Manager Wellbeing with David Carter

In this episode of the One Health Podcast Wellbeing Series, Dorian Broomhall gets to know David Carter, Manager of Physiotherapy Services at the North West Regional Hospital.

David speaks he speaks about finding value in taking a detour and reward in stepping out of habits.

He talks about learning how to be a manager to his team and shares how he thinks about what sort of boss he is to himself.

He talks about the importance and difficulty of exercising after a taxing day at work, and how that fits into his own NEWSTART wellbeing strategy.

Transcript

Dorian Broomhall:

Welcome to the One Health Podcast. This episode was recorded on the land of the palawa people. I acknowledge and pay respect to all Tasmanian Aboriginal people and to their deep history of storytelling. My name's Dorian Broomhall, and I'm the manager of culture and well-being for the Department of Health here in lutruwita Tasmania. In this second series of the podcast, I've been speaking with people from across our organisation about individual strategies for well-being, what the department can do to support the well-being of our people, and how managers can influence this at their local level.

For this episode of the podcast, I got to know David Carter, manager of physiotherapy services in the northwest of Tasmania. In our conversation, David speaks about learning how to be a manager, how to have difficult conversations, and about the power of asking questions. He speaks about finding value in the detour and reward in stepping out of habits. He talks about the importance and difficulty of exercising after a taxing day at work. He shares how he thinks about what sort of boss he is to himself, and he talks about the NEWSTART model of well-being that he uses. So, let's get into it.

The starting point that I'm really interested in for you to share is a bit of an overview of where you are at right now, what you're doing, whether that's about work or not work, or whichever combination of the two that works for you. I sort of don't mind.

David Carter:

Careerwise, where I'm at at the moment of, so I'm managing a reasonably sized team. We've got about 40 in our team. I've been managing for about three years, and when I started out managing, I didn't really realise what managing was. You'd start out, and you're trained to be a physio, and we try and get good at that. And then, all of a sudden, you end up managing, which is quite a different skillset. I sort of started that first year looking at systems and processes, and I made some lovely spreadsheets like we spoke about before and looked at flow with the paperwork and all those sorts of things and looked for efficiencies and thought, "Oh, I'm being a good manager."

But I quickly learned that there's quite a bit more to the managing role than just systems and processes and making sure you sign the right sheet at the right time. So I did a bit of training. I did some management leadership courses and quickly found myself out of depth in that as well because you can do a day course and take some excellent notes on how to have a difficult conversation, and then you walk into the difficult conversation, and you think, "Oh, I'm just going to do this, and I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do this." And then, all of a sudden, you realise, "Oh, actually, that didn't go so well or quite the way it went in the lecture." There's a real difference between having head knowledge and developing that craft of how to do those things. So I think what I set out to think of, well, this is just going to be a short endeavour to develop those skills, I'm realising it's more of a lifetime endeavour to develop those management skills.

Dorian Broomhall:

That's really interesting and not an uncommon story, I don't think, especially in the world that we work in where you get really good at your trade or your profession, and then, all right, cool. Well, there's going to be some sort of next step here. And then, you go management, and we go, "Oh, it's actually entirely different, and there's so much to learn." And I think you're quite right that it becomes a bit of a lifelong journey. Before you made that transition to manager, what were you up to? What were you doing?

David Carter:

So I was looking at where to careerwise next. I had a senior physio job, and I was busy but bored, if you know what I mean. I was busy. I was very active, and there's lots of work pressure and those sorts of things, but doing the same thing. And I was looking for a bit more challenge and a bit more diversity in my work. So I did some study. I did some research and sort of tried to open up some doors. I did some research I thought that I could look at whether I go down more the academic route and some lecturing and things like that because I've got a teaching background, but I also realised that having a qualification would also help in other avenues as well if I went more towards like a team lead position and those sorts of things. And being in a smaller rural area, opportunity does come up probably a little bit more readily than in the bigger CBD areas. So just opportunity came, and I ended up unexpectedly being more towards management.

Dorian Broomhall:

So it's interesting, right? I think many people... Well, I should speak for myself, but I certainly have a perception that people that do physios, people with physiotherapists tend to take care of their physical well-being pretty well. They tend to be pretty active and get out and about and sort of do things. And looking at you, I'm like, "Oh, he moves his body, and that's really, really good, right?" I'm curious, when you made that transition to manager, how'd you go keeping that up when you realised actually, "Wow, my world just got really different." How'd you go keeping physical exercise up or movement up? Talk us through transition.

David Carter:

Well, it actually dipped off quite significantly actually when I went from working the wards to a desk job. And it was a little bit unexpected because you finish the day and you're exhausted, but you haven't had any exertion like physical exertion. So you finish the day, and emotionally, you're tired, and really, the thing you need is some exercise to flush out all that adrenaline and to get some endorphins pumping and all those sorts of things. But just the stress of the day, it's the emotional fortitude that you need to put on your shoes and get out there and walk the dog or go for a jog or whatever it is that you do. And it's actually only in the last sort of six months that I actually got back into the things that I really enjoy, and it's through having a bit of discipline and following a training programme. So I've got my own little training programme on my watch that I follow, and I set my goals to follow, and that's very rewarding. I really wanted to talk about habits a little bit this morning if that's-

Dorian Broomhall:

Yeah, great.

David Carter:

I don't know if I could jump into that.

Dorian Broomhall:

Tell me, especially as you've had an experience of going... As role and world changed, some of them sort of fell out the window, and then you've found a way to bring them back in. Love to know.

David Carter:

Well, look, I naturally think that the human brain is quite... Well, some people would say lazy, but other people would say efficient. You get off the bus, and you make a beeline to the building. And even if the footpath goes around, you see this weird track in the grass where people make that beeline. We're naturally efficient. But then, the coffee shop opens off to the side of that beeline, and all of a sudden, your brain's got this cognitive dissonance, telling do I walk straight to my destination efficiently or do I look for value and take a detour? And often, there's value in the detour, and we actually need to exert ourselves to get that value, to get that coffee on the way. And it got me thinking a little bit around what are the rewards in life as well, and you can always look for efficiency, or you can also look for reward. And for me, I'm always going to have habits. Every day, I'm going to follow a habit, but it's setting those habits that give maximum reward and balancing that with efficiency.

Dorian Broomhall:

I love this topic. I mean, habits is something that I find deeply interesting, and I love to think about what we practise because what we practise that actually might not bring value, we don't realise that we're doing it every day. That habit that might not be working so well for us, we're practising doing it. Therefore, we're getting better at it, and therefore, it makes it even harder to then do something different. So in the context then of you going, "Oh, okay, some habits have fallen off," and then you've realised that, what's your path for retraining your brain to do different?

David Carter:

First of all, it's identification, isn't it? It's working out where the reward is that you're chasing. I came across this quite recently actually of... I've always been thinking about how do I manage my team, right? But I got asked this question just a few weeks ago. How do you manage yourself, and what sort of manager are you to yourself? What sort of boss are you? And I thought, "I'm a rubbish boss" to myself. Seriously, someone in my team mucks up, and I'm going, "Let's work with this constructively. Let's talk it through, how did it go wrong. Oh, yep. Okay. That's all right. We'll pick up from there, and we'll do this. We'll do that together and away we go." But you muck up yourself and your life and all of a sudden, that's it. You're fired.

Dorian Broomhall:

Totally.

David Carter:

And-

Dorian Broomhall:

Compassion for others, not self.

David Carter:

Yeah. And so, I think it really does start with how do you manage yourself, and I'm still thinking about it. I'm still developing that concept of, how do I manage guilt in my life? How do I manage failure? How do I manage perception that other people have, all that idea of people are watching my performance, and how do I feel about that? Am I scrutinised or am I supported? And it's recognising my vulnerabilities, but it's also recognising my strengths. You know?

Dorian Broomhall:

Yeah.

David Carter:

And it's working out what I'm good at and being better at that, what I'm bad at and working on that, getting some training. If I had a team member that was underperforming in an area, it's not, "Oh, you're fired. Get out of here. Don't come back again tomorrow." It's, "Oh, okay. There would be value in investing time in that area, so how can we get you better at that? What course can we put you in? Who can we tee you up with for mentoring, et cetera?" Still developing that idea and that concept. Along those lines, also recently came across Amy Edmondson, psychological safety, and being a bloke, I thought that was a little bit of a soft topic, to be honest. I thought, "Ah, just toughen up a little bit and get the job done." But it's a real thing. We come to work with stresses already often from family or from health or from whatever, and we turn up at work, and we think, "Oh, what's the next threat? Is my boss going to give me a hard time? Is a patient going to be tough on me?

There's always that pressure, that patient flow, "Quick. We got to get that discharge." And I think it's very hard to operate in the high cognitive centres in our brain when there's that constant adrenaline threat. And I love the principles that Amy puts forward of framing it as a learning environment. Every day, imagine doing your course, and you come into that course. And every day, let's say it's something that's quite challenging like calculus, and every day, there's a test, and every lecture is a test, and you're assessed on it, I'd drop out of that course really quickly. But if it was, "Oh, no. This is restructured. It's not an exam, it's learning," we quite like learning, and you're allowed to make mistakes as you learn. And in fact, you learn better if you make mistakes and also modelling vulnerability or fallibility, say, "Look, I get this wrong. Help me out. If I make a mistake, just tell me about it so that we can get that better together."

And the last thing that she really talks about, Amy Edmondson, is questioning. I've been a teacher before as a physio. Questioning is a really strong tool. It's an incredibly strong tool. You can interrogate, hopefully not like what we're doing now. You can really probe for information from someone, but that's quite a confronting experience, or you can do more inductive learning through questioning. You can, "Oh, tell me a bit more about that," and I think that's the really valuable tool of questioning. Someone comes in and you're having that difficult conversation, and that gut response, that habit that I have of being defensive or being aggressive or being... Let's cut to the chase here. I need to hold back on that habit and starve that wolf and feed the habit of, "Tell me a little bit more about that so I understand it better," because it breaks down those barriers and their defensiveness and enables us to think really rationally and constructively together.

Dorian Broomhall:

It's really interesting. So much of what you said is spot on from my perspective and really, really interesting is another person who's a big fan of Professor Edmondson's work and her books and all of the associated world that's gone with it and something that we do talk about a lot through our work. For all intents and purposes, we're here to talk about broadly well-being, right?

David Carter:

Yeah, yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:

And it's really interesting to me that your attention around well-being then as well. I'm a manager. That's been hard, and that transition's been hard, and I've done a bunch of learning through it, but there's this sense of well-being for both self and your team that relates to this idea of safety and creating safety. Really interested. First, how have you gone about with this idea of managing yourself and asking yourself these sort of same questions and trying to cultivate that habit of being kind to yourself perhaps? How have you gone about applying those sort of principles or tools or that idea of safety for yourself in these instances? What have you done?

David Carter:

Yeah, no. There's three domains, right? [inaudible 00:14:23] aren't there? There's the individual responsibility to well-being, and then there's a team aspect of well-being, but there's also that organisational responsibility for well-being. For that individually, for that personal responsibility of well-being, I came across something a while ago, and I'm speaking from memory, so I won't get it a 100% right, but there's a NEWSTART principles, and you can look them up on the website and all those sorts of things. And it's an acronym, right? So NEW, nutrition, exercise, water, you need those in life, don't you? For your physical well-being, you need good nutrition. You need to eat right, and sometimes takeaway is the easy option at the end of the day, but it's just making sure you get good nutrition. And if you start the day and you're fasting, you don't have that energy to get you into the day.

Exercise is critical. Like the physio, I can talk about movement and exercise all day. It all started in the early 1900s with the tram study. Who dies faster, the driver of the tram or the conductor that walks up and down? And we know that sedentary lifestyles is dangerous. It's dangerous for us physically, it's dangerous for us emotionally, and it's increases incidence of death. You die if you don't move. And water, we don't drink enough. We actually need to hydrate the brain cells. My theory is that they heat up and give you... Not really, but you need water. In START, S is for sunlight. So we know the important role in sunlight. You know, if you walk outside even on cloudy days, it's something like 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 lux, whereas indoors, it's much less than that, and you need that sunlight to reset your sleep cycle. And if you're not getting that exposure to the blue light, then you're not alert, and you're not awake during the day. And you sleep poorly, and it's a bad cycle to get into and that affects your emotional well-being.

And the next one is T, temperance. There are some things that are okay in small quantities, but it's good to back off on quantities on other things and just keeping that balance. It's not only in the things you consume, but it's also the temperance and overall like how much Netflix do you binge on, all those sorts of things. It's just keeping things in moderation. The next one is air, fresh air. We need fresh air and having well-ventilated workspace is very important. Rest is the next one, so sleep is essential. If you're operating on... You can live off three or four hours a night. You can, but you're not going to be at your optimum.

Last one was trust. For some people, that's like a faith. For others, it's mindfulness. And for me, it's also that relationship component as well, having really positive friendships inside work and outside work as well. I think it's important to be careful with relationships in work because there will be professional barriers there, but it's actually also important to have friendships within your workspace as well because when you're debriefing on an issue and debriefing to someone who understands that issue well is quite important. Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:

There's so much there, and it's interesting, that NEWSTART acronym. I really like it. It maps beautifully to how we're sort of thinking or conceptualising about the pillars of well-being perhaps through the work that we're doing. And I like that idea of trust and how you can relate that to social connection, and you've done that. I know for me, personally, I get a lot of social connection through the work that I do, and that's actually really important. And you're right. There's still times you might need to have those sort of boundaries, but yeah, heaps there. I want a specific though. What's one-

David Carter:

What do I-

Dorian Broomhall:

... thing that you're doing that encapsulates some of those things that you find particularly useful for you and you know about when you don't do?

David Carter:

Let me give you two, value for money. The one thing is my running. I love running. So, I've got a training programme, and I've got a goal. And at the moment, it's a marathon training programme, and it's on my watch, so it measures all the heart rate and cadence and all those sorts of things. And the neuroscience behind setting a goal and working towards that goal is incredibly important. If you feel like you're just drifting and not going anywhere, it's really bad for the human psyche. I'm convinced of that. Whereas if you've got, "I want to be there," and you're starting to, even small steps, edge towards it, it gives you a reason to put the shoes on and to get out there.

But once you get started, I feel great. I can be stressed as all heck, and then I'm out 15 clicks into a trail run, and I just love it, the connection with the environment, the dusty trail, and the birds and the sometimes snakes, but that's not so good, but it's good for the heart rate. But just the river, the sweat, the challenge, the grit, and then you finish, and you're a little bit closer to your goal. I ran a little bit quicker today. My heart rate was, on average, a little bit lower, my cadence was steady, all those sorts of things, and it just feels great to have that single focus. So that's the one thing.

Goal setting, that's a physical thing, and I feel good for that. But goal setting, I'm really interested. I've always had goals like short-term goals, medium-term goals and long-term goals. And I read Sheer Will by Michael Groom a number of years ago, and it's coming out as a Netflix movie now, and I really recommend it. It's about these two mountaineers. They head up this peak that hadn't been done before, and they almost die doing that. And then, they come down, and they had a climbing accident, and one of them falls into a crevasse and is left for dead by the other guy. And he manages to miraculously get himself out of this crevasse, but he's dehydrated. He's got a shattered leg, and he's just really beaten up physically, and he's got ages to go to base camp. And the thing that gets him to base camp, the thing that saves his life is he thought to himself, "I can't do that. I can't get myself to base camp. It's just insurmountable. There's no way I can achieve that."

But the way he does it, psychologically, he goes, "But what I can do, I can lie here and die. Well, what I can do is I can just get myself to that rock." And not only does he say, "I'm going to get to that rock," but "I'm going to get to that rock by this amount of time," and he just bust his guts to get there. He just works like an absolute dog, but he gets there. So actually, he saves his life by changing his attitude towards, "I'm heading towards something, and it's achievable. And if I work hard, I'll get it," and then he gets it. And he gets that dopamine hit of, "Yeah, I got there. It was tough, but I got there." And then, he goes, "But then, I'm going to go there, and then I'm going to go there." And little by little, he ends up getting back to base camp. Just incredible story, if you get an opportunity to watch it or to read it.

But I'm starting to think about that in my work ethic as well. What are my goals for this month? What are my goals for this quarter? What are these yearly goals, and how does that work cycle fit in? What are the goals for me personally? What are my goals for the team, and how do I interact with the organisation as a whole?

Dorian Broomhall:

I think the bit that I'll pull out of that that is implied in what you said, it's the benefit of doing things that... Your example of someone literally needing to save their life isn't mildly challenging, but you are giving examples of things that largely are mildly challenging or mildly uncomfortable. And again, back to that idea of having safety to do things that are just a little bit out of my comfort zone here. I mean, I was out for a run this morning, and I follow an American physician, Peter Attia, and his whole thing on longevity. And so for me, running, different to you, is about lots of zone two and keeping the heart rate really in check, park the ego about how fast you're going, but then also trying to do those VO2 max intervals. I try to do those once a week, four minutes on, four minutes off essentially, and trying to push yourself into that uncomfortable.

And for me, each of those four minutes every week, you get a little bit faster, and every week, they're just as hard. But you've got that self-talk there of going, "This is hard, and that's okay. If this is something that I'm doing right now that's hard today, that's good." I'm leaning into that discomfort for that four minutes because then I'm going to get to the end of that four minutes. The timer is going to tell me that you can take a break and actually you've made it, and you get to the end like you're saying with your trail run and get to the end and you go, "Gee, that's great."

Throughout the examples that you're giving here though, I think being able to relate that to goal setting in a work context, to do things that might be a little bit out of your comfort zone, but then all linking back to sort of where you're going at the start, too. Self-identifying, "What am I not very good at," having a compassionate conversation with yourself to say, "Well, what am I not very good at, and therefore, what do I need to do to lean into that discomfort to do that better?" If you do all of that, what do you think happens then?

David Carter:

Become an awesome manager.

Dorian Broomhall:

That's a good answer.

David Carter:

No, look, it's a constant cycle, isn't it? Yeah. For me, one thing I like to do is reflection as part of my learning style, and it's looking and learning from the rear vision mirror. A hundred percent need to look through the front of the car and where you're going and have that goal, but it always needs to be in the lens of where you've been. And reflective practise for me is quite important because it's... At the start, we spoke about you do a management course, and then you go, "Oh, yeah. I understand it. Yeah, cool. I'll be a good manager, but oh, actually I'm not. I'd really screwed up in the way I spoke to that person or whatever." But reflecting on that and learning from it is super important.

Look, I think recognising where I'm at during the day is something that is becoming important to me at the moment is there is some drudgery in work. Sometimes it's 3:30, and the lunch break's worn off, and you've still got a lot of things to do. You're recognising at this stage that you're not going to get through them all, but the end of the day is not there yet, but actually, what do you do with that time to still stay efficient and productive and those sorts of things? And I think how I structure the day is actually quite important.

I say a good friend of mine, a friend of mine, but is actually one of my lecturers, wrote a book, Seven Secrets to Success, and he talks about a job needs to have three things. It needs to be meaningful or have for purpose. It needs to be engaging. It needs to be a little bit fun. But that 3:30 moment, it may not be that much fun, and you're struggling to find purpose, but it helps if you recognise where you're at and say, "Well, actually, what I can do is this." I might revert to an easy task at that time of the day, and whereas I might really set the more struggling, difficult things to the start of the day when I'm fresh and cognitively bright and a little bit had too many knocks to the limbic centre, and I can engage with someone really well. So find the things a little bit easier to do at the challenging parts of the day and also just recognise where you're at as well.

There's those triggers that you go, "Oh, actually, things are getting into that out of control zone." When you're completely in control, things are a little bit boring and probably you're not working at your best even. And then, there's that middle zone where it's a bit of in the grey, and if you just work that a little bit harder, you might achieve it. And then, there's a completely out of control zone where I just give up. You're not going to get it. Just stop that sprint, just go back to a walk. And it's recognising when you're just tipping that balance of trying to do too many things, trying to answer too many people all at once, trying to solve people's problems for them rather than just go back to that questioning and that self-regulation as well and just keeping in the middle of that bell curve of being alert and efficient and productive and not getting dysregulated from really flat or really excited. So that's something I'm working on personally as a manager at the moment.

Dorian Broomhall:

I like that bell curve. For me, in my mind, it's bored and overstimulated. How do you regulate where you are in that?

David Carter:

Yeah, I'm-

Dorian Broomhall:

It's the same as what you're talking about if something's not challenging or interesting, or I don't have enough to do, I just do nothing. Then, it's easy then to tip too far to that overstimulated end where it's like, as you say, you've actually lost control a little bit. It's like, "Okay, taking a breath, step back, whatever it is we need to do." What I love about where you've taken this conversation is you're not separating out individual well-being from work so that they're somehow they're totally independent of one another. The work and finding meaning in our work and finding the right balance throughout the day as best we can when we've got the option to, which is hopefully more often than not, and the importance of that for your overarching well-being, I think, is so important.

The last thing I want to ask you then relating to that and back to where you started the conversation, again, about you as a manager, which just love that you've gone there, what are you trying to do or what are you doing to cultivate an environment for your team to be able to make those choices throughout the day or have a little bit more of what you're talking there about meaning and fun? I forget the middle one, sorry. But yeah, those three things in their work as best they can. What are you doing? What specifically?

David Carter:

I've learned this from my previous boss, Elizabeth, a little bit more recently. Yeah, I always thought that was the question I needed to ask. What am I doing to be an excellent manager? And I actually think I've got a really good team to work with, and it's actually more about what are they doing. There's shifting a little bit from that personal sphere. I've got all those things that I've talked about that I've got a hundred growth areas, but it's actually, being a good manager is actually not being a good manager. It's actually having a good team. And I think letting my team be a good team is really the biggest thing I can do. So the biggest thing I can do is actually not doing something. It's not standing in the way of other people's progress, and it's more about facilitating their capacity and recognising my mistakes, being vulnerable, recognising my strengths here, sure, but those three things.

I mean, coming back to the Amy Anderson's, those three things, being vulnerable, "Hey look, I don't know, but let me try and find out." I stuffed this up. So, if I get this part wrong, bear with me. Asking questions. Let's learn this. Let's work this out together. I think that's the biggest thing I can do personally at the moment for the success of my team is actually let the team win. Ask them what they need. Ask them what their goals are. They know their work better than I do. There's this real praxis between leading and leading a team, but at the same time, being led by the team. It's keeping in tune with what the needs of the team are. The [inaudible 00:30:52] group with leader rounding... Nadia calls it leader listening. I like that better actually. Leader listening is the key. It really is the key to doing that. I think as a leader, I need to stop talking and actually just listen a little bit more and work with the team.

Dorian Broomhall:

So there's so much there. I'm not sure if you're familiar with a recently published article. It's called Zombie Leadership essentially. I'll share it with you. You'll enjoy it. Around leadership ideas that won't die, and there's a lot of them. And we talk a lot now, elevate management programme around, "Hey, we should pay attention to what the evidence says because we do it in our clinical practise, but we don't do it in our management practise very well, right?" And this is a great example of it, but one of the ideas that that paper puts forward is around this idea of collective leadership. And yes, in the hierarchy, you need somebody who might be a formal manager whose job is then to do whatever that might be that's flipping that and going, "Right. So yeah, I might have the hierarchy or the positional authority, but my actual role here is to enable this collective leadership for this team," and you've articulated that absolutely beautifully, so thank you.

Really appreciate you joining the conversation and sharing some of your ideas. So many more things that I want to ask you, but we'll wrap it up there. And yeah, thanks again for coming and joining with this conversation.

David Carter:

Thanks for having me. We'll talk more about training after this running. Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:

Nice. Cheers.

David Carter:

Thank you.

Dorian Broomhall:

It's so interesting and enormously useful listening back to these conversations sometime after I've had them, and this one with David was absolutely no exception. A few of the things that I really took from that episode yet again was really David's approach around well-being and the interrelationship between well-being and work. They're not one or the other. They both inform each other right throughout. Him sharing some of his challenges around becoming a manager and what might happen to your personal well-being when you become a manager, which of course is probably when you need your well-being to be at its greatest, but possibly not something that is prioritised in those stages when we're striving so hard to support so many other people.

I also love this metaphor that he touches on the value of the detour, going that little bit further to get a reward such as a cup of coffee and some of those small benefits that might go with that. It reminds me a little bit of our friend Andy Boote's reference to the two-hour shuffle. Sometimes going out and doing something that's a little bit annoying might have a lot of upsides to it. And yes, I'll always be looking for the opportunity to take that cup of coffee break. Even if I've got coffee in the office, sometimes those walks out, that touch into sunshine even for five minutes can have some upsides. So get that cup of coffee even if it's a little bit more difficult than simply making it in the office.

David also introduced a different acronym around the pillars of well-being that I hadn't heard before, the NEWSTART acronym, and we've dropped a link to a little bit more information about that into the show notes because it's another really actionable and tangible way to think about your personal well-being. And it did really beautifully map across to the six pillars that we talk about. So if I consider the things that David mentioned, he absolutely touches on the importance of sleep whilst not necessarily going deep on it. The NEWSTART acronym links to light, which is unusual, I think. It's one of the pillars that probably doesn't get talked about enough, and he talks specifically about the importance of those high lux, that reason to get outside. Even on a cloudy day, it's much brighter outside than inside, and the importance of blue light in the morning. I think it's nice that he touched on those details there.

And of course, given that he's a physio, it's no surprise that movement is a priority in there. Though I did particularly like that he's got a focus at the moment on running for a particular goal and that he mentioned that it's only been in the last six months that that's really got back on track for him. I also thought that the nutrition touch on water, possibly something that we don't talk about enough, but really making sure that people are hydrated, not just well fueled from a food sense, but that water is just so important. The social connection that he talks about really touches in that idea of trust, and I think that's a lovely link. In order to have really strong social connection, you need that trust and that safety that talks about cultivating within the team and getting out of the way of the team to let the team do things. And of course, with that state regulation, this idea of self-management was something that we really talked on throughout the episode.

And something that I really liked that he started to say at the end is something that he's working on at the moment is staying really well regulated as a manager when things get difficult, not just simply allowing yourself to become overcome or dysregulated or over-regulated, but remembering that in those moments that that's the times that you really need to stay regulated and take a breath. And if I think about the best leaders that I've ever had the pleasure of working with, they always seem calm no matter what might be going on. I think it's a really, really nice takeaway for all of us, whether you're in a leadership role or not, to just think about what we're doing for our own regulation in those moments of difficulty.

Thanks again to David Carter for sharing his thoughts in this episode and being so open and generous with some of his ideas. Certainly, for me as an individual and as a manager, I took a lot away. Thanks again. Join me again for our next episode when I speak with Cat Schofield, the executive director of nursing and director of services for the Statewide Mental Health Services.