What do you do if you're facing burnout in your Sports Management career?

To recognize the signs of exhaustion, it is important to manage how well you know your body and identify the signs. After you already recognize them, it is wise to know that, how and when to act so that you can mitigate, prevention is healing in time.

Burnout is a mental condition with physical repercussions. It is caused by believing the thoughts presented to us. Your brain has only one goal: to keep your energy use as low as possible and keep you physically safe. That only sometimes helps you find the best mental solutions. This 1,5 kg of tissue uses approximately 20% of your energy if you are idling. So, it is always wise to investigate any thought that comes up. Is it true? Is it helping? No? Forget it! Most of our fears and sadness are based on our memory, and they often do not serve us. The same goes for burnout. As long as you keep believing the non-helping thoughts, you are dragging yourself down and not doing yourself a disservice.

The problem is that most people on the edge of burn-out don’t recognise their own signals. That is a result of perfectly normal psychological processes such as biases, and cognitive dissonance. We have blind spots for out own situation, especially when stressed. In my view a much better approach in stressreduction and burn-outprevention is to organise (short and simple) dialogue between colleagues. That has three important benefits: - you overcome your own blindspots - that leads to much better decisions about solutions - it creates (the experience of) social support, one of the key factors that influence stress. Good dialogue creates a kind of protective layer against stress for groups and its members.

The first step is to recognize it, and then it is to seek help, eat healthy, exercise physically and mentally, Support groups are of great help in the face of uncertainty and always try to be surrounded by people who help you and support you.

Life is a matter of priorities and planning, if you manage to carry this in all aspects of your life and delegate so that you can direct and see 360 of everything, then you are already one step ahead.

It is too simple to (only) connect stress and burn-out to workload. Many other factors are equally important. Social and colleagual support, (the feeling of) control and grip, possibility to create your own workflow and so on. So before deciding what to do, first get a deeper insight in your situation. Don’t do this alone, you need others to overcome your own blindspots (see above)..

Change will always be that change, it is up to you as an individual how you see it, this depends a lot on the objectives you have, your emotional intelligence and how much you are committed to yourself as a person.

If you are a person who identifies in yourself or in someone around you who has this condition, take the first step of recognizing and helping yourself, always look for why and how you are going to face or get out of the situation, validate and think that everything In life it is circumstantial and where you are today is the first step to where you want to be.