2 Underappreciated Steps for Overcoming Burnout that you MIGHT be Skipping
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What is the single most important thing for overcoming burnout?
Is it sleep? Is it self-care? Is it boundary-setting?
What if I told you, it was none of those things?
In one of my last in-person speaking gigs, my clients threw me curveball right as we were wrapping up: "if you had to pick one final tip for overcoming burnout, what would it be?"
It was one of those questions that I could not answer with my characteristic "it depends". I mean, that's usually what I would say to someone because, yes, it does depend. It depends on you. It depends on your triggers. It depends on the type of burnout you're experiencing (and if you're not sure of your type, click here).
However, "it depends" felt like a cop-out in this situation. So, if I really had to get down to it, what were the most important tips I had for overcoming burnout? Fortunately, my gut didn't fail me, and I stand by this answer to this day:
"The most important things for overcoming burnout are compassion and self-awareness."
Not where you thought I was gonna go with this, right?
But ultimately these are perhaps two of the most important things that you can have when it comes to overcoming your burnout. Let me break this down a little bit to tell you what I mean…
STEP #1
You’ve got to have self-awareness.
For most of us, we are pedal to the metal. We are moving at the speed of light, through our tasks, through our responsibilities, even perhaps through our time at the end of the day. We're trying to be present and be in our time with our loved ones and our family and our friends, and yet there's a sense of guilt there that we “should” be working. So, we rush through it, to get onto the next thing.
We move so quickly through life that we do not make time to be self-aware. And that's a problem. We're flitting so quickly from one task to the next that we don't even have time to take inventory of what our stressors are. We go from back-to-back tasks at work to back-to-back meetings, to back-to-back social commitments. When we get home to back-to-back, you know, responsibilities.
If we're not folding laundry or washing dishes, we are checking our phones and checking our emails. And we never have the time or the pause in our life to really self-reflect. And that's when things start to fall through the cracks self-awareness is ultimately created by creating space in our lives.
I will totally acknowledge that. I used to be the person who used to say, “I don't like silence.” I am still somebody who struggles with not constantly having noise in the background. Probably one of the few times that I am in quiet is when I'm recording. When I'm podcasting, Youtubing, and making this content for you because I can't have noises in the background.
This is something I've been intentionally working against because I have realized that for me, I need to have that white space. I need to have that empty space in my life. Otherwise, I'm not gonna be able to catch on to some of these patterns because it's in this time where we have white space, that we are able to start to reflect.
Seriously, ask yourself right now: When was the last time you did nothing?When was the last time you spent time in silence? When was the last time you didn't feel obligated to do or to produce?
For so many of us, we may not even be able to answer that question. It's been so long that we don't even know when the last time was!
That's also not part of the difficulty with this. What does it even look like when we sit down?
I have had people at speaking engagements out-right ask me, “do you just expect me to stare at a wall?” Well, ya, kind of!
I know how uncomfortable that can be for people. A lot of us don't like spending time in silence because we don't like where our mind goes when there's nothing to distract us. So, instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you some questions to ask yourself:
What things have you been really doing that are helping with your stress?
What things are you doing that are adding to your stress?
These are very, very simple questions. At first, you might not immediately come up with answers. That's okay. The idea here is to give yourself that space and see where your mind goes. Maybe your mind doesn't go to work. Maybe it goes to social commitments. Maybe it goes to expectations that your family has for you or your friends. Just see where your mind goes.
The first things you come up with aren’t necessarily the end-all-be-all of what’s causing your stress and burnout. What I actually would highly recommend doing is this: make this a pattern. Sit down and do this once a week. As you may know, I actually do this in the context of doing a weekly review.
So that's step one. That's the first really underappreciated thing that we can do for overcoming burnout.
STEP #2
You’ve got to have compassion.
Compassion has been a hot topic when it comes to the speaking engagements I've been doing lately. Everybody wants to talk about compassion. And when it comes to compassion, I made a bold statement in one of my speaking engagements: burnout cannot be overcome without compassion.
The more that I think about this, the more I stand by it because, ultimately, there are two impacts of not being compassionate.
If we're not being compassionate toward others, we are gonna not receive the social support that we need to overcome burnout.
If we’re not compassionate toward ourselves, we are going to judge ourselves and not give ourselves what we need.
Social support is probably one the most studied aspects of burnout recovery. Now, whether or not that is social support outside of your work, or really having psychological safety in your team with your manager and feeling like it is safe to talk to your leaders about the things that you are experiencing, that's really what social support and psychological safety looks like. And it is one of the most important things for us when it comes to recovering from burnout.
We do not recover from burnout in a vacuum. We need to know that we're not alone. We need to know that there are people that will take care of us. That's really, really important. And if we are not giving compassion to others, we're not gonna receive it back from them.
However, perhaps the hardest thing when it comes to compassion for people is having compassion for ourselves. Having compassion for our loved ones and friends is relatively easy, but having compassion for ourselves, not so much, right?
We shit talk ourselves to no end. We are our own worst critics. And so that's really where burnout cannot be overcome without compassion comes in.
Yes, we need social support, but, more so than anything, we need the ability to be honest with ourselves and not judge ourselves.
Think of some of the things that you say to yourself. We probably drop some serious, serious self-critique and self-judgment on ourselves day in and day out. And you know what? I’m going to go there.
We say things like:
I'm such a fuck up
I did such a shitty job.
I'm not meant to be a manager.
I'm such a failure.
Why would anybody ever love me?
I'm going there because we say stuff like that to ourselves. Right? And when it comes to stress and burnout comes to mental health, those are some of the worst things we can do.
Self-compassion is one of the most important things that we can have when it comes to our mental health and when it comes to overcoming stress and overcoming burnout. Because if we don't have self-compassion, if we are not able to look at the thing that's causing stress in our lives give ourselves what we need to work through those things.
Self-compassion has three components: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness.
Self-kindness is about not talking shit about ourselves
Common humanity is recognizing that just because it feels like we're the only person who's struggling with this doesn't mean we are
Mindfulness is about recognizing what you’re feeling without overidentifying with it. Just because you feel like a failure doesn’t mean you are.
This is from work by Dr. Kristen Neff. If you haven't read her work, she's got a book that's called self-compassion, which I highly recommend. It's powerful, powerful stuff to just contrast the way in which we often talk about ourselves versus the way in which we need to.
A couple ways to have more self-compassion are:
Channel your inner Brene Brown and pivot your language from shaming language - “I am a mistake” - to blaming language - “that was a mistake”.
Have a growth mindset by realizing that where you are now isn’t where you have to or are going to say. We can do that by using “yet” language or
Self-compassion is gonna help us stop beating ourselves up because if we beat ourselves up, we're not gonna wanna change. If we are beating ourselves up, we're not gonna have the motivation to improve. Self-compassion is about recognizing and not forcing yourself to have that 9:00 PM cup of coffee and keep, keep hustling in your day when all you wanna do is curl up with your significant other on the couch and watch Schitt’s Creek.
That's self-compassion. It's recognizing what you need, having compassion for it, and recognizing that you need to give that thing to yourself. Self-compassion is about realizing it makes you no less of a successful person to do that. That's where self-compassion comes in.
So, if self-awareness is step one, compassion is step two and we need both. If we're gonna overcome from burnout, we need to be able to identify what our stressors and do it in real-time and we need to have the compassion with ourselves to be able to give ourselves the things that we need.
