A Better Job Wont Help The Truth about Burnout
[Music]
does this
sound familiar i’m too
burned out to cook i’m
way too burned out to exercise
i’m too burned out to get my house
organized
i’m too burned out to
you fill in the blank how many times
have you found yourself feeling
too burned out to do life as a high
performance coach
the most common thing my clients tell me
is that they’re
too burned out to take the steps
necessary to do the work to create
an exceptional life they’re too
burned out to write that book to work
towards their dreams to live their
passion
to fill their bucket list imagine my
delight when i read that
the world health organization proclaimed
in 2018
burn out as a legitimate medical
diagnosis
finally i thought a real diagnosis that
explains why
so many of my clients feel trapped in a
cycle of joyless living that
impacts not only their creativity
but their physical vitality when i read
the full description from the world
health organization which said that
burnout is related to employment issues
applies only to work related
circumstances and
shouldn’t be applied to other life
situations
i was confused this didn’t match what
was happening with my clients at all
most of my clients didn’t hate their
jobs they didn’t feel
overworked and they certainly weren’t
underpaid in fact
many of my clients really loved their
work but they felt exhausted and burned
out because of
underlying patterns of self-sabotage
linked to traumatic events from their
past
this started me exploring the question
what if
the real cause of burnout isn’t
overworking
low pay or hating your job but
unresolved
trauma i decided to survey the people
who subscribed to my weekly newsletter
i sent out the survey to about 20 000
people
and approximately a thousand people
filled it out now
obviously this wasn’t a scientifically
targeted random group this is a
group of self-selected people who were
interested in high performance living
and who liked my writing and my work
97 of the survey participants
described themselves as having low
self-worth
92 percent describe themselves as having
experienced
some sort of trauma and 87
reported themselves as being burned out
some of them
so burned out they literally couldn’t go
to work
according to the harvard school of
public medicine unresolved trauma is a
significant cause of low self-worth
and motivational dysfunction something
my survey
seemed to bear out according to the
diagnostic and statistical manual of
mental disorders the
gold standard for mental health
assessment
the psychological diagnosis of trauma
requires
actual or threatened death serious
injury
or sexual violence obviously these kinds
of events
are extremely traumatic but this
diagnostic criteria
also didn’t fit what i was seeing in my
coaching practice
even though most of my clients felt
somehow
traumatized by life very few of them had
actually experienced
these kinds of major traumatic events
the trauma i was seeing wasn’t always so
obvious
one of my clients amy was a burned-out
journalist who was
struggling with an exhausting autoimmune
disorder
after working with a therapist amy
uncovered a memory of her father
discouraging her from pursuing a career
in creative writing while she was in
college
because he was concerned that creative
writing wouldn’t pay
well so in response amy changed her
major to journalism
now you might think that changing majors
and
landing a job that pays the bills isn’t
that big a deal
but amy lost her sense of value around
the one
thing that she perceived was her
greatest gift her creative writing
ability
eventually this sense of loss deeply
hurt her career and
ultimately took a toll on her physical
health
amy was able to resolve her sense of
being traumatized by her father’s
well-intending advice and
once she embraced the idea that it was
okay for her to be a creative writer
she was able to return to work and
started writing for
fun again she’s currently working on her
second novel
because the traditional definition of
trauma
wasn’t really addressing my client’s
pain
i created a new definition of trauma
based on my research
my definition of trauma gives us a
better way to get to the root cause of
burnout
and gives us a broader base from which
to tackle healing the relationship
between
trauma and burnout i define trauma
as any event perception or experience
that causes us to lose our connection to
our sense of value
and to our unique gifts that we have to
bring to the world
when we’re working with people and we’re
only looking for the evidence of
big trauma such as violence and we don’t
take into account that
most people have in some way perceive
themselves as being
judged criticized or told that
they can’t do what they want to do with
their lives and what they dream of doing
it can have a similar effect on their
self-worth
as major trauma if we use this more
expanded definition of trauma it also
explains why
so many people feel burned out even
though they haven’t experienced
textbook trauma one of my clients
mark was a businessman who had a
terrible fear of failing
mark’s father had been a very successful
businessman and
also deeply critical of his son growing
up
mark who in spite of being very capable
and brilliant in his own right kept
sabotaging his success
he consistently miscalculated the time
it took him to complete
projects causing him to either submit
proposals late
or rush through projects with poor
quality work that really didn’t
represent his brilliance
he eventually was so exhausted from this
self-generated chaos that he completely
stopped trying to work at all
when we explored this pattern of failure
we discovered that
mark’s bad time management skills were
actually a way of controlling his
crippling fear of failure
rooted in the trauma from his
hypocritical father
if he could basically fail in advance
then he didn’t have to take the risk of
discovering that his best effort
wasn’t good enough once mark healed
his trauma from being criticized and
judged by his father he was able to
really express his own talents and
define success on his own terms
trauma doesn’t only make becoming
successful a struggle
it creates a stress response in the body
causing the body to produce the hormone
cortisol
putting the body in a state of chronic
fight or flight and at risk for many
other health issues
i’m in the middle of researching the
relationship between trauma
elevated cortisol and resiliency it’s my
hypothesis
that high cortisol levels make it
difficult to
bounce back from the twists and turns
that life inevitably throws at us making
us
less resilient i assess resiliency using
a scale that includes
nine core characteristics called the
resiliency keys
eight of these keys including your sense
of self-worth
your sense of empowerment and your sense
of lovability
need to be functioning at a high level
in order for you to experience the ninth
resiliency key
vitality is having the energy to
take action and to be able to do what
you need to do in life
when you have low vitality it’s hard for
you to do things like
keep your house in order exercise or buy
and cook healthy food
it’s even harder to do those things that
give your life meaning like
writing a book contributing to society
pursuing your passion
or checking things off your bucket list
when you can’t
access your vitality you burn out
understanding the components of
resiliency and how trauma affects
resiliency
helps us understand why some people can
work terrible jobs and never burn out
and others can have amazing dream jobs
and still
struggle with burnout one of my clients
alan is a highly successful surgeon
he owns several medical technology
patents lives in the large mansion in a
thriving metropolitan area
sets his own hours works about 20 hours
a week and receives an enormous amount
of respect
and acknowledgement for his job yet when
i first met alan
he reported himself as being burned out
he gave himself a very low vitality
score on the resiliency key scale
he was struggling to even get out of bed
in the mornings and he developed a
strong
coffee addiction just to help him stay
alert
during surgery allen had gone through a
very contentious breakup of a business
partnership that had really left him
doubting his worthiness of having
success
when we worked on restoring his sense of
self-worth his vitality returned
and he was able to reclaim his normal
state of productivity
not only was he able to get back to his
normal vibrant self with a new sense of
self-worth
the quality of his relationships
improved he’s now happily married with a
brand new wife
and a brand new baby daughter if we’re
not
helping people heal from everyday
trauma and only focusing on extreme
trauma
we’re not only missing the boat on how
to help people tap into their
ability to fulfill their life’s
potential
we’re actually limiting the chances that
we can
find the solutions to the challenges
facing humanity today
people who are burned out and have high
levels of cortisol are more reactive and
less
creative high cortisol levels put the
body
in a chronic state of fight or flight
and when your body’s in a constant
survival mode
it physiologically shuts down the more
creative parts of your brain you don’t
need those parts of your brain when
you’re running from a bear
or fighting for your life when we
feel vital we can access a more
expansive brain state that makes us
more creative we’re better able to find
groundbreaking solutions to problems
without this kind of creativity we
never would have gone to the moon had
light bulbs or discovered electricity
a world facing issues of sustainability
equitability and other challenges such
as
global warming and finding a vaccine or
a cure for a virus
needs healthy creative people in order
to access the elegant solutions
necessary to peacefully resolve
the challenges facing humanity today
burnout accounts for an estimated 125
to 190 billion dollars in healthcare
spending according to an article
published in the harvard business review
the number of people reporting
themselves as burned out is
on the rise every year if the root cause
of burnout is
not work related issues as the world
health organization
suggests but rather unresolved trauma
we’re tackling this debilitating and
costly syndrome the wrong way
getting a better job won’t help
most of my clients are white
middle-class people who want to improve
their performance in life
if these people are feeling traumatized
because somewhere in their life
they got disconnected from their value
imagine what it must be like for people
who face the daily impact of things like
institutionalized racism who don’t feel
safe
driving in their cars or walking through
certain neighborhoods or going to school
when people lose touch with their sense
of value
and the gifts that only they can bring
to the world
not only do they suffer we lose the
potential that the person whose destiny
it is to find the solutions
to the challenges facing the world today
might never get to tap into that destiny
because of trauma we must ask the
question
what exactly is causing so many people
to experience burnout
and we’ve got to do better research to
understand the relationship between
unresolved trauma and burnout we’re
going to have to start looking at
serious sources of trauma including
things such as
institutionalized racism which can cause
an entire
group of people to lose connection with
their value and to the unique gifts that
only they
can contribute to the world we need to
find
a better way to heal the root causes of
burnout
and we need to explore which groups of
people in our society
are being disproportionately traumatized
by
racism sexism gender bias
and other divisive behaviors and
policies so that
we can change our actions and lift
all of us up to the same degree of
vitality
and creativity you never know who might
be carrying the next elegant solution to
the world’s challenges
and the world needs all the help it can
get