Find peace in your safe place: How to avoid occupational burnout

#8.2024.4.25

(summary of Jean’s interview with Hamza Khan; for full transcript, link in comments)

Jean: Hamza Khan is an author, educator, and entrepreneur. His TED Talk received more than 2 million views. His book, Leadership Reinvented, offers a roadmap to productivity, resilience, and constant change.

What is it about what's going on today that you're looking at, that you are talking about?

Hamza: “We're seeing terms like woke culture, being co-opted, we're seeing an active war against diversity, equity and inclusion, legislation, and safe spaces, we're seeing the world get smaller for people who identify with different intersectionalities.

“I identify as a South Asian man, I identify as a Muslim man, I identify as somebody that is neurodivergent, who has struggled with mental illness, I identify as somebody with different communication styles. For us to acknowledge those intersectionalities, for us to feel comfortable in spaces, is becoming increasingly difficult.

“It's happening when I take a keynote stage, and I'm automatically discounted because of my experience. Another example is whenever I'm crossing the border. I am a dual citizen. I was born in the US, I lived for most of my life in Canada, and even now when I cross the border, I'm randomly selected because some other asshole named Hamza Khan ruined it for the rest of us. He ruined it for team Hamza Khan, and now my name is on a no-fly list.

“It is systemic oppression. And I feel like my world is getting smaller and spaces like this -- to say that out loud -- are sacred, because I have been in workplace settings very recently, where I was given a list of words not to say, and some of those words were diversity, equity, and inclusion. Words that define my life, my lived experiences, my ways of thinking and being, I essentially was told by another adult, not technology, what makes me, me.

“I did not say the words diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, I did not acknowledge intersectionality. I made zero reference to what makes me me. But what I did share was a picture of my mom, who is a visible Muslim wearing a hijab, what I did talk about was belonging. What I did talk about was thriving. What I did talk about was community, I said the exact same things I would have said, with precision, but I actually feel like I communicated them in a way that allowed for the audience to receive that message, where they were at.”

Jean: When I was in college, every now and then I'd find myself in the dorm room, lying on the bed with four of my good friends. And all of a sudden, I'm surrounded by White people. And one of my closest friends would look at me and say, "We've become White, haven't we?" And I said, "Yeah." She said, "Jean, we're your friends. It's okay." And I said, "Okay, give me a minute. You all just talk, give me a minute." And then all of a sudden, they'd become my friends again. I had learned the skill when people became White people, I had learned the skill to ride that wave. And then they would become people again.

Hamza: “There are times now where as a keynote speaker, I'll get on stage, and I'll get overwhelmed because I'll be staring at a sea of people that are White. And it is jarring for me when you consider the way I grew up.

“I grew up in New York in a pregentrified Astoria, Queens. I felt like I was surrounded with biodiversity of people during my formative years.

“But then university happens. And then my first job happens. And then my second job happens, and my third job happens. And I'm like, ‘Holy smokes! I'm the only person of color here. I'm the only Muslim here.’

“I consider myself fortunate that I found a very accessible keyhole issue with which to explore systemic oppression: occupational burnout.

“I burned out at a time where the nuanced and sophisticated way with which we speak about burnout in 2024 just wasn't true. Back then, if you typed burnout into Google, you'd probably get the search result for a video game. That's how little we were talking about it in the zeitgeist.

“People are literally dying at work.

“Dr. Christina Maslach said, ‘Workplaces can be very unhealthy environments, you can take a plant and put it in a pot, and not give it enough water, not give it enough sun, give it lousy soil, it doesn't matter how gorgeous the plant was to begin with. It simply isn't going to thrive.’

“What are the system level reasons why I burned out? Sure enough, a lack of fairness in the workplace, unsustainable workload, insufficient uncommunicated values, insufficient reward, lack of control, poor slash toxic community.

“What creates those conditions in the workplace? You keep on peeling back that onion, and you'll eventually arrive at the dark core of personality, which is human beings' hardwired capacity to accept, neglect, or provoke the disutility of others, in order to maximize their own utility.

“And that is fundamentally what's at the heart of broken systems of systemic oppression. It's people who are propping up the status quo. And the status quo, just so we're clear, isn't the avoidance of a decision. It's a continuous past decision.

“We human beings are hardwired to seek equilibrium, we actually don't want to change, we actually don't want to be uncomfortable. You know, you just think about your own life. Think about the things that you do to make yourself comfortable. Whenever you feel like you are happy, you are actually in a moment of status quo. And if you were to perpetuate that moment, ad infinitum, you would then affect the systems around you to keep you in that moment for as long as possible.

“Unfortunately, though, people find themselves in these situations. They're not malevolent, but they are accepting and neglecting the disutility of people who are not in that moment with them. And that is the problem with the status quo. That's why leadership needs to be reinvented. That's why we actually have to take a sledgehammer to these institutions that people are clearly losing trust in.”

Jean: I look at people who are looking at me with hate and I think they have not learned how to get rid of the stereotype. I have, they have not.

Hamza: “There are some people who live so far north where the only other time they see someone like me is in the news, usually portrayed through the lens of, you know, terror.

“They just see me as somebody that is remotely connected to ISIS, Al-Qaeda and the enemy of the day. But then when I actually show up in person, I subvert all of the news and information and preconceived notions they've been forming in my absence, because suddenly, I'm hanging out with them.

“Suddenly, I'm joking, we share the same references, we're playing games together, we're laughing, we're singing. We're aligning on things that go beyond, you know, food and occupation, recreation and dreams, we're talking about values, we're talking about shared visions for a country, and suddenly the walls disappear.

“Suddenly, they don't see me as a South Asian Muslim man, and I no longer see them as a White. The outward identities dissolve, and we start to actually connect, frankly, at a spiritual level, which is what I think is possible here.

“Are you familiar with the transcendental leadership model, the transcendent leadership model?

“We've moved from transactional, we're in the era of transformational, but where we ultimately need to go is transcendence.

“We actually have to break free from the status quo, we have to move out of ourselves, master leadership of self, others, organizations, and as a byproduct, systems.”

Jean: What I do is tell people to learn to respect their gut intuition, to believe in themselves, and how to distinguish between gut intuition and fear, and animosity, and all of the negative things. Because the transcendental impulse, and the negative and the fear and anger and all of that stuff, travel the same neural pathways.

How do I know if that's an impulse that's literally protecting me from harm? Or that's a stereotype? I'm reacting to a stereotype that I was raised in. How am I supposed to know that difference? The answer is, do you feel agitated or at peace?

Hamza: “You talked about the first brain where we process and the neurological pathways receive information. But there's two other brains, there's our heart and there's our gut, which are at least 100,000 years old, or 10,000, with no significant upgrades since then.

“We're processing information in our bodies before we actually become conscious of them. And so, so many of the reasons why people are making bad decisions, specifically why leaders are making bad decisions in the modern era, is because their head, heart, and their hands are not aligned.”

Jean: When intuition hits, and we know what's right, we say, ‘This is right. And I'm prepared to face anybody who says it's not.’ We almost have a feeling of peace, we just know it.

My motto is never argue with the universe. When the universe speaks to you, you just don't argue with it. Just don't argue with the universe if it's telling you something.

Your book is trying to teach people how to do this by giving them role models of how to effect change. So that you're not calling them a bunch of names, what you were saying the radical progressives that you were with before, they're not using a failing tactic.

Hamza: “I'm calling for a reinvention of leadership because we received a system shock during the early days of the pandemic, which is when I wrote this book. There I experienced a very visceral amygdala hijack the part of our brains that is a remnant from our ancestral evolution.

“The amygdala went online and it just took over my prefrontal cortex, the part of our brains that we require for high cognitive capacity tasks, creative thinking, future planning, communication, so on and so forth. It turned that part of my brain offline, it flushed blood to my extremities preparing me for a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response.

“In that moment, I felt an autopilot kick in, I felt like all of the actions, the learning, the preparation that I had done brought me to that present moment, and I was acting from my subconscious. And that was important for me, because once I experienced that and I was able to feel that fully, I started to see this play out during the early days of the pandemic.

“I started to see other leaders falter, I started to see other leaders fall back when I expected them to step up. And I realized that leaders actually stepping up during a time of a crisis is an optical illusion, because people are actually helpless during a time of environmental shift. When there's an outside context problem that's sudden and unexpected, the more difficult it is, the more likely it is to present itself as a crisis. In those moments, you don't actually step up, you sink back to your level of training values and overall preparation.

“What needs to change, and what I talk about in Leadership Reinvented, is there's four values in particular which I believe leaders must invest in during peacetimes, not necessarily peacetimes, with more stable times. Those are the values of servitude, which is really another way to say servant leadership, innovation, diversity with equity, inclusion and belonging (presupposed), and empathy.

“The final form of all of these values to know that you've succeeded as a leader is when you've operationalized and maximized servitude, then it results in belonging in the workplace. When you've operationalized and maximized innovation it results in sustainability in the organization.

“When you've operationalized and maximized servitude, it results in thriving. When you've operationalized and maximized diversity, it results in belonging. And when you've operationalized and maximized empathy, it results in a compassionate culture. And that's ultimately what we want.

“We want workplaces where people are thriving. We want workplaces that are holistically sustainable, we want workplaces in which everyone feels like they belong. And we want workplaces where the default response is compassion, not malevolence.”

Jean: One sentence about servitude, a complete sentence. A sentence about innovation, just more of a definition.

Hamza: “Servitude is about putting the needs of your people before your own needs. It's about wanting for other people what they want for themselves, and it's about centering the employee experience.

“Servitude, diversity, and empathy do not work in an organizational context in a highly VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment.

“What innovation does is it allows us to harness a thriving workforce. Innovation allows for the maximum generation of new ideas, new creative thoughts, and new imaginations. That's what innovation is. Innovation is not about the technology.

“I'm talking about the ability to stand in another person's shoes, to see with their eyes and to feel with their heart. That's what I mean by empathy. It's holistically embodying the other person's experience.

“I'm talking about the full diversity wheel. I'm talking about diversity of age, diversity of education, diversity of marital status, diversity of political ideology, the infinitesimal ways that we can, you know, slice up the human experience, the beautiful spectrum that is the human experience. I'm talking about diversity as holistically as possible.

“But diversity without inclusion is also meaningless because diversity is being asked to the dance, or invited to the dance, inclusion is being asked to dance, and equity is creating the optimal conditions in the dance floor environment and beyond to allow people to dance as fully and freely as they would like. When that happens, the natural byproduct is belonging.”

Jean: What do you want people to take away from this conversation?

Hamza: “I want them to really meditate on this idea of agitation and peace, that dichotomy and how it connects to belonging. If you want to know, if you feel like you're belonging, do a quick gut check and ask, do I feel agitated in this moment in this space with this person? If you do, there's something about the interaction, the person, the environment that you're in that doesn't allow you to feel like you belong.”

Hamza Khan is a best-selling author, award-winning entrepreneur, and world-renowned keynote speaker whose TEDx talk "Stop Managing, Start Leading" has been viewed over two million times. He challenges audiences and organizations to rehumanize their workplaces to achieve inclusive and sustainable growth. He is a visiting scholar, top-ranked university educator, and respected thought leader with actionable insights featured by the likes of Inc., VICE, and Business Insider. The world's leading organizations trust Khan to enhance modern leadership, inspire purposeful productivity, nurture lasting resilience, and navigate constant change. Khan has spoken on various global stages, from the World Youth Forum to TEDx, and works with clients such as Microsoft, PepsiCo, LinkedIn, Deloitte, Salesforce, TikTok, and hundreds of colleges and universities. Through his writing, speaking, teaching, and executive coaching, Khan empowers people to thrive in the future of work.

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