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Burnout: Can it be an opportunity?
The short answer is YES!
But let’s start from the beginning.
Burnout is a rapidly increasing phenomenon that does not only occur in the management sector where you might suspect it.
Those affected usually find their situation to be completely hopeless. They often feel helpless and completely burned out. Burnout can be described as a kind of „call for help“ that makes you realize that something in your life immediately has to change.
If you (or your coaching clients) get this message, there are certainly opportunities to get back on the right track.
Accepting burnout as this „call for help“ of your body allows you to find a positive way out of the dead end. It can be a process of renewal and personal development, self-improvement, and lead to more fulfillment and a happier life.
The CleverMemo Burnout Prevention and Recovery Toolkit supports you and your clients along this way. It is suitable both for working with your coaching clients and as a self-help tool for those at risk of burnout.
What is Burnout? The definition of Burnout
Burnout has several phases and depending on the stage the symptoms are different. Typical signs are severe stress, depression, aggression, anxiety, depression, but also severe dissatisfaction, reduced performance, as well as withdrawal and reduced zest for life.
These symptoms are usually combined with the feeling of powerlessness and incapability to leave the current status. You have the feeling that you have partially or even completely lost control of your own life.
According to Wikipedia burnout is associated with emotional exhaustion, a feeling of being overwhelmed and reduced performance satisfaction. The symptoms are described inconsistently (Matthias Burisch identified more than 130 symptoms) and overlaps with the various other disorders (e.g. depression). Burnout syndromes can start with unremarkable early symptoms and can lead to a complete inability to work or suicide.ng health services, it is not itself classified by the WHO as a medical condition.
The variety of symptoms shows that this is not a classic illness that can be easily defined or identified. The term burnout is often even positively associated in certain parts of our society since it indicates that those affected are hard-working, very diligent, and performance-oriented.
Some people self-diagnose themselves as “burnout“. This usually provides them with a welcome reason to get out of the rat race (at least temporarily). They have a widely accepted explanation for their break and for not performing at their peak.
The affected person simply couldn’t find another way to say stop!
The situation often starts harmless and gets worse over time as a large number of warning signals have been ignored.
The burnout patient has lost himself.
To start helping those affected it is important to find out the reasons for the current situation. Because one can only heal and change what is recognized and named.
Not finding the real reasons for the situation would just relieve certain symptoms without working on the root of the problem.
How to cure Burnout: Dealing with Burnout
Once we know what brought us to this (seemingly) hopeless situation, we can find sustainable, effective ways out of it.
Being completely open and honest is a keyword here. Honesty in the analysis by the coach or therapist, but above all the honesty of the person who is at risk of burnout towards themselves, and of course honesty during each coaching session.
If one analyzes the various symptoms, one can state that burnout is a very individual and also very subjective perceived problem. It is paired with the feelings of hopelessness, being driven by external factors but also loss of control.
It is very important to make thorough and in-depth research in the beginning because the symptoms are so individual.
Burnout Questionnaire – A self-check that gives you insights
In the first tool of the Burnout Prevention Toolkit, your clients make a self-check. They fill our a in-depth questionnaire to check their current situation concerning physical, emotional and behavioral effects. You get a first impression of the client’s situation. Three additional coaching tools allow you to take stock of the clients’ situation and their specific symptoms and problems.
Oftentimes this analysis reveals that an important, if not the most important factor is the lack of authenticity in our client’s life.
Clients find that rigidity, indispensable adherence to certain behaviors, points of view and the like, have failed to take up impulses and make necessary decisions. It was also often neglected to practice necessary self-criticism and to question so-called “laws and rules” as well as one’s behavior.
Clients often realize that they failed to take up impulses or make necessary decisions, because of their rigidity and because they had to stick to a certain plan. Poor self-care, not questioning one’s behavior or certain rules of society lead to their current situation.
Recovering from Burnout – Self-awareness is a key
Especially in our modern performance society, in which we are particularly exposed and under observation due to constant availability and presence on social media, the pressure to function perfectly and not to show any weaknesses or mistakes is getting bigger and bigger.
The pressure to perform and to be part of a certain group often leads to the suppression of one’s individual view of the world. As a result, self-perception is weakened and suppressed more and more.
Confrontational thinking and acting differently highly increase the chances of becoming an outlaw. That leads people to move away from an intrinsically controlled lifestyle (according to their nature) to an extrinsically (determined by external factors) controlled one. In the long run, this leads to an alienation from one’s true self.
This means that the consideration and presentation of oneself, starting with wearing the „right“ clothes, but also choosing the „right“ friends, hobbies and the profession is based on a value system that is learned and specified from the outside (society).
The orientation is almost exclusively based on external factors and hardly on our feelings.
This even goes so far that our essence and needs are hardly felt anymore.
All the values, ideas, rules and perspectives that are socially accepted are perceived as our own.
We have lost ourselves.
Thus our strengths, abilities, potentials, desires, and needs are suppressed more and more and in the end, are no longer perceived.
It is believed that such an inauthentic way of life is ultimately easier and more pleasant because it is less confrontational.
But the opposite is the case. By suppressing your impulses, emotional pressure, aggression and auto-aggression get build up over time. This robs your strength and ultimately leads to undesirable and more and more uncontrolled behavior.
Withdrawal from society is gradually being initiated. The estrangement from itself increases, the stress becomes a more and more unbearable pressure. The complete loss of control leads to isolation and ultimately to the collapse of the psyche.
The burnout is thus the valuable call for help from our soul to finally stop this vicious cycle and reflect on yourself again. At best, after the coaching, we will live the life that corresponds to ourselves. Recovering from burnout is only possible if we become aware of these facts.
What to do about Burnout – There’s no magic pill to prevent and recover from Burnout
Burnout is the opportunity to hit the reset button before worse things happen and we not only lose our track but even fall down the cliff.
If you want to help a person affected by burnout to leave this situation, you should be very careful. Above all, no unrealistic “shortcut” solutions should be promised.
Such a situation did not arise overnight, but over a longer period where the person lost itself more and more. It is therefore not possible to immediately resolve the situation with a “magic pill”.
Therefore, a solution has to be developed step by step very carefully and above all without any time pressure.
How to recover from burnout: Take the process step by step
What to do about burnout? In the first stage, the client needs to be completely honest and take stock of “his reality”. The first step is to become aware of the situation and to accept it. You can find everything you need for this stage in Tools 1 – 4 of the Burnout Prevention and Recovery Toolkit.
An in-depth and final analysis is the first step towards solving the situation (Tool 5). What is not recognized and named as a problem cannot be cured.
Part of this first step is to put the client’s energy balance back in order.
For this purpose, energy sources and resources should be identified and activated, energy drains should be recognized and eliminated in the same way. (Tool 3)
Burnout help: Burnout and stress are often going hand in hand
The analysis also includes an exact localization of the causes of the stress and pressure (intrinsic, extrinsic, professional or private). It also needs a relentless analysis of the priorities that our client has in his daily life.
This often leads to surprising results, because sometimes the reason is somewhere else than we initially thought. For example, our client could be a father who is subconsciously avoiding this role and duties as a father and only concentrating on his work. “After all, I do everything just so that my family is doing fine. – Unfortunately while being busy assuring that there is no time for that beloved family.”).
In the end, he may even believe himself that the resulting imbalance and the overload situation only have their root in his business duties.
How to avoid and recover from Burnout: Priority-Setting is one way. Doing the right things at the right time
Once the real causes have been identified, you can work on them specifically. Questioning priorities also often provides interesting insights.
There’s often a big discrepancy in the evaluation of our daily duties, which increases our stress level massively. While we are working on one task, we feel bad or stressed because there are so many other tasks that also need to be done but aren’t at the moment. There is a constant feeling of guilt not to do or to be enough. Tools 7, 8 and 9 offer helpful approaches and possible solutions to this problems.
Questioning and rearranging this rating system is called priority-setting (Tool 6 and 9). It is a very important part to work on in order to prevent or recovering from burnout.
Because burnout is almost always heavily influenced by the value system we live in (intrinsic, extrinsic).
Burnout prevention and recovery: Making necessary changes step by step
After taking stock of the current situation, it is now a matter of putting the findings into a concrete action plan.
Things that turn out to be changeable should be changed step by step. Things that are considered unchangeable in the short term, need to be seen with a new attitude so that they no longer act too much as energy drains. (Tool 4)
In this transition stage, it is very important to use the energy sources identified in phase 1 and to integrate relaxation phases (e.g. through hobbies, meditation, autogenic training or yoga) into everyday life.
This not only helps with regeneration but also ensures that we find the necessary distance. The neutral observer, i.e. the external view of one’s actions and the view of the respective reactions from the environment, are strengthened.
We receive insights about our path as well as the necessary feedback from the social environment. With awareness, we learn to look at our steps and to steer them consciously.
Bringing our inner assessment into line with the outside is a crucial step in minimizing the stress in life. But we also recognize when we leave our path.
When we regain room for maneuver and energy in this way, the feeling is gradually strengthened that we have more control over our lives again.
The strict order of priorities releases the stress and the feeling of never doing enough. We learn to always do the right thing at the right time.
Burnout is an opportunity: Dealing with burnout (alone or with external help)
In the last stage, the aim is to keep the results in the long term and to avoid setbacks. The detailed analysis we made, in the beginning, will become a big help here.
If we make our true self the basis of our decisions and actions, we are not only living a happy life, using our qualities brings us joy, our actions and duties become stress-free and we use less effort to achieve better results. (Tool 10)
Our energy balance is always positive and allows us to tackle many challenges in a relaxed and calm manner. We don’t have to be afraid that we’re losing ourselves.
But be careful: This is not an invitation to egocentric thinking only from now on and forget and neglect what happens around you. Our life is a constant process of development that eventually makes us the best version of ourselves.
However, we don’t achieve this completely on our own, but in interaction with our (social) environment. This environment serves us as a mirror (feedback & perception) and ensures that we don’t lose ourselves in our egocentricity.
Dealing with burnout is hard work and takes a lot of time. Be patient with yourself. If you feel that you are at risk of burnout or suspect that you already have a burnout, we recommend the burnout self-test and the exercises in the Burnout Prevention and Recovery Toolkit.
If you don’t want to go it alone, there is no shame in seeking external support. Numerous coaches and therapists offer support on the way out of the burnout. We wish you all the best!
