The Care and Monitoring of You

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[Music] [Music] hi there so as kavis said I'm Mary this is my dog ember you'll learn more about him in a minute but we're talking to you today about the care and monitoring of you the first of all I'm going to talk a little bit about Who I am then we're going to talk about you we're talking about preventing burnout in both of us so first of all who am I I am a community builder both personally and professionally I live in San Francisco and as you can tell I don't really look like someone who needs the service jobs my dog also if you've noticed doesn't really look like a service dog but as you can see this is a picture of me when I was three and I've got a MedicAlert bracelet on my left wrist that bracelet identifies me as a type 1 diabetic and there are a lot of misconceptions about type 1 diabetes including this so those misconceptions about what I can and can't eat there's misconceptions about whether or not it's curable so a couple quick things for you to understand a little where I'm coming from type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease it is not curable it is treatable however which leads me to my next picture is this is a little representation of some of the things that I carry with me on a daily basis some of the devices I wear some of the things that help me monitor myself including my dog I tend to be a very independent person I'm outdoorsy and luckily type 1 diabetes does not keep me from doing the things that I want to do so I'm outside on a regular basis I fly in a wind tunnel for indoor skydiving do a lot of different things that keep me busy and keep me on my toes and diabetes doesn't stop me from that so then where does ember come in I got him as a pet about eight years ago and he started waking me up in the middle of the night and eventually figured out every time he was waking me up my blood sugar crashed soon after so i worked with my doctor talked to her talk to Animal Care and Control and got him certified as a service dog and worked with him on training about how we travel how we act when we're around big crowds of people like you what we do in situations like that and now he travels with me full-time and serves as a service dog for me pivoting a little bit i've got some numbers up on the screen here seven percent of people in the US identify themselves as struggling with mental illness including depression there were things along those lines diabetics are three times more likely to struggle with that and the biggest number up there forty-nine percent is the number of people in tech who struggle with some sort of milnes depression things like that including burnout the oxygen masks that I have on the screen is one of the most important things you need to learn to put your oxygen mask on first because if we don't put oxygen masks on we can't take care of other people we can't take care of our product or site we can't learn to say no to personal projects to professional projects to setting up boundaries around ourselves at work something else we can do to help put our oxygen mask on is setting time aside for ourselves whether that means saying no to personal things so that you have a night at home to just chill on your couch or setting aside vacation time when you know things are going to be crazy busy at work also when you're sick allow yourself to be sick don't call in sick to work and then work from home just shut off your laptop put it away you might be amazed at how much more quickly you feel better and rested and ready to go back to work along those same lines when you start feeling depressed when you start feeling anxious talk to someone most of our insurance plans I hope have some sort of caveat in there that allow you a certain number of counseling sessions certain number of conversations with a psychiatrist every year take advantage of that also talk to people around you find people that you identify with outside of work you might be surprised by this but meetup is for more than just tech talks you can find a photography group hiking group people who identify with you and the places that you identify with which leads me to my next slide is find places that connect with you make sure you're allowing yourself to go to places where you can get re-energized or you can feel at peace where you can feel like you're ready to go back to work to the daily grind so how do I know about both of these things diabetes that's easy I've been one for a long time burnout I burned out really really hard about two years ago and it's something that I really struggled with I struggled with being honest about it I struggled with talking to people about it because the perceptions or being told at work it was just a performance issue I struggled with relying on resources like these and so reach out to people rely on these resources and other as well tweet these out afterwards also rely on your community around you everyone in this room understands your day-to-day life for the most part they understand what it means to feel overwhelmed or run down or anxious or nervous about a new job or everything like that so rely on the people around you and like I mentioned last slide I work at a company called spark post I'm a community builder there we handle your email infrastructure so we take all of the email servers off your plate so it's one less thing to burn you out so if you're interested in talking email or burn out or anything else hit me up on Twitter find me later I'm easy to find and with the one with a dog and thanks so much thank you very much [Applause]