Navigating Change with Mental Wellness
In our fifth episode of Inflect, FlexPoint Consulting Founder & CEO Michael Daehne talks with Gloria Chan Packer, Principal and Founder of Recalibrate, about her big inflection point of shifting from management consulting to founding a workplace mental wellness firm. Gloria describes several symptoms of unhealthy stress, to help us be more aware of when stress and anxiety ramp up too much, and she shares three tips for navigating transformative change well.
Learn more about Recalibrate at www.recalibratemind.com.
Introduction
Michael Daehne: Welcome to the fifth episode of Inflect. I’m Michael Daehne, Founder and CEO of FlexPoint Consulting. On today’s show, we have Gloria Chan Packer, Founder and Principal Advisor at Recalibrate, a leading workplace mental wellness provider based in Austin and serving organizations around the globe.
Gloria is a dear friend of mine and someone who mentored me in my early consulting career and remains a role model and inspiration for me as a successful business owner. I hope you enjoy our discussion.
Critical Inflection Point
MD: I want to start with you and your big inflection point, so I’d love it if you’d tell our listeners a little bit more about your transition from consulting to Recalibrate.
Gloria Chan Packer: Thank you for the lovely introduction, and many of the feelings are mutual. As Michael had mentioned, we used to work together at our former consulting firm. And that’s where I began my career for almost a decade.
I was in management consulting, working in various roles from analyst to consultant to project manager to engagement manager. And really enjoyed my career. Consulting fit me so well for so much of that time because it was challenging, there was a lot of variety, and you got to work with a lot of smart, interesting people on the consulting and the client side. And it just felt very fulfilling and impactful. I really enjoyed my consulting career and feel lucky to have worked for a firm that I not only really enjoyed but met a lot of people who have become lifelong friends, just like you, Michael.
So that’s where I began my career.
My big inflection point was really in my shift from consulting to my current work in founding and opening Recalibrate, which, as Michael mentioned, is a workplace mental wellness provider. It’s a pretty big departure, I feel like, and I’ll joke with clients that before I was an expert in mental wellness, I was an expert in stress because consulting is so challenging and stressful.
But stress, I think, is maybe one of the underlying springboards for where my inflection point came from.
In late 2017, I started struggling with migraines that I had never really struggled with before. They became really chronic and really aggressive and really non-responsive to traditional medication. I remember that my wonderful neurologist at the time had suggested that I try out this new thing called mindfulness, and I was just kind of a skeptical butthead about it, and I was like, “I don’t have time for that.” And it really wasn’t until push came to shove where I realized that my body was breaking down and I didn’t have any other options. I had to decide to take some time away from work because what I was doing was not working.
And it was during that period that I experienced a lot of transformation, but it was kind of forced because what I was doing wasn’t working. I learned so much about my own relationship with stress and the ways it was not healthy, but I also learned so much more about the science behind everyday mental health experiences that we share, from stress and anxiety to pressure to perform and perfectionism.
I just felt so strongly that so many of my peers, the high achievers and busy professionals, could benefit from this knowledge.
We lived, and to a certain extent still live, in a culture where we wear busy like it’s a badge of honor, and then stigmatize slowing down and taking care of ourselves. And it was this unsustainable model that I had burned out on many times and watched my peers do the same. I just felt like we could do a lot better when it came to mental wellness.
That’s where Recalibrate was born. It was a desire to fill the gap with more science-backed, relatable, and approachable mental wellness education so that busy professionals could sustain themselves better.
What’s interesting in the inflection point is that the change was a lot around the industry, of course. Core business and organizational skillsets weren’t exactly the same, but I credit consulting providing such a valuable and varied toolset [for me to start my own business]. Being a business owner, especially trying to establish a business in this industry of workplace mental health, which, back in 2018, almost five years ago, didn’t really exist. So, a lot of the skills I had I really credit to consulting.
Probably the less obvious change with that career switch was something more implicit: I feel like I had to keep, but had to continue keeping, myself accountable to how I was valuing and approaching my work-life balance. And it’s a constant test. It’s interesting, I think a lot of people who knew me in my previous career would meet up with me after I opened Recalibrate and say, “oh my gosh, are you just not stressed at all?” And, Michael you know this, starting your own firm, “no, I couldn’t be more stressed.” It's such a valuable journey, but also, some days, I’m just like “oh my gosh, this is so much.” It really is a constant test for me.
I started Recalibrate not only hopefully to make an impact in this gap that I saw. But also, for myself personally, I wanted to pursue a way to design my life in a way that my career was fulfilling and could provide me a with a comfortable living, but at the same gave me more flexibility and freedom in life as the years wore on. But when you’re leading and creating a business in a new industry that meant that was, and is still, a constant test of that. It forces me to always practice what I preach around burnout and boundaries. I have so many ways that I feel like I'm tested around that, that has held me accountable, again, to my original intent but also my continued growth.
I think it helps enrich the work I get to do with clients, because I have that lived perspective of, “do these wellness tools and tips actually work when life is stressful or no?” And I think that helps differentiate what we do in our wellness education, too. It’s not just standard stuff, it’s stuff that we’re putting the – what’s the saying? – test to the fire, burner to the fire, I don’t know.
MD: I was thinking, money where our mouth is, but that’s not right either. But I get it, you’re walking the walk. How about that?
GCP: Yeah, something like that
MD: I think what’s so interesting, and part of the reason I wanted you to come join the podcast today, is that the tagline for Inflect is that we talk about inflection points in careers, personal lives, and organizations. And for you, it was all three at once. You spoke about starting Recalibrate. It’s the origin of a new organization. It was a career pivot. And, when you talk about the self-accountability and walking the walk, it was a bit of a personal inflection point as well. I appreciate you walking through that, because I think it’s so impactful and impressive that you navigated that.
Symptoms of Unhealthy Stress
MD: One question that came to mind as you were talking, you mentioned the migraines that were kind of your flashing red lights that something is wrong. What other symptoms or signs should folks in our organization or our clients’ organizations think about that might go unnoticed as folks are managing stress and challenges inside and outside of work.
Physical Tension
GCP: Yeah, a lot of symptoms are within us, if you will, on how our body physically is. Noticing how your muscles feel, if your shoulders feel like they’re tensed up all the way to your ears. A general rule of thumb is that the more tense our body is, the more we might be in some kind of fight or flight stress mode.
Emotional Impatience or Reactivity
GCP: The more we are emotionally impatient or reactive is another symptom. Again, in fight or flight, we are biochemically tuned to be more defensive and reactive, since that very instinctual brain says, “oh, we’re in danger.” That means our emotional spectrum needs to narrow into defensiveness. This is why, when you’re stressed or burned out, you end up having much more intense reactions than you normally would. And you get annoyed by so much more.
Difficulty Focusing
GCP: Having trouble focusing and feeling like you’re really getting into the flow of thing, because our brain alters in fight or flight and is more easily distracted. In that danger mode, our brain wants to pay attention to the loudest noise or the thing that’s moving the fasted, which is why, when we’re stressed, we can feel more absent-minded or easily distracted.
Feeling Off
GCP: And then just feeling off is another big one. I know that’s not very quantitative, but it’s pretty tangible if you really sit with that. I think all of us know when we feel normal-ish versus when we feel just off. And that, I think, normally happens when our reality of our day-to-day has fallen so out of balance with what our values and priorities are. And that’s a really common underlying source of burnout, when maybe we’re just in a very different season of life, and our body is trying to tell us, “hey, something is not really aligning here.”
A Personal Example of Seeing These Symptoms
GCP: One of my best examples of this is something I’ve lived through recently. I just had our first child. Our son is eight months old now, but as I was preparing to have him, I had set up what I thought at the time was a very effective structure of how I would take maternity leave, then come back from maternity leave with reduced hours that would scale up over a timeline. I would have coverage from the team, I would have childcare coverage, and I felt very lucky to be able to have all of these resources and this ability to design the plan. And I just thought it would work.
For any of your listeners who are parents, they’re probably able to chuckle with me. Anticipating what the challenges of having a child will be are very different than actually living through that. And as I came back to work, it was working okay but it was not working great, because I was exhausted and tired and overwhelmed a lot. But I was so subconsciously hell-bent on, “no, I designed these so intentionally, they have to work. I’m not burned out, this has to work. I designed this to no burn out.” And it took me a few months to realize that I was just in a very different season of life, and the way I had designed my life just wasn’t aligning to that.
Yeah, I feel like I went off on a little tangent, but I would wrap by highlighting that, with stress and burnout, in this wellness conversation, I don’t think that the end goal should be to eradicate stress and burnout completely, because that’s just not possible. It’s a very human and important biological reflex. I think goal should be to rein stress and burnout in a little bit to where we have a healthier and more sustainable relationship with it. And to have more tools to be able to flag it and do something about it when it’s not healthy.
MD: Yeah, absolutely, well said. You use a phrase in there, designing your life. Great book [Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans], you recommended it to me a few years ago, and I think it’s very relevant to this conversation, about thinking not just about “is my job stressful, and is my job fulfilling?” but also looking at all the other components of my life and how do those things play together in a way that supports or detracts from one’s mental health.
How Recalibrate Helps Companies and Employees
MD: You also talked about tools in your toolkit, which is where Recalibrate comes in. I’d love it if you could share a little bit more about some of the services that you provide to your clients to help their employees.
GCP: Sure, we’re a workplace mental wellness provider that focuses on providing a more science-backed, actionable, realistic approach to mental wellness education for busy professionals specifically. We’ve worked with client organizations, big and small, across all different industries, all over the world at this point.
Our services fit into categories of mental wellness education, events, and consulting. The bulk of our work right now is around education and events, which can be anything that is completely turnkey to completely curated. We offer keynotes and speaking that are more on that curated side. Then we also offer turnkey wellness education and event programs that can be executed monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, that follow a series around fundamental mental wellness learning in the workplace across topics of:
Stress and burnout
Emotions
Conflict and difficult conversations
Relationships and deepening those relationships
Bias
As well as seasonal topics like:
Mental health awareness month
The holidays and how our mental wellness is challenged during the holidays, whether personally or specific to our industry, or a little bit of both
We offer those learning programs both in the form of live events, virtual and in-person, and also asynchronously in the form of professionally produced master class series that can be on its own or an add-on. Our clients have really enjoyed that, too.
In addition to our events, we also offer consulting services. These will look more like curated partnerships, creating strategy or interweaving more mental wellness into strategy, and translating that into policies and programming.
MD: One of the things you and I’ve talked about you were embarking on the Recalibrate journey and certainly as you’ve grown it over the last several years is, for a long time, if an employee was struggling was struggling with their mental health, their employer was taking little to no responsibility to help with that. It’s kind of like, “good luck, you’re on your own.”
There’s been a shift to where not all but many employers are embracing that opportunity to help support their employees more. I know you work both with individuals and with the organizations. Seeing that increased openness to make investments on behalf of employees, for some of the services you and the team are providing, I think that’s a great, positive step forward that helps organizations walk the walk when they all the warm fuzzy things about supporting their employees and building a culture and work-life balance and all that.
GCP: Yeah, absolutely.
Three Tips for Navigating Change Well
MD: The other thing we’ve talked about, where we started the conversation, you joked about your consulting career maybe being the instigator of some stress, where now you’re helping folks manage or deal with that more. That’s where there’s an intersection between the work you and the work we do. So much of the work we do with our clients is bringing about big change, transforming organizations, and changing tools and tech that folks are using. All of that increases stress and anxiety.
So, I’d love if you can share a few tips, for organizations or individuals navigating big transformative change, how to navigate that well.
GCP: Yes, what a topic! I’ll cherry-pick a top three here.
Leaning into Communication and Connection
GCP: One that I think is probably at the top of many people’s minds, but this can be a reminder of it. The first is around effective communication and connection. Change is really hard, and one of the fundamental pillars that I think can make or break the difficulty of change is how connected people feel, because connection equals trust. And trust is so paramount to workplaces, but also just to our general mental health. We’re wired for human trust because the more we can trust the humans around us, the more we’re set up to be able to work together to resource ourselves and to thrive. And so, it’s just key, key, key wired into us.
Creating an effective communication plan, something that I imagine FlexPoint helps clients do around that change management piece is so critical and something, like you said, really overlaps between my consulting work formerly as well as our work with clients now. But really being able to set clear expectations can be so helpful, and communicating that in some kind of change plan.
I recognize that it can be really hard to communicate change, because so much is undefined. I always try to encourage clients break the unknown into milestones of either what is known or how you’re going to go about charting out the known so that people can at least distill this big, scary, nebulous cloud into, “okay, we just have to make it to this point, and this point, and this point,” and that makes it so much less scary inherently and so much less difficult.
Structuring time for connection, too, is important, whether that’s regular 1:1s, huddles, or a way to consistently keep a pulse on people within the organization. I know especially remote working, and virtually, one great way is to utilize all of these virtual polling methodologies or virtual surveys, where you can get a quick pulse check of how people are doing and see that in a measurable way.
Providing Emotional Equipping for Employees
GCP: Beyond connection and communication, another tip or tool I think is really important is how we are emotionally equipping our people by normalizing the difficult emotion in change and then giving our people the education and tools to process those difficult emotions. A lot of times we see in change a lot of unpleasant, panicky emotions that wreak havoc within the organization and within the goals of the organization.
So, one thing is being able to educate employees on why change is going to feel so hard. At Recalibrate, we do a lot of that, talking about the science of emotion, and the science behind why uncertainty is not something that our brains like, so they can contextualize what they feel and know that it is normal. That’s so important.
Otherwise, what we do is, “oh, I’m feeling an unpleasant emotion, it’s negative, this must be because of my company.” And then you blame it on the company and your job, instead of just understanding that change happens with life, and biologically speaking, it doesn’t feel good. Knowing that this is normal and is to be expected most of the time is key. Then providing tools and process around, “okay, what we do with this emotion? How do I find ways to stay regulated in my emotion? How do I determine what to take action on and how to do that? What are frameworks I can use to have conversations about this in the workplace, in a regulated and professional and productive way?” Those are our structures and processes and tools that I think are really important.
I know that we all maybe grew up in a work culture where emotions are meant to be checked at the door. Although I understand where that standard came from, I think we’re realizing that it’s outdated. Especially in the last few years, I think we’ve realized that emotions are the lifeblood of whether an organization is doing well or not.
On the positive end, when our employees feel like they have meaning and connection and belonging at work, organizations thrive. But if they feel like they can’t trust people, if they feel not valued, if they feel betrayed, organizations do not work well.
I think the key is to ensure that we can use our emotions as a tool versus try to completely suppress emotions or have a firehose of unregulated emotion. It’s really around regulation and tools.
Equipping All Leaders to Navigate Change Well
GCP: Third area I would say is the most important for working change is equipping our leaders. A lot times, when you see change happens, the executive leaders communicate it to our middle manager or the rest of our leaders, and we talk through some plans and some communication, but then we’re just like, “go tell you people.” And that can really leave a lot up to interpretation, but it also leaves a lot of inconsistency based on each individual leader’s ability to handle change and to be a strong people leader.
I think it’s really important to try to standardize tools as much as possible to accommodate for the different gaps in soft skills around leaders. I think this is a burgeoning area for companies. We’ve really focused on technical skills recently, that we’ve overlooked the importance of soft skills too, which is understandable. When it comes to things like change, it’s so important to equip our leaders with tools like remembering if a team member brings you something and you don’t know the answer, that you can buy time before responding. Don’t just make up an answer on the spot. Again, understandable, but as leaders when someone brings something to you, and you’re like, “I don’t know the answer,” sometimes an insecure trigger can come up and you find yourself either swinging into overpromising and saying yes or over-discouraging and shutting things down.
And we really want to remember as leaders that we have the ability to buy some time before you respond. To be able to be like, “thank you for bringing this to me. Give me some time to think through it and get back to you.” Or even ask around the time urgency, too: “help me understand how urgent this is.” This is huge for people feeling heard and also for retention opportunities, too. “Is this an issue where you’re going to quit next week if we don’t figure it out, or is this something you can give us a little bit of time on?”
Orienting around really distilling out needs and what the impact is if the need isn’t met, and thinking through solutions, is also important when it comes to change and the hard emotion. I think we can feel like we get lost in the intangible of it all, and the more we can distill it into tangible need, impact, and solution can be helpful for all of us, individually and organizationally, too.
As much as possible, structuring different processes and tools that can empower and equip our leaders through the change, to level-set the playing field for how those leaders communicate and deal with the change, is so important, too. I always think about the saying, “people don’t quit their jobs, they quit their bosses.” I think that’s unfortunately pretty true. A very hard challenge, but if we are really focusing on connection and communication, educational awareness and tools, as well as just empowering our leaders that we can get through tough times of change a little bit better.
MD: I love those pearls of wisdom. I think they all – from the communication and engagement and education and equipping leaders – they all resonate with me because the stat that’s always cited about the kinds of projects we do is that three out of four big transformation projects fail. There’s such a tendency to think, “well, it’s because the technology didn’t work.” It’s rarely that. It’s almost always all the soft tissue stuff – people and process stuff – and so one of my takeaways is aligned with our DNA as an organization.
All the things you’re talking about are tools and tips and frameworks that we should be helping our clients work through at the front end of big transformations so they’re being intentional about communication, equipping their leaders, and all of those things because that really is what makes or breaks a lot of the big projects in a way that retains employees and helps the organization thrive.
Closing
MD: I’m so grateful that you took the time, especially right in the middle of mental health awareness month, to chat with me and share some of your personal story and your wisdom. I know it will be very useful and valuable for our listeners. Thank you so much.
GCP: Thank you for having me, and thank you for all the great work that you and your team do.