Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, where we help leaders activate strong performance while also humanizing the work experience. And these days, much of the work we are doing with clients is coming down to burnout. And the thing is, we've got it all wrong.
In fact, we've done ourselves such a collective disservice when it comes to our fundamental understanding of all things burnout, that I'm gonna be dedicating four straight episodes to this topic, and today it's the first. If you are experiencing burnout or seeing it around you, you've come to the right place.
Hang with me today and for the whole month of May, as we're gonna unpack this thing together, leaving everyone feeling lighter and empowered to create meaningful change and head over to lead above noise slash burnout for more resources and programs, I would love to bring your way. Okay, can I start with a quick story? If you'll humor me, I promise it has a point. Okay. So when my kiddos were little, they played all the sports, and my husband coached pretty much every team they were on.
He loved getting to relive his glory days, and you know, having that time with his girls, I loved that I never had to be the parent to bring orange slices, so it was a win for everybody. My husband had been a youth athlete himself, so his approach was to bring back to life all the drills that his own coaches had used with him, the ones designed to grow speed and agility and skills. And for some kids, the drills worked like a dream, but for others, not so much over time.
What my husband came to realize was this, when a kid isn't having a version of success on the field or the court, it may be a skill or agility issue, but also it might actually be something else. Like some kids might need help with strategy, building their sense of where to be or who to chase. For others, it might be a confidence thing, and the support they need is more around mindset.
Still, others may have amazing individual skills, but the coaching they need is in being part of a team, working with and not against the other players. I share this because I think it offers an insight into what we're getting so wrong about burnout and how as a result, we're kind of failing to fix it. See, my husband thought poor performance at sports was a skill problem, and therefore the way to fix it is with skill building. But that turned out to be true.
Only sometimes, likewise, leaders, or at least pretty much all the ones I'm talking to, think burnout is a volume problem and therefore the only way to solve it is by reducing volume, which is wrong, but also stressful. Because now more than ever, we're being asked to do more with less. In the first of this four part series on finally resolving burnout, we are gonna talk about what's really causing burnout.
Because if we keep trying to implement solutions to a volume problem when that's actually not the problem, we're going to keep failing. First, let's start with what burnout feels like. Before we jump into the drivers of burnout, we have to ask, what actually is it? When I think about this, I chuckle because it reminds me of the wacky thing that a Supreme Court justice once said about the standard for obscenity. When he was asked, well, what's the actual definition of obscenity?
He famously said, well, I know it when I see it slightly less obscene. Burnout is a little bit the same, like there's no test for it, and it's not really a binary. People aren't necessarily burned out or not burned out. It's more like an accumulation of symptoms. If I ask you to do a word association with burnout, what comes to mind?
I've started asking this in my keynotes on the topic, and I consistently get answers like frantic, hurried, ripping my hair out, exhausted, and these are all fair, but what comes up less frequently? Words like lonely, bored, going through the motions, distracted always pivoting and never delivering. But these two are fair and valid. We just aren't associating all of these experiences with burnout.
The point here is this, there is no singular definition or experience of burnout, and we all have good days and bad days. So for me, I think of burnout as a chronic experience of feeling unable or disempowered to do good meaningful work. And it lives on a spectrum, which is to say some people may literally struggle to get out of bed while others may just feel like they're working with a little mental sludge.
As far as I'm concerned, not every case of burnout is a five alarm fire, but any experience of burnout deserves our attention and correction. So if you or your team is feeling any version of these things, let's talk about what might be causing it. So to start, there's actually some good news here, like really good. See, when everyone thinks burnout is a volume problem, and if volume feels like the one thing you can't control, you're probably gonna feel defeated.
But if it turns out the real driver of your burnout is something else, then often there is something within your locus of control that we can change, and that is a great thing. So let's talk about some of these. First, let's talk about volume, because that is real. And I wanna be clear when I say it's often not a volume problem, that doesn't mean volume isn't an issue. Leaders absolutely need to have an eye on the realities of humanity regularly.
Pushing people to and beyond the limits of their capacity tends not to be considered a best practice. So friends and leaders, please prioritize consistently, frequently across silos. Be mindful of when you add to a plate, you check to see if there's room or if peas and potatoes are overflowing.
Connection is another one, as in we all experience it differently, but having a community of people that we trust around us, that we get to collaborate, to learn from, to have a shared lexicon instead of experiences with it's protective. And when organizations either don't make time or space for building relationships, or worse, they try to mandate community through forced fun events, well, we feel burnout.
Purpose is also huge, as in why am I spending hours every day in this spreadsheet, following this script with customers, building this dashboard, and on and on? Sometimes just ensuring that our people can actually see a link between the stuff, the activities of their days, and an outcome that's meaningful. This can put some much needed fuel back in their tanks. Next up, we've got inanity, as in when the stuff of our days is bureaucratic, inefficient, pointless.
When we're wading through process that hasn't been updated since the eighties, when we're doing things manually that could be automated when we're putting a dog in pony shows, instead of doing the meaningful work, this burns us out. Next, we've got excessive change. You know, I talk a lot about change and it is the new normal and we need to have resilience for it, but also sometimes we need just a minute to catch our breath.
In some organizations, I'm finding leaders who change their minds daily. They turn left today and right tomorrow. Now this is a priority Tomorrow it's that change is here to stay, but it should be in response to strategic shifts when it's constant because our leaders aren't effectively talking or planning, this just creates chaos, and that is exhausting. And finally, external forces. As in, Hey, have you noticed the world is low key on fire these days? People are struggling just to get through.
It's taking energy from our tanks that we would otherwise have to give to our work, and we need to honor this, not ignore it, not tell people to leave that stuff at home. We carry it everywhere, and it needs to live in the conversation we'll have about solutions. Okay, for today, I'll stop here if you have been feeling the burn and also a sense of disempowerment to do anything about it because volume's out of your hands. I hope you're feeling hopeful and excited for the next episode.
In episode two of this series, we are gonna focus on managers because they are feeling it doubly hard and we need to talk about resetting expectations around what is their burden to carry and what isn't. But I promise you there will be good stuff in there for managers as well as individual contributors. So make sure you come back next week. If your organization or team or self is struggling with burnout, please head to my website, lead above noise.com/burnout.
Grab some resources or fill out the contact form and tell me more. I would love to come in and give a talk or run a heavy on the action planning workshop for your leaders or team. I promise I'll leave you feeling lighter. Join me next week for another great episode. Until then, visit my website@leadabovenoise.com. Follow modern mentor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks so much for listening and have a successful week.
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