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?

We have been wounded at work. The coronavirus, about 1/10,000th the size of a grain of salt, altered everything. Wounds have ranged from fatality and unemployment to burnout or the loss of what we thought work was.

I am seeing many articles about coming back stronger. I am uncomfortable with that…not the coming back stronger, but the sense of let’s get over this. Sometimes, this seems to be a shallow plea for resilient workers – when life throws you a lemon make lemonade leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Wounds tend to attract attention to themselves and grief, as hard as it is, is a way to keep a loss alive. I don’t know about you but I plan to keep alive what has happened to myself and so many in 2020.

Robert Bly believed that our wounds transformed can become our gifts to our community. I like the idea of transformational gifts but I don’t think it can be rushed.

William Bridges was adamant that our biggest failure in organizations is the failure to acknowledge who is losing what because of a change. Our transition out of our wounds is through our wounds.

Ensure you pause fully to take stock of your wounds, that everyone is invited to talk about what they lost in 2020, and you move forward carefully, which to me, means full of care.

Last year at this time, none of us imagined how much change we would experience in work in 2020? To get a handle on it, I invite you write a personal 6-word story to capture your work experiences in the first half of 2020.

We may achieve a certain sense of comprehension or control over our experience when we transform experience into story. It may offer us a new perspective or a simple structure for a deeper more salient understanding of what has been going through. Creativity thrives with constraints and the constraint of capturing your work over 5 months with 6 words if a definite constraint.

We have been asking registrants of our June 11^th Poppulo webinar on learn, adapt, and transform to write their 6-word story after registering. Here are 2 examples:

• Thought I might catch up; baloney.
• We can rise to the challenge.

And here is my 6-word story: Almost retired, pandemic pandemonium – I’m needed.”

In 2009 I asked members of the Employee Experience & Engagement Network to compose a six-word story of engagement. We turned it into a small book. I offer you this e-book as inspiration for you to write your own story of 2020. http://www.davidzinger.com/wp-content/uploads/Employee-Engagement-Six-Word-ebook.pdf

So, what is your six-word story?

I invite you to join me this Thursday June 11^th for the webinar: Learn, Adapt, & Transform for the New Work Reality: https://bit.ly/35W3MlJ