Ken Huey 0:00

Welcome to The Voice of Hope, where bold leaders and healers share how they're building hope, not just talking about it. I'm Dr. Ken Huey. Let's meet the change makers transforming lives from the therapy room to the boardroom. Today's guest is Dr. Jennifer Blinchett, host of the Therapist Burnout Podcast. She's a licensed psychologist, expert consultant in mental health and trauma. With more than two decades of experience, Jennifer helps therapists, counselors, and mental health providers navigate burnout, career transitions, and trauma-informed care. She combines clinical experience, neurodiversity insight, and entrepreneurial experience to empower helpers to sustain their careers while prioritizing their well-being. Dr. Jen, thanks for being here.

Jennifer Blanchette 0:46

I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Ken Huey 0:48

Absolutely. I'd like to start with understanding what gets people to this point. What's your why in kind of a Simon Cynic flavor?

Jennifer Blanchette 0:56

Yeah, I think my why has always kind of come back to helping professionals. So I've always been drawn to collaborating with professionals. So all of my roles that I think back in the Wayback Machine about what did I like to do? And I loved it when I collaborated with prof other professionals that were in my field. And I just found as I became a psychologist that I was drawn to peer supervision. I've done that from a volunteer basis before. And I completed a dissertation on compassion fatigue as well. And so I was interested in how a helper struggles and why, you know, we might need help ourselves. And so I think my why is just to really reduce suffering for those who are called to care for others. So that's my big why, probably.

Ken Huey 1:44

All right. Your experience in private practice and as a private practice owner, how did it shape your perspective on sustainable careers in the mental health profession?

Jennifer Blanchette 1:52

That's a nuanced and layered one for sure. So I host the Therapist Burnout Podcast. And part of what I talk about on there a lot of times is just full surrender. Uh, my pivot came from really realizing I couldn't push anymore. And so private practice, for those of you who don't know what that is, it's you're basically your own business. You're an entrepreneur, but as a therapist, you don't even think about yourself as a business owner. You think, okay, I have this little private practice, I'm doing therapy on the side, but it is a business. And I think for caring professionals, we don't register that this is a business. And so that entails a lot of things you have to do. So admin work, cleaning toilets sometimes, that's part of your job. And so there's a whole host of activities I didn't realize would be part of my working day that were my working day. And I think in the pandemic, we all know what happened in 2020. I didn't realize the cost it would take on my psyche, on my just ability to output the caring that I did and having that private practice that I'm running as well on the side.

Ken Huey 3:04

That's what you were doing. Yeah. What about that shaped your understanding of how to turn that into a real career?

Jennifer Blanchette 3:10

Yeah. So I think that's where I struggled. I think that's where a lot of people struggle with how do I make this produce the meaningful income that I need to? Because I think caring professionals and therapists especially struggle with the business end of things and struggle with really meeting their own financial and well-being needs. So there's money involved, right? You have to produce enough money. And I think the reckoning I sat with was, you know, myself, I think maybe I was, let's see, 2020. So I was like six or seven years into practice. And I realized my take-home salary was close to what I earned on my postdoctoral residency. And so sitting with math. So it's why my first recommendation is to do the math. Like, does the math add up? Because sometimes it doesn't add up. So that was huge. Just figuring out like, I can't, you know, continue to like take on this level of financial burden for myself. And so I had to figure that piece out.

Ken Huey 4:10

Yeah. You have expertise in trauma, neurodiversity, and burnout. That's an interesting intersection. Tell us a little bit about it.

Jennifer Blanchette 4:19

Yeah. So I think the neurodiversity training, I first started working with folks after brain injury. And so that really was an illuminating experience to work with people post-brain injury and to see when people like no longer had their basic brain functions available to them, like they maybe have adequate attention, memory functioning, things like that. And after leaving my private practice, I started working in schools. So I still do that. I still worked as a contract school psychologist. And so I still work with folks who are on the spectrum, who might have ADHD or other disabilities, learning disabilities. And when I went through my own burnout and talking with other therapists, I found this layer of cognitive burnout, which I talk about often on my podcast, that we experience now in mental mental in modern life. So we're all experiencing kind of this low-level, just kind of like digital hum. There's so many inputs that we have. We're scrolling on our phones. We're getting text messages. I'm a parent. So I'm like coordinating my kids' lives as a parent. And I think in the past 10 years, there's been a lot of research out there on just the amount of input that we have, just from a sensory perspective, that has changed dramatically. And I started to just see these themes and burnout for people of dealing with modern life. And how I was like, this reminds me of people when I work with brain injury survivors that are just struggling to just do life because there is just too much coming at people. And I felt that as well, like acutely in the pandemic. But I think my expertise with brain injury taught me like, okay, I know some tools that can help, that can help reduce some of that input. And I feel like in burnout, everything feels like too much. So I think the first layer I start with people when I work with them is thinking about like, what can we start to prune? What can we start to let go of? Like I did with my survivors, including those sensory inputs. So the biggest one is your phone. And so a lot of us don't realize just how taxing cognitively scrolling is, constantly looking at screens can be. I think we felt that in the pandemic with constantly being on a screen, having Zoom meetings constantly, and just how tired we were when we weren't doing anything, right? So I think it's layered, but I think that's kind of what I can share from my expertise in those areas.

Ken Huey 6:42

Yeah. It's interesting. I I just recently just took my charging cord and moved it to a different room to never have my phone next to me while I'm sleeping, fundamentally changed my sleep cycle. I mean, I got I gained an hour of sleep and more relational time. I'm cuddling with my wife, and it just changed things. I'm like, what how dumb am I to have waited this long?

Jennifer Blanchette 7:02

You're not. You're not. I think it's what a lot of people struggle with. I think Cal Newport and his work, you know, talk about like the phone four-year method with putting your phone, actually leaving it plugged in most of your day, because we are so prone to just go back into it. So the more we can try to leave it, have time away from our phone, that's one layer is the phone. There's also like multiple other layers that we deal with just in modern life now: emails, just scheduling, those kinds of things that we interface with that we didn't have to before. So remember starting out in my early years of work doing paper written notes in one of my first jobs. It was like, okay, I wrote my note because I was a residential counselor for teen boys, like back circuit aid like 01, and I'm writing handwritten notes. And that my workflow now is so very different. I'm interfacing with so many different systems to complete my work today that there is a layer of fatigue, I think, that we get in just interacting with these systems that we have to interact with in modern life.

Ken Huey 8:04

Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about clinical psychology. That's quite a training ground. How did your background in clinical psychology influence how you coach leadership in organizations, schools?

Jennifer Blanchette 8:18

I think my training informs how I can hear people and reading a room. So being able to have skills where I know how to really listen to someone and really like understand what is really going on and understanding the layers from a mental health perspective, I think one of the biggest things that I found shocking in my own field is there is not robust data on mental health in therapists, which you're you would think, like, why is that? That's kind of crazy that we don't have data on that. But like physicians, we have robust data on physicians' anxiety, depression, rates of suicide. And so just thinking of my profession, I know that mental health is a big component that is overlooked because there's a lot of shame. So a lot of people who work as a therapist, work as a psychologist will not seek out support because they're like, well, if I'm impaired, then are someone going to think I can't do my job? Or they get scared. I got scared of feeling like I couldn't do my job. And so we don't want to be a liability to our clients or our patients. So I think it's really understanding that layer of mental health that is unique to my specific skill set can be really helpful in knowing, like, okay, you might need specific help targeted to trauma or targeted to your mental health. Or maybe you need some business support. You need to just figure out some strategies over here, which I also have, you know, strong business acumen as well, to know this is kind of the direction you need to go. But I think understanding that, especially for helping providers for doctors, nurses, there's a mental health component that I think that we don't address that is important to just tease out and know, like, okay, even if I'm not, even I'm your coach, you need to make sure that you're getting that need met somewhere because it's going to impact everything. It's going to impact the way you lead, the way you show up, and perhaps your ability to stay in that role.

Ken Huey 10:10

Yeah. You're running a lot. You've got a podcast. You're doing consulting, you're doing clinical work, your mom, your wife.

Jennifer Blanchette 10:16

Yeah.

Ken Huey 10:16

How do you balance those and protect your own mental health?

Jennifer Blanchette 10:20

It's a journey. One I will continue to work on, probably I think till I stop working. I don't know, maybe till I die. Who knows? It's interesting when talking about burnout, there's this word of like work-life balance. Like we just need to figure out like it's some kind of destination we'll reach, which is not true. It's a fallacy that we will reach a work-life balance. I like to think in terms of counterbalance. So, how can I counterbalance, let's say, in different seasons of my life? Like when I became a mother and I had a little baby, that was an intense focus on my home life and me being a new mother and needing to nurse my baby and stay with my baby. So I worked very little. I worked probably like, I think when I, my second son, I probably worked like four hours out of the home for the first like six months. And then I like toggled that up. And so there's times in our life where work has an intense focus. Like when I wrote my dissertation, it was all work. I was working all the time. I didn't have children at home. So I just think different seasons are going to bring different types of demands on our lives. And this season, now that I'm in with having like school-age children, it just feels like I'm holding a lot because, you know, I got kids, they're kind of independent, kind of not. And my job, I'm kind of mid-career. So some parts can kind of sail, and some parts need a little bit more focus or push-in. And some things I need to let go of. So I think it's I like to use a metaphor of like a garden. And there's things we are always kind of pruning, taping out. There's things we want to plant, but the work is never completed because otherwise, you know what happens when you don't tend to a garden bed one spring or fall. It looks bad. It looks real bad. So I think it's more the iterative process of continuing to prune, to plant, to think about what you need in each season.

Ken Huey 12:04

Yeah. I find work-life balance to be just a failed strategy. I really dislike even hearing the term because it sets you up to be always looking at the deficit. I don't think there's enough balance. So the balance always has to be, I need more of real life, my family, or whatever the fun. But it's more about work-life integration. How do I do those two together? I think that's what I hear you're saying. What would you add to that?

Jennifer Blanchette 12:28

Yeah, I think work-life integration, I would also say your capacity is finite. So your emotional resources that you give to your work, especially if I'm talking in terms of caregiving professions, therapists, especially. So if I'm outputting like a seven-hour therapy day and my kids roll in and they're a hot mess, I'm going to have reduced capacity to be able to hold space emotionally for them and be able to be a patient parent, be a loving parent, a parent who can be present. That's going to be impacted by how much I output at work. And so I acutely fell that as a therapist who was working full-time, I didn't have that much emotionally to give to my kids. And sitting with that had me reckon with that's not the life I want. That's not the person I want to be. And that's okay.

Ken Huey 13:16

Yeah. So here you are, you know, you've got the advantage of some years' experience. If you can go back to your younger self, I don't know, pick an age, 20, 25, you're finishing a degree. What would you say? What would you give as just clear, here's the advice I want you to get for the next decade?

Jennifer Blanchette 13:30

Yeah. Yeah, it's so funny. It's like I I had times, I think, in my acute burnout where I was like, I shouldn't have gone into psychology. I should have done business and just made money and, you know, just done something completely else. But I think my niece actually is going into counseling. So I'm kind of thinking through like the advice I gave her. And it's part of me, you know, worries about like what part of myself is so different from being a therapist and parts I'm still healing from. And so while I don't want that for her, I understand that I think for people like us, like helpers and people that are drawn to this work, I don't know if you can stop us. So I would just really think about growing in your ability to self-advocate for yourself, to know what you need and to really speak up when you can't do something, because it might mean you can no longer work in the thing that you thought you'd trained to do for the rest of your life. Or perhaps you pivot, that's okay too. But I think I would tell myself, like, it's okay to pivot, it's okay to change. You need to learn how to speak up and learn to listen to your body more because it's your compass for what you can do and what you can't do.

Ken Huey 14:41

Yeah. So we're coming to the end here. If if you were to share a story of hope, so it's the voice of hope, that's the name of the podcast. It's a time of pessimism, I think, greater than I can really remember in my life. So do you have a story about anything that you've seen that makes you think, you know, this this is a hopeful moment, and here's why.

Jennifer Blanchette 15:00

Yeah. You know, I think I I have struggled with that, I think, in my own burnout, to find places of hope. And I think I see glimmers of that in my kids. I mean, when I think of hope, I think of like the next generation, honestly, and what I tell them. And so I think really I think being present with them in the everyday moments is what gives me the most hope. And that what I'm doing, just even if it seems small, like my work every day, I know that I'm providing a legacy for them. I know I'm providing a future for them. And I can't think of like a specific instance of that. But I think more often than not, I am more available emotionally to them. And I'm proud of that. I'm proud that, you know, I've made these changes, even though they were extremely hard to leave the career I trained to do and close a practice. I think to model for them that it's okay to change your mind, it's okay to pivot, and it's okay to do something else. So I think just giving them permission for change, which we're hearing more and often now, that Gen Z will pivot way more often than X or millennials. I don't know what generation you are, but I would gander maybe X or millennial, that they have to pivot more. And so just giving them permission for that. So I think that's what I would say.

Ken Huey 16:16

All right. People want to get a hold of you, Jen. They want to know, man, she's fascinating. I want to know more about her stuff. How do how do they find you?

Jennifer Blanchette 16:23

Yeah, I think the best place is my podcast, so the Therapist Burnout Podcast. If you're a therapist, I'm also at drjenblanchette.com online if you want to find me. Most of my stuff is tailored to therapists, but I have worked with folks who struggle with a brain injury, and I still provide some consultation in that area as well and to schools.

Ken Huey 16:43

Fantastic. Dr. Jen Blanchett, really wonderful to think through a little bit about burnout, neurodiversity, trauma. I appreciate you spending some time with us.

Jennifer Blanchette 16:51

Great. I was so grateful to be here.

Ken Huey 16:53

Thanks for joining us on The Voice of Hope. If you were inspired, share the light. And remember, hope's not just a feeling, it's a force. We'll see you next time.