Episode 29: How to make a big impact without burnout

Bianca’s website

Big Impact Without Burnout

NABS Advice Line

NABS Managers’ Mindsets

Marketing Week: What’s causing marketing’s burnout crisis?

Marketing Week: How should leaders fight burnout in their teams?

NABS on burnout in Campaign (£)

Louise Scodie – NABS  00:00

Welcome to the NABS podcast. NABS is the support organisation for those working in advertising, marketing and media. I’m your host, Louise Scodie. Each week I’ll be chatting with someone from our industry to find out how they support themselves and those around them through challenging times, as well as the day to day. And it’s all to help you support your own mental wellness. I can’t wait to start chatting.

This week on the NABS podcast my guest is Bianca Best. Bianca is the global chief growth officer at Performix, part of Publicis. Bianca is also an entrepreneur, a speaker, a coach, an author and an expert on burnout. Bianca is founder and CEO of the Burnout Business and the Energyscape method.

She’s a certified coach, a keynote speaker, and a solo parenting mother of four, passionately eradicating the world’s burnout epidemic at scale. Bianca’s CV includes a decade running the Bespoke Gift company, a decade of running vast digital divisions in the world’s largest comms companies including WPP and Publicis, and also certifying in healing modalities, from hypnotherapy to executive coaching.

Bianca now speaks to individuals and companies across the world about ambition and burnout. Well, I felt exhausted just reading all that. That’s so impressive. How are you today? Bianca, welcome to the podcast.

Bianca Best  01:17

Thank you so much for having me, and I’m great. Really good. Thank you. Good.

Louise Scodie

I mean, look, you’ve done an awful lot, and you continue to do an awful lot. We’re going to talk today about how people can have that similar level of ambition and achievement, but without driving themselves crazy and experiencing burnout at the same time. Let’s dive in with a question that I ask everyone. Tell us about your own mental wellness journey and a challenge that you’ve had to face?

Bianca Best

Well, it’s so important a good question, a good place to start, because I sit here as a burnout authority, because I’ve had the experience of crashing and burning, and I think what I’ve learned across my own journey is we don’t learn at school or as children how to self-manage, and we know societally, we’re in this environment where everything’s expanding at a crazy pace.

So yes, life expands in terms of career responsibility, career growth. But so do our families, so do our responsibilities, like having a home and having pets and all these different dynamics of our lives, and we don’t know how to manage the variety and abundance that’s going to hit us as we grow up. And so for me, it was probably when I was in my mid to late 20s, when I was stepping into my dreams.

I’m ambitious, but the more life expanded, the more I kept crashing and hitting wall after wall after wall, and I was in a cycle of burnout. That would mean that I wouldn’t just get a common cold, I would get flu, I would get pneumonia. I would be floored and in bed for two weeks.

And this continued, this pattern of me chasing dreams, pursuing career goals, whilst having the children, whilst trying to be an amazing wife, mother, fitness person, nutritional expert, all the stuff that we try and embrace with part of our glossy, lovely lives, and I just kept hitting all off the wall, and most catastrophically, I ended up being hospitalized for total immune collapse.

And at that point, a doctor said to me, Look, if you don’t alleviate your stress, then you’re not going to be any good to anyone else. You’re having, like, total shutdown. All your different systems in your body are in such a high stress state you can’t continue any more like this.

And my reaction to that was severe resistance. Like, what do you mean? What do you mean? I’m not stressed. I’m living my best life. I’ve got my gorgeous kids, I’ve got my amazing business that I was running then, and, you know, I just felt that life was great, and someone telling me I was stressed, I thought I was living the dream, but, of course, I was stressed, but I was in a bit of denial. I was really resistant to being told you’re burning out.

And I think that’s also a prevalent trend, which is why I care so much about healing this awful epidemic of burnout that we’re in today, because I felt that there was a shame associated with admitting or I actually am a bit burnt out, I’m flipping exhausted because I had succumbed to this mythology that having it all was what I was doing, and therefore, if I wasn’t actually sustaining myself and able to deliver it all, then I was somehow inadequate and failing.

So I had to go on a real mental journey of acknowledging that actually there’s no shame in this. I’m just pushing myself in too many directions simultaneously, and no wonder I’m falling over. And so that was a gradual process, probably a decade or so where I started experimenting with, well, how can I continue to have all my ambitions continue to have the impact that I want, in all the different dimensions of my life, without falling over?

And that’s where I am now, as this burnout, authority, if you like, where I’m teaching through my coaching and. How I work with organisations, and the book that I’ve just written, is all around, how we can still have our biggest impact without burning out. And I feel that I’ve found a way, over that decade of experimenting, I learned how to achieve impact without burning out.

Louise Scodie – NABS  05:21

It’s really interesting hearing you talking about that, and hearing about shame as part of the experience of burnout, and maybe that the first step to trying to overcome it is to acknowledge the shame and to actually be okay with the fact you’re burnt out.

But there’s so many people are burnt out at the moment. At NABS, we keep getting people keep asking us for comment about burnout in the trade media, it’s a really, really big topic. Yeah, loads of people are suffering from it.

So you’ve had your very particular experience of burnout, where it was manifesting physically as well as mentally. Broadly, how would you describe burnout? And how do you think, in maybe one or two practical ways, that people can seek to prevent it?

Bianca Best  06:03

Well, burnout is holistic. Let’s get really clear that we are doing ourselves a disservice if we just try and bucket it into one particular realm, as in burnout, it’s just a physical disease, if you like, a physical malfunction. It’s not, and the way I address it, the way I define it, is, it’s physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.

So burnout is a total, utter depletion in those particular four realms, and it may not be simultaneously as extreme in each one. Similarly, it may be that one is particularly stressed over and above another, but until we address each of those elements of ourselves and our lives, holistically, we’re not going to be able to actually combat burnout.

So the absolute critical piece in burnout prevention is going within. And I see a lot of as well as shame. I see blame, shame and blame, and that’s a very common reaction to, ‘I think I’m failing, I think I’m losing control.’

And that loss of control is the number one precursor to sliding into burnout. You feel you’re losing control.

Louise Scodie

So is that like feeling overwhelmed? I can’t cope. I’ve got all of this stuff to do, and I literally can’t deal with it.

Bianca Best

That kind of feeling, yes, that total feeling that where the task list is no longer invigorating and motivating, and like, well, I can’t wait to get the teeth into that and do a bit of, you know, growing and having impact. But you look at it and you’re like, I’ve got to do battle with it. I’ve got to just get into crossing this stuff off my list.

This belief that somehow you’re going to overcome that task list and you’re going to tick it all off, and then you’re going to feel great because that task list is never, ever going to end or shrink and goodness, we know we’re going to be working long into our lives.

The solution is about going within and understanding, where am I right now in terms of my physical, my mental, my emotional and spiritual? Potentially combine those last two?

Addressing the physical. Yeah, that helps absolutely, you know, look after yourself. There’s a lot of common sense around how frequently you exercise, how well you eat, how you stop stressing your body with additional cortisol inducing stimulants, like too much coffee. You know, we know that so absolutely try and pay attention to that.

But the mental side is we where we’re expecting ourselves to continue to produce at pace, and continue to use our brains and have this high level of cognitive function consistently, and that’s where we’re not helping ourselves, because our brains need a little rest.

That kind of fog can assault you when you’re so overwhelmed by task after task after task. And if you’re not resting your brain, you simply cannot function. You can’t think, so, having that mental awareness of, what can I do to soothe my own brain, whether it’s the meditation, the mindfulness, the journaling, anything to just slow the thoughts down, that’s incredibly important.

And then the final piece is this sort of emotional, spiritual realm, and that’s where I think we have the biggest under represented array of advice out in the wellbeing prayer, everything focuses on the physical, the mental, and not enough on the emotional stress that a lot of us are dealing with.

And this is where I feel the biggest transformations can occur when we look at actually, where’s the emotional stress coming from? Is it the volume of work, or is it the sense of the work isn’t meaningful, or I’m not sure that I’m even contributing in the right direction.

So unpacking where the stress is coming from that’s creating that burnout is really important and significant, because quite often, once you isolate what that particular stressor is, that’s the biggest niggle, the biggest creation of tension in your life, and you address that, you start to settle your nervous system because you’re solving the most acute stress impact in your life.

Louise Scodie – NABS  10:10

So is that what you meant earlier by the process of going within, by practically taking some time, maybe finding someone to help you have that conversation, if you don’t feel like you can do it by yourself, and starting to think about, what am I really not reacting to you well, then once you’ve identified it, what can you do about it?

This is a great time to give a shout out to the NABS Advice Line and our therapy referral service. If you are feeling like you need to bounce some ideas around and do some of this investigative, emotional work, give our Advice Line a call for free. They’re fabulous. All of our support providers can have these guided, helpful conversations with you, and we also have a therapy referral service as well, if you need to go a bit deeper in this work as well.

So those are some good tips there, checking in with yourself and having those conversations and seeing what’s up and what you can fix. Another aspect of life that you are really focused on is ambition, which is a very interesting mix when you’re also talking about burnout, which I guess would account for the title of your book, being impacted without burnout, so you can have the ambition but  you don’t have to have burnout at the same time.

At NABS we’re really working a lot on management at the moment and how managers in our industry are feeling, which is largely unsupported and not trained enough to do what they need to do today, which is to give emotional support to their teams, and not just to do all of the time sheets and the appraisals on those traditional roles.

Now, usually to go up the career ladder, you do need to take on those management roles. So how can you be a junior manager who’s ambitious, but your obvious track is to go up the management side of things, which, at the moment is pretty stressful.

Yes, definitely avail yourself of NABS’ training in that area to help you. But before you’ve got to that point, you might be just so overwhelmed by everything you’ve got going on your own workload, managing up, managing down, helping the team’s emotional wellness, you can’t even begin to think about your career ambitions. You know you’d like to move upwards, but you can’t even begin to because you’re so crowded in your head, you’re so overwhelmed.

So let’s start with that, Bianca. To those junior people who want to come up the ranks, what would you say?

 

Bianca Best  10:30

First of all, lift up out of the minutiae of that to-do list, which is overwhelming. You know, we’ve all got responsibilities and obligations at home with the children, with all the school staff, potentially, you know, as well as the work staff, as well as the social stuff and the fitness staff, we put ourselves under so much pressure to deliver everything, but actually we need to be paying attention to what are the biggest niggles in our lives.

Those niggles are quite often clues to where change needs to be made. So when I’m coaching clients individually, I try and really lift up the covers of what that niggle’s about, because it might be a particular relationship with a boss or a colleague or a partner, perhaps, perhaps all the work needs to start there with that significant relationship that is creating emotional stress.

Because anything that becomes chronic, as in long-term, is doing us a disservice, and quite often, emotional disquiet is where we’re most significantly out of balance within ourselves, and that is creating this lethargy, this exhaustion, this foggy thinking, because we’re constantly in a stressed state that might even be at a subconscious level that’s adding to our overall energetic depletion.

I empathise, and I know I’m so sorry that we’re at this moment in time where we have a fear, systemic fear, now, of actually ascending the ranks. We do. We do generally. And I mean in our industry, 54% of the C-suite are thinking about a career pivot. That’s the C-suite. Yeah.

So at every level, there is this catastrophic impact.  These stats around how, how frightening that horizon, as we look out across the year, that horizon of burnout threat is. It’s significant. It goes back to what I was saying at the beginning, around those skills we don’t get taught in school, those skills around how to manage an expanding life.

It all has to start there, and part of the book and the work that I do is to reassure and emphasise that ambition is not a dirty word. It’s okay to be ambitious, that’s good, that’s healthy. Go for it and impact. And having big impact does not have to be synonymous with struggle, but it is all down to us to ensure that we architect our lives so that we’re not in the struggle.

And so your brilliant description, just then, around sort of the overwhelm of a junior manager looking to manage more and expand more, assumes that with increased responsibility, with that ascended level of the job title comes more and more work, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way.

It’s about designing that responsibility in alignment with core skills, core strengths, so that we are having our highest contribution in the areas that matter most. And this is the exercise that needs to be done, understanding that new role, that promotion, what is the core expectation around delivery in that particular role?

And there will be different dimensions. Every role has multiple different dimensions, but our interpretation of how we contribute our highest value in that particular role is how we glide into it, and we’re able to maintain this level of graceful productivity, which is what I describe it as.

When I talk about graceful productivity, I am teaching and encouraging that we get into this place where we leave that ridiculous trend of frenetic productivity far, far behind that we are graceful in how we deliver our highest contribution, but it is up to us individually to recognise what our skill set is that is going to contribute to that overarching role remit, and it’s for us to convey that to our manager, to our colleagues, to our team, and to make sure that we are then doing that highest contribution.

Because when we’re operating in our zone of excellence, as it’s known, and we’re delivering tasks that come very naturally to us. There is actual energy expansion, not depletion. We’re invigorated by it. It feels great.

If we are trying to squeeze ourselves into doing a higher proportion of tasks that are not in our zone of genius, we’re exhausted. It’s overwhelming. So if we start trying to do everything, then, of course, we’re going to start burning out.

So we need to understand, firstly, what is that overall role expectation. Then secondly, how does our skill set contribute to that most additively, most effectively? And then thirdly, how do we communicate that to our boss, to our colleagues around this is the magic I’m going to sprinkle into this role. This is how I’m going to focus. Because once we start doing that, and we plug the gaps by delegating elsewhere or making it very clear to our boss, that’s not necessarily my zone of having impact here positively, and once we communicate all of this, then we can feel and be empowered to deliver our work in that particular way.

And then we’ve got the space to learn and grow, but it comes down to communication and that self awareness. And then we can ask managers help me with how I manage staff, help me understand this. Because management is absolutely key, as we all know, the people first theories, and goodness you do it so well at NABS, understanding how we can manage and nurture people so that they can thrive is an absolutely core skill, and being able to communicate effectively is core to that as well.

Louise Scodie – NABS  17:52

So I can think of some organisations where that approach would work pretty seamlessly, and actually, you would probably be applauded for having initiative and taking the reins. And I can think of some other organisations where, if you went to your manager and said, look, well, I’m coming into this management role, and I don’t think that I can really do that, that aspect, even though that’s KPIs, yeah, but I think I can do that one, and your manager says, well, we’ve got this client, and you have to do that bit, otherwise you can’t do this job. So when you don’t have that autonomy, and when you’ve got client demands and an inflexible approach to work, then then how do you manage that?

Bianca Best  18:28

So that comes down to balance. And you’re right, good question. And certainly with today’s contraction of the economy and the amount we’re being expected to do with little resource, makes it more and more of a pressure cooker. It’s not about not doing it. It’s about shrinking it.

So it’s about emphasising that you can do more in other areas that are going to have greater impact quicker. So it’s about getting that percentage, because if you spend 80% of your working week doing tasks that are in the remit, but you know, they’re not your zone of excellence, you know it’s a struggle.

You know, you’ve got to learn how to do it, and it’s going to exhaust you, then you’re going to burn out. I mean, that’s absolutely guaranteed, but if it’s 10% of your time is you’ve got to do a task that’s a bit of a grind, and, you know, doesn’t really make you feel very sparkly. Then, of course, we’ve got to do that. We’ve all got to do that. I don’t want to do my tax return. I don’t want to clean up dog sick, you know, the stuff that we have to do, but it’s just getting the proportional balance right.

And if you are in a role where 80% of your time is doing tasks that don’t come naturally to you, that don’t invigorate and energise you, then you’re in the wrong role. But you’ve got to do that work to identify it. And then when there are moments where you’ve got to over-index on a particular project that might be exhausting or consuming, you’ve got to organise your life in such a way where there’s a focus on this particular area that’s going to need extra effort or extra attention, and it might be that you have to compromise certain area of your life momentarily in honour of delivering that particular role expectation, but not if it’s consistent demand, and that’s what it’s about. It’s understanding this sort of delicacy of how we balance our own selves and our own direction of energy and effort. And that really needs the inner work.

Louise Scodie – NABS  20:12

I would also point out NABS Managers Mindsets programme that we are rolling out, and people are really loving it at the moment. And we go into all of the aspects that you need, skills wise, to succeed as a manager, whether that’s leading mental wellness conversations or creating inclusive atmospheres your team or responding to pressure. We’ll pop the link for that program down in our show notes. So you said something really interesting about we’re not taught at school how you manage an expanding life, and there’s so much in that. So how can junior managers at the beginning of their career equip themselves for an expanding life, when arguably, a lot of Gen Zers are seeing maybe not as many reachable possibilities as perhaps people in our generation?

Bianca Best  21:01

Yeah, absolutely. And that sense of feeling trapped, it correlates to that sense of loss of control, and that is a terrible place to be, so I think. And it’s not as bleak as that. So the younger generation, yes, you’ve got certain differences to previous generations, absolutely. And it is, it is tough. It my heart weeps for this society that we are raising the new generation. It is so tough. It is so tough. It is it’s just devastating what technology has done to our children. It just oh, breaks my heart, this ability to still feel positive and have a sense of optimism of what lies out ahead of us has to come down to knowing, again, what our contribution to the world can be.

And this isn’t about having a lofty purpose, like I’m going to eradicate child hunger and you know, that’s what I’m going to do. It can be as tight and neat as just knowing I’m really good at number analysis, or I’m really good at inspiring people, or whatever it is, your special little way of knowing that you can make a difference is your magic. And so owning that and waking up every day, being connected to how can I use that magic? Let’s call it magic. How can I sprinkle my particular style of magic into my life, my realm, right now and then?

How do we apply that into the work domain? That’s really, really key. Get a job that invigorates and inspires you, because we’ve got to make sure that we’re managing our energy in such a way that we can cope with the very busy, different demands that are going to be pulling us in different directions. Managing energy through the work that we do is absolutely step one.

And yes, we’re potentially going to become parents, have children, yes, potentially have pets, yes, have homes, and we’re gonna have to learn DIY, all that stuff, and it’s all gonna hit us, and there’s gonna be loads. So we’ve got to manage our energy, and that’s why I say, think about the job that you do through the energy that it gives you, because energy management is what’s going to be key to how we thrive, rather than just survive in our lives.

So for younger managers, looking up at their future career trajectory and life trajectory, don’t be disheartened that it’s all impossible and it’s all overwhelming, because you can self-manage yourself to get into that place of having the energy to have the abundant impact that you so desire. Understanding your energy is critical.

So if I think about advice that I give my children, anyone I work with, and anyone in any of my teams at work, it’s really unpacking your own relationship with energy. Because the number one complaint I hear is no energy and no time. So that’s sort of tied into that. I haven’t got enough time to do what I want to do. I haven’t got the energy to do it. Start with the energy. Understand your own energy, and stop chasing it as something that’s going to come in a can of Coke or a coffee, and actually work with your natural energetic rhythms and observe and learn how you create energy.

Because let’s be clear, we are actually designed to create all the energy we need to have our brilliant, wonderful lives, but it’s up to us to recognise what’s depleting and draining our energy and what’s invigorating and expanding it. And this can be from the work that we do to the people we spend time with, to the environments that we are in for rest or rejuvenation, to the food that we eat, the exercise that we do learn about your own bio individuality, because owning and seizing that is where truly your magic can be unleashed.

But you’ve got to manage that, and it’s never one size fits all. So just because you can have a coffee and have a nice sleep, you know, potentially, that’s going to derail me and I won’t sleep until next week. So we’ve got to learn about our own energetic rhythms and optimise ourselves sp we’ve got the energy to do the stuff that we want to do, and that comes from focusing our attention on the stuff that matters most. To us individually.

So if I’m giving anyone a very practical tip, it’s just really look at where are you focusing your attention right now? Does that energise you or not? If it doesn’t, stop, pivot, do the stuff that energizes you.

And the other really important thing is understanding the equation between stress and rest and that permanent productivity is not sustainable. Soyou’ve probably talked about it on the show before, the stress productivity curve. Are you aware of that?

This is two psychologists back in the 70s called Yerkes and Dodson came up with this curve that depicts the correlation between stress and productivity. Now the curve starts. Imagine it as a bell. It’s a bell curve. And on the good side of the curve, as healthy stress starts to impact us, we start to increase in productivity. Because what happens is we start to get healthily stressed, like if we’re about to go on a roller coaster or a first date, or about to do a presentation, our body gets into that cortisol peaked state where we get a little bit sort of excited, a little burst of that creates work and productivity that’s invigorated, it’s motivated. We feel impassioned. We feel alive. You know that feeling when you’re really sort of quite electrified, and that’s really cool. We want to be in that state, because that’s actually what we’re designed to feel like, to feel alive. So it’s good to get up into that, that that lovely, healthy peak performance place at the top of the curve.

But what’s happening is that too often we’re staying at the top of that curve for too long, because there’s another thing we need to do, another thing we need to do, another thing, another thing, another thing. And then we start careering down the other side, where we’re now slowing down into burnout, because it’s too much for too long in too many different directions all at once. And so we get into that mental fog, and then physical overwhelm, our energy is gone.

And then we properly create disease in the body, which could eventually manifest as disease. That’s the slippery slope down to burnout. So for anyone starting their career and at any level, understanding where we sit on that stress productivity curve is really key to how we’re going to be able to embrace our full, rich lives.

It’s okay to be at the top, but then you have got to recognise when you’re going to recharge and how you’re going to rejuvenate and when to step off, because you can’t stay up there, it’s unsustainable. If you’re up there, you’re going to crash.

So we have to recognise that beautiful, delicate balance between stress, the good, healthy stress and rest, because then on the other side is growth. So remember that equation stress plus rest equals growth.

Louise Scodie – NABS  27:41

There’s a strong theme coming through about auditing, where you’re at auditing. What gives you energy auditing? What takes your energy auditing when you’re feeling over a tipping point and consciously giving yourselves time to break as well? So loads of actions for us there, you’re a single mum. Do you prefer single mum or solo parenting? What’s your preference?

Bianca Best  28:01

I’m engaged, actually. So he’s only here half the month, so I’m solo parenting.

Louise Scodie – NABS  28:07

Okay, solo parenting. So you’re a solo parent. Solo parent, would be no mean feat, but you also have your career, and you’ve got the books, you’ve got.. it’s not a side hustle. It’s more of a large hustle that’s a huge juggle. So how are you managing, practically, to manage that huge juggle, and then separately, as a working parent who’s currently in a big corporation, what have you seen that employers can really do to better support working parents?

Bianca Best  28:35

Well, yes, it’s definitely a big challenge, having so many children. It’s different challenges as they get older. So sometimes, if I’m coaching mums who are in the zone, they’ve got a three-year-old, you know, it’s a very different set of challenges and unpredictability as the children get older the teenagers, it’s a whole different set of emotional stress that’s, you know, as they’re expanding into their adulthoods.

So it’s making myself available for them emotionally, it’s less about the school run, you know, it’s more around the overall being there and wanting to show up as a mum.

And the way I run my life and this family is rather like I run my business divisions. And I’m not kidding when I say we have board meetings at this very table sitting here in that in our dining room, and we will frequently all sit down together, and I chair the meeting, and then we have a chat about the following upcoming week, and who wants to do what? Who wants to achieve, what, what matters most.

And we go round the table, I listen. I’m very conscious to understanding and making sure each one of the children feels that their particular worries or concerns or excitements are all shared and known, and the minute everybody feels heard and that we’re all connected, it’s then very easy for me to go, ok, so I’m going to need a bit of support, because this coming week, I’m going to have to be in London here, or I’m filming a podcast in here. And then you get that sort of unity of okay, and we’re all aligned, and we’re on this mission together.

So I would say a key to the success of running this family is communication all the time and respect for my children, like in and out. I don’t see them as just people to put the bins out and nag, I absolutely see their little individual souls or big they’re all bigger than me now, I see them for who they are. I listen to what matters, and we’ve got very good, respectful relationships throughout.

So the meeting that we had last week, my littlest is 15, and, you know, I said, What are you worried about at the moment? What’s going on in your world? And they’re doing GCSE mocks, and there’s all this stress. And he said, look, I’m just really worried that too many people have been giving the dog snacks and he’s got a rash, and I really feel that, you know, we just need to protect Rex the dog.

And you know, that’s not something that you would expect in a family meeting about, you know, wants and needs, but how wonderful that he feels heard, and we can all sit there and agree, yes, no more snacks for the dog. Let’s manage his rash. And you know, it’s a lovely way to just foster this, this respect for each other, so we keep the machine flowing through good communication, respect for each other’s worlds.

In the workplace, I see working parents, men and women. I see that support and the ability for these multi-dimensional lives, where we can work from home. You know, the pandemic obviously really, really helped us in that realm, and really didn’t help us in many other realms. So I see that there is consideration for the juggle of nursery drop offs and more and more groups within Publicis, there’s a working mothers group that’s being set up at the moment, so there’s connectivity around bonding through the challenges and the juggle, breastfeeding rooms. I mean, I’m seeing this, my experience at Dentsu, WPP, and now Publicis, I’m seeing that. So that’s great.

The reality is, it’s still an absolute struggle and juggle, and it’s more intense for women than it is for men entering the parenting realm, because we’re the ones with the boobs that might be doing the breastfeeding and expressing and it’s not easy.

So I think additional support and an awareness that there’s a mention emotional strain that comes with mothering, that’s something that needs to be taught to managers. I don’t think it’s just having a separate ERG that makes it you know, you can come together and chat about it. I think it needs to be part of manager training to actually be aware of what individuals are going through, whether they’re returning to work after having a child, or just in the juggle. Just more awareness, education all starts there.

Louise Scodie – NABS  32:42

Communication as well is really, really key, which is, again, comes back to learning how to do those inclusive conversations. Now coming to the end of the podcast, unbelievably, how does the advertising and marketing community lift you up?

Bianca Best  32:54

It is an incredible, incredible community of support and sisterhood and all sorts of different dimensions. I love the work that we do. I love the impact that we have out in the world. I love the dynamism of what we do. I love the fact that it’s always different. It tends to be impassioned. I will say, I feel we choose to be in this industry because we have that energy, actually, that embraces the dynamic, the rich, the new, the innovative. And I find that energising actually. So I love the community.

Louise Scodie – NABS  33:29

Lovely. And what’s the best lesson you’ve learned about how to support yourself? It’s going to be something to do with auditing your energy?

Bianca Best  33:37

I’d say the biggest, the biggest tip is when you’re in a mental swirl and you’re all up there in your head, is bring it down into the body. So it’s about getting out of that mental state and get down into the body. Because the minute you connect into your physicality, your pure physicality, you actually start to settle. You get out of those anxious swirly thoughts. So I self soothe that way by doing little techniques that bring me back into my body.

Louise Scodie – NABS  34:05

Even some deep breathing for a couple of minutes can help to do that right. Exactly.

Bianca Best  34:09

It’s the deep breathing, because that’s absolutely how we slow from the sort of crazy beta brain waves down into alpha. And the other little tip that I teach is just rub your thumb and forefingers together and really experience what that feels like physically. So as you’re sitting at your desk or on the train or in the toilet or wherever you are, just do that, and as you feel that sensation, it literally your whole body starts to settle. It’s like you come into a calmer vibrational state, and it’s lovely. And from that point, you can go out and have more input.

Louise Scodie – NABS  34:43

Marvelous. Thank you so much. I’m off to do a little bit of deep breathing myself before onto the next task. It’s been an absolute pleasure speaking with you, and just so interesting to hear how you can have loads of ambition and achieve loads of things, but also very carefully curate yourself as you go along, so you don’t get burnt out.

If you want to find out more about Bianca’s approach, her book is out. Big Impact Without Burnout. We will post a link to that in the show notes, and also post a link to Bianca’s website as well. In the meantime, Bianca, you’ve been absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Bianca Best  35:15

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been absolute pleasure. I just love the work that NABS is doing.

Louise Scodie – NABS  35:19

Thank you so much.