Is the Whirlwind Spiraling into Burnout? 5 Ways to Claim Back your Time and Peace of Mind

According to Gallup research (Gallup, 2022), five factors correlated most highly with employee burnout:

1. Unfair treatment at work: this can include any issue in the workplace, such as bias, favoritism, hostile or toxic work environments, inconsistent policies, and pay.
2. Unmanageable workload: represents the sense of feeling suffocated and overworked. When you have difficulty managing the number of tasks you have to complete and the endless number of emails you must respond to.
3. Unclear communications from managers: feeling like you're lacking the information you need to effectively do your job, making the work challenging and frustrating to do.
4. Lack of manager support: not feeling like your manager is aware of your scope of work. Employees experience this lack of support when their managers are absent or condescending, leaving them feeling uninformed, alone, and defensive.
5. Unreasonable time pressure: this can happen when there is a skill gap, requiring the person in the role to do something they're not good at. It can also occur when those less connected to the execution impose unreasonable time constraints because they don't understand the intricacies of delivering high-quality work. 

While it is true that the above five things are happening to you, which means it's not something you can control or a predicament you asked to be in, you have a choice to make. Do you respond to these factors, or do you react?

Here are the five ways you can claim back your time and have peace of mind:

1. Assess what you're thinking: what are the five recurring thoughts you have about your current situation

2. For each of these thoughts: think about what event, person, or fact makes you believe this thought to be true

3. Take inventory of your beliefs: re-read what you wrote in number 2, and categorize each statement as limiting or encouraging. Now add up what you classified as limiting and divide that answer by the total number of statements to calculate the % of limiting beliefs.

4. Identify the primary emotion you feel. Looking at your % of limiting beliefs, when you think about this sense of burnout you're experiencing, what word(s) would you use to describe the overall feeling you have about your situation: do you feel you don't have a choice, that it's a dead-end, are you being forced to be dishonest, do you feel like there is no time to engage in meaningful things outside of work, are your feeling hostility or opposition, strife, jealousy, anger, getting into disputes, disagreements or conflict, do you envy other people's situations, are you dreading to show up, do you feel stress, anxious or overwhelmed?

5. Now that you've identified the root of your burnout: what do you hope to feel instead? What needs to happen or be true about your situation to reframe those limiting beliefs? How might you begin to change your thinking from limiting to encouraging as it relates to your problem? Finally, how willing are you to make the changes necessary to feel how you hope to feel?

Next week we will release part 2 of this article. So, for now, take action and assess the Root of your Burnout. We are including an editable pdf workbook to help you better identify what needs to change about your specific situation. 

References:

Gallup, I. (2022, January 7). How to prevent employee burnout. Gallup.com. Retrieved January 28, 2022, from https://www.gallup.com/workplace/313160/preventing-and-dealing-with-employee-burnout.aspx

Note: If you download the workbook on an IOS mobile device you'll need to click on the share icon, select "Import to Adobe" then click edit file to update from your mobile device. If you open the workbook on an Android device, click box you want to edit, then an options' header will pop up for you to add a text box. Editing the workbook works best when opened from your desktop via Adobe Reader.