In this episode of Buried in Work, host Adam Zuckerman welcomes Erin Whalen, founder of Compassionate Coaching, a company dedicated to providing communication tools and emotional support to end-of-life professionals. Erin shares her inspiring journey, from starting as a general life coach during the pandemic to focusing her work on supporting hospice, palliative care, and grief professionals. She highlights the vital role empathy plays in dealing with the grieving and the dying, and how crucial communication skills can make a profound impact on the quality of care provided.

Key Topics:

• Discover how Erin transitioned from a career in acting to launching Compassionate Coaching, specifically serving end-of-life workers.

• Erin emphasizes the importance of “head moments” vs. “heart moments” when breaking difficult news to patients and how professionals should balance logic with emotional support.

• Learn about the unique use of actors in medical schools to help train future physicians in empathetic communication, particularly in end-of-life scenarios.

• Erin explains how her role-playing exercises and playback theater techniques help end-of-life professionals practice difficult conversations and improve their connection with patients and families.

• Erin offers practical tips for those experiencing burnout in emotionally taxing fields like hospice and palliative care, including the importance of deep breathing, connecting with colleagues, and finding a support system.

Whether you're facing the daily challenges of working in hospice care, palliative care, or grief counseling, or you're supporting a loved one through end-of-life transitions, empathy is your most powerful tool. This episode delves deep into practical communication strategies that will help you connect more meaningfully with patients and families, while also maintaining your own emotional health. Erin Whalen shares expert advice on how to stay grounded, prevent burnout, and truly make a difference in the lives of those you care for.

Show links:

• Find more about Erin’s work and explore free resources like the Burnout Barometer and Transition Routine for end-of-life workers on her website: compassionatecoaching.org.

• Connect with Erin on LinkedIn: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-whalen-compassionate-coaching/

• Website: compassionatecoaching.org

• Visit Buried in Work for more episodes and resources.

• Use code BIWPodcast for 10% off products at Buried in Work.

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This is the Buried in Work podcast, where we share tips and interview experts to help you simplify estate planning and end of life tasks.

I'm your host, Adam Zuckerman. And today we have a very special guest with us, Aaron Whelan. Aaron is the founder of Compassionate Coaching, a company that supports end of life and grief professionals by providing communication tools and emotional support to the grieving and the dying. Aaron, it is so great to have you here today. We're going to learn a lot, and I'm really excited based on what you're doing. Let's start off. Can you share a little bit about your journey and what inspired you to start compassionate coaching?

Sure. Well, my journey started like a lot of people who got a little stuck in the pandemic, and I was an actor at the time and doing freelance acting. As you can imagine, in 2020, a lot of the places that were hiring actors just said, we don't need you right now and for the foreseeable future. So I was out of work, and I thought to myself, well, I've always been curious about this concept of coaching. Let me look into this. And I founded my company in the fall of 2020. And then it took me a long time. It took me probably a good two years to figure out exactly what I was doing and who I was serving. I started as a general life coach, which, you know, I was one of a thousand million gazillion life coaches on the planet. And I then I did a couple other things, and then I really looked at my past and what I had done in work, and I looked specifically at these two types of acting jobs that I had that I really, really enjoyed. And I said, well, let me just, let me do that in my coaching business. And so I did that. And then I did a lot of journaling and some prayer and said, okay, now I know who I'm going to serve. And I was surprised by the answer. And the answer was end of life professionals. So, very long story. A little long. That's. That's how I got there. And here we are, middle, middle of 2024, and I've been in business almost four years, and I'm really happy to be here and talk to you about end of life.

All right. So it's a little bit of a parallel path to buried in work in that when we started with our content, we thought we'd be serving just direct to consumer. We're now working with businesses as well. We did a little bit of pivot. So we're working still with consumers, but also businesses is that the type of shift that you're talking about in terms of client focus, or is it something else altogether?

It's something else altogether. So I started working as a life coach, just saying, like, I want to help people. I want to help women. And then I spent some time saying, well, I want to help women, who I was really moved by the racial reconciliation movement that was happening in the summer of 2020. So I said, well, I'm going to help women who want to go out and do justice. And so I worked with women for a while, and then I started saying, well, let me. Let me go back to my roots, which is in empathy, communication skills training, acting in kind of some really interesting ways. And then I said, well, let's do that for a while. And then I started doing that for other coaches, and then I was like, well, this is the kind of stuff I could do this for anyone. Like, I could help anyone with the skills I'm doing. I'm doing communication skills coaching, helping people practice in a safe environment with a professional role player. Everyone, myself included, can use communication skills coaching. And then I'm doing playback theater, which is a really cool, improvisational type of theater where we hear people's stories and we play them back with music and movement and drama. And I was like, well, everyone would love that. So then I was like, you know what? I just. I keep coming back to this idea of being of service to those who are helping the grieving and the dying. And so it was a shift to, like, I have the potential to help everyone to, these are my people. These are the people. And I really focus on the workers. I really focus on people who are in that field. Occasionally I will strike a chord with someone, say, like a grief coach or someone who says, oh, my gosh, what you are doing is amazing. I want you to bring that to my clients, to the people who are grieving. And so I have worked some with the actual grievers, and that's clearly adjacent to the work that I do and the niche that I support. Yeah. But for me, it was really just like, a narrowing down of, like, okay, these are my people, and these people are people who work in end of life, who work in grief.

So we went from that wide scope funnel all the way down to the targeted individuals, the targeted companies, hospice, palliative care. In our pre conversation and a little bit of research, we found out that you're working with medical schools, even with professional role playing. What does that even mean? And this is a little bit of behind the scenes for people who aren't familiar with this side of the industry. I was surprised to hear medical schools hire actors. What's going on?

Yeah, medical schools hire actors. It's the best kept secret about medical school training. And good news for actors everywhere that they hire actors to play patients. And it can be everything from I have a cough to I am dying and you need to talk to me about hospice, or I'm dying, you know, very soon. I'm on hospice and you have come to say goodbye to me. And how does a physician say goodbye to a patient thinking that they've, quote unquote, failed them? Because medicine is all about diagnose and treat, and then you have a patient who dies, which, spoiler alert, we all die. So the range is huge. It can be everything from, like, here's how you talk to a patient about their cough to this is how you talk to a patient about the fact that they're dying. So I did all of it. And then I eventually started training other actors to be patients for the more complicated cases. I did things like training for end of life cases, training for domestic violence cases, training for boundaries, concerns that physicians have with their patients. And so I have that training component as well. And it's really cool. It's really awesome. And a lot of standardized patients actually come to the work just because they have a real heart for helping medical students, or they have a real heart for the medical industry in general, and they want to do their part to improve it. So it's mostly actors, but even non actors can become standardized patients.

No. Bedside manner is something that almost always comes up when somebody goes to the hospital. How did you feel? How was the experience? Oh, that doctor just didn't care. I was just a patient, and you could tell their mind was somewhere else. The acting is somewhat of a subjective role with an objective layer on top of that. Are you grading them? Is someone else grading them? What's that process?

It really varies. So some events are formative where they're just. It could even be, like, a small group of students and maybe some faculty members. And it's just a formative event where there's no grading going on. There are events that are graded. There are evaluative events, and they. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that even part of their boards or something, something that the medical students have to do in order to become a physician involves standardized patients. So I think it's, like, called their step two medical exam. So it is preparing them for that, but it's also preparing them for you know, pretty soon you're gonna be out there having these conversations for real with people who are really experiencing these very challenging things. And we want you to practice now on, quote unquote, fake patients, because we want you to get those training wheels going and going and going so that when they come off, you actually have some experience under your belt. Getting confident in these conversations and actually hearing how the conversation went, because, like you said, like, we all have had good experiences with doctors and unfortunately, bad experiences with doctors in their bedside manner, and we rarely go and tell those doctors, look, your bedside manner was horrible. Look, when you said this, I wanted to punch you in the face. When you said this, I shut down. Doctors don't get that feedback, but thankfully, medical students can, because they practice working with standardized patients, and they get to hear how the things that they're doing and saying actually comes across.

We like to give our listeners a little bit of an actual. These are tasks or steps or learnings that they can take away from. Let's pretend that we stayed in a Holiday Inn last night, and we are now experts in this field. What should our listeners know about that process? So, give them a quick tutorial of, this is what you can expect. This is what we're hoping that the people that we're training take away so they can start internalizing that message as well.

So I've basically taken the concept. Just so we're clear, I still work at med school sometimes, but I've taken some of these concepts, and I put it into my own company, compassionate coaching. So assuming we're talking about my role players and how I train them and the things that I want them to work with on people, one of the concepts I've come up with is called head moments and heart moments. And so it's basically saying that when someone's in a head moment, which is logic, facts, data, they are in that headspace. If someone's in a heart moment, they are having strong feelings, right? They're having strong feelings. And if someone's in a heart momentous, they cannot be talked to with head focus. They cannot be talked to with logic, data, facts. And so even something like breaking bad news to someone and bad news physicians have to break really bad news to people, like, your person just died. But a lot of the things that are happening out there and a lot of the conversations that physicians are having with patients are bad news in the eyes of the patient. And so what physicians and other healthcare professionals need to be aware of is that bad news conversations happen a lot more frequently so breaking bad, that was just a side note soapbox to say when you break bad news to someone before you go into the data and the facts sit with them in that heart moment because they're going to be having some sort of emotional reaction to what you just said. You may think it's not a big deal to say you have diabetes, but for a patient, that could be really bad news. And so instead of you have diabetes, we're going to get you on metformin. We're going to follow you every three months like that. Facts, data, logic. The patient is not ready to hear it. Instead, you need to. You have diabetes. Pause. Wait, how are you feeling to hear that news and then check in with them? You can get to the metformin later, but until the patient is ready to hear it, it's going to go completely over their head.

And I think that that's an experience that many of us run into where the doctors are on their round. This is exactly what it is. They've got 17 other things on the clipboard that they need to follow or their iPad or their list, and they're in, this is what it is. And then they're just out the door. And that leaves people in this void of, well, I have to figure this out on my own.

Yeah.

So how do you help people understand the difference and identify. This is a heart moment. This is a head momentous.

It's really about, what are you thinking about? So say I'm that person who was just told I have diabetes. What am I thinking about? Oh, my gosh. Am I going to have my leg amputated like my mom did? Oh, my gosh. Does this mean I need to take insulin? Like, how bad is it? I hate shots. I can't do shots. Right? Like, I'm thinking a lot of things about fear, worry, anxiety. Those are emotions. So the thoughts are really emotionally charged. Basically, anytime you notice a shift, I actually have a blog post about this called notice the shift. Anytime you're in conversation with someone and something changes, they start to pause more. They look away, their voice changes, something is happening emotionally for them. So it's not just for bad news, it's for any time you notice that shift, that change, stop and check in. Stop and check in and say, oh, my gosh, I noticed that, you know, you. Something shifted for you. What's going on? It's as simple as that.

So compassionate coaching. You're supporting these end of life and bereavement professionals in their daily work. What does that process look like for you? To engage them. Do you typically have an online presence? Are there a series of classes? Is this something that in a two hour workshop people can take away everything they need to know? Or is this an ongoing ever learning? You need to come back to this over and over and over to stay up to speak.

So what we currently have for the way we serve end of life professionals, and it's ever evolving, right. Because we're always seeking, what do you all need? How can we be of more service to you? What we currently have is the communication skills coaching, which happens in a small group, it can also happen in a larger group, but it's not as interactive when you have more people who can actually participate in the process. So that's one aspect of it. And that is usually like a four to six session that I work with a small group. So it would be like a team, say it's a large hospice organization that brings on new nurses, and the nurses are new to hospice. So they've had their RN for a long time. They've been rns for a long time, but now they're new to hospice and they need to start practicing having some of the conversations that they're going to be having in hospice that they haven't really focused on as much in their career so far. So that's one concept. And then other concept is these team building events that we do for teams. And it can be like a one off, like, okay, like you all want, you know, you want us to come in for your retreat, you want us to come in for your staff day, you want us to come in for this thing, or we can work together for a longer time. But those events are really powerful. I bring my whole team, a facilitator, musician, actors, and it's a process that we use playback theatre for. Playback theatre is an art form. It's been around since 1975. It's done all over the world, 60 countries, and we hear people's stories and then we play them back. So my favorite prompt to use for these situations is, why do you do what you do? Why did you get into this work? Why did you choose this field? And the stories people share are just amazing.

And what do you do with that information? So if. Let's, let's reverse it. So why did you get into this field? So please respond and then let's figure out what you would do. That response.

Okay. And we can also do yours, Adam, if you want.

Oh, no. Okay. Okay, I'm ready.

Oh, my gosh. Okay. Okay. So just, just to be clear, like this is not playback, because this is like talking about playback. And I have a whole team, so this is just me and you having a conversation.

Everybody else, just imagine that there's a musician behind us, there's other actors with us. There's a big stage. The lighting is perfect, and.

Right. Just imagine that. So I'll go first, and then. And then I'll have you go. So my why is. Which we chatted a little bit, you know, before you hit record. So I started this work basically because my jobs went away as an actor in the pandemic. So summer 2020, everything, all my acting jobs went away as a freelance actor, started this company. But I really meandered for a long time. I really, like, didn't know who I was serving. I started as a general life coach, and I didn't really feel aligned with my work. I didn't really feel like, oh, this is what I'm supposed to do. This is what I want to do. And then I really started, to be honest. A lot of it was prayer. I also spent some time journaling and saying, okay, what has happened in my life so far? What are the jobs I've had? What are the experiences I've had that have lit me up, that have felt more aligned? Who are the people I really, like feel compelled to be of service to? And then I would just journal. And through that journaling prayer process, I looked at the list, and I was like, oh. Oh. Like, it was a lot of death, grief, dying stuff that had come up. And I was like, oh, man, I think. I think this is it. I think I'm supposed to be working with people who are in that field. And just to give some more background, one of the experiences that was just so part, so intertwined with my life is that I'm the youngest of four. My older sister, Gina, she was the second oldest. She was born with really severe cerebral palsy. And as a result, I watched her, you know, live a life that was very different from my own. She had a lot of limitations. And what I didn't know, a phrase I had not heard until I was in my forties, was anticipatory grief. I literally had it from the moment I first took my first breath. I literally was born into anticipatory grief, knowing in my bones I would outlive my sister. And so that absolutely shaped who I am and the jobs that have lit me up. And the work that I want to do is knowing that grief has been a part of my life. Gina died in 2016. Yesterday, July 14, was actually her birthday. We're recording on July 15. So she's been on my mind a lot lately, and she's definitely a part of why I do what I do and why I feel so convicted and compelled to be of service to people in that field.

All right, so we've collected your story.

Yep.

What's the next step?

So, the next step is. And granted, it wasn't just, you know, if we were doing an actual playback show, it wouldn't be just, like, some person talking. It would be, like, facilitated by someone. After that, the facilitator would say, let's watch. And then what would happen immediately, without rehearsal, without any preparation, is music would start. The musician has been listening to my story the whole time. The musician might be playing music that they're making up based on my story. They might play guitar, violin, use voice, drumming, whatever feels resonant to the story that I told.

And this is real time in front of a group.

Absolutely. All right.

Yeah.

And then they play a little bit, and then an actor will go forth and do something. So, for instance, in my story, the first actor may be my sister, right. And they may be portraying my sister, and they may get up there and say something like, Erin, it's me, Gina. Hey, it's okay. I know you've had a rough go at it. I know you had 40 years of anticipatory grief. I know that, and I'm okay. And you can take all of that and put it into your work. I'm here with you. I'm guiding you. I'm part of this with you, Erin. I'm with you. And then they would stop, and then the music would play again, different. Right. Or like some kind of refrain. And then the next actor would go. And that actor could be, you know, the pandemic coming and getting rid of my job, my jobs, and, you know, being like, ha ha. Like, Aaron, what are you going to do now? Watch those acting tubes go down the drain. Right. And so they can. And there's movement. They're not just standing there talking. We have very minimal props. We simply have four boxes that we use. And so the boxes can be anything. So you get the thing, but someone will be me. At some .1 of those actors will be me, because it's my story, and they want to honor the person who told their story.

So through this process, they're building empathy and expanding empathy. They're leveraging the role of storytelling to help them understand and put themselves in someone else's shoes.

Yes.

What is the takeaway of this? If it is a perfect session. Is this you now go back and you have a better experience with your customers, with your clients? Is it just having a more holistic and understanding view of yourself?

That is a great question. If it has gone perfectly and our job is well done, then what happens is that team, let's say it was a hospice team. We've got nurses, social workers, we've got chaplains. We've got the clinical leaders and managers. Right? We've got the team there, and we do this, and it's a process. There's also some sociometry. There's also some one on one conversations that they have when they walk out of there. They are like, oh, my gosh, I love the people I work with. I am now, man, I can't believe I'd forgotten grandma. Whatever it was, whatever their why was that? Resonates with me. Oh, my gosh. Susan's story, man, that was. I had no idea that her first husband died. How did I not know that? Right? And so, like, it's multifaceted. It's a self awareness. It's also a connection to each other, and it's a reconnection to their why. Because something got them into that field. Someone or something, some experience got them into their work. I don't know if anyone is a child in kindergarten. And they say, what do you want to be when you grow up? And they say, you know, I want to be a hospice nurse.

No, try not to worry. Fireman and astronaut. I mean, fireman.

Like, I want to be a death doula. That's what I want to be. I want to. I want to be a funeral manager. Like, no one does that. Maybe they do. There are some unicorns. So they are reconnected to their why, their reason, because burnout is real, and they need to connect to each other, and they need to connect to their why. And the managers need to be a part of it because the onus of burnout is on the organization. And so it is important for the higher ups to be a part of it, too.

For those overwhelmed listeners who may be struggling a bit in their roles in the helping profession, what advice do you have for them to maintain their own emotional health?

My first piece of advice is to breathe. Deep breaths are helpful if you are in a survival state regarding your emotions. Like, you gotta get back to basics. You gotta get back to deep breaths. You gotta check in about your level of sleep, your level of physical activity, your nutrition. Like, if we are, like, if they are, like, burnt out, you gotta get back to your basics. First, you gotta find your people. So maybe there's a colleague that, and I don't mean someone for you to just, you know, have event session with someone who cares about you and wants to support you. Have them on speed dial, like text them, call them. It doesn't have to be a colleague. It can just be a very compassionate friend. Like find a person at minimum, that you can talk to. Maybe it's a therapist, maybe it's a healthcare professional. Right, a professional. A mental health professional, because that's okay. You do really hard work. And if you need that, that's a beautiful step for you to take. But you got to take care of those basic needs and you got to find at least one person for you to connect with and talk with and get support from.

Okay? To help you connect with all our listeners, one final question for you. What's the one thing we should have talked about today but didn't?

I think we've lost sight of our humanity. All of us. We've lost sight of our own humanity. Like, am I killing myself through work? Am I killing myself with ambition, with this, with that? We've lost sight of the humanity of people who disagree with us on issues, on politics. We've just really lost sight of our common humanity. And so I just invite everyone to find a way to take a step back and view each other as we are helping each other on this journey called life, instead of enemies everywhere. And, you know, people were going to complain about everywhere, like, let's take care of ourselves and let's actually take care of each other.

All right, Aaron, if people want to find out a little bit more about compassionate coaching, if they want to connect with you, where can they find you?

So I am very active on LinkedIn. You can find me. I'm sure it'll be in the show notes my website, which has a couple of free resources on there. The website is compassionatecoaching.org. we've got a burnout barometer for end of life leaders if they want to check in and see the temperature of their own team. And then we've got a transition routine for anyone who works in end of life or volunteers who feels the need to have some sort of routine between work and the rest of their day.

All right, we'll definitely add that into the show notes Aaron. We enjoyed the conversation. And that wraps up another buried in work podcast episode where we feature tips and stories from industry professionals who specialize in making estate planning, end of life tasks and estate transition just a bit more manageable. If you enjoyed the podcast, please consider leaving a review following us on social media or visiting us at our website, buried in work.com. and don't forget, if you're a podcast listener, you can save 10% off our estate preparation package and our games with Code Biwpodcast. Erin, thanks again. It has been a pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me. Adam. Take care, take care. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Buried in Work podcast. Remember, you can save 10% on our estate preparation package and games with code PODCAST10 at buriedinwork.com.