Burnout is EXHAUSTING
One of the first signs that I was burning out in my teaching career was when grading a stack of lab reports went from taking 2-3 DAYS to 2-3 WEEKS. Even the easiest tasks seemed to take extreme amounts of energy and effort. In order to get your mojo back at this stage, we need to put what we learned through defining our Beliefs and Loves (see the last two articles in this series) into Action.
The Short Version
Take an inventory of your to-do list and start asking the question – how could this use my Beliefs and Loves?
Examples:
Veronica has an “appreciation of beauty” as one of her character strengths/values. Understanding this made it clear that taking a walk for a break is not just something that is “nice” to do but absolutely essential for her survival in the otherwise blank white walls of corporate office life. Having a notepad with a pretty design to write in and sprucing up presentations with visuals are not a waste of time but a way to incorporate her values into work that is otherwise dull and draining.
Sandra has a strong value around financial stability due to her upbringing and past situations where being on shaky financial ground really shaped her world. This value (like most) can be helpful or harmful in the way it is used. In the way she’s currently using this value, it’s keeping her stuck in a series of part-time gigs that pay the bills and feed the narrative of having to take on jobs you don’t like in order to be financially stable. The downside is that this is keeping her from fully launching her new business, which could easily make far more income than the part-time gigs. By understanding her value of financial stability, she can get clarity by really putting hard numbers together for a cost/benefit analysis of giving up the gigs and focusing on getting clients for her new business. By seeing that this business is actually more financially sound than these gigs that are not interesting or satisfying, she’s able to create a plan to let go of them as she phases in more clients on the business side.
Happiness = Work?
We all like to feel as though we are using our unique skills and talents – those projects where we feel a state of “flow”. Not necessarily easy, but fully engaged. Engagement is the opposite of burnout. This is what happens when we mindfully apply our Loves.
Our Beliefs (aka values, or character strengths) are the internal motivators that help to increase our engagement. Studies by the VIA Character Institute have shown that when people used one of their top strengths purposefully in new and different ways every day for a week, this led to long-lasting increases in happiness, and fewer depression symptoms. In the “Science of Well Being” online course from Yale, it was cited that regularly using four character strengths together was linked to people saying their job was a calling. Further, while people in the study anticipated that more “leisure time” would make them happier, it was found that happiness was more strongly linked to being productive and fulfilled.
The long version: A coaching case study
Alex is an overachiever and always brings 110% to her projects, but she’s frustrated by the lack of direct impact she sees in her job. She doesn’t find inspiration in her company’s mission and feels like her work only benefits the company’s bottom line. In fact, she’s so far removed from the products her company creates as an IT professional that she wonders if it would even matter if she switched to a more mission-driven company.
Her values are service and compassion, and while she loves the technical work, it’s hard to find ways to align her work with these values. Alex is already using her skills and talents with her technical problem solving but the fatigue from disconnection to her values is starting to really weigh her down. She’s not ready to even think about the job search process right now because it’s exhausting, and her energy is so low that she doesn’t have any hope that things would be better anywhere else.
Alex feels trapped, which is only creating more of the drain that’s fueling her burnout. We take some time to think about ways to bring in service and compassion, even looking outside of work. She makes a list of community service projects in the area she feels strongly about but admits that right now it’s all she can do to just crash on the couch when she gets home on Friday and focus on resting enough to be ready to go back in and face the grind on Monday. We put the list and contact information on the fridge so that it’s handy when she has a little more energy.
Instead, we look for smaller actions, ways to reframe things she is already doing to start getting that energy back up. One of the things that Alex finds “completely undoes” all the rest from the weekend is the Monday morning team meetings. She says these meetings just remind her how her job is just a series of troubleshooting with no real impact. I ask, “What would compassion look like during that meeting?”.
After a moment to consider, imagining the room and people sitting at the table Alex says, “We have a new hire, Emily, who is really quiet. I can tell she has ideas that she wants to share but hasn’t found the right way to interrupt to get her ideas across.”
Alex recalls wishing that someone had helped her when she first started at the company, to help find her voice in meetings like that. Alex resolves to invite Emily to have coffee together before the meeting and talk about her goals and provide guidance on the ways that Alex has found effective for speaking up in meetings. This ticks both values boxes for Alex- compassion for a fellow human being, and service by offering her time and energy to a colleague. Alex hadn’t considered this action before because it felt like extra work, but once she’s followed through with the plan, she realizes that she feels more energized, not less. In fact, the dreaded Monday morning meeting feels less draining this time because she is using her compassion, sharing a smile with Emily and nodding in encouragement when Emily pipes up “how about trying it this way..” partway through the meeting.
Now, Alex feels more engaged and starts to look for other small acts of compassion and service with her team. While this is still not the company she wants to work for long-term, just feeling a little less exhausted at the end of the day is opening up new possibilities. Alex feels ready to volunteer at the women’s shelter this weekend and has enough of her mojo back to dust off her resume.