Strategic Resilience: Dr. Marie-Helene Pelletier On Boosting Mental Health And Performance In The Workplace

In this episode, Tony Martignetti sits down with Dr. Marie-Helene Pelletier to explore the concept of strategic resilience. With her unique blend of psychology and business acumen, Marie-Helene shares valuable insights on how professionals and business leaders can thrive by strategically enhancing their workplace mental health. Tune in to discover how investing in resilience can transform your work performance and personal well-being. This conversation delves into the intersection of psychology and business strategy, making it a must-listen for anyone looking to bolster their resilience in today's demanding professional landscape.

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It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier, better known to her colleagues as MH, who brings a signature mix of business and psychology to the table. She holds both a PhD and an MBA. She translates psychology research into strategies professionals, business leaders, and their teams need to thrive. MH shares what psychologists know, but other professionals and business leaders may not know about resilience, specifically the intersection of successful work performance, and strong workplace mental health.

She has over twenty years of experience as a practicing psychologist and a senior leader in the corporate insurance, governance, and healthcare sectors. Her award-winning book, The Resilience Plan: A Strategic Approach to Optimizing Your Work Performance And Mental Health, was named a top five book to read by Inc. Magazine and Forbes. It is truly a pleasure to welcome you to the show.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. 

It's amazing when I read your accolades and see all the things that you've gotten into and how you've come to this place where you're making an impact. I'm looking forward to the journey that got you into this work and how you've landed in this place of making a big impact in the workplace through the different modalities that you've created. It's pretty fun.

Your book is fantastic. Thank you so much for all the brilliance you put into your thought leadership. I'm glad that we're able to dive into that as well. Before we do anything on the book, I want to give people a sense of who is this person who's standing in front of us here. What we're going to do, as we always do in the show, is dive through what's called the flashpoint moments of your journey. What I want to do is I want to turn it over to you and allow you to share the moments along your journey that have ignited your gifts into the world, and you can share what you're called to share. Along the way, we'll stop and look at the themes that are showing up.

In general, I followed what I was interested in and paid attention to opportunities that came up that interested me truly. Sometimes I describe this as following my nose. One of the flash points I would probably say is early in my career, I had the chance to move to a small remote area with my husband, mostly because of his work. That meant that I found myself in a small and remote community in year one of practice as at the time as a generalist psychologist. Knowing that I was going to go to that remote area, I did a number of additional internships.

The Turning Point In Workplace Mental Health

I took additional supervision and ended up in that first year working in almost all the possible areas a psychologist would work in. One of them was the workplace. Mental health was in employee and family assistance programs which were at the beginning at that time. That was a turning point for me, seeing the opportunity that we would have to bring what we know from psychology research and practice to everyone in a proactive way and deal with things much more proactively sooner while people were still at work, still contributing and all these things, starting to struggle with something but having an opportunity to change the course of how things would go for that. 

Embrace the power of proactive mental health strategies in the workplace to stay ahead and thrive.

I love the way you're diving into this is a sense of bringing awareness, where sometimes I don't think there was always an awareness that there is this support out there. There are people out there who can help, especially in the workplace. 

That is something that's still fairly present where we as employees of an organization often will have access to resources and we don't tend to use them. They tend to be underutilized. That's a known fact. Sometimes it's because of insufficient communication. Sometimes it's a lack of trust in the confidentiality or lack of belief that these resources may help, but the reality is they're there and often all you need, and at least will be a first step towards what you need. That represented a very eye-opening significant opportunity and then an interest in doing even more. 

Challenges In Early Days Of Workplace Mental Health

In those early days, what were the biggest hurdles to bringing this type of service inside organizations? Was it a cost-benefit proposal? What are some of the challenges you faced in the early days of doing this work? 

At the time, I was not working on bringing the service to organizations. I was a service provider. I was working for one of those organizations. I learned later that in these early days, part of the difficulty was to make a business case and that kind of thing for them. That was not a problem for me. I was in my office. People were booked to see me, and no hurdle there. It was seen as a resource. It's there. I've got something going on with my kids, with my partner, or personally.

I can talk to this person to hopefully help. We were doing this. My particular window at the time as a service provider was magnificent. From the organizations that were providing these services and connecting with those that would purchase them, there was an emerging need, but probably a need to make the business case. 

I'm sure that fell on your lap a bit more as time went on, but it is interesting that you got insulated from the frontline of having to sell the case, but at least you got a chance to serve. You probably heard many amazing things from people coming in and not just family-related, but I'm sure there are a lot of burnout and stress-related things that come to the table that are intertwined with the personal elements. 

The personal and the professional are all in one person. We have things going on on the personal side, and things going on on the professional side, and it's all in one person. It's all in Tony. It's all in MH. Emotions don't have lanes. It's all here. 

Strategic Resilience: Emotions don't have lanes; our personal and professional lives are intertwined.

I love that, “Emotions don't have lanes.” They intertwine. In some ways, it's trying to figure out like,
“What do they mean? How do we make sense of them?” Tell me what happens next. As you started to get into this work, it seemed like it was a calling from the get-go. It was pulling from you from the early days. How did things progress for you as you went through this journey? 

As I said, I was in that remote isolated northern area. I knew that I wanted to continue my education and was interested in the programs on the West Coast. All that was happening on the East Coast. I was interested in this program at UBC and ended up moving here, and starting my doctoral studies. I ended up doing research in what was called at the time, telehealth. It was providing psychological services via video conferencing, but it was before FaceTime existed.

I had to use six telephone lines to transmit video and audio data. I had to use lots of technology that was expensive and a number of things that were fairly complex from a management perspective, from a financial perspective, in addition to all the research on the psychological side of things. Therefore, as I did this particular piece of research, I ended up having the chance to have to lead a large team of individuals, retain them over a long period of time without being able to pay them, and also have to have a lot of funding for the technology.

All this led me to realize I was interested in management. That led me to enter the MBA program on a part-time basis while I was starting my first leadership role. That's how it all came together, mixing the psychology and business side of things. 

Combining psychology and business allows leaders to create strategies that ensure both performance and mental health are optimized.

It's one of those situations where you’re like, “I never thought this would be something that I would be getting into, but here I am.” In the telehealth aspect of this, it is interesting that's early days, to be pre-FaceTime and having that element included is not easy. It's a lot of adaptation.

It was considered pre-embryonic from a business perspective. At the time, people had no interest. You were wondering why anyone would be interested in this area, but I had come from a small remote location seeing how access to services was very challenging. That is what motivated my idea and desire to pursue and do original research in this area. You never know sometimes, but life events happen and for me, it was learning from these events and wanting to learn more. 

I love it because there's a sense that this could be a big obstacle for many people when they say this is not possible, but it opens a door for something that is extremely possible. Now, we welcome it. I think most people welcome the idea of operating virtually with a psychologist or with any practitioner of sorts. Even for an internal medicine professional. They've done consults through Zoom. That's amazing we do that nowadays. You started this practice and you've got people who have been hired. You initially weren't paying them. Now you started to pay them and you started building this business. Tell me what happens along that next part of the journey. 

That part was because I was a doctoral student. The specific nature of the study I was doing was testing the efficacy of cognitive behavior therapy for social anxiety disorder. I was using a fully developed treatment protocol that involved session exposure. That exposure was exposure to people since we were dealing with social anxiety. We would not have wanted to introduce variability in the exposure by having different people. It needed to be the same people. As a doctoral student, you don't have funds or money. You have to provide value to people who accept to be involved in your research in different ways. That's what I did with these individuals. Outside of this moment, no. People need to be paid for the services they provide. 

I was being facetious about that. It's funny because when you think about people being involved in these programs do have to give their time, and participating in these things requires something that they can be sure that they're giving an unbiased approach to this. I think that's great that's what it was. Tell me what happens as you start to build out this practice? 

After that, what happened is I worked within an employee and family assistance program, a large organization. Immediately after my PhD, I started my MBA on a part-time basis, as well as junior leadership role. My first leadership role was leading a call center. If anyone has ever led a call center, you know what it's like entering a fire every single day. My colleague psychologist at the time looked at me and said, “What are you doing? Why would you want to do this?” I was interested. I wanted to almost test myself and see, “Am I just interested, or do I enjoy this type of work?” I did that, and I truly enjoyed it.

From there, I finished the MBA and progressed in more senior leadership roles up to a chief officer role, and then moved into various other types of organizations, public health, and insurance. In the past few years, I’ve been on my own mostly doing keynotes at conferences, and executive coaching, and still have a small practice as a psychologist. 

How did that shift affect your view of things? At some point, you stop being one thing and then you start becoming many other things. You can't necessarily spend all of your time being a psychologist or a leader leading a company. How did that affect you personally? Were you feeling like you were torn, or did you look at the challenges and say, “This is what I'm evolving to be?” 

Evolving Professional Identity

I like the way you said it. This is what I'm evolving to be. If I had paused to think about it, that's how I would've thought about it, but I didn't. I seemed to do what seemed to be the thing that made sense to do next while I was initially doing more purely focused psychologist work that felt right. When I moved into leadership roles, that felt right. I did notice how even when I was a psychologist, I seemed to be a bit more business-minded than a lot of my colleagues. When I moved into business, I was more people-minded than most of my colleagues.

I was like, “That's what it means to be interdisciplinary.” In some ways, you have your own island sometimes but that worked out fine, then people started calling me as the translator. I can translate the psychology and business and the business and psychology. It seemed to be the place where I needed to be. 

There's something about that that I embrace. Sometimes we think we have to be attached to one identity, and that's it. That's who we are. The reality is our identities are multiple and we have to continue to include the past self of who we are and bring it into our new identity so that it becomes an additive piece and things you've continued to add in more pieces of who you are. That has made you into a more full-bodied person who can take in and be able to play differently in the spaces you run.

Your comment also will be important for all of us and apply to all of us as we incorporate in our personal and professional lives AI even more. Sometimes the impression depends on how much AI is in your life right now, but for some, it brings questions of, “What contribution do I bring, given that AI can do all these things and all that.” Part of a healthy mindset or response to this is to remind ourselves of the various parts of our identity, our past experience, our current experience, and our knowledge all coming together to create a contribution that's unique and needed. 

I love your perspective on this. It's an interesting way of touching on where we're headed because there are a lot of challenges people are facing right now and have been facing for a number of years around who are we now, who are we with all of the technologies we have, and how do we maintain a sense of sanity in the world that is constantly challenging us. This is probably going to lead us into a good conversation around your book, which I love to get into, but I don't want to go too fast. Is there any other flashpoint you wanted to share before we get into the book? 

We've probably covered the main ones. Now I would say being in the work I do, one of the key pieces has continued to be in different ways, but paying attention to what's going on and following, listening, and following in the same way that when you do academic research, a large part of what you do as a researcher is you publish articles and all. A good way to think about these publications or these articles is that you are contributing to a conversation.

What makes an article relevant in part is the knowledge you have about what other things have been said before you are saying this thing now in this particular article, and you're that way contributing to this conversation. I find it is very similar to the way I approach things now where part of what I need to do is listen to the conversation, both the one that's happening in the research realm and the one that's happening in the real world, in industry and organizations, and then extract the themes that need to be contributed next. That's a lot of what I do that seems to work well this time in this context. 

That's a great perspective. I think it's one that I don't often hear from people. I can imagine that it is something that we should be doing more of. If we want to contribute positively to the ongoing research and the ongoing perspective, we have to make sure that we're tuning in at the right places and seeing where is the data going and where is the conversation going. It's hard to do, I can imagine, especially with the amount of data that's going out there right now. 

The amount and the even more multifaceted perspectives we need to take. Take AI where there are usually technology perspectives, business, human resources, organizational safety, psychology, and ethics. It ends up being in a number of realms before you can see what's going on. 

Especially when it comes down to the global nature of things. It's not like we're talking about this in a bubble. We're having technology coming out of different pockets. Whereas, in the past, you used to have these niche places. Silicon Valley used to be the way you'd get all your information from, or Boston was a good hub, but now it's coming from all over the place. You have to be finding ways to stay tuned to what's happening.

Overview Of Strategic Resilience

Tell me what would you like to go to next. Let's go to the book and talk a bit about resilience. What got you interested in this particular area? Was it something that you landed on because of all the work you were doing in corporations? Tell me about the story that got you to the book. 

If I take this one notch further, it is specifically about strategic resilience. That's important because it combines what we know about resilience from a psychological perspective with what we know about being strategic from a business perspective. That's the core additional contribution that I wanted to bring to this book.

Strategic resilience is about combining what we know from psychology with strategic business thinking to thrive in demanding roles.

It came because in all of my work, whether it's with audience, executive coaching, or my psychology work, I end up working a lot with professionals and leaders. They are fantastic, highly resourceful, highly performing, and all these things. They are a bit more in general focused on hard skills, hard data, and that kind of thing, but they're also human and facing an immense amount of demands, especially as they progress in more senior roles that they have wanted and are again fantastic at. 

Being human means, at some point, they'll be feeling the amount of demands that they're experiencing. Some of them will feel a little bit come back out, moderately struggle, possibly burnout, and all those kinds of things. As I've been working with those professionals and leaders, the first thing I need to be able to do is help them see how investing strategically in their resilience makes sense and is required.

I ended up using more and more that analogy that if we were in business and had a great idea about a certain product or service, would we have that great idea and go launch it? Would we have this great idea and then turn to, “Who else is offering anything close to this? How much are they charging for it? Who's buying it? How much are they willing to pay for it? What forces in the future might impact the demand for this?”

We would do all this. That is strategic thinking that leads to a strategy for our launch. We need to do the same thing about resilience. It's not enough everyone knows the kinds of things that research supports would increase our resilience. We've heard them during a pandemic. We read them anywhere you read about resilience, and they are research-supported. However, the challenge is not in knowing it's in implementing it. What's often missing is to have a strategy that takes your context into account. That is what I talk about in the book. 

That's wonderful. I love that you described that because instead of moving so fast that you don't have a chance to build the frameworks and the ways of knowing, are we setting ourselves up for success? Are we even aware of all of the things that are happening? Quick decisions are not going to be the path to getting there. It's about almost slowing down to speed up. 

That slowing down is not going to take you four weeks of time off. Sometimes people when the demands are high and we're running all day every day, it feels like, “Great, but I don't have time to even have that reflection.” Having that reflection does not take time. This is not a strategic exercise process where you need to retreat for two weeks in a remote area to think on your own. You can take a flight from one coast to the other in North America or across any of the ponds, and you'll have your resilience plan when you get out. I've distilled the main ways in which my clients, people, and I have used it as well. It seems to be able to get there in the most effective way. 

The book has been out for how long now? 

It's been out for almost seven months. 

Since it's been out, have you noticed that people are starting to grasp these concepts? They're starting to see the benefit of putting these types of plans in place, these resilient plans.

From my work prior, and even in the process of writing the book, I've run focus groups to further test these exercises and this overall approach. That's one of the things where you end up hearing from people.

I love that. It's great to have feedback. When you write a book, it's like the start of a dialogue. I think that's a beautiful thing. 

I was not expecting that. I was maybe hoping. I was mostly wanting to have this information available to people because many of my clients had said, “I'm glad I know this now. It's so helpful. I wish I knew this sooner.” That sentence came out a number of times, which is what at some point made me think, “Step back. Maybe you have a chance to put this in the hands of more people sooner.” That's what I'm starting to see in the comments I'm hearing. It's fabulous and exciting. 

It's validating to know that the work you're doing is having an impact and that it was a worthwhile endeavor to put this out into the world and create something that can allow others to learn a path themselves to put this in place. It seems so simple, but yet many companies and people have gotten it wrong along the way. What is interesting about this is I don't know what has been the biggest obstacle that you've seen that companies get in the way of them doing this right.

You're right that comment about it is so simple. Sometimes it does feel, “If I said well, in order to ensure you have fantastic resilience if you learn and then fill in the blank,” to do something completely complex, “Stand on your head while eating blueberries and singing,” then people would like to want to try to do this. It does not have to be complex in that sense.

It requires stepping back and evaluating certain elements of your context so that you align your actions with what makes sense to you at this moment in time. That's the other important piece that the strategy we need nowadays may need to evolve in 3 months, 6 months, or 1 year, the same way they would need to evolve in business. It's not complex. It's powerful and effective if we invest a little bit of focus to get it done. 

Strategic resilience plans need to evolve just like business strategies. Stay adaptable to remain resilient.

I'm going to flip it back to you in terms of where you've been doing this, you put this book out there. What have you learned about yourself in this process not just about the writing, but also when you look at now, how has your work changed you?

Back to the writing, I found the writing to be more demanding and more enjoyable experience than I thought. I knew it would be demanding. It was more demanding than I thought it would be, but also more enjoyable. I've had the chance to discover this whole community of writers that are now some of them friends, colleagues, and people who support each other. That's been wonderful. That's a positive, surprising learning for me. What is also a great one is conversations like this. I knew if you have a book, part of what you'll have to do after is make sure that you talk about it and have conversations, possibly join people on podcasts, and I was thinking, “I'll do that.”

At times, thinking of it more as a necessary task to support the right business things to do for a book, which it is. However, very rapidly, it became so much more than this, Like how you and I. Without me having written this book, the likelihood that you and I would've had a conversation is fairly low. With this, that means I get to connect with you and have this conversation, and hopefully, someone is going to get something out of this, even me. I do think it's fantastic. That is something that surprised me and is amazing. The third one is what I was hoping it would do, open doors that I would not even know existed, which is cool as well. 

It's such a great reflection and a very humbling experience for you to say that because it's like you do the book, you write the book, it has its own challenges and elements of it that you're surprised by, but then you also realize it opens up this whole world of connections. It’s not selfishly saying, “I'm going to make all these connections and it's going to give me business.” It's more about the conversations that start to spark new ideas and bring new things into your world. I think that's the beauty of being bold enough to put something out there in the world like you do. 

I've talked to other authors about this, how initially you don't necessarily think of it as a bold thing to do. You do it for whatever reason you have to do it. Like me, I had these comments about, “I wish I knew this sooner.” I put it in the hands of more people sooner. It got to a point where I realized, “Now it's going to be in the world.” By that time, the book was written but there was a moment when I thought, “Okay.” That's where the boldness happened. By that time, it had to be there because the book was created. 

Future Focus And Emerging Themes

When you think about the next things for you or the things that are top of mind these days, what's on the agenda for you when it comes to the next leap that you'd be taking? This is a lot right now, but I'm wondering, where are you leaning into in terms of areas you want to focus on as you move forward? 

Being still in year one of the book, I'm very much in the movement that's created by the book itself, I have to say. There isn't an immediate next step as big as this that is in front of me. The other thing too is that when you write a book, and that's true in different ways for different people, for me, it did mean making some choices from a resilience planning perspective.

There are things that I was interested in that I had to put on pause and say, “I'll come back to this after this one big project is further on its way.” It is now a moment where I can return to some of these things, and I want to do that. I’m not telling you that I'm writing the next big book. I'm probably not going to write another book. I loved this one, but I have many other things I want to do. Potentially, that’s it.

To answer your question, it's turning to those other projects like what other new themes are coming up, like what we were talking about earlier, the academic research and the workplaces, and my best ways to support this. In part, they're connected with the book. In part, they're emerging themes that we need to make sense of, given what we know, things like AI, for example, and others. That's where my focus is. 

It's interesting that you said that because I was thinking that's where you're going to head next. Our conversation earlier had me thinking that there was going to be an element of how this strategic resilience maps out as we go into the next stage of where we're headed in terms of society, or how this affects a workplace as we go forward. The AI element is probably on the top of everyone's tongue at this point, but I'm sure it weighs heavily into the way you're thinking about this too. 

Yes, it does. It is one of the keynotes that I do most often these days.

You deserve a break. Don't feel any pressure. Do what you need to do. We all need time to recharge and get the batteries back up and running. We have to have fun. Is there anything you like to share that you haven't shared already in terms of from the book or from your journey that you think the audience could benefit from hearing? 

As professionals and leaders listen to the conversations on strategic resilience, there is this question, “Do I need this? I'm feeling pretty good. Is this something I need to pay attention to?” What is my recommendation with this is to stay curious and see if, for you, this may be your competitive advantage. Some people like to call it, “My secret weapon,” or however you call it. This investment that potentially you make in yourself, there may be others.

That's why I'm saying stay curious, “Is this one? Are there others?”t I would say stay curious about how you're investing in yourself professionally and personally so that you can build that buffer and your baseline so to speak, such that as we continue to navigate in the very exciting things and also the very demanding things, you'll come at them with bringing your best from both on the personal and professional side. 

Strategic Resilience: Stay curious about how you're investing in yourself professionally and personally.

Influential Books And Their Impact

I love that. That's a great insight because we do need to have that aperture open a little longer sometimes, and it can be the secret weapon or secret sauce, we talk about weapons here. I think it's a great perspective to have. I'm going to shift gears. We have one last question I'm going to ask, and I'll ask this of every guest. I'm excited to hear what you have to say on this. What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you and why? 

The book I'm going to tell you about has been edited and published at least twice, translated into over twenty languages, and bought by over a million people. The name of it is Mind Over Mood. That book has been written by Greenberger and Padesky. It's a workbook, 8 by 11, with some theory, and lots of exercises. It is a book that is based entirely on cognitive behavior therapy and has chapters on various experiences we may have as humans, like feeling anxious, feeling that our mood is down, feeling impatience, and potentially all these things, experiences that we can all have at various degrees.

This book is magnificent, in my opinion, because it is research-based, but immensely practical as well. It's a book that if I could put in everyone's home, I would. I would put it on everyone's desk at work because it would open conversations about how are you investing in your own mental health. That's the book I would mention.

The second author, Dr. Christine Padesky is an endorser of my book. When I received her endorsement, I was like, “I am satisfied. I can move on now,” but there were other wonderful moments and endorsers. All this to say, Mind Over Mood is a book that has been significant. It has helped many people I've worked with. It's a fantastic resource. 

I'm putting that on my list. Thanks for the recommendation. Is there anything else? Any other books that come to mind that you'd like to recommend or to talk about? 

A lot of people know about Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini. He is also an endorser of my book. He is another one that I'm like, “Seriously? That's so incredible.” It’s a different type of book, but I think it's a useful one for all of us. Cialdini is a professor at Arizona State. This book has been published also in a more recent version since its first publication 40 years ago. It's a wonderful combination of bringing what we know from social psychology research into very practical points. It's especially important I think for anyone in business and sales for sure, but also useful for everyone. It applies to real-life situations at work and outside of work. 

It's a great book and it's something that has been mentioned here quite a few times. What I love about the people you've mentioned in both books is it's cool when you think about how you would admire these authors, these thought leaders, and then you eventually have the gumption to ask them, “Would you be open to endorsing my book or what have you?” When they do, it's almost like you have a “pinch me” moment. It's like, “Can you believe it?” These things happen. Dreams come true.

It's extremely valuable and validating to know that someone who knows so much about this particular area, that's the case for Robert Cialdini and the case for Christine Padesky. I've got others too that look at this from their perspective and say, “This is a unique contribution, a book I would recommend.” You're completely right. I had been to talks and workshops by both of these immensely well-renowned individuals. It is very meaningful for me as an author. 

This has been great. I have enjoyed our conversation. Everything you shared was coming from a place of humbleness because I know you're doing a lot of great stuff in the world. Your book is brilliant. It's such a great angle on looking at how people are creating that resilience in their businesses and themselves. I also love the journey you've been on because it incorporates all these different elements of who you are. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing yourself with us. 

Thank you for having pulled it out of me. I very much enjoyed the conversation.

Before I let you go, I want to make sure I give the readers a chance to find out where they can learn more about you. What's the best place to reach out? 

They can go to TheResiliencePlan.com. That website will get you to everything that I do, including the book. We'll have a link to worksheets if you're interested in some of the exercises that I have in my book. You don't even have to have the book. They are very self-explanatory. We'll have that there and LinkedIn is always a good place to connect so that I can see what you are contributing to the conversation and support. You can do the same. That way we can all help each other even more. 

Keep the conversation going. What we're all about is using connections to change the world together. Thank you so much and thanks to the audience for coming on the journey. I know you're leaving inspired and ready to take on new challenges with this new plan that you're going to put in place. 

Important Links:

• The Resilience Plan: A Strategic Approach to Optimizing Your Work Performance And Mental Health

• Mind Over Mood

• Influence

• TheResiliencePlan.com

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