053: Tina Paterson on burnout and sharing the mental load

Life Admin Life Hacks

In this episode, we interview Tina Paterson, remote working and productivity expert, about burnout and how to avoid the ultimate level of exhaustion.

About Tina Paterson

Tina Paterson has worked across nine industries and 12 countries over the past 20+ years. She has led large departments, governed billions of dollars of assets and her teams have delivered Transformation Programs and Projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

She has achieved all this while raising two kids with her husband James, running marathons, raising a million dollars for charity and taking 3-month sabbaticals every 5 years with her family.

Following her own story of burnout (where she ended up in the local Emergency Department due to being at work with pneumonia), she now partners with large organisations to help their leaders embed the strategies she has learned, lives and breathes.

What we talk about

During the interview, we chat about:

• what burnout is - a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress
• Tina’s story of burnout and how it slowly crept up on her
• that people often abandon their self-care right at the time they need it the most
• how Tina’s burnout was the impetus to do things differently
• that the mental load of parenting and household management contributed to her burnout
• that reducing the number of decisions she has to make is an important contributor to relieving the mental load
• how she relies on friends to make recommendations about what to buy to save herself the time to do the research
• that 'being busy' is not a badge of honour
• that doing a time audit of your 168 hours per week can help you consciously see what you are spending time on and how you can swap your hours to activities more in line with what is important to you
• that it’s common to get out of touch with what’s actually fun for you
• setting up your environment to make the things you enjoy easier to do
• how Tina shares the load with her husband and kids - by having a regular family meeting and agreeing who owns what and ensuring end to end accountability
• how watching Teenage Boss inspired Tina and her husband to put their kids in control of the family budget for a month to provide a real lesson in the value of money
• how she has a chart to help navigate what fruit and vegetables her kids enjoy to simplify family dinnertime.

RESOURCES

• Tina Paterson’s website
• Tina Paterson on LinkedIn
• Time to Breathe : Navigating Life and Work for Energy, Success and Happiness, Dr Bill Micthell
• 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, Laura Vanderkam
• Teenage Boss
• Money Brilliant App

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