This is the Humble Inquiries series. In this episode, Leslie joins me as my co-host to humbly inquire into Mental Health and Burnout - a huge challenge for leaders and everyone else in the era of Covid-19, hybrid work, sudden changes, and all the uncertainty.

In each episode of Humble Inquiries, we are deliberately going to put ourselves in the uncomfortable space of not knowing the answer and humbly inquiring about these challenges - with the aim to provoke new thoughts, actions, and practices - to help us better serve our coaching clients, and also to help the leader in you navigate the biggest challenges - at life and at work.

Show Notes

• Leslie - "The key theme is taking that moment to pause, whatever that may be, pause to find out what your emotion or your reaction is positive for you. Pause before you react."
• Sumit - "Everybody is different. Every family is different. Every society and every group is different. So there is also that something very localized, very personal. , To this challenge, we cannot really predict. We cannot really guess what is happening to somebody. "
• Sumit - "what makes it, I think even worse or what compounds the problem is, we don't talk about all of this stuff. This is very human stuff. This is not alien stuff, This is very human stuff. And yet we don't talk about it."
• Leslie - "And because we don't talk about it. We don't even know how to talk about it. And the sensitivity around that creates even more hesitation."
• Sumit - " It takes a moment to shift ourselves to do, to bring up a smile on our faces."
• Leslie - "just as we learn and grow all throughout our lives and career, this is another step in the journey and another opportunity to change how we work moving forward, how our world is moving forward."
• Sumit - "there are a lot of things which we are on top of it, but at the same time to make it an assumption that I can be on top of everything can become a very heavy place to operate from. It can almost become self-defeating."
• Sumit - "letting go of control is actually not anxiety is actually curiosity."
• Leslie - "The individual may have depression or anxiety, but that doesn't shape everything. That's not who they are. They are not a depressed and anxious person. They are someone who has depression and anxiety."
• Sumit - " The external does not control the internal in a deterministic way. So we still do have a choice, to choose how to react to situations. And our well-being is not a function of what is happening outside. Nobody can take that away from us."
• Leslie - "Creating the space to talk about mental health and wellbeing. And allowing that to be accepted is a powerful piece of what each and every one of us brings to every day and every conversation."
• Sumit - "the neutral state of any human being is wellbeing is peace. That's a neutral state. It's not like jumping with joy, but it's also not being depressed or sad, the neutral state. We don't really have to do anything if we just let things go that we are trying to control. That's where (the neutral state) we will land automatically."

As quoted by Edgar Schein in his book Humble Inquiry, an humble inquiry is recognizing that insights most often come from conversations and relationships in which we have learned to listen to each other and have learned to respond appropriately, to make joint sense out of our shared context, rather than arguing with each other into submission.