Protecting against burnout

Kandi stands in a New York City street in a bright green top in front of a yellow taxi.

A health scare led Kandi Wiens, GRD’16, to her life’s work. Almost a decade ago, while working a high-stress consulting job, earning her doctorate from Penn GSE’s Chief Learning Officer (CLO) program, and juggling her responsibilities as a mom to three young children, she had a hypertensive emergency during a routine check-up. While she was tapping away at her phone, still conducting work from inside her doctor’s office, a nurse was checking and rechecking her blood pressure, not believing the numbers she was seeing in a seemingly healthy young woman.

“I could have had a stroke. I could have had a heart attack,” said Wiens. “I could have died right then and there.”

Instead, she had a wake-up call. Stress was literally killing her, and she needed to find a way to manage it better. In the week that followed, during her doctor-mandated rest, one of the things she pondered was why the stress had impacted her so profoundly. Many of her Penn GSE classmates were also busy working parents with high-stress jobs, but their blood pressure readings hadn’t made medical professionals do a double take. What were they doing differently? She decided to make that question the heart of her doctoral dissertation, exploring stress and burnout.

That research became the basis for her new professional path—one that could not be more timely given the rise of post-pandemic burnout. Wiens is now a senior fellow, director of Penn GSE’s Medical Education (Med Ed) master’s program, and academic director of the Penn CLO master’s program, as well as an executive coach and sought-after speaker. Her new book, Burnout Immunity: How Emotional Intelligence Can Help You Build Resilience and Heal Your Relationship to Work, which synthesizes all her research, was released by HarperCollins in April.

“I’ve been so fortunate and blessed and lucky to be able to research something that has been personally helpful for me,” she said, “and that it’s turned into this whole passion where I get to teach people about how to protect ourselves from burnout.”

Read the full Q-and-A with Kandi Wiens for more on her work on burnout in the spring/summer 2024 issue of Penn GSE Magazine.