Healing the Hearts of Healthcare

In this podcast, Arleen discusses how healthcare workers can quickly slip into compassion fatigue. Managing the constant demands, internal and external stressors, and dealing with the trauma from serving during the pandemic can be overwhelming and exhausting.

Compassion fatigue, a condition related to the emotional and physical exhaustion by healthcare workers must be identified and managed effectively. During the pandemic, healthcare workers were forced to experience pain and suffering firsthand.  Those feelings and experiences can replay over and over in your mind, or worse yet, settle deep within your heart.

When compassion fatigue goes untreated, it can lead to apathy or feeling disconnected from the patients you serve. It can prevent you from using your greatest superpower--healing others. The secret in preventing compassion fatigue is spotting the experiences that affect your ability to deliver care as it is intended--with empathy and compassion. Learn strategies to identify the cardinal signs that you are heading down the path of compassion fatigue. Create and develop a plan to manage through these feelings. It is 100% possible when you know what to look for.  

In this podcast, Veronica Barber, EdD joins Arleen to help healthcare workers understand how recognizing emotions and feelings is necessary in providing compassionate care. We will discuss how internal and external stressors and influences affect our emotional response. You will learn the neuroscience behind how our brains form new neural pathways and how our emotional responses can affect our ability to see things from a different lens.  

As healthcare workers, the work we do every day is soul-filling purposeful work which should leave you feeling fulfilled and satisfied. Forming the habit of being attuned to our emotions while building in moments of stillness, quiet reflection, and creating pauses benefits you and your patients. 

You will learn about the six-second window and what happens inside our bodies when emotions begin to surface. You will understand the importance of hitting the pause button once you feel the emotions bubbling up and evaluate those feelings by blending your cognitive abilities with your emotional sensing.

In this podcast episode, Noreen O'Sullivan, an animal-assisted teacher and author, joins Arleen to share her transformative model, Look, Listen, Love.

Noreen advocates that self-awareness is essential to enable thoughtful responses over impulsive reactions in stressful situations. She explains that we always have a choice between two feelings in every situation: feelings that have love or feelings that need love. 

By taking a moment to look at your feelings in triggering moments and listening to where you feel it in your body, you can replace them with loving feelings. This helps you respond thoughtfully instead of reacting impulsively. We delve into how the Look, Listen, Love  model can be particularly beneficial for healthcare workers. This useful tool helps them recognize when others need love during direct care, allowing them to play a crucial role in promoting healing for everyone involved.

Visit Noreen's website to receive a PDF copy of the Look, Listen, Love model.

www.noreenosullivan.com

In this podcast we explore how setting your intentions towards the positive will help you to search for those moments where you can experience love, joy and peace again. In a world where negativity is everywhere, as healthcare workers you are in the best position to channel positivity in your words and actions. It’s about setting your intentions and making a conscious choice to seek positivity, to improve the way care is delivered. It is about taking a stand to eliminate negativity from our workplace. You will learn to slow down your response and to look around you for the things that are going well and to celebrate these moments instead. 

In this podcast, Rashidah Cartwright, Ed.M, LCADC, CCS, Autism for Badass Moms podcast host and Licensed Clinical Drug and Alcohol Counselor and Mental Health Therapist joins Arleen to discuss the burdens that many healthcare workers continue to live with from experiencing pain and suffering of serving in the pandemic. This call to action is for all of us as caregivers to invite the support of mental health services that are available so that you can begin to heal your heart. To remove the emotional feelings associated with “The Great Sadness” you must grant yourself permission to release it through daily simple practices for self-care. We cannot bury the feelings we had, rather we must bring them forward to evaluate them so that we can move forward and be the best version of ourselves.

This podcast explains why it is essential to forgive yourself from your past experiences in order to heal your heart from “The Great Sadness.” You were designed to heal others, but every day you are exposed to pain and suffering which affects your ability to press forward and heal others. You will be inspired to take steps to release the pain and suffering of what you experienced as a front-line healthcare worker during the global pandemic so you can make room in your heart again for love, laughter, joy and compassion.  

You will learn that true forgiveness, although difficult for many, is a conscious choice that is essential in managing your internal emotions. You will imagine through a visualization exercise, what your loved ones would say at your life celebration. We will learn from two authors. Tyler Perry, in his book Higher is Waiting about the power of writing a letter of forgiveness to your younger self and we will explore how simply using the words “I forgive myself” from The Shack by William P. Young will help you to release the burden of suffering from your heart and mind.  

In this podcast, I am joined by Laurie Smith, founder of the 28-day Flow Challenge and author of Leap with Me: A Creative Path to Finding and Following Your True Voice. Laurie is an expert on the flow state and shows us how even just five minutes a day spent doing activities we love can improve our overall well being. Finding opportunities to escape and exist in the flow state is one of the fastest ways to promote healing your heart. She offers tips for getting into flow such as setting strong boundaries, connecting with joy, experimenting with the power of softness and so much more.

To connect with Laurie and learn more about how the flow habit can change your life, check out her website at www.LaurieSmith.com

One of the secrets to healing your heart from The Great Sadness, lies in self-exploration and self-discovery of searching inside yourself. In this episode we will dive into the transformative practices of slowing down your pace in order to discover healing, growth and inner peace 

In a world consumed by external distractions, this podcast will explore the ancient art of kintsugi and how and why we must reframe our broken spirit. You will learn from Arthur C. Brooks, Social Scientist and Harvard Professor as to why must be careful of being caught up in “arrival fallacy” instead of living in a state of happiness. We will explore a poem from Yung Pueblo to help you to visualize releasing the burdens you might be carrying around with you. You will understand why as healthcare workers we must experience “moments of sabbath” to allow our body to rest and heal from the book Sabbath by Wayne Mueller. Finally, we will end learning from Chade-Meng Tan, Googler, Engineer and author of Search Inside Yourself as to why and how to implement the practice of mindfulness in 2 minutes every day. 

As a healthcare worker what you do is soul-filling, purposeful work. You were designed to care for others, but the global pandemic changed everything. It had you rethinking about whether or not you have what it takes to continue to press on.

What you witnessed, firsthand, had a profound effect on your heart and mind. Over time, you were left to feel like the layers of your heart were slowly being peeled away, and in it's place "The Great Sadness" was left to reside. You can't imagine how to step forward and reclaim love, laughter, joy and hope. Because it has been 4 years and you are still dealing with its effects.

What it if could be different? What if you could replace "The Great Sadness" by learning from the those who came before you. Consider this your call to action--to heal your heart and see the beauty that awaits. Because you are a healer--and it's time to heal your own heart!