Forging Resilience
Join us as we explore experiences and stories to help gain fresh insights into the art of resilience and the true meaning of success.
Whether you're seeking to overcome personal challenges, enhance your leadership skills, or simply navigate life's twists and turns, "Forging Resilience" offers a unique and inspiring perspective for you to apply in your own life.
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Forging Resilience
44 Sharon Pickering: "Humans are humans first, before we do anything we need to breath".
Join us on Forging Resilience as we uncover the incredible journey of Dr. Sharon Pickering, a trailblazer in the world of aviation and human factors.
Sharon's insights into working at NASA Ames and Boeing offer a fascinating look into the evolution of human factors science. As she navigated male-dominated environments, Sharon learned the importance of leveraging personal connections and emotional intelligence to build credibility and foster meaningful conversations.
Her journey is a testament to the power of mentorship and curiosity, emphasizing a holistic approach that integrates both psychological and emotional elements to enhance safety and performance in high-stakes industries.
Discover how Sharon overcame burnout by setting boundaries and prioritizing self-care, a vital lesson for anyone striving for sustainable productivity.
With a focus on continuous learning and shared communication, this episode offers a roadmap for turning obstacles into stepping stones, underscoring the importance of self-compassion and adaptability in achieving lasting success.
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Welcome to Forging Resilience, exploring for a different perspective on strength and leadership. Join me as we discuss experiences and stories with guests to help gain fresh insights around challenge, success and leadership. So today, on Forging Resilience, I'm joined by Dr Sharon Pickering, a woman who's very special in my life, who's very supportive of me and my journey. We've had a lot of conversations and I'm tempted to give you a really big, long introduction, but as somebody who's got more degrees than I've had hot dinners, I thought I'd hand that over to you, sharon. But welcome, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for having me on the show. It's been a long time coming. I know we've tried to arrange this a number of times and finally the universe has aligned us.
Speaker 1:Sometimes these things happen, but it's all good. It's all good. Today it was Menavie.
Speaker 2:We've had many great conversations in the meantime, so yeah, good morning and thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:No worries, it's my absolute pleasure. Yeah, sharon, you've got a very interesting and varied background, so give us a quick snapshot of some of the things that you've experienced in your career, some of the relevant points, and we'll take it from there.
Speaker 2:Okay, great. So I'm from Burton-on-Trent in the UK. So I'm from Burton-on-Trent in the UK and my experience growing up was really very average in terms of education. It was not really much career direction, but the one shining light I did have in my career was my father as a self-employed car salesman actually, but he'd dealt with people every day and he'd tell me these incredible stories about all of the variations in personalities from customers lots of really funny conversations when I was growing up about that.
Speaker 2:And then on a serious pathway was my uncle who was a paratrooper, and he joined up when he was just 16 years old and he was sent to the Falklands and he was the youngest soldier in the Falklands as well. So I've got goosebumps, just as I said that, because this is a very um, it's a very emotional connection that I have with him. We we don't speak very often, but we have this connection of mutual respect and I remember I was a very young girl when he went off to the Falklands and I like to say that because I don't sound too old and I remember the day he came back. Actually, uh, everybody so excited, but we were the lucky family.
Speaker 2:He did come back, but he came back with the heavy weight of all the stories of his friends that didn't make it now he had to carry those. So so, from a very early age, my dad and my uncle were very much the role models in what I thought I wanted to be. So instead of going down the what should I say? Traditional path of a girl and I went down the vehicle design and engineering, woodwork, banger, racing, go-kart, building, you name it. I had oil all over, so it then got me into thinking that I wanted to join the army, and wanting to join the army as a driver, because I absolutely love driving. My dad taught me how to drive when I was little not on the road, obviously.
Speaker 1:Obviously.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we had a lot of fun with that. You know, I was changing tires before I was, you know, braiding my own hair and things like that. So for me it was a logical one need desire to be a driver in the army. Because I looked at my uncle and I looked at my dad and those two worlds merged. And I still have a letter that my uncle sent to me when he was on tour in Belfast one year and by this point I was around 12 years old and I'd written him a letter and I told him I want to be like you, but I want to be a driver in the army. And he wrote back this absolutely semi-stern but loving letter to say no, bleeping way.
Speaker 1:You can swear here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can, ok. So I still have that letter and I find it frequently and just sit down and read it and take pictures of him and send that to him and remind him how special he is in my journey. Because he said no, you, actually you could go for the air force, you could be a pilot. So then I joined the air training corps at 13 years old and, to be honest with you everybody, majority of the kids my age in Burton and Trent were joining youth clubs and they were down a path of, you know, drink, alcohol, sex and I knew definitely that wasn't where I wanted to be. So I joined the air training call with a friend of mine and absolutely loved it, like it was a complete obsession, to the point where I don't know if this was a good thing or not. But I I missed family holidays to really wonderful locations because I was just enamored by everything that that experience could give me. So I was in the shooting range, I was hiking and abseiling crazy places, camping every weekend, and then they put me on a gliding course, a power gliding course at RAF Oxford at 15 years old and really, to be honest with you, I was never very good at school didn't get very good grades, didn't really understand maths and all the things that they were attempting to teach us in the traditional system, but flying just seemed to come naturally to me, so I got stuck with that then. So then that became my world, literally flying every weekend. Big camps, you know, summer camps three times a summer. You'll probably notice a theme in my stories that when I get stuck on something I become quite obsessed with it because I really really find so much satisfaction out of these experiences. The people were great, the energy was great.
Speaker 2:The learning side of it was unique because it was practical. So for me it made sense because I was a very practical learner as a child and I didn't get the book smart. I didn't really understand the things that people were teaching us on the board. You know, even simple things like a plus b equals c. I was like dumbfounded and but the practicality was really the way I absorbed learning. And back then I think there was all these differences in learning style that maybe we didn't appreciate in children. So I did that for years. So I had my Howard Glided license before I had my driver's license and then I was an instructor at 16 years old and it was amazing. So then I was like, okay, this is obvious, then I'm going to be, I'm going to be a fighter pilot in the air force. There's, there's no other career out there. And and again, we never had career guidance at school, aside from the odd conversation where it'd be like, oh, you can be an accountant. I didn't want to fly a desk, I wanted to fly a machine, and so then I started a psychology course at college.
Speaker 2:So by this point I didn't get very good grades in GCSEs, but somehow there was a cross communication at my school that I was going to be allowed in the sixth form to do A-levels. So I know, with my mum we bought a uniform. I showed up to school first day of sixth form. I'm sitting in the auditorium and they're calling out everybody's names and assigning them to different classes, and there was about three of us that were left behind. We weren't assigned. And there was about three of us that were left behind, we weren't assigned. And somehow there was a miscommunication where they said you're not welcome here. They actually used those words. I won't mention them all. And you're not, you're not welcome here, your grades aren't good enough, you're going to have to go to the community and you're going to have to go to Burton College.
Speaker 2:So for me in that moment in time, that was a sign of oh shit, I've failed. I've completely failed. I've let everybody down. Everybody had high hopes of me being a fighter pilot and my parents were just wonderful. But they had me when they were really young, 16 and 17. And I just wanted to make everybody proud. But in that moment I'm standing in a brand new school uniform that is absolutely useless at this point. So I walked the 10 minute, very long, painful walk back home. My mum opened the door. I burst into tears and my mum is just super. She just went into. Right now we've got to fix this. So we got changed, we had a cup of tea. We went down to the Burton College and they were awesome. They welcomed me with open arms. They said don't worry, this is sometimes a glitch in the, in the system. You're more than welcome here. We'll get you through your A-levels.
Speaker 2:So I signed up for psychology A-level and a geography A-level, which actually neither of those seemed to match and complementary, but actually in time there was quite a connection with why I enjoyed both of those subjects. I love to travel and I love people. So the psychology one really got me. And still, every weekend I was flying, I was training other cadets how to fly and I was having the time of my life. And then one day somebody handed me in a psychology module on human error. They handed me an air accident investigation report and it blew my mind and again more goosebumps coming my mind and again more goosebumps come in um.
Speaker 2:For me, this was the pivotal moment in my mindset into what I wanted to do in the world.
Speaker 2:I wanted to figure out how I can save people's lives through human factors, which at the time was kind of a loose scientific topic.
Speaker 2:It was more branded under psychology.
Speaker 2:But how could I work to save people's lives so that they could go home to their families?
Speaker 2:So it kind of comes full circle back to the moment where I remember my uncle walking through the door from the Falklands War and everybody just being emotional beyond anything I'd ever experienced as a young child and it was a mixture of frantic, happy, sad, worry, anxiety, all of the screaming, laughing, shouting, and my family is very emotive anyway, so maybe that's an oddball day, but yeah, I just remember it so vividly and I wanted to be part of a world that could contribute to safety in a way that I may never understand if I've had a direct impact, but if I could contribute to that world, then that was my. That was what I was here for. So I changed from wants to be a fighter pilot to wanting to be a human factors scientist and at the time, to be quite honest, nobody had a be a human factors scientist and at the time, to be quite honest, nobody had a clue what I was talking about, including the air force, which is a bit ironic given the the lead in power that they have on human factors these days.
Speaker 1:Can I just ask you, sharon, what was it about that, that report that impacted you so much, that air accident investigation?
Speaker 2:the, I think the scale of it um, it was. It was actually the worst aircraft disaster that's happened to date, and it was the same year that I was born, 1976. Two aircraft collided on the runway. Actually, one was coming to land and one was taxiing, and essentially hundreds of people died in that moment and I couldn't quite comprehend and I hadn't experienced loss at this time. I was very fortunate my parents were young, my grandparents were young, everybody was healthy in the family at that age, so I hadn't actually experienced loss.
Speaker 2:But the way the report was written, there was two things that massively stuck out to me Human error as a term and trying to understand the complexity behind two very simple words simple words and secondly, the mass impact that that had in terms of the hundreds of people that lost their lives and the snowball effect that has in the world to how many families, friends, colleagues, people you pass in the street, how that would impact. And then also, I think, from a societal perspective, the fear then that comes associated with aviation. For me, having been in aviation for 30 years, it's the safest industry in the world as far as I'm concerned. But when an accident happens, there's so much on the spotlight and we'll talk a little bit more about my two worlds in terms of aviation and health care. You know, every day in health care, lives are lost and they're starting to be reported publicly more, but but they were always behind the, the doors in aviation.
Speaker 2:When an accident happens and lives are lost, it's splattered all over the world and I thought, oh yeah, that's massive, that's absolutely massive and I don't know how. I don't know how anybody on the in the planet can fix it. But if I can be part of a team that can contribute to that, then that's where I want to be. There's a lot in there, hey I'd say yeah, so, yeah.
Speaker 2:So where did we get to? Um? So our exit investigation report nobody understood human facts at the time couldn't join the air force unless I was going to be a clinical psychologist. Um, and clinical psychology was interesting to me because you're still helping people. But for me it was more a difference between helping people on an individual level and helping people on mass scale. So then I went down the civilian route.
Speaker 2:So I joined the first masters at Cranfield University in human factors and safety settings and aeronautics, and it was phenomenal. And oh and oh, my goodness, did I struggle? I struggled because you know it was. It was very heavy on the engineering and and like I say just going back to school, I failed my GCSE maths five times before I eventually got a grade C. So so we can talk about resilience related to that um, which kind of set me on a path of well, if you put your mind to it and you're dedicated and you show up and you give it all your commitment, then you can achieve what you have to. But I hadn't realized at the time and neither did anybody educate me or talk to me about this that that could lead to severe burnout. So again, that's another part of my story a little later.
Speaker 2:But so we managed to convince the Cranfield to run this course. There was only five of us but there was some extremely intelligent people with me. It was backed by Bowen and again the expectations were very high that we were going to walk out there with the highest level of master's degrees. And I probably dragged myself through it and thankfully had a very supportive supervisor, dr Tony Head, who recognised that I had more than just the academics. He recognised the passion, he recognised the dedication and he recognized that I had an ability to connect with people and so it was much more than just ticking the boxes of the education. But I did, I passed and it was great.
Speaker 2:And then I was about to get sponsored by the Air Force to do a PhD with Cranfield, but that sadly fell through because of a budget shift in terms of research. That sadly fell through because of a budget shift in terms of research. So another phase of devastation. I just busted my ass to get this degree, thinking I was going to walk straight into a PhD because, to be fair, all I knew at that time was academia. I hadn't had any. I'd had like work experience in terms of jobs all the way through my academics. But I I hadn't been part of a corporation so I didn't really know what human factors was in a corporation. Neither were there really that many opportunities unless you joined an airline or Boeing or Airbus. At the time that was kind of all I knew. And so another point of devastation, lots of tears, lots of feelings of failure.
Speaker 2:And Tony, my supervisor, called me, said I'm on the way to the Royal Aeronautical Society. There's going to be a talk by a woman from NASA. Ames, get changed, come with me. Let's just go and talk on the way, get your mind out of this game that you're in, and we'll see, we'll make a plan. So we went down there and I met this lovely lady, barbara Burian, who was giving a talk on on human error and what that meant for aviation and talk about enamored by every word, like literally hanging on every word. Again, human error was a running theme in that and I didn't know at the time really how much power that term had in the industry. So um got talking to her after the, after her presentation, and we explained the situation to her, just because we were chatting over team biscuits, and she said well, I think we can, we can probably sponsor you in America.
Speaker 2:So at this point I'm 22 years old, thinking what the hell like? I've never been out of England apart from holidays. And so we started that conversation and sure enough they they would. They found a way, they took me out, they sent me out to California and in that they asked me to meet several people who were, in my mind, just super intelligent. So so this is kind of like a fear of mine from the early days. Everybody is way more intelligent than me. What the hell am I doing here? You know, complete classic imposter syndrome. And so I was talking to all these lovely people, but super intelligent people, and they asked me to present my master's thesis to a room full of experts in the area. So I just written a thesis on no, no panic anxiety, but I did it. I just did everything that was put in front of me and I you know I won't lie it was hard, it was difficult from an emotional perspective, but I had to keep it together and for me the way I related to people was through an authentic personality connection. I was just trying to be you the other day, didn't we running out one of our calls? He did say to me the smiles are all great, but you need to, you need to show some more of the intelligent conversation.
Speaker 2:So again, another point of failure mode kicking in, feeling very oh my god, I shouldn't be here. What am I doing here? But I want to be here. I don't even really know why, because I don't necessarily fit in, but I knew I had to be somewhere like that to be able to make a difference.
Speaker 2:And I had to do it early in my career because if I'd have gotten stuck in another path and I say that without really understanding what that means, being stuck and I guess it means not being able to make as big an impact, because sometimes having the name to back up your early career, like the name of an organization, the title of your role, can be the make or break of the rest of how you're perceived in the world. So yeah, um went down that path, ended up having to do a second master's. So you know you opened with I have more degrees than you have at dinners and that was never my intention. The intention was never even really to do one and I skipped one actually that was a psychology degree before I did the masters I told you uh, yeah so, sharon, just to pause you there, though, because I it's really interesting and what do you think they saw in you?
Speaker 1:if you reflect back now? And and yeah, we talked about the smile and the intellect, and there's lots of ways to interpretate that um, but yeah, what do you think they they saw in you? Because those sorts of opportunities don't just get given to everyone, and the way that you, yeah, received that probably meant a certain set of actions and thoughts, but at the same time, it's probably delivered with a different intention. So, yeah, again, what do you think they saw in you to be able to give you that opportunity?
Speaker 2:I had a really incredible man that was fortunate enough to enter my life at that point as my then boss. He was the manager of the department that they were posing. I eventually joined after the second master's and he was very connected to people and he's a human factor scientist, the smartest man I knew on the planet at the time. You know multiple PhDs, so if you can imagine me trying to have a conversation or thinking about the potential of that conversation, but he was the most genuine, caring, philosophical man that I'd had the pleasure to give me time and attention in that he heard me so he went beyond looking at my cv and looking at my, I guess, professional criteria how I would fit the mold in that sense and he really looked at me as a person and we would take lengthy walks around the perimeter of nasa, ames and he and what he really liked and he told me this was very open. He said I like your curiosity. You never stop asking questions and some of the best human factors professionals out there are the ones that never stop asking questions, because the moment you think you know everything about human performance, human behavior and extreme environments, simple environments, he said that's when you've lost the passion for your profession. So he said I see in you the drive to learn about people in a way that the books won't give you. And so then he works with me. He put me into the program at the University of Oregon with a really good friend and colleague of his, who was also very nurturing in the sense of I get that you don't. You don't have the straight A's in maths and science, but you've done well, you know you, at this point you've, you've got an undergraduate, you've got a master's and you pass them and that's good enough for us. We don't need to see straight A's because we see that you have much more to offer.
Speaker 2:And I just wanted to. I wanted to absorb the topic beyond belief. It was not just about the books, it was the questions, talking to people, talking to peers and supervisors, people in general, and just absorbing everything I possibly could about how people think, how they behave, when you imagine that something can happen. But sometimes they'll do the opposite and you have no. There's no rationale as to why they just did that.
Speaker 2:But that was fascinating for me. So I knew human factors was going to be the thing that kept me getting up in the morning, but also the thing that I would feel alive by asking the questions and living the curiosity path and then using that knowledge in every moment to bring it back into the world of human factors, science and figuring out how can we make this better, how do we learn from what's going right, how do we learn from what's going wrong and how do we feed that back in. So, yeah, that sent me on quite an interesting crazy path around the world then, and yeah, that's where the year embarked on in the fact of application give us a snapshot.
Speaker 1:What was it like working at nasa? What was your role? What was that experience like? Because most of us have only can imagine, because it's quite a closed, closed off organization. But yeah, give us a, give us a, a snapshot what that experience was like for you, sharon.
Speaker 2:So I think it's a very structured government organisation in terms of the rules. It's a civil servant career path, so when people join they very rarely leave. So I had to go through a more of like a contractor approach by a San Jose State University and NASA. Ames had this program where people from psychology and human factors masters at San Jose University were able to work at NASA. So it was a bit more of a hybrid situation for me rather than the very strict typical kind of NASA that we imagine when or that we see on the on the news. So I was really fortunate that it was also California, so it so people were super chilled. You know they'd be, they'd surf in the morning and then they'd show up in their shorts and flip-flops and then have this insanely inspiring conversation that was full of intellect and questions and unknowns and passion, and then, you know, break for lunch and you'd think that would be downtime, but their downtime is continuing that conversation. So I just I got to for a difficult opportunity to stumble across and applying to NASA Ames from the UK is almost unheard of, but fortunately it was a really diverse group of people from all over the world. I mean, there was a lady there from the Navy in Greece. It's connected to the team. There was people from Israel, england, all over America, australia. So we had a really diverse group and I think for me that that was the right place to be.
Speaker 2:But on the flip side it was also a hard journey because I didn't quite know how to keep up. I didn't know where I fit in terms of a career path. So I was a human factors um research associate. So we've done a lot of research and and part of that research world for me is you get to do these great experiments but then you have to sit at computer and you have to crunch numbers and statistics, which wasn't my thing. Fortunately, later in life I learned to ask for help, but at the time, you know, I was really struggling to try to tick all the boxes and prove myself then. But it was. It was a really interesting journey. But then after three years out in California, I missed my family. You know, back then we didn't have. We didn't have the luxury of whatsapp, skype and zoom and all of the, the free connections you know I we didn't have the money.
Speaker 2:I didn't see my family for 12 months and that was probably the hardest part to not just be able to give them a hug whenever I felt like it. So I made the decision to leave. I mean to be fair. I could have stayed there and had a very phenomenal career, but I made the decision to leave. I mean to be fair. I could have stayed there and had a very phenomenal career, but I made a decision to leave and I went to work for Boeing for a period of time in Madrid, so again didn't go back to the UK.
Speaker 2:I didn't feel like at the time the UK really had an awareness that was able to offer me a career in human factors without it being attached to a very heavy engineering scope. But for me it was all about the people. So I went out to work at bone for a period of time, then airbus military and I got into flight deck design. So then 15 years of flight deck design around the world, major manufacturers, business jets. I love.
Speaker 2:I love this point of my career where we'd be in a room with pilots, engineers, managers and I'd be the one that has to do the negotiation, facilitate the conversation to make sure everybody's needs are met but at the same time, the safety and the human factors requirements are met. And we got stuck once, um, and it was quite early on in my career and I was the only woman in the room, or often than not, you know, I'd be in the room with high ranking officers from the UK military, the Australian military, and there'd be 50 of them and then there'd be me in my late 20s, which was a bit bizarre and wonky and freaking scary, if I'm honest. At the time, um, and I just remember we got so well, they got stuck on where the coffee cup holder was going to go in this flight deck conversion and, honestly, it's like it's raw human needs, right, you know they, they see the technology and pilots, they're like, yeah, we know what that can do, but but when do we get the coffee? Like, how do we reach it? How do we make sure we don't spill it?
Speaker 2:And, to be fair, you know I've always used this as the reality check around humans at work. We can spend endless hours and money and resources to design what we see as the perfect environment in terms of the layout, the tools, the procedures, the training, and then we can forget the basics you know humans need to go to the bathroom, they need to be hydrated and they need to be able to communicate. And so I'm very well my my approach to human factors is keep it real. You know, the science is there for a reason and we've learned a lot from the science over the years, from the first accident investigation report through to what we're, what we're capable of doing now and implementing now.
Speaker 2:But humans are humans fundamentally and they need to breathe first. So that's one of my mantras is before you do anything, just breathe first. So that links very beautifully to resilience, because if we stop breathing, then we're no longer existing and we need the bathroom, we need to hydrate, you know, to be able to function and we need to be able to communicate and interact with each other around us yeah, yeah, and connect with you, to each other, like communicate yes, that's what you're saying.
Speaker 1:The same sort of thing, the real basic things. Yeah, how, how easy it is to forget in terms of, um, yeah, you, you touched on that. So as, as a young, a young woman in in your mid to late 20s, sat in probably quite a male or very male orientated environment, how did you find your place and your voice to be able to? Yeah, how did you find your voice, how did you find your your place to be able to negotiate and help guide those conversations?
Speaker 2:I think. Well, I didn't for the longest time, actually not confidently anyway, I found it in terms of knowing what was right from a scientific perspective and knowing what the people need and knowing how to keep them safe. You know, I was still I was still learning a lot then on human factors, you know. So it wasn't like I had all the answers, so I couldn't come at it with a. I have all this knowledge and all this experience. Therefore, this experience, therefore, yeah, yeah, you shall listen it wasn't that simple. You know, I was literally late 20s. I'd had some experiences at NASA, which carried some weight in thankfully again comes back to the title and the name of the corporations in those early days, um, which, as soon as I disclosed that as part of my background, people listened and then looked at me slightly differently, but I had an ability to communicate in a way that I don't believe can be taught at school or university, and I feel like now the entrepreneurship world is understanding that there's many other skills that come as a package, as part of you who shows up at work, and I love that that then there's now more awareness and more of a dialogue about the complementary skills, and it's not like education is the answer necessarily um. So I basically connecting with people was was always my path through to a conversation and I always made sure that it was a conversation and it wasn't a dictatorship moment Like this is the theory, this is the science. We have all of this knowledge from the past. You have to do it that way. Like that will never get somebody to say I agree.
Speaker 2:So I didn't realize at the time and nobody ever really taught me this that negotiation skills were a massive part of my career, from all levels Negotiating with the pilots to where a specific new piece of technology and innovation is going to be integrated into an old platform. Negotiation with the engineers about how fast can we make that, but how safe can we make that and how compliant, and then negotiation with the managers that human factors actually matters to some point back in my early days career and people kept referring to human factors as human resources because they thought, well, you deal with people. So then I had to explain the scientific perspective rather than yeah, we all deal with people. So then I have to explain the scientific perspective rather than yeah, we all deal with people and human resources and human factors so what would you say is a party line?
Speaker 1:then, if you were to, if somebody had never heard of human factors, what? What is human factors in a sentence or a short paragraph to you?
Speaker 2:now. So traditionally human factors is how we ensure that the human at work has the best and the safest environment, tools, procedures, techniques and how we train them to be able to interact with that environment, keep them safe. And so it's a combination of physiology and psychology and now, having known what I've learned in the last 30 years of observing people across the world in many different environments, looking at the complexity of that, I have a slightly different definition and for me it's keeping the human at the core of absolutely everything and it's connecting their out-of-work world with their in work world. Because genuinely Human factors traditionally has always been focused on performance at work and that is massively impact impacted by what's going on outside of work.
Speaker 2:So what happens prior to your shift, regardless of the industry industry, what happens at work then impacts what happens outside of work.
Speaker 2:So for me it's very interrelated now. So I go for a much more deeper holistic, human factors integrated approach of the psychology being more than just the cognitive processes of you understanding your environment and making decisions and being able to communicate that. I go deep in the emotional side, so it has actually come full circle for me in the fact that clinical psychology was a path for me now those rules um align, in that I don't have a conversation without there being an emotional component to that, and part of my work with the military in the past and you'll you'll resonate with this that the emotional brief and debrief is is a equally valid and valued part of the day, whereas in some industries I've worked in you don't talk about emotions. So that's when things start to go wrong, because they go wrong outside of work and then that starts to impact what happens in work and then the safety starts to go. So for me, it's a big driver on how we reframe human error and it's a human contribution to a situation that went wrong.
Speaker 1:In my opinion, yeah, so how do you help people then understand organizations, understand that human contribution and and set up things to to be able to catch that or or, at the moment, a minimum learn from it yeah, it's a tough one most of the time.
Speaker 2:But, um, make things more relatable, make things more personal. So I've had many situations where it's been very focused on high performance and safety markers, and they're two, two measures that we use in industry quite frequently. But understanding that high performance is not essentially sustainable and so often trying to find optimum performance is is the key to success really, and that should lead that lead equally to a safer environment with less errors, more open channels of communication. So I make it more relatable and I've had to learn that through, I guess, my own showing up in a way that was risky sometimes. So I'd be having conversations with a room full of pilots from a military background in a in a culture that didn't necessarily have women working in their environment, and they'd be very focused on the checklist that we ticked to say that everything was safe. And there was very little conversation around the emotional awareness and the emotional intelligence, the trust, the psychological safety. In fact they were not even words, necessarily that we used in the first maybe ten years of my career and I knew them, but it was really difficult to bring them into a conversation. So the only way I could ever find to make those concepts relatable was to actually bring it back to real life.
Speaker 2:So, yes, you're a pilot, you're a test pilot, you're very capable, you are aware of all the risks that you're about to take by getting on this aircraft and taking first flight. But my question to you is would you take your family with you? And that stops the room cold and it actually brings a chill to the room, that that wakes people up and it makes them take note of. Actually, you're not just here to tick a box, are you? You're actually here to keep us safe and make sure that everybody in the ground is safe, because ultimately, it's more than just the aircraft and the team on the team on first flight, for example.
Speaker 2:You know I've got many, many of those examples in health care as well. I've worked in health care for almost a couple of decades now and you know the individuals themselves will. They're accountable for their own responsibilities and they're you know, they get to the point where they are so such experts in the area and they have such confidence that they don't necessarily stop and think for a second is there something more? And so that's just part of my role is to facilitate a deeper conversation and fortunately, most, most people have been very open to that conversation once it's raised. So then we can look to more uh, I guess, negotiation with with themselves rather than negotiation with the management, for example.
Speaker 1:So so for me that all leads very nicely to burnout prevention, stress management and, of course, you mentioned you suffered your own burnout as well, so would you mind talking us through that, sharing what happened?
Speaker 2:absolutely yes. So maybe I've alluded to the fact that I've quite a lot education-wise, you know, careers that maybe I wasn't very well equipped for or didn't necessarily know career opportunities, but I didn't necessarily know all that. I needed to be in that space and then running my own companies very early on, so that more often than not I've been doing a degree, I've had a full-time job and I've been running a side company because there's so much to do and certainly when I was younger I felt a responsibility to share as much as possible, to influence as much as possible and to try to um raise the awareness as much as possible. But I couldn't carry that responsibility long term. Again, it's high performance. So I was operating at a level that I thought was sustainable.
Speaker 2:But at some point I've definitely told you this on a number of occasions on our reflections where I'd do a full day's work and I would be studying then for a few hours after dinner and then I'd have my phone underneath my pillow at night time, because then it switched to America time and I had clients in America that for some reason I thought needed my immediate attention whenever they called. And I'm much wiser now, much smarter and definitely much healthier, because that did lead me twice to what I can only label as burnout. So I'm a strong believer that burnout represents itself very differently to all individuals. Um, and there's, there's such a huge range. You know, I don't want to differentiate between mild burnout and extreme burnout, but I think your experience of burnout as an individual is your experience and so it.
Speaker 2:It may be defined as mild to the outside world, but what you're experiencing internally could be so extreme I hadn't even recognized the signs, and I come from a psychology background so that then it blows my mind at this point in my career to look back and think I was busting my ass to help other people, but I wasn't helping myself.
Speaker 2:But oh my goodness, did that teach me such an incredible lesson that now I have to put my own oxygen mask on first and I'm using that reference because I come from an aviation background, and it's a very practical need that we direct people to do in the moment, because without breathing first, you cannot help other people. So now for me a running theme, and you'll see that in everything that I say, everything that I do in terms of toolkit that I'm producing, it's it's help yourself first so that you can help other people because you may think that you're doing your best by helping other people consistently, but if you don't stop for a second to take your own needs in check, then that's not sustainable yeah, yeah, I, I wrote about this the other day.
Speaker 1:It's um the distinction of giving it all and giving your all, and it's something. Yeah, I'm hearing that. So the difference for me would be giving it all or giving your all is, yeah, nine to five, you're dedicated to the job, but there's boundaries in place. Giving it all, the boundaries slide and slip and end up with you answering emails at four o'clock in the morning because your phone's under your pillow, as an example, and there's there's no boundaries, and I guess after a while that comes at a cost yeah, absolutely, the healthy boundaries.
Speaker 2:Now it's such a, it's such an equal part of my day, as well as my commitments that I've made to other people. You know, and I'm more than happy to just lock the phone in the safe doesn't, doesn't faze me, because I feel like, if it's important enough, the the only thing that keeps me attached to that as a device is family. Really, you know, I live in. I live in different countries to my family, so for me there's always that if I need to be contactable, I want to be available, but I could also just look at the screen and think, ok, well, I don't have to answer that right now, they'll leave me a voicemail or send me an email, not a problem. But I think it's an important aspect because I work with individuals and then individuals in teams. This is this was an enlightening moment for me when there must be about 15 years ago, when I first walked in to observe my first surgery, orthopedic surgery so I decided to embark on a PhD in medical sciences and bring across my yeah, there we go. There's the fourth.
Speaker 1:I'm smiling because you must have been bored that week.
Speaker 2:Yeah, not enough to do right. So, yeah, remember, the PhD fell through many years before, but it was still a point of self-validation. This was no longer external validation that was required for me, it was something that I needed to do for me. Plus, I absolutely loved what I was doing in terms of the, the content. So I thought, well, what better way to do a PhD that you actually enjoy? You know that. I think for me, that's the only way you can really get through it. I've got all all credit to the people that get through PhDs that don't actually feel the topic, but I was.
Speaker 2:I was healthily obsessed with the topic. So I was bringing over aviation principles and and figuring out how to adapt them to a surgical setting. So everything I knew from a highly proceduralized environment, structured and organized personalities had their roles, responsibilities. My first exposure to surgery was oh my god, what just happened, like within the first five seconds, because the whole world for me flipped upside down of what I thought should have been happening in health care and health care. I'm just going to caveat that very quickly. This is not an attack on health care or any health care professionals. Health care is phenomenal. The health care professionals are beyond. I'm in awe of them. They're able to well, I guess, how they're able to adapt with such and this for me is the pinnacle of resilience. But what I was exposed to flipped my world of human factor structure in aviation upside down.
Speaker 1:Why was that?
Speaker 2:in aviation upside down. Why was that? Because the roles and responsibilities were labeled but there was this hierarchy that I hadn't expected, because we we break that down in crew resource management in aviation everybody has a voice, but in in that surgical setting at that time and again, it was likely personality dependent, based on the individual having to cope with so much. You know, there's extreme layers of complexity in health care that as the public, the general public, we can never really appreciate. You know, we think that patient safety should be, you know, the one, the one main focus, but actually being able to run the hospital with the basic resources, have a healthy workforce, have all the equipment there on time, working, sterilizing I could go on in a whole other podcast of how complex that world is. So this is not a, this is not for me to capture that individual, as you know, a personality deficit in any way. It represents itself, as you know, a stress reaction and everything's set up beautifully, it's all very organized, everything's sterilized, everybody's rubbed up, they're ready to go with this surgery.
Speaker 2:The surgeon comes in and in that moment the atmosphere completely changed because, instead of saying what I know to be a brief, when you walk into that environment from aviation instead of saying hello, does everybody know each other? Have we got all the equipment? How's? The patient said that the surgeon just bled at full volume something, and I can't even recall what it was because I went into a state of shock as an observer. So bear in mind, I'd been observing people that worked for for a decade at this point and I'd never experienced that and that level of um change in an environment within an instant second. So it really really set my head in a spin because now everything that I'd been exposed to the decade before suddenly was I don't know if it was undone, how do I adapt this?
Speaker 2:But that gave me even more of a fire in my belly to try to understand why things were a certain way in healthcare. And, like I said, I've worked in healthcare now for, I think, 15 years and I'm in awe of what the healthcare professionals are about. You know, have to have to cope with in terms of trying to package human capability and limitations like we do in human factors. There's a level that hasn't been uncovered yet because I don't quite know how they're able to do some things based on not being able to go to the toilet for several hours having sips of you know drink under their surgical masks but not really being able to take, you know, their eyes off of the mission that they, you know, in terms of patient safety. So just coming back a little circle into burnout prevention, I think I was supposed to be talking about my burnout prevention more, but it's all related um.
Speaker 2:For me now it's you know the narrative around individuals, what we're responsible for and how we can help ourselves and how that connects to the team. So it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be part of a team. That's consistent showing up. You're already part of a team because there's a wider ecosystem of people in the company you work for. For example, as a solo entrepreneur, you are part of a team without realizing it, because there's people you're networking with, you're connected to the resources that you require, and so it's. It's such a focus. For me now.
Speaker 2:This burnout prevention is like how can we help individuals help themselves through more accessible and relatable and affordable tools, because not everybody can go on the right course. Not everybody has time to read the right book. You know there's fantastic material out there. I've written a book myself for healthcare professionals based on career resource management. We've sold in what would it be? Three years now? We've sold around 100 books. Now.
Speaker 2:It took NASA scientists, stanford professors, ex-nasa astronaut trainers and myself and I don't know what my label is to write that book, imagining that that was going to be an accessible, affordable resource for health care professionals to help themselves, and it's only reached 100 people. That for me is like three years to write a book to reach 100 people. That that can't be the way that we we make the world a better place by being healthier and focusing on our well-being. There has to be an easier way for more um, scientific based tools, but that are produced faster and in a quality, in the quality that's required, that people can afford to buy and have the inclination to buy and then use.
Speaker 2:You know, it's one thing to buy these things. I'm sure you've had conversations with many people, as I have, and sometimes do this myself. We get the apps to track our sleep. We get the books to figure out what's the best nutrition. We get a personal trainer so that is deemed as we understand how to take care of ourselves as humans. You know, we get the coaches again another really important component but we don't necessarily, as humans, have the consistency that we need yeah, no, I, I get that and, and thinking along those lines in parallels, I think if I was, I get that.
Speaker 1:I've got the books that I've read and then ignored or got halfway through or ignored, I think, yeah, for me, I would imagine being able to insights during the podcast, being able to create that community or network to be able to influence behaviour or at least demonstrate, because we can't be responsible for how people perceive the information. No no, or even if they want to it's out of our control.
Speaker 2:We've talked about this a number of times. You know we can do our, we can do our best, but we really, as individuals, have to focus on what's in our control. But then we have to be more comfortable with being vulnerable. I'm using terms and labels that are familiar. I may not necessarily agree with the definition of them, but I'm just going to use them because they are more familiar now to the general public and to professionals that are working in this space. But it's, how do we now make the connection between what we know are our limitations and capabilities to what we need others to know, without that being misinterpreted? In the industries? The ability to voice your needs in a way that doesn't just help you, actually does, does keep the team safe and then keeps that team functioning at the optimum performance. So the end goal whether it's a patient, whether it's the flight, whether it's a military mission that that's as safe as it can be. So it's a patient, whether it's the flight, whether it's a military mission, that that's as safe as it can be. So it's a responsibility, but it's a responsibility of everybody, to be able to have that interaction and dialogue in a way that brings awareness and adaptability and some flexibility, but more in terms of like self-compassion.
Speaker 2:I think everybody needs to recognize that we're not superhuman. You know, I've had dialogues where people actually do say, well, I'm superhuman, look at everything I can do. But actually at that point, if that mindset shifts to that thought of this is my label, there's nothing that can bring me down. That's a detriment to the team and the team's performance and the team's safety and the mission's safety. So there's a, there's a psychological safety around burnout prevention that for me as a young woman in a very and this is not reflected on it being a male-dominated environment, but I didn't know how to ask for help. You know going through personal things in not feeling that great today, but I know your expectations are for me to deliver this project on time, because that has massive impacts.
Speaker 2:So when I talk about burnout prevention now and resilience building, it's more of an interconnected conversation. It's about a negotiation where you recognize what you need as an individual, what the team needs, what the company needs, what the world needs, and and it's also a responsibility from the organization's perspective to be able to press pause and have that conversation and negotiate. Okay. So we appreciate that now, but we have all of these demands on us from our clients, so we can't just press stop. So how do we work together to find common ground? And I think I don't believe there is one solution, and that's why it's become a really interesting conversation with the people I'm working with right now to figure out, when we talk about burnout prevention and the right to switch off, the right to disengage from work and not have your phone and if your pillow and not being available all the time, all the time, what does that really look like in reality?
Speaker 1:because there's demands placed on everybody yeah, and our own belief systems to, to complicate and yeah for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's definitely. It's an interesting. It's an interesting one because I think you know we've spoken at length about labels and how they can be very powerful to how people feel like they need to behave, they need to perform, they need to show up and they need to hide some of the things that are happening outside of work, for example.
Speaker 1:Come to the shared conclusion maybe not this specific sentence, but the way I I feel like we've reached a point of understanding is resilience is both a very personal journey, but it also has to be a shared experience yeah, yeah, and I'd agree because there's a connection element there, and so that's both to self to understand or have an awareness or an inclination of what's going on, but then being able to ask others for support or guidance or just be able to communicate to them, recognising that we can't always deal with things on our own or there might be somebody better placed to help us get a different perspective on what's really going on. So, yeah, I completely agree.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, communication is a real core focus to all of this. It's enabling people to use their voice in a way that is um I'm going to use this coin, this term from a really famous book called non-violent communication. You know, it's in that in that. In that sense, then, we don't necessarily have control over how what we're saying is received, but at least if we're more aware of how we communicate not just verbally, but body language, my contact, there's so much more to how we're able to transmit our need. And then working with yourself and with others on looking at what resources do I have available? So that's a big theme in the things that I'm developing right now in my toolkit.
Speaker 2:It's not a toolkit that everybody needs every single tool in that box, and even if one person decides, well, I want those five tools out of your 50 that are available and they're my thing there'll be different phases in the week even not just in life where they actually might need to then go and find a different tool because something's drastically changed.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of change happening around us now, both in terms of people wanting to change their health, change their career. There's change in the world that's happening, that that is bringing an anxiety that we weren't necessarily aware of before, because the information was just the news at six or the news at ten. Now the news is there all the time. You know every single thing that's happening in the world and unfortunately it's packaged in such a negatively impacting emotional way and so those toolkits are growing into more like the traditional self-help material books, meditation they're all found, they've got fantastic foundations in the science, but it's not everybody's way to sit and meditate for 10 minutes a day. You know, certainly not, marlene. I'm a dynamic, I call myself a dynamic meditator. Where I have to be on the move, I can't sit there and I definitely can't get in any lotus positions. But it's just. I think it's just making things more accessible and a wider range so that it can suit different people's desires, needs, ways of learning, and that in itself is a fluid phase.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely Give us an idea, sharon, if you don't mind, of a couple of the tools that you're working on or that you use for yourself or commonly use for people that you work with, or that you use for yourself or commonly use for people that you work with.
Speaker 2:So I'm currently writing a workbook that originally started out just as a how do we handle change from a psychological perspective. So I'm contributing to that from human factors, science and my dear mentor and colleague who I wrote the book with, dr Lacey Schmidt, is an occupational psychologist, so she's trained NASA astronauts in extreme environments and she's been in academia. She now runs her own company in occupational psychology. That started off as essentially a few pages to help people go through the process of change around, for example, a relationship change or a job change. So we made it quite generic and then we sent out the workbook for some feedback and people said oh well, actually, can you go into more detail in a certain area? It's evolved now to a digital solution and that's being tested where it has four realms of change so that they're typically and traditionally the more common realms of change. So I just alluded to them in a few sentences ago. There's change around you as an individual. Your career and this relationship change and that can be with one individual or it can be with many, and then there is an anxiety around changing the world that we can't control. So these realms of change have typically been where people go and access some psychology help, support because it's gotten to the point where they feel stuck and they can't take steps forward. So typically a therapy session would be the go-to solution for those feelings that are happening. But what we have, what we're designing, is something that's more accessible and more proactive, as in a first stage, and this is not in replacement for therapy by any means, but it's. It's something that's more accessible, where people can take themselves through the journey and they can go as deep as they want. There's guided questions based on the science, the scientific backgrounds that we have, but there want there's guided questions based on the science, the scientific backgrounds that we have, but there's there's also relatable questions via the conversations we have with our friends and family. So we've really tried to bring all of those concepts into something that's tangible and understandable for people to help themselves. So that's just one example, and then I'm also developing health technology for safety critical industry professionals. So this is to really bring them knowledge and individual awareness to their own individual performance, expectation of consistent high performance. If we can find a way to enable the individuals to understand their own performance and their varying needs depending on, you know, whether it's a certain season or a certain time of the month or a certain phase in their life. How much knowledge can we give them through biofeedback measures? So there's lots of fantastic devices out there. It started, really, in the sports world, which is now bringing itself into the, you know, finance sector. I'm bringing it more into the healthcare sector and the aviation environment, where people can not only track did I?
Speaker 2:I do 10,000 steps a day, which seems to be this arbitrary marker of we all need to do that. I'm not sure why. I'm still trying to figure out the answer to that, because for one people, 10,000 steps may not be enough. For a new person, 10,000 steps may not be attainable. So there's that layer of variation that I'm constantly asking questions about, being curious as to how we adapt the technology.
Speaker 2:People wear a smartwatch and then people will say to me look, look, look at my data. I'm in the amber, I didn't sleep very well and I'm like great. So what are you going to do with that knowledge? I'm going to sleep more. I'm going to sleep more, so then I. Then I have this little conversation of what do you understand? What type of sleep is important because you may think going to bed early and waking up later is giving you like 12 hours in bed and you're hoping that you might sleep for eight of those, but actually in reality you might only be getting the deep sleep that your body needs for restoration for like an hour of that period of time.
Speaker 2:So it's it's an individual thing. You know, I've had many, many different phases in my life and I think sometimes it's dependent on what I'm working on and how I feel personally. You know there's there's hormone shifts. There's so much going on now that we're finally aware of and we were able to have these conversations more openly about where my sleep might look great one week, and then the next week it's completely out of whack and I've got insomnia. I'm not necessarily any idea why, but I've got that data to show me. So then I have to go back and think what's changed? What's changed about me, what's changed about my routine, what I'm doing, and then, if it's hormonal, for example, then I'm going to go and get a test and I'm going to figure out what's going on. So I just think it's great that there's lots of tools out there, but we need to figure out, uh, as a community. How do we take that data, transfer it into knowledge and then awareness and understanding of how we can help ourselves?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah, love it and and I my gut feeling, sharon is I think I think we're close to being there for today, I think that's a great way to round it up, and I'd just like to offer the opportunity for you to, yeah, say anything that maybe we've not covered, or if there's anything you wanted to mention during our conversation today that's important to you.
Speaker 2:I know we've covered a lot um and I could. We could always cover more, right, it's an endless conversation. That's what I love about these conversations and the opportunity to be a part and contribute to your podcast, because I've listened to many of your prior ones and I think there's there's for me. I call them gems of insights and it's it's working with.
Speaker 2:When we listen to a podcast and we take away our own take-homes insights to that, it's like how do we now take action? So how do we learn how to have the self-compassion and the flexibility we need? How do we, how do we then go on a path of our own to then say, right, okay, these and I know this will hit home for you, because we've definitely been highlighting this recently the things that we perceive as blocks, how do we look at them as relevant diversions, to go out and seek the right resources to help us to turn challenges into opportunities? So I guess my moment of self-care is, as I'm talking to other people today about what I feel we could do more of, I'm also reflecting is there more I can do for myself?
Speaker 1:Sharon, thank you so much for spending time talking with me today. Um, yeah, thoroughly enjoy your, your thoughts, your, your experience, your revelations and insights. Yeah, um, and just a moment of appreciation for you and all that you're doing, for both yourself, but for me and I know a lot of other people as well it means a lot and, um, yeah, keep on shining my pleasure.
Speaker 2:It's been absolutely wonderful to talk to you today and to share this with the people out there brilliant.
Speaker 1:Speak soon, cheers.