 Hello and welcome to my talk. I hope you're enjoying Drupalcon. I'm very happy that there is space for mental health topics at Drupalcon and I'm very grateful to be here. I find it important to talk about resilience and burnout because in today's workplace the relentless pace often makes us miss the fact that we are running lower and lower on energy. It's a bit like the proverbial frog not noticing that it's getting boiled because the temperature is getting raised ever so slightly. I mean I do love the carpentry skills but I'm not sure if people notice the irony in putting hamster wheels in offices for better health. In my talk I'm going to share my experience with burnout with both with employees and teammates and with myself and what I have learned about what we can do to prevent it. My name is Jochen Dillich. I'm Jibis on Twitter. I started system administration in 1993 and 500 weeks ago to this day I founded Freistil IT, a managed services company and our main product is Freistil Box, a managed hosting platform for Drupal. I'm well aware that the German word is hard to spell so if you simply go to hostingpeaceofmind.com you will find the website as well. Six years ago I moved from Germany to Holland and with my family and when I'm not spending time with my family or doing some live coding on Twitch I'm probably building another expensive keyboard. Before I get into what resilience is let me make it clear what it isn't. This is not resilience, this is ignorance and in order to deal with burnout, in order to deal with all the stress we have properly we need to know the symptoms and we need to know the methods to counteract them. In his book Powering Through Pressure, Bryce Howard puts this diagram, the core elements of resilience with purpose at the center, positive realism, determination, relationships, self-awareness and self-management as the five core elements and I'm going to be talking about that in a minute. Before let me tell you a bit of a story that I experienced myself. In an early job I led a team of highly skilled IT specialists in a corporate environment. One of these people made me regret becoming a manager. I simply wasn't prepared for the amount of pushback or even hostility he put up against me and it became clear to me quickly that he was severely burnt out but I simply didn't know how to handle this situation. I wasn't prepared, I had no formal education on mental health. I know my way around the Unix shell but I wasn't in any way equipped to deal with people with real mental health issues. And when he finally quit, first my team and later the company, if I'm honest, was happy for both of us. I left the company about a year later and shortly after I received an email. Here are some paraphrase excerpts what he wrote to me. Next week it's going to be a year that I left the company. A good point in time for a retrospective. It was the right step for me to leave and in hindsight long overdue end quote. And that's already a good insight. I have a motto that helps me deal with difficult situations and it goes love it, leave it or change it. Sometimes simply leaving is the right option. Quote, I'm now 75 to 80% of the way to full recovery but the last meters are the hardest people with whom I'm still in touch say I'm substantially more calm and relaxed. So note that even after a year he had still not fully recovered from his previous work experience. I can't imagine the hell he was going through back then. Quote, my boss is doing an anti-stress program with me because the old nervous flutter still comes back very easily. That's the last major to do. I think you wouldn't recognize me. So he seems to be doing much better and he feels that he's getting better. Quote, only recently I found the ability to look at what happened three years ago with the required distance. I was about to burn myself out for the company without any appreciation by our leadership or customers. So from his perspective the company was willing to sacrifice people's health so that the higher-ups could dilute themselves that everything was okay. And I'm not saying he was wrong. Quote, the doctrine that we were the cream of the crop equipped to save the world day after day steered me right into the wall. And I was stupid enough to even floor the gas because I thought that's what I'm getting paid for. That's another important point. Hero culture is very prevalent in tech, especially in engineering. There are many reasons for this. One reason being an irrational trust in the growing power of our tools. We feel there's nothing we can't do. We can automate and we can be more and more efficient. Another reason might still be male stereotypes. Quote, maybe you remember our first talk in the new team in which I blamed you for my nervous breakdown a few months before and told you that I considered you partly responsible for my condition. And I kept treating you accordingly in the following months. I remember that it was a rough start to an even rougher collaboration. Quote, today I have to admit that I was wrong. I felt that I was fighting with my back to the wall for my existence and ultimately for my life. I couldn't find a way out of this spiral and only had you and my wife escape goats and pressure bulbs. Burnout is a vicious thing. It not only destroys people, but also the relationships they need to break out of it. It's a bit like a parasite that cuts off your support lines. Quote, I regarded burnout as a problem, not a mental health issue, as did the company by the way. So that's another misconception typical for engineers where there's a problem, there's an algorithm to solve it. And that's not the case with mental health. Mental health requires people who know how to deal with these things and helping each other. Quote, my behavior towards you was terrible regardless of the reasons. I regret how I treated you and I'd like to apologize. I hope I didn't damage you in some way. Thanks for your efforts. Back then they didn't take effect, but today I can appreciate their value. Thank you. You can imagine that I was very happy to receive this email and even though I didn't hold any grudge anyway, I was happy to have this kind of closure. But you can also see how burnout can severely affect people, relationships and everything around it. So now that we've taken a look at how burnout can look like in the extreme, let's look at the small symptoms. There are several things that can make you aware of that things are going awry a bit. So for example there's poor focus, which often also leads to procrastination. Just as an example in preparation for this talk I learned how to solve a Rubik's Cube. Congratulations. Thanks. Still not very fast with it though. Another is physical discomfort where you feel that you're worse than normal or susceptibility to illness. As an example for myself, at the end of my corporate job I took a three-week vacation with my family and I actually spent the first week of this vacation in bed. I had something like a flu with 39 degrees and I felt exhausted and had headaches but no physical symptoms like like coughing or sneezing and things like that. I just felt completely destroyed and after a week I was I got I got to recover enough to enjoy my vacation. I even got a blood test made during my vacation but it didn't turn up anything. After that vacation I lost my job but that's another story. So I started my current business. I started building the infrastructure for a hosting platform. I started thinking about marketing. I went to Drupal Camps and in May 2010 I finally launched the product and started getting my first customers and the fever returned. Again 39 degrees, feeling completely spent but no other symptoms that would tell you that it's a flu and then I realized okay that's something completely different. That's my body telling me that I'm pushing myself too far. Emotional unavailability is another thing that might point to burnout and if you don't find a way to recover it might even lead to a mental download spiral and that's when things really go wrong. In colloquial terms we use the word stress when the pressure gets high. However I found a more fine-grained spectrum of states that go from everything is green to I severely need help and that's from powering through pressure as well. First it starts with the challenge state followed by pressure only then comes stress and in the end distress. Challenge is when things get a little bit harder and when things aren't trivial anymore so that's when you might experience bad sleep when you realize okay I'm getting emotional more quickly than usual if you have difficulty focusing if you feel low on energy and if you're easy to frustrate. That's still a state in which you can rely on your own resources to get out of this. You could reduce your workload you could simply switch down a few gears start delegating more trying to relax in any way that you feel fit. Develop a sleep routine. Sleep is an important part of health in general. Take more breaks. Seek out people that help you recharge instead of draining you and look a bit at a more healthy lifestyle in general. However beware of continuous periods of challenge because that will get you into the pressure zone where you will have both physical and emotional as well as mental effects. People react differently to this pressure state. Some react stubbornly and bloody-mindedly. They double down telling themselves I don't do stress I just need to keep going. Others are of the more mindless and ignorant type. Telling themselves it will go away. It's not so big deal. But only the self-aware and enlightened reaction is really healthy telling yourself this is not right. It's time to make some changes. Because if you don't we'll finally land in the red zone with stress where things get really for the worse where you get from discomfort into illness where your social life will be affected and your performance is going down the drain. And that's a state where normally our own resources are insufficient to deal with the demands and we need to rely on expert support. Experts like GP or maybe even a therapist. People who are trained to help people in this state. I do sincerely hope you'll never get into the final stage when both your physical and mental health breaks down. So let's focus on solutions or approaches to counteract these states. First of all purpose. It was at the heart of the model I showed you earlier. Purpose means if work is stressing you out you are more than your work. You're also a mother, gamer, a runner, all kinds of things. And a clear sense of purpose what makes you as a person will help you stay focused on the things that are important in the long term. So ask yourself what are your goals your long-term goals and the medium and short-term goals that will get you there. What are the directions you want to take in life and in your work? How do these directions fit with others? So talk to loved ones and figure out if your goals match what they have in mind. Which activities get you nearer to your goals and identify also the activities that won't? So for example for myself I've gotten into the habit of making a weekly plan where I state one or at most two goals for the week. Things that I really want to have finished until Friday and then I start every day with a coffee and making a daily plan. Which smaller steps will get me there? I also do regular personal retreats where I simply book a hotel room for two days or so and switch off all notifications, tell my family and my colleagues that I won't be available and spend my time with a notepad or maybe a mind mapping app where I think about what's important to me, what's important for my work, what's important for my relationships, for my family life, for my personal health and all these things. Speaking of relationships, Ben Stein says personal relationships are the fertile soil from which all advancement, all success, all achievement in real life grows. And on the flip side relationships that don't work out can be the worst source of difficulties and anxiety. So it's really important to take a critical look at your relationships and maybe identify which relationships will help you and which won't. The model also mentioned positive realism that might sound like a strange phrase and to be sure it's not optimism. Optimism means that you believe the good thing will happen. Positive realism however means that you believe that anything good or bad can happen and you know that it often doesn't. When you've identified where you want to be in life and where your good place is it's easier to become determined and really set your compass. Be determined yet remain open-minded because for every journey there are detours and always let the solution not the challenge dominate your thoughts. What gets you ahead? What gets you out of this? What gets you nearer to your goals? It's easy to become bogged down by your own voices in your head that tell you you're not good enough. You're not knowledgeable enough. You're not healthy enough or other things and that might or might not be the case. It's not that important. The important question is what is going to be my next step regardless which brings us to self-awareness. A method that is very simple in daily life is the stop method. When you realize something doesn't smell quite right stop. Stop, take a breath, observe what's happening with you and around you and then proceed. Make a decision how to proceed after you've calmed down a bit. In the long term having a few self-management methods available will really help you to keep burnout at bay. There are three steps you can take. First of all release pressure when it comes then take action and in the long term change your mindset to a positive outlook. That's the high-level view so let's take a closer look. How can you release pressure? There are many ways. You could verbalize what troubles you. You could take vigorous exercise, talk to an expert, relax in something that helps you calm down. Music or gaming might help. Going to trivia night tonight might help. Sometimes stroking a cat for half an hour helps. Make sure you get enough sleep, rely on your relationships or simply take yourself somewhere else by dreaming or simply relaxing. That's a short-term reaction to pressure however it's even more important to not get into these pressure states and if pressure comes from being time constrained which is often the case in our industry there are many things that you can do to make sure time doesn't become a major factor in your mental health issues. I won't read them I'll share the slides anyway so it's fine just you can simply skim over them and just a short note if you're not familiar with the monkey reference having a monkey on your back is an old management metaphor for responsibilities that suddenly switch owners. You might have experienced that yourself when a colleague comes to you with a thing they just can't cope with and I have an issue with doing X or Y and then they leave and you realize now it's suddenly your task that's when the monkey has switched backs. As I already mentioned sometimes relationships are not only solution to issues but also the source and there's a saying conflict is two people in the same country so it's good to have a few methods to deal with relationship pressure being clear about expectations don't not letting things simmer being mindful where the stories you tell yourself might not be realistic and the truth and being clear that different people will need different ways to deal with them but the main thing in relationships and that's nothing new is communication and part of communication is listening which is different from hearing there's a saying hearing is through the ears listening is through the mind. Listening is not the time during which you prepare your next statement there are a lot of scientific methods and studies and insight in general that help with communication so for example there's a concept called nonviolent communication I'll reference the book later there's also a concept named transactional analysis which is an interesting scientific view into how communication works and goes wrong as well and the next thing might mainly be for the managers if change that you introduce causes pressure and to be frank it always will because change is always a crisis people do not like change this crisis might be tiny because the change isn't is tiny but it can be also be large and here are a few things that will make sure that you take a bit of that pressure out another important long-term strategy is changing your mindset this quote is a bit strange isn't it who would wait with leaving their house until the whole earth is covered with leather if all of us have shoes however that's exactly how we behave in certain situations where we say I can't deal with that I simply can't even though we might have the most simple of tools available many times it's not the challenge itself that affects us negatively but the beliefs we have about these challenges and challenging these beliefs helps us towards a solution for example if your kids are driving you up the wall which mine often do to me there's a difference between believing that their behavior is caused by them being disrespectful and not well behaved and all these things and the belief that that's exactly how six-year-olds behave another thing many of us struggle with I'm pretty sure is perfectionism just this one more commit just a bit more refinement maybe I can get this a bit more elegant and that's where we put pressure on ourselves where the solution is already in front of us these are beliefs that we need to challenge and people have been doing so for thousands of years there are very old methods to deal with beliefs that hold us back and there are new ones and an old one is the philosophy of stoicism that's more than 2000 years old my my main machine at home for example is named Seneca and there are also modern scientific insights into challenging these beliefs in us for example the our ebt the rational emotive behavior therapy where we learn to challenge beliefs that hold us back beliefs that tend to push us into negative downward spirals where we start by telling ourselves I can't do this I'm not good at this it's difficult to do this where from the start we frame a problem in a way that will only make it harder for us to deal with it because we'll notice our internal reaction what we think and feel about this and it doesn't feel good this will in turn reflect in our performance and then we'll have the negative confirmation that we see others noticing us struggling so this confirms we're not good at it and then everyone knows and and then we get into this vicious cycle where our own thoughts become self-fulfitting prophecies by being mindful and challenging these beliefs we can turn this around when we ask ourselves what in this situation can I do well where am I well equipped to deal with this what resources do I have at my disposal that will help me with this resources being tools or colleagues or books YouTube anything and then get at it with a positive attitude see how some things might not go as well as we'd want them to be but life isn't perfect but other things do go well because we have prepared because we have first thought about the course and then sailed off and getting the positive confirmation then that we are doing quite well and getting into a virtuous cycle this is this is of course a thing that needs a lot of reflection so I'd say shaving off time for all these things is the most important thing in keeping mental health so the methods I mentioned earlier to release time pressure might be the first thing that you could do in practice and use that time that you've freed for the self-management methods and self-awareness exercises that you need to get from a negative belief cycle into a positive one and just to wrap things up here again the core elements of resilience first of all start with your purpose ask yourself why am I here at this workplace at this conference why what what am I as a person where would I'd like to be and then use positive realism where you know that good things and bad things will happen might happen or might not going at things with determination relying on your relationships especially if you find yourself in one of the later stages in the challenge distress model practicing self-awareness and having habits and routines that help you help you to manage yourself will help you keep burnout at bay and in the end that's what the word resilience in this context means here are a few books that I recommend reading I enjoyed reading them powering through pressure I've mentioned already stronger is another good book slack getting past burnout busy work and the myth of total efficiency is not about the chat tool it's about leaving room for the things that I've mentioned before the chat tool might actually be on the opposite side of that nonviolent communication and stoicism and the art of happiness is a nice low-weight intro into this philosophy before I'll get into questions I'd like to point out the contribution opportunities and ask you politely to take the survey any questions yes so if you understand you correctly if you're having sometimes in the lot of negative thoughts one of the solutions is to plan in time for positive thoughts so you can train to get out of negative thoughts earlier yeah that's right I I think everyone has negative thoughts or feels pressure at sometimes and that's nothing we can completely avoid but first of all being mindful enough to notice it is a good thing when you feel okay why did I get this angry just now that's not how I usually behave why can my kids drive me up the wall like this simply by by doing small things that's the first step to realize that something is not quite right and then actually have the time to to deal with that to say okay maybe I need to talk to take a walk right now maybe I let my wife deal with the kids and I just take a walk around the block and let's see how that will change my attitude or doing something something else that's appropriate in this situation and if you notice that these things keep reoccurring that might be a reason to talk to someone else about that might be a colleague you trust or might be someone in your family or a trusted friend or something or if you have access to a therapist that that might help as well just spending an hour talking to someone who has dealt with these things a lot of times that definitely will help you sometimes the issue ever have negative thoughts then I know by theory I should have positive thoughts but somehow I cannot make that step I should is sometimes not really true because negative thoughts and I might get a bit Buddhistic here but negative thoughts simply are that's nothing negative in itself it's just a state you are in and it's important how you deal with this state not judging yourself that you're feeling bad or angry or something like that because by saying I should you keep putting pressure on yourself you mean by saying I should have positive thoughts no not necessarily that is a very individual thing but noticing it and asking yourselves what what can I do to change the situation that I don't like is certainly a good thing other questions the way you talked about your experience with your co-worker do you deal with this case now with your experience and how would you suggest you think as maybe burnout but you cannot simply say that depends on the resources I would have at my disposal in my previous job I should have probably involved HR earlier because they might have resources at their disposal that I don't as a technical manager they might have experienced that with other departments as well or something like that and they certainly would would be able to make decisions that I can't as someone who isn't really equipped to deal with these things especially in such a late state as this person was in yeah I certainly wasn't able to help him I'm not sure if I would be able to help him today even even though I have dealt with this topic a lot more so making steps that more people more expert at this can take over is certainly a good idea I guess that's when when relationships come into play and there's there's also structures in in in companies that help with that for for example some companies do things called 360 evaluations where everyone gets basically reviewed by their peers and that might be a source where you get the indication okay if several people tell me that I get angry too early or that I snap at people for no reason that might be actually an indication that I need to do something with myself any more questions if there was one thing that you could take from your time running your company that you hope everyone could implement where they work that could help reduce risks to burn out what would it be I'm hesitating because this word is getting overused but getting people into a mindfulness practice probably would be the single thing that I would implement because simply becoming aware where my mind goes in certain situations is so important I've I'm I still need to get into a meditation habit but I do it from time to time and I remember to do it and it has already helped me to sometimes stop and realize okay I've gone on on the wrong track here something is bothering me far too much I'm far too anxious about this thing or I'm much too angry than I should be in this situation and I would be normally or was in the past something like that simply realizing that something is not quite right and then maybe doing this stop method where I take a time off and say sorry I just can't deal with this at this point please excuse me while I'll take a walk or I need to think for five minutes or something like that really helps with preventing things from going out of hand thank you so if there's anything anything more I'll be here and I wish you all a very pressure-free Drupal Con.