Imagine that just about every day at work you feel exhausted, cynical, and you do not seem to be making a difference. These are strong indicators that you may be burning out at work. Perhaps it is time to use the same 3-steps you would use if you literally were on fire: Stop, Drop, and Roll.

Stop: Come to a complete stop and take stock of your experiences and emotions surrounding work and yourself. If you are burning out, failure to stop what is going on can intensify job strain and and can lead to a variety of negative physical and emotional consequences.

Drop: Determine what internal or external demands can be dropped. These demands can take the form of hassles, threats, conflicts, and other demands. Is it possible to drop some of your workload and expectations?

Roll: Burnout can stop us dead in our tracks. To get rolling again determine the resources you need to marshal to have a positive and constructive relationship with your work. Often others can play a big role in helping us to get rolling again.

I am sure you can identify, create, and implement your own applications and nuances of using stop, drop, and roll as personal nudges to bust up the negative experiences surrounding burnout.

According to Gallup the level of burnout of people working from home has risen this year from 18% to 29% and the amount of people working entirely from home has risen from 4% to 40%. This nullifies the idea, “that there is no place like home.”

Keeping the home fires burning for too long or without recovery can be adding fuel for potential burnout. Take pause and read the opening lyrics to Talking Head’s Burning Down the House:

Watch out you might get what you’re after
Cool babies, strange but not a stranger
I’m an ordinary guy
Burning down the house

Hold tight wait ’til the party’s over
Hold tight we’re in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Burning down the house

…

I will be offering online workshops and sessions starting in January to prevent and intervene in burnout at an individual and organizational level. If you are interested in learning more leave a comment or email me directly at: david@davidzinger.com

Work offers us structure, purpose, meaning and contribution. Work can make us well, but when burnout occurs positive emotions can feel fleeting, engagement is threadbare, relationships are frayed, meaning is murky, accomplishments are infrequent, and our personal strengths languish.

Let’s prevent and alleviate burnout – the cost is too high.

I will be offering online open workshops and online sessions for teams and organizations starting in January to help all employees strive and thrive to keep a healthy relationship with work.

If you are interested in learning more or hosting a session for your staff, email me directly: david@davidzinger.com.

Burnout.

Carol B offers her personal metaphor for burnout in Christina Maslach‘s quintessential, and my favorite book on burnout: Burnout the Cost of Caring.

“When I try to describe my experience to someone else, I use the analogy of a teapot. Just like a teapot, I was on the fire, with water boiling – working hard to handle problems and do good. But after several years, the water had boiled away, and yet I was still on the fire – a burned-out teapot in danger of cracking.”

I first read this in 1983 and resonated strongly with the description but unfortunately I am seeing far too many burned-out teapots today from healthcare workers to home-workers!

As a Canadian, I hope my American friends will use this Thanksgiving weekend to ‘put more water in your teapots.’ We need good recovery as a resource to meet the demands of our work. We need to be hearty in our work not suffering from a permanent hardening of our human heart in relationships to our work.

In January of 2021, I will be offering online workshops, facilitation, and coaching to dampen the flames of burnout. If you are interested leave a comment or direct message.

In the interim take care and carry on caring.

There was a robust response to my post on Wounded Workers 2020. We have experienced a plethora of wounds at work related to Covid-19. Our wounds can be physical, spatial, emotional, mental, stress-related, relationships, technological, psychological, economic, etc. There is a pervasive range and experience of the working wounded and those who are no longer working at this time.

To examine the metaphor a little more, “a wound is a disruption of the normal structure and function of the skin.” Wounded worker have experienced disruption of the normal structure and function of work. Obviously, not everyone has been wounded at work but there are so many more of us wounded than most of us imagine.

A large difference in work wounds from physical wounds is that often we can’t see many of the wounds of wounded workers. That is why I placed a bandage of my shirt, to make things a little more visible even if it is just symbolic.

We need to heal. I believe we will need time, energy, attention, conversation, and caring to heal our wounds. Please note that I say heal not cure. I love Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition of healing, “coming to terms with things as they are.” Easier said, than done.

How are you doing coming to terms with things as they are?