burnout prevention is needed now

photo: nikko macaspac

Burnout has a ripple effect.

We tend to wait to talk about burnout until we burn out, which then leads to a burnout culture. Not because we talk about it, but because once someone burns out the ripple effect means that others take more on to help out, and then they burn out too.

COVID gave us the “gift” of talking about mental health and burnout and we need to harness that conversation, so it leads to a healthy culture conversation, NOW. We cannot wait till we figure out what the future looks like. This is not just a period we need to get though because burnout was a problem before COVID. Actually, it was a crisis before COVID but a silent one, which makes it even more of a crisis, because that means we were not doing anything about it. Part of the problem is that we judge self-care and people who burn out; “they probably did something wrong”. Or “they are not strong enough if they need self-care”.

We have self-care all wrong.

We have a self-care problem, but it’s not a personal problem, it’s a culture problem.

Rethinking self-care is to focus on how we support our human drive rather than just using it up until we have no more left in us. One of the first signs of burnout is not feeling motivated, we’ve lost our energy to care. The key to getting through this without burning out is to focus on how we humans function, care, and work better every day, not wait to see how we will be working in the future. It’s not a logistics problem, it’s a humanity problem.

If we focus on what drives us as human beings, which means what we care about, and how we work better when we are inclusive of our humanity at work, we will prevent burnout and we will also build a stronger more successful culture. It’s the same conversation, not two different ones.

To be honest, I have been wishing for this conversation for the past 20 years. When I first decided to leave the fashion business 20 years ago, after two burnouts and losing both my parents to cancer just one year apart, it was because I wanted to help people have both a healthy career and a successful personal life. Yes, I switched that around, because what if we look at it that way what could change?

We can make self-care a culture possibility.

care is the new (very old) currency

We humans are driven by care, but we tend to abandon our self-care when stress hits even though that’s when we need it the most. We don’t need self-care on weekends we need it all week long so we can spend our weekends having fun or relaxing or both. I know you think of that as self-care and you can argue that it is, I just call it weekends. To prevent burnout we need to learn to work better all week long by managing our physical, emotional, and mental energy.

We care too much, we often say, and you can argue that’s true, because the backside of care is to worry. What we care about is also what we worry about. It’s a paradox really, and we can work with that when we realize it. We need the tools to shift our attention when we get sucked into the worry (and we do several times a day), because we are not just burning out from working too much, we are burning out from worrying so much.

we don't burn out from working too much, we burn out from worrying too much

Worry is what burns us out. That’s how we see people hustle and not burn out. They are having fun because they have a sense of agency over their work. The daily dealing with anxiety, not having the tools, or engaging in the conversations at work to deal with the uncertainty that’s surrounding everyone is a problem we need to address. That’s how we can reclaim agency over our lives and create healthy work cultures built on harnessing our humanity, not suppressing it. Especially right now our humanity needs to be included in the company strategy for success, if we want to change the future of work for the better. Marketing has long been about understanding how our humanity drives our choices, why are we so far behind when it comes to understanding peak-performance?

we need the tools to deal with the reality of life: uncertainty

Uncertainty has always been part of life, however we have been brought up to believe that certainty is something we can create and hold on to. It’s part of the lie we grow up with and then get stuck in and then burn out from. If we could be more cognizant of the fact that uncertainty is part of life, would we engage differently with ourselves, each other, with work and with life?

I learned this throughout my life. Uncertainty is at the core of my life experience. I almost died at birth, almost drowned at 5 years old, almost got killed in a car-crash at 7 years old, and almost drowned in a diving incident in my late 30’s. And that’s just for starters. My mother was an amazing woman, and she was also bi-polar, which included deeply depressed on a regular basis and suicidal, which added to the unpredictability of my daily life. I could keep adding how uncertainty is the essence of my life experience, with a surprise divorce and a couple of “out of the blue” being fired, but I think you get the picture. We ignore the reality of life and try to craft the life we want, when really we are working against life rather than working with it. We say the only constant in life is change, and yet we don’t learn how to deal with change.

We need to learn that burnout prevention is about becoming more aware, adaptable, and agile from a place of care and attention, instead of toughness and pushing through. Recognizing that our emotions are the doorway to our survival, not a problem to solve, but rather our super-power to harness.

change the way we think

We are pushing ourselves to be problem solvers, to focus on team motivation and engagement, we need to produce results and we think that speaking about emotions will take up time, so we try to have the conversations but they are like getting stuck in the pothole because we don’t know how to go from how we think and feel to what are something we can to with, about and for the way we think and feel. Instead, we tend to “just have to deal with it” and we end up suppressing and putting our emotions on standby until we have time to deal with them. That’s the edge of burnout right there.

burnout prevention is about power-pausing

By now you might be thinking that this all sounds good, and you want to learn to think better and now comes the question; HOW?

It starts with learning to pause more; I call it power-pausing. That small moment in time where we can notice, listen, ask inside how we are in there, and then ask what we need so that we can deal with whatever it is that’s right there in front of us to solve. It could be we just need a physical break, a moment to go outside to stretch our legs, walk it off, breathe in some fresh air and give our mind a pause. It could be we need to acknowledge how we feel and instead of ignoring our emotions and rather ask ourselves what would help us feel more confident or and safe. Or maybe it’s a mental pause that helps us navigate the overwhelm of too much information and ask what we need so that we can cut through the noise.

We tend to think self-care is something we do, but it starts with how we think and then it shows up in how we engage with others and the choices we make about how to keep going, without the burnout. Rethinking self-care at work we can harness our super-power, our humanity.