Life Reclaimed

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It's a podcast about workplace culture. Hello, I'm Bruce Daisley. Had really good feedback for the newsletter last week, which was about challenges to psychological safety in purpose-driven organisations. If you're not following the newsletter, you can see that in the show notes. But it's often a sort of good place for people to have discussions, disagreements, reflections on the things I'm writing about. And generally, that's everything workplace culture-related. Today's podcast discussion is with Dr. Pippa Grange. Now Pippa used to work at the England football team, and I sort of built a connection with her when she was there. She was credited in an article way back in 2018, credited in her role as Head of People and Culture for Gareth Southgate's England team. And I got in touch with her there, featured her on the podcast shortly after she left the team. And I've sort of stayed in contact with her as she's become a best-selling author. She's often called out by the likes of Brennie Brown. She's been featured on some of the biggest podcasts in the world, just talking about her previous book, Fearless. I love getting the chance to chat to people like Pippa because she's worked with such elite teams and she's been in such incredibly exclusive environments, you know, like the semi-final of the World Cup. She's in that dressing room. I think her perspective is incredibly valuable. I'm always intrigued, what does someone like Pippa say when they're sitting down with, what do they ask them? What's the advice to them? How do they counsel them? And I think that's why this book's so powerful. She's sort of styling herself as a regenerative psychologist now, helping us to regenerate, re-energise, rebuild, whether in the aftermath of burnout or more, as we're sort of reflecting on what we're trying to achieve with our lives. Incredibly powerful and thoughtful discussion. And it's always, like I say, an honour to get to chat to someone like Pippa. So this is my discussion with Dr. Pippa Grange. She's the author of a brand new book, Life Reclaimed. Just to kick off, I wonder if you could introduce who you are and what you do. Yeah, I am Pippa Grange. I am a performance psychologist, or what I now call a regenerative performance psychologist. And for the last 25 or so years, I've worked with organisations, teams and individuals to help them stay in one piece and enjoy the ride while they're doing amazing things, performing in, most often in sport. Most of my career has been in sport, but also business and science and tech and industry at large. So yeah, that's kind of me in a nutshell. Now, I was revisiting the notes, albeit that you and I have communicated many times in the last time since you've been on the podcast. But when you were on the podcast, which was a pre-COVID thing, you'd just left the FA and the book actually talks about it, opens your new book. We should introduce your new book, but the new book begins with you describing your burnout in that period. And I've tried to piece together where you were in that. So I'd love you to sort of fill in the gaps there, really. After the FA, I went and worked with another football organisation, which was fantastic, Right to Dream. They're an organisation that has football clubs and developmental academies across the world. And I was Chief Culture Officer there, which was a really great job. And my burnout was at the end of that period. But as you would know yourself, but also from reading the book, that burnout is not an event, it's a cumulative gathering of stuff, situations and circumstances and overreaching for a long period of time. And then it's involuntary when it comes. I don't associate it with that role necessarily, but more a long journey getting to that point. Okay, okay, that makes sense. I was just trying to place exactly the sort of the time and the place and how that went through. I wonder if you could lean into that a bit more. You talked there about burnout is not necessarily an event. How do you think about burnout, especially having either witnessed it in other people, experienced it yourself? How do you think about burnout? I think what it is basically a very uncomfortable, involuntary transition away from what's no longer working for you. The way I see it is, as I said, cumulative gathering of denying, avoiding, ignoring, overriding yourself and all the signals that your body is giving you until eventually your body says, hey, I'm going to take over here. You're handing over the keys. This is no longer an option for you. And a full burnout as I experienced is not light work. It's very physical. It has a set of symptoms, a vast set of symptoms that many people experience differently. But the ones I experienced had a lot to do with cognitive fog and massive fatigue and low mood and inability to just basically have any mojo on any given day. My body was involuntarily making me do what it needed because I was refusing to listen for so long. So I see it like that. It's a hard thing across the research and the literature. It's a hard thing to actually define. It's still got the word syndrome with it. It's not yet considered evidenced enough and clean and clear enough to be described as a disease or an illness. And we use the term colloquially, like if you've had a rough week, we might say you're a bit burnt out this week. But actually a full burnout is a much more sort of comprehensive falling apart, basically. And it takes a good while to come back. I wonder if this is part of what's led you to write this really reflective book, the new book's called Life Reclaimed and it's a reflective, quite beautifully written exploration into kind of the meaning that we derive from things, what we're setting out to do, why we might have those goals that we're setting out to do. But one of the things that really struck me was that you talk about us burning out, not just because we do a lot, but because what we're doing doesn't give meaning to the way that we're feeling. And that sense that burnout, to some extent, is almost a psychological rather than physical thing. You talk about nurses who are burning out because they're doing reporting instead of nursing or teachers doing admin instead of teaching. And that's a really interesting, I mean, it's very relatable, but it's a really interesting reframing, Bruce, we might reach burnout. And I'd love you to explore a bit more of that if you could. Yeah, absolutely. One thing I would say, you would have read this in the book, but that sort of artificial division between your biology and your psychology, I conflate those a lot more because I don't think things really just happen in our head or in our body. Burnout is absolutely biological, but it's also deeply psychological. That's worth saying up front. But humans can overperform. We do it very often and it doesn't cause a problem. The problem comes when it's chronic and when it's taking us away from aligning with what we actually care about so that we're masking, we're pretending, we're pushing when we don't want to push, we're overreaching cognitively and physically. Burnout is a culmination of those things. I describe it in the book as eventually being unfaithful to yourself because you're getting a strong no from an internal no, but externally you're still doing it. And it does definitely make a difference how much cost it extracts when you're not attached to the thing that you're doing or you've lost meaning in the thing that you're doing. You're maybe, sometimes that can be, it's too tasky and you don't have anything other than the task. It's too repetitive. Sometimes that's actually, it's quite far away from what you thought you'd be doing or what you intended to do, but you've got yourself stuck in a rut or you feel like you've got yourself stuck in a rut and don't know how to come out of there. The reason why it's so intriguing from you is, or you were a credible, really credible person to talk about it, is that, you know, we associate sports psychology or like elite psychology overperformance or elite level performance, getting the last bit of capability out of us. And so understanding the balance between overperformance and then burnout is a really important understanding for us to have. And you talk a lot about overperformance. You talk a lot about what is overperformance. And I'd love you to go into that really, because it helped me reframe what I thought a performance coach was setting out to try to do really. Yeah. I think the easiest way to approach this is to think about the reality of how, of staying in one mode all the time rather than moving in and out of a mode. And that mode in this case, as you're talking about, is intensity, right? So that Out, do more, be more, push harder. There's a kind of really, we've really imbibed those in workplaces and organizations, but they're actually not the most effective method if what you want is sustained performance. You have to get people over the idea that it's anti-ambition, or it's not even anti-hustle. It's pro-sustainability. It's working with human beings rather than machines, and that's that human experience where you want people to be able to access the values that are on the wall. They don't, people don't tune out of them for any other reason than that they they don't have the capacity or the bandwidth left when their nervous system is so dysregulated, and includes their own their own values. So it's really about the reframing of what high performance takes if it's not just for now. If it's not just this tiny window of opportunity in which case push and drive maybe is the way, but there has to be a rebound. It's what I put in the book, in Life Reclaimed, that the performance is coming up to the crest of the circle, and then you've got to come down the other side too. What we do in organizations often times when it's constant push is just rev on that first curve and never allow the completion of the cycle, and so people can't even access their best ideas, their best decisions there. Certainly not their best collaborations. And I guess that's the reframe. It's not about less performance. It's nothing about lowering the standards here. It's better methods. If you were to go back, you talked about like the period when you worked with a big sports club and then you went into something more corporate. Were there any of those elements that were playing a part in your own experience, that you had gone from something that had natural seasons, ups and downs, peaks, to now something that was more commercial, that was just that hamster wheel? Was any of that in your own experience? Yeah, definitely. That's the kind of work that I do, I need to be able to diversify my modes, speeds. It needs to be, I need to have the kind of rhythm where I can be imaginative, where I can find a real edge or a point of difference, and that doesn't always happen when you're sprinting. So that is certainly a part. I think for me, it's also worth saying, the realization as I'd moved up the chain and I was running departments and executive roles, for me personally, that took me away from the work I'm best at and that rewards me most, which is one-on-one or small intimate teamwork where I'm, it's transformational and you can really change the way somebody is living their life and performing at work, whatever their work is. Sitting around tables, discussing stadiums and strategy wasn't for me. That's not that it's wrong, it's just that that wasn't the right alignment for me, and the pace piece absolutely dulled my imagination. It's so interesting, isn't it? Like I've heard businesses talk about Fridays or four-day weeks or all manner of little interventions that they introduce. And one of the things, this is where summer Fridays might be, they finish at three o'clock on a Friday in the summer months, or that they give everyone the period between Christmas and New Year off and you don't need to use vacation. And what you often hear is because there's such an obsession with productivity and individualism, that people looking at that will go, Oh, there you go. You've just baked in low productivity. But what, to some extent, using the lens that you've given there, is actually allowing people to recognize this is a between stage. This is a little moment in the calendar where we're not going full pelt. You're giving them some subconscious signal that, okay, it's going to get intense in September, but actually enjoy August, enjoy July. Something in creating those rhythms, maybe in an unspoken way, that possibly those businesses benefit from that by having this sort of subconscious communication of peaks and troughs. That's the way I interpret some of what you're saying there. Yeah, for sure. And regenerative performance, the word regenerative is to renew, to go again and renew. And for me, regenerative performance is being able to do it within the system that you're in, rather than having to come out of the system and break. So the main point of this is that we build workplace systems for output, not for human beings. And I think that we should really revisit that. I think it needs a lot of courage to revisit that. But at the end of the day, I'm talking about regenerative performance, not just as summer Fridays. That's lovely, by the way, but not just as that, but how do you have, how do you make it normal that regulating the nervous system, buffering is part of the day? How do you plan for when there's a really heavy cognitive load and loads of decision-making and loads of output required? And then a softer period. How do you make that part of your operational planning? How do you plan for even just in an individual sort of workflow across a week? How do you plan for transitions so that there is no back-to-back meetings? Everybody knows that we shouldn't do back-to-back meetings, right? That our cognitive capacity drops so dramatically. You're in the same room, the CO2 has gone up too far and everybody's a little bit foggy and a bit less capable, but we still have that such a strong urgency to, such a strong drive to push and do a bit more. It's not what gets the result. So to step away and buffer and transition, walk, move, step outside. They're such small things, but it's like, how do you regulate within the day, not wait for the break at the end of the week or at the three o'clock on a Friday? I would like to see redesign within the workplace. I would also really like to see it be taken seriously as something other than a perk. If there's nice things that go around your job, like a bit more time off on a Friday, how is the, how can you expand that thinking to make it about within work, within culture? And the culture is designed for regenerative performance. It's not a lowering of standards. It's not a lowering of productivity. It's a lowering of urgency, false deadlines, artificial priorities, rush mentality, push mentality, where it doesn't need to be. And it requires leadership permission, requires demonstration and requires probably some better structural planning within workforces. One of the things that the book is very good at is helping you to reappraise what your actual ambitions are. Where do your motivations, your desires come? Where, why do I strive for this? Why am I driven by this? What's the gap inside me that's thinking about this? And you, there's a chapter in there that talks about that a lot of high performance is essentially trauma dressed up as ambition. Like a lot of the time, people's desire to do something is filling a void that they've felt inside them. As you've worked directly with sports people, and you might have witnessed some of that, I'd love you to reflect on where we get our motivations from. And sometimes in extremes where those motivations come from. Yeah. I think the thing with trauma is that it amplifies rather than necessarily always creates, right? So if you are thinking, Hey, I'd really like to be the one who achieves X, you'll, if there's trauma kicking around, you might be so much more likely to override yourself, overperform, as I call it, and push yourself to the brink a little bit more. So it's really about method as much as anything, but I do both the narratives that I start with in the book of, you know, seeing ourselves as separate and you can press override on yourself. Nothing else matters. The humans in charge of everything, not wasting a minute, optimizing everything, needing to stand out, not worrying about fitting in, and always the chase for more. When you match those with what your values are, because really our strongest motivation comes from what we value or should come from what we value. When you match up with what you value, it's a really good reflective exercise, say, what am I doing this for again? And is this a moment to really consider better reasons to perform than the ones that I've had, reach the top, get some more, optimize, be seen? I think that's a, I think that's a nice, that's something I enjoyed about the book that came out of me and came out in the book was that's an important thing to offer ourselves, especially seasonally. Like, how do I feel in my, I might feel different in my forties than my thirties or my fifties than my forties. Like, let me recheck on what my values actually are. Am I in integrity with them? Am I in flow with the work? Am I in vitality with myself and am I in relationship with the people I want to be and with the world at large? Or am I in a little bubble gritting and pressing the gas? I was having a conversation about this specifically yesterday. I don't feel like I've got clearly articulated values. And I was like, Oh, I wonder if I could go through the process of trying to work out what my values are. If somebody's trying to do that, where would you advise them to start? What are the things that they need to think about? But I was just trying to think, I don't want loads of these values, but I do want to understand what the things that make me tick are and what things that make me, either when you work with people in coaching or whether, or just when you're going through that process yourself, do you think about reaching your own values? It's kind of, that's what Life Reclaimed does in a way, it's like a reflective, what am I doing it the way I intend to do it? And what else would I do if that's not the case? One of the things that's really important is checking your behavior first. So before you go off into some esoteric thought Opening heart as well as mindset, changing the mindset away from individual, ever-upward me orientation. I talk about from me to we to us. Me is my gain. We might be my team, but us is all of us. So, yeah, I think that's a really beautiful link back to the idea of values too. What are you here to do? I guess it's not directly from the new book, but I just, I wanted to get a perspective from you about team culture, team cohesion, trying to build something bigger. You've obviously worked with lots of different teams. And I guess the interesting perspective that a lot of people say to me right now is that teams don't feel as good as they've felt before, or they're not as cohesive the way we're working. The way that our attention is so fragmented now that the teams don't feel as connected. When you're working with teams now, I'm sure the essence of these things is unchanged and eternal. But when you're working with teams now, what are the things that you're having to remind them of? What are the sort of the things that maybe they've seen that they've deprioritized that they need to be put back on the straight and narrow about? I think the thing I would say is that culture emerges through conditions. It's so easy to think it's that guy over there that needs to do X differently, or the individual's attention is scattered short. That's the thing, but I wouldn't say that's the fulcrum of what we're experiencing in sort of diffuse culture right now. I would say it's the conditions. And I would always orient a team or a set of leaders to rethink the conditions that they're asking people to operate in. Those conditions where psychological safety shows up, those conditions are where you feel free, mentally flexible, where there's emotional range or not, where you feel that you have to code switch and be in role or not, where you have to conform to the norm or where you can bring something new or not. You have to rethink what is the environment? You've probably heard me say before, Bruce, but if the flower isn't growing, you don't blame the flower. You look at the soil. It's the same thing with culture. It's that whole mindset, that ecological mindset. As I say in Life Reclaimed, it's you have to reconsider what conditions you're creating for people to unleash what they've got, including their motivation, their talent, their productivity, et cetera. It should be a verb. It's like you make culture, right? People make culture. It doesn't exist outside of people. It's made from what you resist, what you reward, what you prioritize. And if we just put junk inputs in all the time, you'll get junk outputs, junk inputs in terms of the conditions, you'll get junk outputs or lessened outputs or fake performative outputs. If you want something more real and more sustainable, then you have to make real and sustainable conditions. And then back to your earlier question then, what's the bravest question a leader can ask themselves that they might resist at first in thinking about regenerative performance? It's like, what is it that I'm not prepared to put on the table to change? And it's usually not a result-based thing, it's a method-based thing like timing or the push culture, something like that. Always a fascination for me that someone who's worked with some of the highest performing individuals, and I always, the question in my head is, what do they talk about? I wonder what happens when you go into a room. And so I think the reason why I was quite moved by this book, I'm not remotely a reflective person, for good or for bad. Sometimes it's got advantages to it. And I rarely lie awake at night thinking about things. And that process of me thinking about values takes a lot to drag me to that stage where I'm like, yeah, I need to do that process. I think I've got it roughly there, but I want it consistent. And so it's just so fascinating to see what one of the world's most respected performance coaches actually asks you to think about. And it's, for me, some of the most powerful stuff is the contextualization, the perspective-taking, the thinking about what you're setting out to do rather than what you're trying to get ticked off today that are incredibly powerful for me. I think people will get a lot from this because it's inviting you to think, look, there's context of burnout, there's context of how we're feeling, but it's also helping you to reframe what your own goals are in life, what success looks like. And I think what was incredibly powerful for me. Thank you. I appreciate that. I've got people like you in mind, Bruce, when I write for an audience because I'm thinking about, you named it before, it's like the, you start inside, you have to start inside and then you do the outside work. But it's, it is behavioral. It is things that we're already doing. I just want people to understand that they're probably not doing it wrong, but they might be not paying attention to the right things, the right methods. And it might not take that much to be, to get back on track with some things, but a little reframe on what are you performing for? What is it costing you? Can you be a bit more honest about your behavior and how you're showing up and your behavior, especially in overriding your body, overriding what, doing things in a way that you know is going to lead to trouble one way or another, even if it doesn't lead to burnout, it might lead to, as I was saying before, worse performance because we're just human and that's what human beings need and do. You know, you can regenerate within the set of circumstances that you find yourself in today. And it's not all navel gazing. It's definitely requires action. That's the backend of the book of what do you do next. Yeah. Will we see, I see that Dear England, the TV, the play is going to be making its way onto TV screens. It is. And you were a character in that play. Will you be, will you be on our TV screens this summer? Unfortunately for you guys, yes, I will. It's not me. It's Jodie Whittaker who's playing the Doctor for Grange in the TV adaptation. So I think the play got 422,000 people through England who went to the theatre to see it. It's just, I'm so proud of them for being willing to dramatise the emotional side of sport like that. And people loved it. It's not about me. It's about what they created and what that moment represented. And I think that's fantastic. But yeah, it will be a four-part series just before the World Cup on the BBC. Have you seen it yourself? Not yet. I'm going to have a preview. It's too cringey. Yeah, of course. It's so weird. It's so weird. But, but no, I haven't seen it. I've seen the play, but I haven't seen the TV adaptation yet. How exciting. And like you say, exciting and surreal in equal measure. Very, yeah. Very surreal. Yeah. It's very odd. Thank you, Pippa. Thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk. And I loved the fact that for me, this was, a lot of people might have read your previous book, Fearless, but this is really a sort of partner piece, really. An ongoing conversation. It is. The quality of writing is, is just enjoyable just to sit and reflect upon. You did a fabulous job there. I really appreciate that. Thanks. Thank you to Pippa. If you're interested, her new book is Life Reclaimed. And I think it comes out pretty much any day now. So whenever you're listening to this, you'll be able to order it and receive it pretty much instantly. I've been Bruce Ailey. As I mentioned right at the outset, best way to stay in touch with any of this stuff is via the newsletter and you'll see a link to that in the show notes. Thank you for your company. See you next time.