Burnout. My story and my advice.

Have you ever burnt out? I have. I was trying to carry the weight of a $30m business on my shoulders.

In the end, as happens when trying to carry a heavy weight for a long time, my back gave way. I had 3 bulging disks causing me huge pain every day. Having a fairly big ‘be strong’ driver, I dosed myself up on strong painkillers for months, and spent my days in the office wired up to a TENS machine on the maximum setting to try and distract me from the pain.

It wasn’t much fun, and it correlated with a time when the business faced some major challenges. Slowly but surely I started to lose my passion for my job, swapped a sense of humour for irritability, exchanged perspective for hyper-criticality and tried to remedy every problem by solving it myself.

In the end, despite months of painkillers and physio, it was clear nothing was working. Spinal surgery is never the easy option, but something needed to change. After 7 hours of surgery, and various bits of my back being taken out and replaced with titanium body parts, they patched me up. I came round from the anaesthetic in a lot of pain, with the surgeon waving what used to be part of my insides in front of my face talking about the ‘huge sequestration’. It meant nothing to me, but as I understand it, a (large) portion of one of my vertebral discs had fragmented, migrated into the spinal canal and was pressing on the nerves in my back. It turns out it wasn’t the people around me that were getting on my nerves – it was my nucleus pulposus and a big bit of disc!

Two months of rest and recuperation later, I returned to work. I vowed not to make the same mistakes again, and while I still worked hard, I had gained a different sense of perspective. Unfortunately, it was only then that I realised I’d gained something else from my time in pain; a reputation for being hard to please, critical and curmudgeonly.

They say experience is the hardest teacher, because it gives the exam first and the lesson after. But it’s also one of the best teachers. On reflection, this stage in my life shaped what I’m doing now.

As a coach, I see a lot of business owners heading the same way I did. They end up ‘in the grip’, working harder and harder to try and keep control of their business. Their hours are unsustainable, their teams are underperforming and their relationships are suffering. It doesn’t have to be this way, but when you’re deep in the forest, sometimes you need a hand to guide you out. Now one of the things I enjoy most is helping business owners to get more control of their business through others.

According to David Ballard who is the head of the APA’S Psychologically Healthy Workplace Programme in America, job burnout is “an extended period of time where someone experiences exhaustion and a lack of interest in things, resulting in a decline in their job performance.”

“A lot of burnout really has to do with experiencing chronic stress,” says Dr Ballard. “In those situations, the demands being placed on you exceed the resources you have available to deal with the stressors.”

Left unchecked, burnout can wreak havoc on your health, happiness, relationships and job performance and dealing with burnout can be a complicated and emotional process.

“You cannot selectively numb emotions. You can’t say here’s the bad stuff. The vulnerability, the grief, shame, disappointment. I don’t want to feel these. You can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the other feelings. So when we numb those, we also numb joy, gratitude, happiness and then we are miserable and we’re looking for purpose and meaning….” Says Brene Brown during her TED X talk about vulnerability.

If you think you are heading towards some form of burnout, or you know someone who may be, here are my top 5 tips:

1. Learn how to say ‘no’. The more you take on, the more it will end up wearing you out. Fact. It can be easy to say yes to everything, especially if you have that go-getter mentality. Trust me, I know. But it’s important to say no to some things in your career if you’re going to stay engaged, excited, and energetic about your work. Chose what’s most important to you (or most necessary to your work). Delegation and outsourcing is another option to bear in mind when it comes to workload.
2. Socialise. Yes really. Spending time with pals away from work gives you emotional fulfilment and connection. We work to live right? So make sure you’re living and enjoying life.
3. Self care. “Self-care is dependent on the individual. It is based on what helps them to feel more like they’re in their natural state, which is the thing, place or feeling that would happen if there were no pressure on them — the thing they would want to do,” said Robert L. Bogue, co-author of Extinguish Burnout: A Practical Guide to Prevention and Recovery. “When you’re operating outside of your natural state, you are consuming energy,” he explained. “The more in alignment you become, the less you’re demanding of yourself and the more personal agency you build up.” With this in mind, you need to work out what restores you. This will be totally different for everyone – some may enjoy hanging out with friends and others may enjoy a long stroll on the beach with the dogs. Whatever it is, make sure you prioritise your wellbeing in order for you to perform to the best of your ability in the workplace.
4. Perform a job analysis. Work overload can make you feel like you’re stuck on a treadmill day in, day out. You often can’t see the wood from the trees and therefore you have little clarity and focus, which results in poor drive and motivation. By performing a job analysis you can create much needed clarity over what parts of your role are important and what parts can be outsources/delegated. You can prioritise your day, create default diaries and create structure, which will help with productivity and therefore job satisfaction.
5. Work with a purpose. Have you lost your workplace purpose a little? With no purpose comes no satisfaction, and it therefore becomes increasingly more difficult to understand the difference you are making to your industry/business/employees. Take a step back and think about why you do what you do. This could take time and may require you to totally step away to reconnect with who you are and what you want to achieve. Be kind on yourself. Throughout life we change and it may be that something isn’t quite working for you now. Once you’ve identified what this is then, and only then, can you make changes.

To conclude, burnout is an occupational phenomenon. You can either look for triggers and be proactive in facing it, or, what most commonly occurs, you have to be in full burnout mode, facing the stark reality to then want to make a change.

Remember, if, at any time, stress and burnout are causing you to worry about your health, seek the advice of an appropriate health professional.

You can also head to mind, a mental health charity based in Norfolk who offer fantastic support.

To find out more about how I may be able to help your Norfolk business thrive then please don’t hesitate to get in touch on 01603 559590 or email [email protected] – you can also get in touch through my contact form here. If you’d like to know a little more about my experience, expertise and accolades then click here.