Diane Sieg

With record-high rates of burnout, turnover, and disengagement in healthcare, these challenging times require resiliency more than ever --and it starts with leadership. Learning to incorporate and model key resilience practices such as compassion, engagement, and self-leadership, the resilient leader becomes the key to a culture shift that results in less burnout, greater retention, and restoration of the joy, meaning, and purpose in work. This kind of re-engagement transforms people into better caregivers and better colleagues, which directly translates to improved patient quality surveys and an improved bottom line. The critical resilience skills taught can be immediately applied and taken back to staff to help create and sustain a resilient culture at the unit, department, and organizational level.

Chaos in healthcare today impacts all healthcare workers. While we can’t do anything about the current healthcare crisis, there are teachable skills that can keep you focused, productive, and resilient by being calmer in the face of chaos. Without resilience, people become overwhelmed, make more mistakes, take longer to do things, and become physically and emotionally exhausted -- all expensive in human and financial costs. Chaos to Calm teaches specific, practical skills such as mindfulness, compassion, and self-leadership to handle chaos so that even in the middle of the storm we can remain engaged and resilient.

The current crisis in healthcare exposes all of our vulnerabilities, requiring us to slow down, evaluate, and improve our systems professionally and personally. Powerful, effective leadership is needed today more than ever, and the most effective leaders know how to lead themselves first. By practicing self-leadership, they empower their colleagues, teams, and organizations which is critical during times of crisis. Self-leadership is a unique set of skills and behaviors that include trust, transparency, compassion, connection, and vulnerability. Regardless of your title or experience, role modeling self-leadership has ripple effects felt throughout the organization, building teamwork, engagement in vision and mission, and a reconnection to ourselves and our noble profession.

There is a “compassion crisis” in healthcare today with a great paradox. While healthcare is inherently compassionate, the very connection we need to make to be effective caregivers can cause stress and burnout, undermining our ability to be compassionate. The solution to this paradox lies in understanding the critical differences between compassion, empathy, and sympathy. Understanding those differences improves patient outcomes, engages the caregiver, and drives hospital revenues. The critical skill required to build resilience with compassion is the often-overlooked element of self-compassion. Self-compassion has been shown to protect caregivers from compassion fatigue and increase their satisfaction in their caregiving roles. Compassion and self-compassion are teachable skills that produce a remarkable difference in engagement, morale --the antidote to burnout.