About the Guest

Dr. Sherry Walling is a clinical psychologist, entrepreneur, international speaker, yoga teacher, podcaster and best-selling author. She works with leaders and entrepreneurs around the world to help them tackle the many mental health and relationship challenges that go along with building a great business.

Her best-selling book, The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Keeping Your Sh*t Together, is a handbook for navigating life as an entrepreneur.

Married to a serial entrepreneur, Sherry combines her extensive experience helping people who have high-intensity jobs with her 18 years of personal experience in the trenches of the startup world. Sherry combines the insight and warmth of a therapist with the truth-telling mirth of someone who has been there.

When she’s not in the consulting room or hopping conferences; Sherry can be found on her paddleboard, in the yoga studio, or ushering her three kiddos through an art museum in some fabulous city.

She can also be found at ZenFounder.com, SherryWalling.com or on Twitter as @ZenFounder.

Links
Managing Founder Stress Guide

“How to Stay at the Top of Your Game” talk at BoS USA 2017 

Links Referenced: 

• Book recommendation: Play it Away by Charlie Hoehn
• Book recommendation: The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor 
• Sherry’s “How to Stay at the Top of Your Game” talk at BoS USA 2017 
• Managing Founder Stress Guide

Transcript:

Mike Julian: Running infrastructure at scale is hard, it's messy, it's complicated, and it has a tendency to go sideways in the middle of the night. Rather than talk about the idealized versions of things, we're going to talk about the rough edges. We're going to talk about what it's really like running infrastructure at scale. Welcome to the Real World DevOps podcast. I'm your host, Mike Julian, editor and analyst for Monitoring Weekly and author of O’Reilly's Practical Monitoring.

Mike Julian: This episode is sponsored by the lovely folks at InfluxData. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably also interested in better monitoring tools — and that's where Influx comes in. Personally, I'm a huge fan of their products, and I often recommend them to my own clients. You're probably familiar with their time series database, InfluxDB, but you may not be as familiar with their other tools. Telegraph for metrics collection from systems, coronagraph for visualization and capacitor for real-time streaming. All of this is available as open source, and they also have a hosted commercial version too. You can check all of this out at influxdata.com.

Mike Julian: Hi Folks, I'm Mike Julian, your hosts for the Real World DevOps podcast. I'm here with Dr. Sherry Walling, clinical psychologist, author and fellow podcaster at ZenFounder.com. Welcome to the show, Sherry.

Sherry Walling: Hey, it's my pleasure Mike. After a couple of reschedules, I'm glad we finally got this to come together.

Mike Julian: It was a bit of work to make that happen, but I'm really excited about this episode. So Sherry, why don't you start off by just telling us a bit about who you are and what you do.

Sherry Walling: Yeah. So like you said, I'm a clinical psychologist and I have spent my professional life working with people who have high intensity jobs. That looks like a couple of different things over the course of my career. Sometimes it's with folks in the military returning from military service. I've worked a lot with physicians, who have high intensity work either in the ER or in surgery. Then I actually work a lot with software entrepreneurs and software folks. My connection to the developer world is largely through my husband, Rob Walling, who maybe some of your audience know of MicroConf and things like that. So I work with really smart people who are trying to do really hard things, and often have a lot of pressure in their work lives.

Mike Julian: Yeah, that's some awesome stuff. The reason I'm especially interested in talking to you is as DevOps engineers, we lead extraordinarily stressful lives. A day in the life of a operations engineer… we’re project driven, and yet it's often interrupt heavy. So we're never really finishing anything, thanks to putting out fires constantly. Just so many fires is all the time, everything is always awful, everything's just a tire fire everywhere we look. So we're responsible for keeping systems of multimillion dollar, sometimes multi billion dollar companies running and available, and on call is a standard part of the job. And sometimes this is even this is really bad, like the on call rotations of some companies might be 15 pages a night for a week or two weeks at a time, and it just gets insane. This is not just a few years or one job, this is like an entire career. So to say that the role of an Ops engineer is stressed, is kind of an understatement. So I'm really excited to talk to you about how can we manage the stress? Is there something we can do about it? How can we improve our lives?

Sherry Walling: Well, I'm really empathizing with the way that you're describing this, and there's a couple of things that you said that would lead me to believe that folks who are doing this kind of work are really at a pretty high risk for burnout.Whenever there's high work demand, so lots of things to do without having appropriately accomplishable goals, goals that have a tight timeline and clear successes — those three things tend to be a combination that really causes burnout in a lot of folks. So I can empathize with the amount of stress that folks are feeling, and certainly guessing that some of your listeners are really struggling at this point with stress related difficulties, or things like burnout.

Mike Julian: Yeah, absolutely. So why don't we talk, why don't we just start with burnout? There's so many different ways that I want to tackle this conversation, but why don't we just start with burnout? What is burnout?

Sherry Walling: Yeah, so burnout is a newly recognized clinical syndrome. It has its own diagnostic code. It is a real thing.

Mike Julian: That's fantastic. It's about time.

Sherry Walling: It is about time. It exists in ICD 10, which is the International Classification of Disorders 10. It's called something like “burnout estate of vital exhaustion,” is the technical title which I think is really lovely language that paints the picture of what this feels like. Vital exhaustion. So burnout is something that was ...