S8E4 - Burnout
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Shawn Buttner: [00:00:00] Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Meaningful Revolution podcast. I am your host and certified high performance coach, Shawn Buttner. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about burnout, what causes it, a couple of different factors of it, how you can prevent it. in yourself, organizations, or how do you get out of it if you are in the midst of it and what it actually is.
And so if you've ever been working on something and you just feel chronically exhausted, checked out mentally, checked out attention wise in your job and it's been impacting your performance, then this is the episode for you. And if not, it's a really great episode for looking for this in your team or the people around you that you work with because it is such a prevalent thing that people deal with [00:01:00] every day.
And We'll get right into that, Enjoy the episode.
​Burnout is caused by unresolved stress, either physically or mentally. Now, physically, this could be from lack of sleep, lack of exercise and movement, lack of proper nutrition, or lack of hydration over a long period of time that will impair your productivity, your general feelings about life, your well being, your health, your relationships, all of it.
And On the psychological side, when we live in a world of overworked and under resourced jobs, it takes a toll over time. not having control over the tasks you do day to day, the meetings that you attend or don't attend, the times that you're [00:02:00] actually on and available for your work. are all recipes for you to feel like you don't have control in your life and then for an existential crisis of what is this?
There has to be something more, something greater than what I'm doing right now. these can lead to something that is clinically, which is called clinically burnt out, which are chronic symptoms from this unresolved stress of exhaustion or feeling just depleted energetically, mental distancing, disassociating with the work ahead, being a little bit cynical in your day to day job or day to day living.
there's cognitive impairments, meaning your ability to think clearly about how to change the situation, what to do differently, your executive functioning gets goofed up, and emotional impairment, which is you [00:03:00] are grumpy, you're irritable, you snap at people, you're not Totally available to collaborate or to try to isolate yourself from others because you really can't handle just being emotionally wrecked.
If you're experiencing any of these four types of symptoms, you might have that chronic clinical burnout that you will need to seek a mental health professional to diagnose, and the literature that I've been reading suggests that cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, is really effective at helping those extreme cases, so you're like, hey, I'm chronically burnt out, go see a mental health professional.
but, for everyone else, who, and As a manager, as a leader, as a professional, you want to be able to identify burnout in yourself and in the people around you, right? [00:04:00] Some of the best things we can do as professionals or leaders in our offices or companies is be the person to help reduce stress for those around us.
Because that's the antidote to preventing burnout. And from allowing it to dissipate and for people to overcome it when it happens, right? And what I'm talking, while I'm talking about This is not about eliminating all stress. Because that would be impossible and actually would probably make your job dull.
Make your life dull. the right amount of stress at the right amount of time for the right amount of duration. Can be helpful. It is helpful, right? It helps us grow. It helps us learn and develop new skills. It helps us really focus on what's important so it can help us prioritize. But when that's not correctly applied, it can cause people to break.
And I'm speaking [00:05:00] from experience having worked at some large corporations. In my time in tech, where the expectation and the resources you had were not feasible long term, right? It was purposely built up in that way, in my humble opinion, to cut costs. And, which is fine if that's your normal way of operating, but there were doom projects that we talked about.
Or that I saw happen, where people were pushed to go above and beyond even the very stressful, very time constrained, resource constrained environment that we worked in, and on these projects, if you ever had to deal with someone on a project that kept expanding, never seemed to end, you never seemed to make progress, it was always fighting fires, there's always problems that required people to get up at two o'clock in the morning to fix It You know, those types of things, you're not sleeping regularly, and you're [00:06:00] expected to do all this work, and there's no rest, there's no respite, there's no sense of, oh, this will be over soon.
You get to where people are super irritable to be around, right? And rightfully I'm not begrudging anyone that was on any of those projects for why they were grumpy, because that's tough. And it can be really tough to figure out how do you help in that situation, right? And again, as a manager, as a leader in your industry, it's how do you figure out that correct balance of stress without burning people out?
And so I have three ideas for you. I also want to let you know I have a free PDF, which you can get the link in the show notes here, about the Ideal Life Work Mix, to help you get some clarity around [00:07:00] this area. If it's something that you're interested in or struggling with, that'll just ask you a couple of questions about what you want out of your life, the different types of quality of life outcomes you really would like, and a quick self assessment.
And that'll help you Get a little bit clearer what you need to do going forward, which can help you then start to make moves to change. So I invite you to check out my work life mix PDF linked below this video. And let's get back to what we can do when we're looking at burnout in a team or organization or in yourself, right?
for me, I noticed that there are basically three different sources of stress. I'm externally that could really drive everything home. And this is also assuming that you are adequately taking care of all those physical stressors we're talking about. You're eating right, getting some movement in, you're seeing the sun, just taking care of your body to feel the best that it possibly can.
Because [00:08:00] again, if you are constantly dehydrated and not sleeping like You will feel exhausted and tired and it's going to make everything else so much tougher. assuming that you are able to get those in order or able to have some control over that. And I know that's not possible 100 percent of the time, but for the sake of this conversation, bear with me.
If we're looking at our jobs, right? We really have a couple of options, right? We can do nothing and endure, right? And if you're burning out, that's probably not a great option. We can completely throw and change everything and quit our jobs and find something different to do. Maybe we start gardening and we retire or whatever, right?
And so that's an option is to completely change everything. And then the third option is there's Some type of change that needs to happen that we can either enact or get help in help with within an organization. So the first thing [00:09:00] That can really stress us out are environmental stressors So I know I've talked about this a lot on the podcast, but I'm an introvert and I came of age in my career when Everyone in technology was going towards this open office format, right?
no cubes, no offices, we'll just have desks and computers and you just show up, plug in, and there's noise going on around you, and that's great, right? And some people can really thrive in that type of noisy environment where everyone is accessible. And that's not someone like me, right? It's not someone who gets energy from being alone and focused on my work, and then pulling in people as I need to, but,there is some type of collaboration that needs to happen, but, at the end of the day, I need time where I can not be disturbed, not be interrupted, not have the guy screaming into his phone on a conference [00:10:00] call because they can't hear him.
If you've ever been in a small room or big room where there's a bunch of people yelling into conference calls, it's not super fun. And that's a type of environmental stress that can really burn you out over time. And how can you manage that environmental stress? Personally, you could go to a different area that's more quieter, or, there was a time where I would leave and go to coffee shops.
Believe it or not, because nobody from work would come up to me while I was trying to program. They'd just put in music, have a cup of coffee, and type away. It was great, and that helped a lot. getting noise canceling headphones can also help in an environment like that. I had a different job from the, one with the big open plan.
I had to work in a lab for a while, so I had big, Headphones on, so just heads down, and people knew that when the headphones were up that I was [00:11:00] focused and not to bug me. that can help. how do you handle or change your environmental stressors? for me, again, that was change locations, it was get some noise cancelling headphones to indicate to other people that I was focused and to not be disturbed when people come in talking to the lab.
But sometimes you can't control environmental stressors, and that could be. a very aggressive project deadline or a company that prides itself on getting work done with half of the people that it should normally take, for instance, like a startup. And so that type of environment, the startup environment or a very bare bones type of environment can be very stressful.
And so then you have to. Get clear on well, things change or is this the right environment for me and then make a choice accordingly? The second type of stress we can experience on the work is just interpersonal [00:12:00] stressors, right? If you've ever heard the adage that it just takes one bad apple to ruin the batch This is very important with teams So if you've ever worked on a team that everyone was great except for the one person who's a total jerk You know what I'm talking about.
It can completely sap the performance of a team. It can really demoralize a team to just have one person that's not pulling their weight or goes out of their way to embarrass and make themselves look good because they think that's how you get ahead in corporate America. And in some environments that probably is true, but the environments that I have been in.
It really could impact you if you've ever had a manager that was really great as an engineer or whatever their specialty knowledge was. So good that they get promoted to manage other people in that field [00:13:00] and you realize that you have zero people skills. They don't know how to connect. They don't know how to lead.
They don't know how to inspire. They don't know how to properly communicate. In a way that the person they're communicating to feels like they can do their best work. And so these interpersonal stressors, if you've had a bad manager or a bad teammate, can make or break your job. And sometimes it can really, cause you to go crazy.
I have worked with people that have left because there have been one or two people that they couldn't get along with on the team. And often what happens is you'll just find that person on the next team you go to. And how do you deal with those interpersonal stressors? It could be learning how to better communicate yourself.
how do I prioritize my time, my work? How do I say no or address conflict on teams? How do I [00:14:00] have that tough conversation to be like, Hey, Joe, you suck. could you stop sucking and just really Let me do my job, or we're not going to see eye to eye on this. Here's how we can proceed forward, where we both can get our work done.
And we both collaborate when we, how we need to collaborate, the way we want to collaborate. But, you don't have to be friends. And those types of soft skills, when people talk about soft skills on job, on the job, they're talking about how do you handle people that will take advantage of you, or people that will, Push their work off to you or people that will try to make your life a living hell, frankly.
how do you handle all those different types of interpersonal skills are? Do you have a plan to figure out psychology, figure out persuasion, figure out how humans work so that you can be impactful in those communication and persuasion situations? interpersonal stressors are the second thing to [00:15:00] consider.
As you're figuring out how do you fix your burnout issue on your team or for yourself? Third thing is that there's sometimes competence and performance expectations that cause stress. And when I say competence, the ability to do your job. So if you are new in a knowledge profession, like maybe medicine, maybe software engineering, maybe another type of engineering, You might require a lot of handholding as you're trying to put the basic building blocks that you've learned into industry, right?
So what you learn in school is often different on how things actually work on the job. And school doesn't really teach you that part, but it gives you that ability to at least have that base knowledge to pick up those skills as you go. So as you start your career, honestly. You usually need a little bit more collaboration, a little bit [00:16:00] more oversight, a little bit more, contact with senior members on the team to make sure that you're performing at your best.
But as you get more experience, as you get a little bit more comfortable, as you get a little bit more confidence, you tend to be a little bit, you tend to be more independent as you work. And so that's what I mean by confidence, competence stressors. So if you can never. If you get stuck on a particular area of your job, it's really because you're not learning.
And so the question here is, what do you need to learn to increase your competence in your job, in your field, et cetera, right? Coupled with that is performance expectations. Sometimes you can work, again, in an environment where there's hyper aggressive deadlines, where we need you. To deliver a brand new fresh software [00:17:00] system, a new app in three days with a team of two, which the actual work would be a full like division of engineers working together to get this done over a six month period.
And That performance expectation of delivering this huge deliverable. In an unreasonable timeline happens a lot, I think, in corporate America. And so how can you manage that? You have to be very clear and you have to again, have those interpersonal skills to have that conversation, to be like, Hey, like we can try this.
But, really, this should take a full team six months to do. You're wanting us to be done in three days. That's not reasonable, so we need to work with that expectation. and, again, this is going to depend on your team. It's [00:18:00] going to depend on the organization you're operating in. But, it can cause a lot of stress.
Especially, too, if You constantly have these big deadlines and deliverables done. Blech, that was a mouthful. Do, if you have these deliverables, do. Constantly, without any type of rest, or any type of learning that can happen, right? If you're constantly on to the next thing because there's so much to do, you can't incorporate the things that you're learning, and you can't grow, which again, hits your competence.
Confidence and away it goes. So I know that I've talked a lot about burnout in my business and there's previous episodes of me talking about burnout on the Meaningful Revolution podcast, but it's something that's really hits home for me and it's connected to the [00:19:00] Meaningful Revolution because If you're stressed out over something you don't really care about, or something that's not really lighting the fire in your heart, it's a miserable experience.
And one of the ways that we can feel like we're more in control of our life is to live into our personal, meaningful revolutions. And that's my wish for each and every one of you. if this spoke to you in some way, shape, or form, Please go and share this episode with two or three of your friends who are people you think you might need it.
Let's get the word out on this show. It would help me out. I'd really appreciate it. And, if not, totally cool too, but, We will see you in the next episode of The Meaningful Revolution. So this is Shawn Buttner signing off.
And again, if you liked this video, check out this other video we did last week on Life, Work, Mix right over here.
And with that, we'll see you [00:20:00] guys later.
