7/6/2022

What type of pharmacy manager are you?

A recent Canadian Pharmacist Association national survey on pharmacists’ mental health revealed some disturbingly negative results with many of us at risk of leaving the profession and others currently looking elsewhere for work. It points to us having to ask ourselves bigger questions to help navigate from here.

Forget about customers, staff and vaccines for a moment. Let go of the details of the day, breath and zoom out. Think bigger.

Who are you? What do you stand for? What do you want to leave to others? What are your obsessions and are they healthy? What brings you reprieve from the grind? What core values describe you as a pharmacist/manager/leader? What does your pharmacy practice stand for?

Like a mission statement for yourself, your leadership identity helps you navigate the hard moments that can have you sidetracked, going down tangents or on the wrong path before its too late to turn around.

How can you figure out all these questions in one simple exercise?

In their book The 5 Choices by Kogan et al, they offer a spidergram that can be applied to pharmacy. By plotting the top 6 values of your practice you can easily evaluate how evenly aligned or unbalanced your current situation is. Repeat the exercise with the values applied to your pharmacy or your life overall.

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What about negative thoughts?

It starts with you. Once you deep dive into who you are, you will be able to define your identity and let that guide you. Who do you want to be? How do your friends, kids or staff see you?

Leaning on principles of Cognitive Behaviroual Therapy (CBT), the goal is not to avoid negative thoughts, but to test their validation before believing them. I use a template of important questions to help validate negative thoughts called Mindset Challenge Log. Print if off and journal with it to train your brain to cope instead of crumble. With repeated use, your train of thought will find these important questions without writing or journaling. It takes some practice, but allows us to build resilience at work and at home.

CBT is something we mention to patients in counseling, yet we don’t practice it ourselves. Bias is a factor here that we can start to navigate with sleep, nutrition and exercise as a start. When was the last time you had an uninterrupted healthy lunch on shift! We may not always take our own advice, but we would be advised to zoom out to the bigger picture for clarity.

To go deeper, find out how you stack up on sleep, nutrition & mindset with the 1-hour Sleep & Nutrition Accelerator.