it optimal energy flow. If we can get the story right, a story that’s going to help us, propel us to movement, propel us to…
In my humble opinion, it’s not always positive thinking, because I don’t know that that’s always possible, because sometimes things just are really bad. But if we can get ourselves to think productively, productive thinking, that’ll increase more of the pleasant emotions or the emotions that will serve us, which then gets our body right, which then propels us to take positive behavior, which helps us to work through our stressors.
And cope with our stress, work through our stressors, even perceive the stress as good, embrace it, which is really what I do. So when I’m working at the high performance levels, it’s all about how to embrace the stress, how to embrace pressure as a performance enhancer. And that starts with the story.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:14:41)
Hmm. Yes, and it’s interesting, isn’t it? The two people literally sitting side by side doing what appears to be the same thing. The difference in how they approach that, how they see it, how they respond to it is their is their attitude, their their whole approach mentally to what they’re doing, isn’t it?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:15:03)
Right. Yeah, it’s their story. It’s their thought around that stressor. And then depending on your story, that stressor, in order for you to experience stress, you need to have a stimulus and then you need to have a stress response. And there are people that the stimulus is there, but they don’t have a stress response, therefore they don’t experience stress. Traffic is a perfect example. There are some people that have a high stress response to traffic. And then there are other people who they
Traffic is, it’s indifferent, like they’re indifferent about it. They don’t have a response. Therefore they don’t experience stress around traffic. I’m sure they experience stress in other ways.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:15:45)
Yes, I mean, resilience, mental resilience is another thing I know you talk a lot about. What does resilience really mean in a high performance context?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:15:53)
So when you fall down, you get back up. But I believe you get back up with intention. And so I always add that on. It’s the bounce back with intention. And something I learned in sports, and we can apply it to our lives. The best athlete, the athlete that stands on top of the podium at the end of the day is not the perfect athlete. It’s the athlete that best recovered. When a mistake was made, they quickly reset.
And the faster they reset and were able to just move on to the next moment, they gave themselves the greatest advantage. That’s resilience. So in the world in which you and I live, we can strive to be perfect, but resilience is when we do make a mistake, when something doesn’t go our way. Okay, how are we going to best recover? How are we going to best reset with intention, making that move forward? and I always like to use our strengths.
Yes. So an exercise that I do with everyone in my private practice is I ask you, when you are at your best, what describes you? Three words. What are your fundamental strengths? And you can look at it in a life domain. So at work or at home, if you’re a parent, if you’re a wellness enthusiast, you can look at it in those terms, or you can just ask yourself in the broad scheme of things as a human being.
What are my three best characters? And that’s what I’ve learned from my mentors. And then those become your fundamental strengths. So when I’m approached with a stressor or when a stressor comes to me, I’m going to expose myself to that stressor leading with one of my strengths.
And then that moves me away from a state of anxiety and it moves me more to a place of, let’s say arousal or challenge. And that’s energy.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:18:00)
I love this strength based focus and we’ve done quite a few programs on that. And I know there are varying ways of assessing your strengths. You know, you talk about, well, give it to me off the top of your head. You may not really go very deeply there, but there are different analysis out there. I mean, I know of the via strengths analysis and the, what is it, the Gallup Clifton strengths analysis.
Dr Haley Perlus (00:18:23)
Or the the book the strength finder
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:18:28)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you find those tools helpful, useful?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:18:31)
In my practice, I don’t use those and it’s not because I don’t find them useful. just, I like to offer the opportunity for people that I work with to tell their story. So I shared my story about how my coach put pressure on me and then I was either going to think, no, or I was going to think, yeah. And then I’ll share that story and then ask people, whether it’s my private practice or in my public speaking event, what’s your.
I call it a personal podium moment. What is your personal podium moment when you were approached by a stressor that you could not control and you found yourself looking at it as a challenge, giving you confidence, getting excited instead of anger, fear, frustration, worry. And then when they can tell you a story, now they suddenly armed themselves. They grounded themselves in a place of confidence. And then what did you do in that moment? And then they get to pull out some real details about what makes them their best self.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:19:33)
Hmm. I’d love to certainly explore those, I wondered if we might just, what are some early warning signs that things aren’t working out well for you? That you need to watch out for before burnout actually takes hold?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:19:49)
A really good way to create some awareness is from the emotional perspective.
There are, the education that I have is that there’s four categories. There’s an emotional quadrant. So there’s really four categories of emotion. And it’s the, the, the two spectrums are really stress, high stress, low stress. In other words, energy out or energy in, and then you either feel that in a pleasant way or an unpleasant way. So for example, a high stress, you know, pleasant would be that challenge, excitement, passion. And then on the other side, high stress but unpleasant would be that fear, worry, frustration. Now that fear, worry, frustration is not all bad. I don’t know about you, Ron, but sometimes I consider myself to be a pro crasinator because I need to feel a little bit of worry. I need to feel a little bit of fear to ignite me, to get me motivated, to heighten my concentration.
But that’s not where I’m going to be my best self. And it’s also the quickest way to burn out if I live in those high unpleasant emotions. So if you assess, if you were to look at yourself and you may separate your life, work and beyond, or you just may generally look at it, when I’m exposing myself to the stressors of life, if I’m living more in that high unpleasant, fear, worry, frustration, anger, anxiety, if I’m living more there, compared to living it challenged, excited, passionate, aligned, that’s a clue that burnout is around the corner. Because those unpleasant emotions use up a lot more energy and much faster than the pleasant emotions. So that’s a clue.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:21:44)
Hmm. Yeah, the and I mean, this keeping that high performance going for individuals to adopt. What what are some of those strategies that we can we can implement to to make sure we’re thinking positively like that? You know, that’s easier said than done for a lot of people.
Dr Haley Perlus (00:22:03)
Well, let me just give one specific tool and, you know, in the time that we have, cause obviously, you know, mindset is a, is a big topic. This is a great way to catch yourself. If you ever find yourself saying, want fill in the blank. So I’ll use the example I said before, which is I want to exercise after work, but I’m too tired. So if you find yourself saying, I want fill in the blank, but.
That but is a sign that you have a mental block. Because whatever follows that but is typically how you’re going to justify why you’re not going to follow through on your intentions and stay where you are. We have a lot of, we’ve got big buts. We’ve got these buts. So that’s a really quick way to start catching yourself thinking, perhaps not in a productive way. And then how do you reframe it?
Remember these words, the truth is, and I would even throw in there the productive truth. So if we use our exercise example, the truth is, Haley, I’ve been sitting all day, physically rested. So the truth is, as I’m physically recovered, I’m emotionally and mentally exhausted. And the truth is, the best way to recover my emotions and mind is to move my body.
And the truth is something is better than nothing. The truth is I’ve never regretted exercise. And the truth is, and the truth is, and the truth is, and the truth is. And you start reworking your thoughts. You start retelling your stories. You eliminate the buts by replacing them with the truth is that serves you, the productive truth. And that’s one really great way to start improving your mindset, so that it supports you creating emotions and a body and then executing that behavior.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:24:07)
It’s interesting, isn’t it, I don’t want to do a commercial here, but just do it is a really, it’s a powerful thing to have going in your head, isn’t it? Just do it when you’re wondering whether you should or shouldn’t just do it.
Dr Haley Perlus (00:24:23)
Yeah, but that but but getting getting that done just doing it is the hard part. So I do feel that we need a little bit more of a slogan. I do feel that we need something that’s going to tip us off. Something, you know, for so for me, I’ll be real honest. I this is the work that I teach and I do not want to be a hypocrite. I want to walk the walk.
And often when I’m finding myself saying, I want, but the truth is, Haley, you get to share this story that you actually didn’t want to do it and you did it. You get to share this with your students. You get to walk the walk. You get to not be a hypocrite. And so you have to find. I don’t want us to think a lot, but I do want us. We have to come up with that one nugget that’s going to really help us to just do it.
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Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:26:30)
I’m interested because you’re working with sports people and you know, I know at the very elite level, all of these sportsmen, think what separates them is really their attitude. What do you think, what have you noticed in sportsmen that you kind of meet somebody and you think, now there is a champion. What is it about a champion that makes them a champion?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:27:00)
They show up even if they don’t want to.
And they of course love it when things are perfect, when the weather is just right and the competition is just right and they slept just right. I mean they will embrace those moments, but they also say when it’s imperfect, great, this is where I’m going to gain a competitive advantage because everyone else is going to complain about the imperfect conditions and I’m going to make my move.
They also embrace the pressure. They, I call it, and I borrow it from one of my favorite movies called The Replacements. It was a football movie. Winners want the ball. They want the responsibility. Not, they don’t want to lose. Who wants to lose? Nobody wants to fail. But they’re also not focusing on that. I want the ball. I want the responsibility. I’ve earned this pressure and I want to make the most I can with it. These are the things that separates. And so when you say, Ron, that it’s about attitude, it absolutely is. athletes train their bodies countless, countless hours, weeks, months, years, decades, train their bodies. And one unhelpful story can totally cut them off at the neck.
And then we call it choking, their performance just suffers. But on the flip side, if they have a clean mind, a very clear mind, then they don’t have to think so much. They can just do it. And then their body takes over and their bodies get to do what they’ve been training it to do. So the best of the best know what the mind is capable of and they use it.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:28:55)
Yeah, because it always intrigues me, particularly when you’re watching a tennis game or a golf game. You know, these people are all scratch golfers, which means they can hit a great ball or they’re great tennis players. But you can almost see the mental game that’s going on there. And, you know, I imagine having a performance psychologist sitting on the sideline there, which you can have eye contact with and just know is that that do you do deal with sports people on that level?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:29:28)
I do, but I don’t always get to be there in person. So what we do do, interestingly enough, is we record our sessions so that these athletes have them as a resource. And when something really great comes up in that session, I’ll take a little bit of a clip. I’ll take a 10 second, 30 second clip of my voice or their voice, and then I text it to them. And so they have that for themselves, a little bit of a, because I don’t always get to be you know, on the court with every athlete that I work with. But yeah, those moments, those, because it’s all, they wouldn’t be coming to me if it was all habit. So we have to build these habits. And so at first we have to push ourselves to remember to do these things. And so those, if I can’t be there in person to remind them little audio clues or, you know, attentional pieces we use.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:30:19)
What’s an example of some tools that you’ve given sports people to, you know, improve their, for them to think about at the time that they’re in this critical moment of the game of the sport?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:30:31)
One of the, I’ll just, just last week, I’ll just mention, she’s a, she’s female soccer player. And in our discussion, she said, I know how to play soccer. Soccer is the easy part. And I took that clip and I sent it to her because in the heat of the moment, she sometimes doubts. But very comfortably sitting across from me, was able to like, soccer is the easy part. So I needed her to remember that. And in her voice, and then that is what we call an attentional cue to- Attentional cue. Yeah, it’s those attentional cues to remind her of that, to remind her to shift. And then she today, we were actually talking and.
She wrote, not scared on her arm. She goes, I don’t want to write fearless because fearless to her was a little bit cheesy and over and overplayed. So she just wrote, not scared. I know how to play this game. And the last two weeks she’s had her best two games ever played.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:31:37)
Self-doubt is something that haunts us in our lives. mean, it can push us to greater things, but I imagine in sport, self-doubt, as you say, is a real problem to overcome, isn’t it?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:31:52)
You anxiety. So it’s an interesting thing. So there’s anxiety and then there’s excitement. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who’s the founder of FlowState, called it arousal. So there’s anxiety and then there’s arousal. And the way I look at it is the difference is confidence or doubt. Anxiety and doubt work together. Arousal and confidence work together.
So one of the best ways to move you from an anxious feeling to more of a challenge, excitement feeling is confidence. And these doubts, and I’ll be honest with you, sometimes I tell the people that I’m working with, just say to yourself, it’s just your thinking. And you don’t have to believe everything you think. Like, let’s say,
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:32:42)
Yeah, fake it until you make it.
Dr Haley Perlus (00:32:44)
Well, it’s not even that. It’s, well, kind of, but I’m not, I don’t even know that I believe in faking it till you make it, but I’ll use myself as an example. If I’m delivering a new keynote and it’s for a new company and I want to make a good impression, I want to do a good job, and then a little bit of doubt creeps in, will I do a good job? What if I don’t deliver what they want me to? And then I immediately pause and I say, Haley, it’s just your thinking.
They chose you for a reason. You’ve had numerous phone calls with them. You know your participants. You know the examples. They’ve seen you before in other presentations. So I’m not really faking it. I’m just putting a stop. I’m like, it’s a pattern interrupt. Haley, it’s just your thinking. And you don’t have to believe everything you think because over here, there’s ample evidence to support that you’re in the right place and you belong to be here and they want you here.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:33:40)
I like that pattern interrupt. I’ve got to do more pattern interrupting in my life. It’s interesting also that you’re doing a lot of work in the corporate space because a lot of interesting things are happening in Australia in the corporate space. I think they’re happening internationally about managing, mitigating psychosocial risk within the workplace. mean, we’re focused on workplace physical, but now it’s recognized that psychosocial risk is an important part of the workplace and leadership is an important part of that. do you, how have you found, you know, the corporate world’s commitment to performance psychology and psychosocial risk?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:34:25)
I believe we’re planting some really good seeds. We need to improve our follow through.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:34:38)
Well, yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. Yeah.
Dr Haley Perlus (00:34:39)
However, those, I mean, we are planting the seeds and the first piece is awareness. So let’s continue the conversation. Let’s start looking at it. And it’s contagious. We now just have to live up to, you know, one example that I can think of is that there are, going back to burnout, this idea of wash, rinse and repeat, back to back emails, back to back meetings without adequate recovery.
There are many organizations that are identifying that, understanding that, and then putting measures into place. They’re taking on their calendars, their software that schedules. They’re not allowing for 60-minute meetings. They’re moving these 60-minute meetings to 50-minute meetings so that you have 10 minutes in between. But the people on the meeting aren’t adhering to it.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:35:35)
Okay, that’s interesting.
Dr Haley Perlus (00:35:36)
So we’re starting there. The seeds are planted. Certain protocols are being implemented from an organizational level. And now we really have to follow through. And why aren’t we following through? Well, some people will feel guilty if they take 10 minutes recovery. Some people say, well, my, you know, that didn’t happen in the last meeting. So it’s okay if I go over, there’s all these different, buts, right? They want to adhere, but and all these reasons why they feel they can’t. So that’s the piece that we need to start really working at and changing the story so that the implementation will be there. We cannot follow through without the right story. Even if the organization has put certain boundaries in place, the people need to follow them and a story is going to help people follow through.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:36:36)
I mean, that is the challenge, isn’t it, to get leadership buy-in more than just lip service? mean, what do you think the key is to getting leadership buy-in?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:36:44)
Walk the walk. put so much pressure on myself and I believe it’s good pressure and I don’t shy away with it. I want to embrace it. I put a lot of pressure on myself to adhere to schedules. I put a lot of pressure on myself to, if I’m the one leading the call, there is no way that that call is going over. No way. That is one of my primary goals. And so I truly believe that we have to…
Whoever is the leader on a specific call needs to do that. leaders, we don’t, we don’t necessarily have to verbally say, give you permission, but directs employees need to have permission to go and take a 10 minute break. And so if a leader’s not doing it, the employee is never going to do it because they’re not going to believe that they can. So we have to, we have to put things in place and then we have to walk the walk.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:37:40)
Yeah, I mean, one of the paradoxes is that leaders are being asked to and given responsibility to manage stress and burnout in psychosocial risk in the workplace. And yet they’re the ones that will benefit most from it.
Dr Haley Perlus (00:37:55)
Very true. Very true. And then I actually see some great leaders will send an email. And I understand, because I do this myself, sometimes leaders will, it’s on the top of your mind. You had a moment, and so you send an email, maybe after work hours. But in that email, you say, I’m just sending this for, but I do not expect you to answer it until Monday. And then employees don’t listen. They think, well, it was sent to me, therefore I have to reply. Well, no, it was clearly written that you do not need to reply. So there’s just this work around. And some people will look at me and say, well, the leader shouldn’t send the email. I don’t know. It was clearly communicated to you that do not feel pressure. So we have to also listen. I get both sides, but there has to be an open communication, so that we can actually feel that psychological safety we’re talking about.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:38:54)
What do you think? We talked initially about recovery and let’s just focus on that for a moment. mean, what are some of the keys to building recovery into your life, into your everyday practice?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:39:07)
So let’s start again with a story. So a great story to adapt is that we are sprinters. We are not marathon runners. The story that life is a marathon, if we look at a marathon runner, they have two objectives. One is to obviously finish the marathon, but the second objective, as fast as they can, they wanna finish it. But the second intention is to conserve energy so that they can finish it in the first place.
Sprinters, they have one goal to get to the other side as fast as they can, effectively, efficiently, high performance. It is not about conserving energy. So I want us to look at life as a sprinter, where we go in for a meeting all out, because we know we’re going to have some recovery afterwards. And again, if you look at a marathon runner, after they run a marathon, they take two weeks off. And then when they come back,
Yes. And then when they come back, they don’t just go back into a marathon, they gradually warm themselves up. We can’t do that in the world in which we live. We can’t go all out in a project and then when it’s done, take two weeks off. And then when we come back to work, we’re just going to do a couple of meetings today and we’ll just gradually work our way up. So the story of a marathoner doesn’t work, but a sprinter, a sprinter in the Olympics goes and has a sprint.
Some of them collapse on the floor afterwards. Some of them don’t, but they have a very quick recovery bout because they have to go and run another sprint the next day. But they’re energized because it was all out. Then they recovered. Then it was all out. Then they recovered all out, recover. And that’s the kind of life that we want to lead. We stress, we recover. We stress, we recover and we recover in short. That’s why I said bouts. Their recovery pauses.
Where we go wrong as we think about recovery as our evenings, as our weekends, when we take holiday. Recovery bouts are 30 minutes, 15 minutes, five minutes. Even if you have less than one minute, something will always be better than nothing. And there’s two ways to recover. There is stillness, meditation, deep breathing, the brilliance of boredom. But then there’s also active recovery, which is taking yourself out of one task, and putting yourself into another task as long as that other task creates calm and peace while you’re doing it. So a lot of people will say, well, when I take a recovery break, I go and fold the laundry and then I feel calm and peace. No, you just crossed something else on the list, which allowed you to feel calm and from an achievement. But if folding laundry, is actually calming to you in the moment, then yeah, that’s active recovery.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:42:05)
Mm hmm. Yeah, just do it. Just just break it up and do it. Build it into your day. Because I do think I mean, people trivialise sleep. They kind of don’t take it as seriously as they should. And I think that’s an important part of recovery. But these other built into the day recovery events are really quite an important part. Performance psychology. What excites you most about the future?
Performance psychology. mean, it’s a whole area that I must admit I haven’t I haven’t had a performance psychologist on before. But what what do you think? What’s the role in the healthier workplace, healthier communities? What do you see as that moving forward?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:42:48)
Yeah, my personal enjoyment is this pressure and stress piece. And it’s helping us embrace that pressure. And one of my favorite things to do in a presentation when I’m talking about resilience and stress, show of hands, how many of you have volunteered for the role that you’re in, like volunteered for the promotion, volunteered to lead a project? And all many hands obviously go up. How many of you volunteered to be married?
How many of you volunteered to have children, volunteered to purchase a home? In other words, how many of you have asked for stress in your life and the pressure that comes with it? And then the question is why? And you get answers like that’s excitement, that’s growth, that’s, you know, full engagement, that’s fulfillment. And that’s what life’s all about. But we can’t do it if we’re just, well, recovery is good, but if we’re just recovering all day, every day.
That actually leads to some health implications too, because atrophy, we become complacent, we become depressed. We’re not necessarily living a healthy life. So there’s this balance between stress and recovery that I’m super interested in. I want us to recover intentionally, and I want us to learn how to embrace this stress, embrace this pressure. And now we’re going to realize our true potential and live a very fulfilled life with not just performance, but overall health and well-being. My two mentors who created a performance business recently, I was just with them probably six months ago, and they said, we thought we were in the business of performance, but we realized we’re actually in the business of health because you can’t optimize your performance without first optimizing your health. And the stress recover piece is the is one of the greatest health pieces to then allow us to perform our best.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:44:52)
Yeah. Listen, just want to finish up because taking a step back from your role as a performance psychologist, we’re all on a health journey as individuals in this modern world. What do you think the biggest challenge is for us as individuals on that journey?
Dr Haley Perlus (00:45:11)
Confusion.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:45:12)
Okay, go on.
Dr Haley Perlus (00:45:16)
There’s so much information, some real backed up by science, mean, this is what I love about you and your podcast. You’re looking for the real data and research and science. That’s why you have so many doctors. I love how it’s all not only about governed protocols, it’s just the truth. But there’s so much information. Some is true, some isn’t. And so we get really confused and then the confused mind says, no, mean, nutrition is a great example. There are so many different, the banana is great. No, the banana is not healthy. There’s so much confusing information that we end up just kind of throwing our arms up in the air and giving up and going back to our old habits. If we were able to, of course, do your due diligence, but then find a protocol that was created by someone you’ve learned to trust. So you’ve listened to them a lot, you’ve read a lot, you’ve gone and seen them, someone you trust. But then the second piece is that it also fits your lifestyle. You know, it’s one thing if you’re gonna follow a nutrition regiment, but you’re on the road all the time and you’re eating out all the time, it’s not plausible for you. There is other alternatives. You have to find a protocol that you trust and then also one that you can do given the life you lead.
And then the idea, in my humble opinion, is to tune everything else out and give this a real, what do they say, a good old college try, like really go out there and commit to it and give yourself the opportunity for it to succeed. Give yourself the opportunity for you to succeed. Too often, I think the confusion and the not allowing it, not being patient, we all just want the quick result. So the combination of the confusion and not really letting the protocol do its work. I think are the biggest barriers that we have to health.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:47:17)
Well, that’s a great message and a note for us to finish on because it’s one of our reasons for being from confusion to clarity, from information to knowledge. That’s one of my favorite bylines. But thank you, Haley, so much for joining us today and sharing your knowledge and wisdom with us. Well, this whole idea of performance psychology, I love the idea of it. And Haley has some great initiatives there and
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:47:34)
My pleasure, Ron.
Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:47:35)
Great ways of looking at things. mean, it’s one of the things that unstress health is very focused on, and that is this daily cycle of challenges, the mindset with which we approach those challenges and the decisions we make about recovery. And in unstress health, I view the some of the challenges. I mean, we have many challenges in life, social, financial work, etc. But I think we can all agree that one of the biggest challenges is health. And if we get that right, a lot more will follow on. And that is why when we talk about challenges and unstressed health, we explore the five stresses, emotional, environmental, postural, nutritional, and yes, dental stress, which will not be a surprise to any regular listener of this podcast or for that matter, anybody with a mouth who is interested in their health and never fully connected the two. When we talk about mindset, we talk about is yours a survivor, a thrive mindset?
A growth mindset is important and how we think about things is the key. In fact, thoughts are things and those thoughts cause our bodies to produce neurotransmitters that are either stressful or empowering and mindset is important. And then we focus on recovery. And when we talk about recovery and unstressed health, we’re talking about the five pillars, sleep, breathe, nourish, movement and thought. And underpending all of those is mental fitness.
Your mind can be your best friend or your worst enemy and that’s a big focus too. So look, we’ll have links to Hayley’s website and some of the work that she’s doing. I’d encourage you to join the unstressed health community. I hope this finds you well. Until next time, this is Dr Ron Erhlich. Be well.
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