Job Burnout: What It Is, Why We Feel It, & How to Overcome It (Ep 29)
Are you considered a job or career change because you’re exhausted by work, unmotivated and unfulfilled? Is burnout a factor in your desire for change? Unfortunately, job burnout has only become more common since the start of the pandemic. Here’s my advice for how to improve or redesign your relationship to your work if you’re struggling with this.
In this final solo episode of our season on career leaps, I’m tackling burnout, one of the biggest issues I see facing workers today. I’m explaining why it’s become so common in the past few years, and I’m sharing my own experience with burnout in my career. Then, I’m giving you some actionable tips for tackling burnout in your own work life.
In this episode, you’ll learn...
The role burnout plays in making a career leap [1:37]
How burnout has become more common in the past few years [2:58]
What job burnout is and what it feels like [3:39]
How a coach can help you get out of burnout and into a career you love [5:16]
How the pandemic spurred burnout for “knowledge workers” and service providers [8:11]
Why you shouldn’t rely solely on your job to provide meaning[11:37]
My advice for anyone struggling with burnout [16:11]
Why it’s important to take ownership of the parts of your work life you can control [25:18]
If you’re considering your own courageous career leap, be sure to tune into this episode.
Standing at your own crossroads and ready to get clear on your direction? Apply for my Catalyst Coaching Program today!
If you are at that sort of stage where you are trying to figure out what do you want out of your next role, and you want to do some self reflection, I have something that is going to help you do that. Check out my self-paced digital course, Illuminate Your Career Path in 5 Steps. Five different modules will take you through step by step how to do some of this initial planning and thinking about what you want next for your career path.
I want you to know about my new free change planner. This planner is for you if you'd like to make a significant change in life or work, but you're feeling kind of stuck. My change planner will help you get the clarity you need to take your next steps. Inside, I'll show you how to understand what you really want and why it's important, how to face your fears constructively so they don't hold you back, and this planner also has a scenario cruncher. I hope you get all possible scenarios out of your head so you can find the right one for you!
Links mentioned in this episode…
“The Case Against Loving Your Job” from the Ezra Klein Show
Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe
The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel J. Siegel
Transcript of Episode 29: Job Burnout: What It Is, Why We Feel It, & How to Overcome It
If you're feeling burned out, get curious about it. Where is it really coming from? Is it from overwork, from work life imbalance, from a lack of social support, from a lack of control over your work and the outcomes it has? Or from an even deeper place of moral injury. Of this feeling of utter disenchantment in your profession?
Welcome to Leap Like Me. If you can't shake the feeling that you're not on the right path. If you feel called to change things up but don't know how to begin, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Lisa Hoashi, and my specialty is coaching people at those crossroads moments in life when you feel called to take a new direction. Sometimes that means taking a leap. I want to share practical advice and inspiration for your leaps and how to keep going after your dreams in a challenging world. This season, we're talking all about career leaps. Come along for the conversation.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Leap Like Me. It's Lisa here, and today's show is going to be my last solo show of this season. Next season, we're moving into a new type of leap. And so as I prepared for today, I realized it was my last chance for a little while where I get to talk specifically about careers and about work. And as I pondered what topic I would really like to leave you with, I realized that what I most wanted to say was related to job burnout. So I'm curious, how burned out are you feeling right now?
On today's show, I wanted to share what I am noticing about burnout and offer you some ideas about how to redesign your relationship to work. If you're struggling with this, and if it's a part of the reason why you're considering changing jobs or careers, as you've heard over this season, I think it's been a factor for a number of the people who have been on the show. And burnout as a topic is very near and dear to my own heart. It was definitely a factor in my own decision to take a yearlong sabbatical from work, which is something that I talked about when I shared my sabbatical story on this podcast. It's back in episodes nine and ten, if you want to check those out. And what I've found since the pandemic started is that burnout increasingly is a huge reason why people reach out for coaching, why they want to make changes in their work, and why they also might be considering taking a break from work.
You know, before the pandemic, people would contact me for career break coaching because they wanted to take a break to pursue some unfulfilled dreams, like sailing across the ocean or going tango dancing in Argentina. And now it's mainly because they're physically and emotionally exhausted. And that's been upsetting to me as I hear their stories. If burnout is also a factor in your own decision to make changes in your work life, I want you to first know that you are definitely not alone. And I want to offer you some ideas for how to address that burnout as you're thinking about your next job. So what is burnout? If you go to the Mayo Clinic website, they define it this way. Job burnout is a special type of work related stress, a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity. So what are the common symptoms? You might wonder? So here are some of the common symptoms that I listen for as a coach.
When someone describes how they are and how they feel around work. I might suspect job burnout if they're feeling pretty miserable overall at work, including feeling taken advantage of, disrespected or even more toxic sources of stress if they have low or dragging energy, if they're not sleeping well or have other physical problems that are cropping up like gut issues or skin flare ups, if they feel like work has taken over life and that there's feels like not much room for all the other important things, if they feel like a sense of dullness or feeling like they're not themselves anymore. Sometimes this is best described as just feeling kind of like you've lost your spark. Do any of these sound like you? Now it's important to note that as a coach, when I'm listening to all these things, I know that some of them are not mine to help with. Obviously, physical issues need to be taken care of by a doctor or a nutritionist or other specialists, and mental health issues will need to be treated by a mental health professional as well.
So what can I help with, though? As a coach, I can help support someone in taking action to begin addressing these things, to identify where they need support and why it's important, and to strategize what to do next. So coaching really has four key elements to it. One element is around goal setting and vision. So getting clear on what it is that you want and starting to think about, how can you make that happen? That accountability piece is the other element that's really important. So saying aloud to someone else like your coach, about what it is that you want, who can hold you accountable to following through, to having that commitment to it. The other element that's really important about coaching is taking action. So in coaching, we really have a bias toward action. So we're really going to support you to take continuous action towards your goals and then tweaking those. Actions. As you learn more from taking them and you get clear on what is the right path for you. And the last really important element to coaching is awareness. So all of these things are really in service to helping you grow your own awareness of yourself, your values, and the other things that are important to you in this life. This is where the learning and the personal development piece is. You know, what this work really adds up to is helping you grow your awareness of yourself and what is most important to you.
So when I coach someone who comes to me to help improve their work life and burnout is a factor there. Here's how our coaching might break down, according to those four different elements. So for goal setting, we would talk about how they would like work to be and how we might find something like that for them in the world. Accountability. When we do this work together and for the coaching to work, the person needs to commit to their goal and their actions to be accountable to them for the time we work together. I support them to stay accountable through check ins and other types of tools, and the idea is that we set them up so they can have the accountability systems in place and can stay on track. Even after we coach together for action, we design actions that help them get to their goals. Maybe it becomes clear that they need to take time off to recover from burnout. Maybe they need to stay on top of their doctor or other specialist visits, or to develop a new diet or a sleep routine. A coach can help you design all of these types of actions and awareness. Finally, what we want the coaching to bring is a fuller awareness in that person about what burnout is for them, what causes it internally and externally, how they can cope, how they can be healthier. And this is all deeper learning that we want them to take forward about themselves.
As I mentioned before, burnout is a really timely issue. It's really moving into the forefront with the pandemic and the great resignation. So let's talk about that. First, I want to talk about specifically what kind of worker I'm talking about in this discussion of burnout. The majority of my clients work in jobs that are similar to those that I've personally held their knowledge workers. It's not my favorite term, but maybe the best for describing this type of worker. If you haven't heard this term before, knowledge workers are basically people who think for a living, including physicians, lawyers, marketing and communications professionals, editors, teachers, programmers, scientists, engineers, accountants and academics. Their main capital is knowledge, and since they do a lot of problem solving, they often use a lot of creativity. And they're also quite dependent on information technology.
So it's a growing area of work. The people that I generally work with as well are people who often work for nonprofits or who are invested in their work, having some social good and having meaning. They care a lot about their work generally, and they often work a lot. They also typically span Generation X and millennials. So during the pandemic, these were generally all the people who continued working and went remote. Are you also in this group? If you're listening to this podcast or have been following my work for some time, I would guess that you are. So let's sit for a moment with your own experience of these last two pandemic years. How has it changed your own relationship to work? You know, I love my job and I've really done a lot intentionally to design it. So it really fits me and my life. And yet yet I also experienced some burnout over a couple of months during the last two years. I have a lot of professional boundaries so that I can do my work well and sustainably. It's so incredibly interpersonal and I'm also a sensitive and empathetic person. And still I found that the mental health needs that I was finding in my work and in my personal life and that is required for being a mother of two small kids during a pandemic, was just starting to get to me. It definitely caused me to step back and take some time off. It also got me thinking about my work and how I was engaging with it and what I might need to change about both my work and my life to be healthier through this time. Maybe you've also had a moment or several moments like this, too.
Right now I feel like these moments of reckoning is what the media has dubbed as the great resignation or the Great Awakening, whatever you want to call it, record now. Numbers of people, as you likely know, have been quitting their jobs or changing jobs. And the pandemic really gave people time to think about work and how it was affecting their lives. It was also a moment when maybe employers showed their true colors. Putting profit over people are really just plain mismanaging how they treated their employees through the pandemic, and I think that influenced a lot of people, too. If you want a really great overview of this moment and an in-depth conversation about the bigger factors that are at play here, including the historical factors, I want to recommend another podcast to you. It's an episode from the New York Times Ezra Klein show called The Case Against Loving Your Job. The guest is Sarah Jaffe, who wrote a book called Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. Whoa. Right. A client shared this podcast episode with me last fall, waiting to know what I thought. And I have been thinking about it ever since. It is so good.
I could go on all day about various topics in this interview between Rogé Karma and Sarah Jaffe. But for the sake of our conversation today, burnout, I've got to hone in on one. Basically, Jaffe warns about the labor of love, basically looking to your job for personal fulfillment and meaning. She points out how this is a generational thing that if you think back a generation or two, people weren't expecting their jobs to bring them meaning just a paycheck. And she also describes how seeking meaning and identity in our work can have a real backlash. In their conversation, Rosie Karma and Sarah Jaffe talk about this idea of moral injury. So Roget says this term was first used with war veterans to describe the specific trauma that soldiers experienced when they were forced to act contrary to their moral beliefs by killing civilians, for example, and the way that specific psychological harm showed up differently than traditional PTSD. And in recent years, he goes on to say, there's been a movement among physicians to sort of extend this term of moral injury to their own profession, arguing that what's often called burnout is actually the wrong label to describe what they are experiencing, because the source of their exhaustion, their cynicism, their severe mental distress is not simply that they're being overworked, but that their jobs render it impossible for them to actually fulfill their Hippocratic Oath to the patient, their patients, health and well-being to provide high quality care. What Rogé Karma and Sarah Jaffe then discuss in this interview is taking this idea of moral injury even further to extend it to any professionals who are also working with a moral purpose. Very much like the knowledge workers I described earlier, the teachers, the nonprofit sector workers, and that the burnout that they're experiencing is perhaps not only overwork, but this idea of moral injury. They're having to recognize that despite everything that they've done to get into our profession, in order to have a social impact, that impact is still elusive or questionable because of systemic issues.
I think about my own experience with working in humanitarian aid and how much it meant to me to get to a stage in my career where I was able to go and support aid efforts in Haiti following the earthquake there, only to see how the system that I was a part of was not having the impact I hoped for. It was actually having a negative impact on Haitians that absolutely killed me inside. It's burnout and it's also something else. And I think a lot of us are struggling with that coming out of the pandemic. I'm thinking of two good friends, for example, who are college professors who have struggled to teach and to be there for their students during this time within the constraints of the university and higher education system. So there's two things here. If you're feeling burned out, get curious about it. Where is it really coming from? Is it from overwork, from work life imbalance, from a lack of social support, from a lack of control over your work and the outcomes it has? Or from an even deeper place of moral injury, of this feeling of utter disenchantment in your profession. Now I promise some advice for how to deal with burnout. I just took it to a whole new level, but here is some of my ideas and advice for how to deal with burn.
Our first piece of advice. You probably need a break. I often have to say this to my clients emphatically. It is the most basic and sometimes the hardest to hear. Maybe because in our fast paced, high pressure world, it can be scary to take a break. But depending on how burned out you feel, you may just need a good break to rest and to tend to your basics. Sleep, eating well, getting outside, being with loved ones. So remember that I am the mother of a three year old and a five year old. And what I've learned is that when problems arise with them. Think about a tantrum. Right. There's this huge, you know, explosion of a problem right in front of you. Well, actually, first, before you deal with that, you have to check to see if they have an underlying, basic need that needs to be addressed first. I recently learned a helpful acronym for this, which is halt, HALT. Before jumping into a discipline issue. I was told ask is this kid hungry, angry, lonely or tired? This is from the Whole Brain Child by Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson, by the way. I think that all of us, no matter our age, need to also ask this of ourselves before we get carried away with trying to deal with any situation. Is everything taken care of on a basic level? Do we need to eat better? Do we need to process some feelings? Do we need some love and friendship and social support? Do we just need some sleep? When you take a break for burnout, these are the fundamentals that you need to.
Here's my second piece of advice. Take some time to look deeply at your relationship to meaning and to impact when it comes to your work. Do you work in one of those professions we talked about earlier that have a moral purpose or is striving to have a social impact? How do you feel about that right now and how is it impacting you and your relationship to your work? Going back to that Sarah Jaffe interview, her take was that it was better for workers to remember that they're in capitalist systems and to take a more transactional approach to work. I do this and you pay me. She suggests that it's healthier and perhaps less exploitative for workers to find their meaning outside of work. I think that everyone needs to find their own balance. And I also say that it's really important, especially if you're dealing with burnout, to really examine this for yourself. It takes reflection and experimentation to figure out what might be best for you. In my twenties, because I wanted to save my inner resources and creativity for writing, I tried a transactional approach and got a good job that paid the bills and did not ask too much else of me. And it would have been fine. It was a really great job. It did serve, you know, vaguely social mission, except that I got bored. And the sheer hours that I was there at that job, it felt like too much for me to give away just for the money. And that's where I decided that I needed more meaning if I were going to give those hours away from there. Though, when I went on to work for a nonprofit, I just gave too much, too many hours, too much identity, too much emotional labor. So that's something to really watch out for. For you, what is just the right mix of a job that pays the bills is meaningful for the hours of your life. You're giving an exchange and allows you to enjoy the rest of your life. I'm still tinkering with this myself all the time, and I want to encourage you to think about it in your own career.
Here's my third piece of advice. Review your own work habits and how they affect you. So earlier we were talking about the idea of moral injury and how that can be caused by systems that are outside of your or perhaps beyond your control. But what about the elements of your burnout that might be caused by things that you can control? Here's what I'm talking about. Do you really have to work so many hours? Is anyone really going to come down on you if you log off at 6 p.m. instead of 8 p.m.? Do you really have to be so responsive to emails and slack messages? Can you respond within 24 hours versus 2 hours? Do you really not have time to take that lunch break or get exercise during the workday? If you're remote, working and single. Are you making enough time to get out of your apartment every day to be outdoors and to socialize? Are you being a good boss of yourself? We are all ultimately our own bosses and we need to take that ownership back sometimes to be truly a good boss to ourselves. We need to be a boss that allows unplugging, that allows us to feel satisfied and happy with our efforts. That allows us to not respond to emails immediately, but allows a peaceful night's sleep. That allows our families and partners to get our undistracted selves. That allows us to have fun and interests and ideas beyond our work. I'm curious what is an element of your work life that you really don't like? Now let's think about do you have a role in it and what is that? A lot of times one of our own beliefs is enforcing one of our habits or behaviors that's affecting us negatively.
So here's an example. When I started working for myself, I was now my own boss and I could do anything I wanted. But I found myself slipping into some old patterns, working long hours, not making enough time for lunch breaks or exercise or recreation. And I recalled the same end of day sensation from back when I was at my last office job. I would end the day feeling like I hadn't gotten enough done or that I hadn't been productive enough. So I just sit at my desk and keep working. As people started to go home around me and even though I was just doing busywork like an email here and there and messing around my inbox, it wasn't really anything important. And it was like I didn't feel like I had done a good enough job to stand up for. My desk, says, fired at a hard day's work and go, It never felt like that. And I thought it was that job that had made me feel that way. But it turned out it wasn't. I still struggle with that feeling. It comes from inside of me and I'm still working on it. I actually have a practice now where I forced myself at a specific hour to stand up from my desk and say, That's good enough for now. Good job, Lisa. That's good enough. And then I closed my laptop, I closed the door, and I leave from talking with other clients. I know others share this exact same feeling at the end of the day.
Here's another super common one. And watch out for this. Whenever you get into your next new job, it's a belief that you need to prove yourself and keep proving yourself in order to keep your job and win other people's respect. So without much conscious thought, proving ourselves somehow surpasses doing a good job to being available at all times to my team or responding quickly to messages even on nights and weekends. And our beliefs are big drivers and so strong. So even when we're getting praise for our work, our boss is telling us to stop being so responsive. We still act the same way. It takes changing our beliefs from the inside. That will change our behavior on the outside. And this is really the power of personal growth and coaching, is to recognize what's going on and then to start trying to change that and to tweak it. And so it starts to serve you more. There is a fine line here, though, and I just want to alert you to that. A lot of times people try tinkering with their work life only to discover that they've done what they can to be happy with it, like they've really tried everything. And what's really a problem is out of their control. And so if that is your case, do it leap and make that change. There are some work environments that are just harmful and not worth it. So get yourself out. All right. So we talked about so much good stuff today that is so close to my heart.
If you're struggling with burnout, I hope you got some good ideas for where it might be coming from, how you might start addressing it, how you could change, how you approach your career and day to day work to reduce your chances of burning out in the future. The message that I want to leave you with with this podcast above all, is to make the most of the parts of your working life that you can control. A lot in life is out of our control, but a lot is truly within our control. When you take a more intentional and thoughtful approach to designing your work and your life, you're making the most of what you can control. You're looking at what jobs are really the right fit and starting to take action. To move closer to that, you have an idea of the place that you want your work to have within your larger life, your relationships or interests. What do you do for fun and adventure and learning? And you're making changes here and there to make the right amount of space and support for that. You are exploring how much meaning you want it to bring and how is that through a certain type of impact.
And finally, if it’s time to redesign your career path or to leap. I hope you've gotten some helpful ideas from this season of Leap like me and know that I am always here if you need some extra support. There are two more interview episodes left in this season and I hope you enjoy them. In the meantime, I hope that this episode supports you in having a much healthier relationship to your work life. Oh. Thank you for listening to this episode of Leap Like Me. If you're enjoying the show and getting lots of value from it, be sure to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss any new episodes and leave us a five star review. Also, do you know anyone who's considering a career change who might appreciate the ideas and inspiration from the show? Please let them know about it. We want as many people as possible to benefit from these shows and know that if you do share it, you can always tag me at Lisa Hoashi on Instagram or LinkedIn, by the way, if you haven't already connected with me in those two places. I'm also sharing tons of good stuff there.
Speaking of sharing, I want you to know about my new free change planner. This planner is for you. If you'd like to make a significant change in life or work, but you're feeling kind of stuck by change planner, it will help you get the clarity you need to take your next steps inside us, show you how to understand what you really want and why it's important, how to face your fears constructively so they don't hold you back. And this planner also has a scenario cruncher. I help you get all possible scenarios out of your head so you can find the right one for you. It's my favorite part, and having used it with many clients, I've seen how powerful it is. I know you're going to get many great insights out of this free planner, so head on over to LeapLikeMe.com to get your copy. That's a wrap for this episode. Thanks for listening, for sharing the show and being part of this journey with me. Take good care.