Achieving Mental Resilience with Mary Meduna-Gross, Ph.D.

Your emotional intelligence helps you separate your personal life from your work life, allowing you to concentrate on your tasks. This is called compartmentalization, which is a way our brain manages multiple conflicting perspectives at the same time. But, to what degree do you engage in compartmentalization? Or in other words, do you categorize things to make sense of them? Join me for a fascinating conversation with Mary Meduna-Gross, Ph.D., the founder of Blue Bamboo Leadership. With a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership from Indiana State University, Mary is a seasoned expert in the field of leadership development. Mary shares her insights on how to overcome anxiety and make better decisions in less time, by improving relationships and breaking down internal barriers. Don't miss this opportunity to learn from one of the leading voices in leadership development! --- Listen to the podcast here: Achieving Mental Resilience with Mary Meduna-Gross, Ph.D. Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote for the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One thing a lot of us tend to do is really compartmentalize our lives and this kind of goes back to some of the old school work cultures we used to have where this time of day, you’re working, this time of day, you’re taking care of this stuff, this time of day, you’re taking care of that, and we tend to do the same thing with our initiatives, with our mindset on everything. Your work is here, your business is here, your social life is here, your whatever else is important to you in your life is over there. However, unfortunately, or fortunately for a lot of people because it can actually expedite some of the improvements we want to make into all of our lives, they are very well connected. The idea of leave it at the door when you come into work, leave your personal life at the door, that is quite possibly one of the 20th century’s most unrealistic ideas. My guest today, Mary Meduna-Gross, has a business called Blue Bamboo Leadership where she advocates to her clients that we actually take care of ourselves in order to take care of our business as well as some other kind of personal initiative. --- Mary, welcome to the program. Thank you. It’s so great to be here. I’m really looking forward to this, particularly this topic about compartmentalizing. It’s something that I am personally well aware of my own habits to compartmentalize and it’s often a topic that comes up in my coaching with my clients. So what I want to do is get to the beginning of this. Where does this urge to compartmentalize our lives come from in your belief? Yeah. Oh, I love that question. Well, literally just before this call, a client and I were having this conversation. We were talking about it. And based on what that part and my own experience, I think that compartmentalizing is one way that we control our experience. I love systems. I just love it. Like if I could put everything on automation, I probably would. I think that is compartmentalizing to the 10th, maybe even 11th degree. But I think we do that as a way, again, to control what is happening. When our work life and our personal life and our relationships and Lord knows if we have kids or pets or anything else, like things just get muddied, and so by compartmentalizing, I get to say, “Okay, I’m gonna just focus on this right now and nothing else matters, and then when I get to my home life, I’m just focusing on this now and nothing else matters.” We literally can’t function that way. Yeah, but is there an advantage to having that level of focus? Because it is really hard to really get anything done when your mind is everywhere all at once. Yeah. I think it’s the middle way again. There’s the everything is automated and just happens on a routine, and the other side of that is nothing’s automated and we’re recreating everything every single day. We can’t live like that either. Yeah. So I think what is this middle way is conscious living and conscious leadership. It is knowing that one extreme or the other isn’t going to serve me, what is going to be that middle way that’s right for me? And then how do I listen to my own stories to even know what’s right for me? Quick story, my husband and I adopted a puppy last summer. Oh, congratulations. Oh, it’s been amazing. Absolutely amazing. We lost both of our older dogs during COVID and so we took some time and we brought the right dog home and what I’ve noticed, and especially it’s been cold these last couple of days here in Chicago, and what I’ve caught myself doing is when it’s time to take her out for a walk, and she definitely wants to go, I, in my mind, am trying to justify why I should stay at my desk and continue to do my work and not take her out for a walk. And I heard myself saying things like, “Oh, wow, why do I have to always take her out?” Like all of the self-pity kind of stuff. And then I catch myself and I say, “Mary, you’re doing what you’re doing here because you wanted this work life integration. This is the life part of that. You have to make room for the life part in the work part.” And so that’s just one way that I’ve noticed how I want to compartmentalize, I want to do only work from eight o’clock to four o’clock in the afternoon, and then after those, I don’t want to have anything to do with work and shut it all off. I still catch myself in those patterns of thought. Interesting, because that seems like an ingrained pattern based on what our work culture was for most of the 20th century and still is for a lot of people, even here in 2023, although it’s changing quite a bit. What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages in --- because I’m sure there are some people out there that are kind of longing for this idea of five o’clock, shut my laptop down, off, I’m in this other mode once I get home or once I, in the case of remote work, shut the laptop down and do something else --- Right, move away from the laptop. Yeah, yeah, like is there an advantage to that system --- exactly, like in my view, the biggest drawback, of course, is that the work from nine to five or eight to five, whatever system, takes up all of your daylight hours. It’s really a terrible use of daylight and probably one of the key drivers behind the fact that 70 percent of Americans are vitamin D deficient right now. What are the advantages and disadvantages of that system? Well, I think that the system comes from --- I think we could probably trace it all the way back to Ford and the assembly line, that was automation, that’s control. And the hours, thinking about the unions, and how many hours are we working and what are those hours that we’re working, and so I see how we got to this mindset is through this history and a lot of that history really is all about controlling the employees to get to the business’s financial outcomes. And it’s worked well. We bought into the story. Now, I grew up on a farm and so my parents have always been self-employed. There’s never been an eight to four o’clock kind of timeline on the farm. It literally is working and living in the same space. So you would think that because I grew up with that, that I would have some sort of an advantage here. Somehow, I also bought into this whole idea. Again, I love systems. I have that innate need for control.Share on X It’s something that I’m finding less need for but particularly early on in my career, like that was one of the ways that I was able to say --- how do I say this? It’s coming back to how do I know when enough is enough and when I don’t have a timeline that says I’m done at four o’clock, then I have to look at my work and what have I done and is that enough for today. Yeah. And that’s a harder decision to make. So, again, I think we fall into this pattern because it simplifies things. I know what the rules are, I follow the rules. Now, I have to live within those rules but I’m willing to do that for the payoff of I don’t have to recreate this every single day. I don’t have to think about this every single day. I don’t have to set this up. I don’t have to worry that I’m going to forget about this transaction or whatever part of it. Yeah. So I think that employers, first of all, I had an advantage of the way they were controlling their employees. I think we bought into it and for our own benefit of knowing when is enough enough and when do I have permission to play? I think, again, that work ethic here in the US where our value comes from our work. Well, you lay that on top of this issue, it just compounds the sense of I’ve always got to be doing something. Oh, yeah, productivity guilt. Yes, exactly, and if I’m not working, I’m not producing, which means that I must not be good enough. Now, is there a mentality behind that that relates to how we kind of feel about ourselves and our own value? Definitely, definitely. So, to make sense of this, to help me kind of keep things organized, I have a system, of course. You did say you love them systems so yeah. I do love systems. So, I use a system that I learned in my coach program. It’s called the Energy Leadership System and there’s seven levels of energy leadership and, basically, what that’s looking at is how do I perceive the world? Do I see things as happening to me or do I see life as happening for me? And so when I see life is happening to me, then I’m in this space where I do need to control things. If life is happening to me, that must mean that I have to defend myself and I have to take initiative to control things so that things work out in my favor because I don’t trust that the universe is going to bring me what I need. Oh, wow. Okay. So that’s where that need to control things comes from? Exactly....