How to avoid burnout
In this post, we're going to be exploring the topic of avoiding burnout.
And the challenge we see is that we live in complex and ever-changing world right now. There's so much change going on with globalisation, with technology, with the climate, with political uncertainty, economic uncertainty and so on.
And people feel very busy, busy in their life and busy in their heads. There are many people who are living without balance.
If you would prefer to listen to Martin and Rena discuss the idea of burnout and its causes then please watch the video above.
They're living in an extreme way that is not helping them at all, which is leading to stress, it's leading to overwhelm, it's leading to mental health issues, it's also leading to employee disengagement.
Overwhelm – like a traffic jam in your head
It's like there's a traffic jam in your head going on. I in Bangkok in 2019 on the King's birthday and all the roads were shut down, everything was jammed up, there was nowhere for anybody to go. If they were trying to get somewhere, they were travelling extremely slowly. It was extremely frustrating for all those involved.
That's sometimes how people's heads feel. You might relate to this is like, it feels like there's a traffic jam in your head, like a jungle of thought going on that's constraining and restricting and causing stress and burnout.
We're going to explore the topic of Burnout looking at it from a psychological perspective, really exploring and looking at what the mind is doing to create it.
The real cause of burnout
The key question to ask is, what's the real cause of burnout?
In my experience, nine out of ten people you ask will point to burnout being caused by things that are going on in their life - by their job, or just how busy they are or by their life circumstances. They will point to those external factors as being the causal factors of why they're in burnout.
When we explore the nature of the mind and how it works, we can start to see the real cause of burnout.
The reason why we get to burnout, is because we don't listen to, or we misread the big warning signals that our minds and our bodies are giving us. We can use our feelings as a barometer. Our feeling system gives us lots of signals. It's like the warning light on the dashboard of your car when you're running the system too hard. When you're overloading it, the warning light goes off.
And how that shows up for us psychologically as human beings is that we start to feel caught up, we start to feel heavy, we start to feel stressed, we start to feel anxious. Now often what we'll mistakenly do is read those signals and think that they're giving us feedback on our circumstances or our situation. And then we kind of try to look to those circumstances or situations and make changes there in order so that we feel better.
So, we think we've got to change our job, or we think we've got to change our circumstance.
Now, there may be some changes that need to happen on the outside. It may be a good idea for example to change our job or change the way we live. But…
Thought creates what we experience
However, when we look at how the mind works, what we start to see is that the information provided by our feelings is telling us about our thought in that moment. Our thinking is creating our reality, and then there's a feeling comes with that reality. When we tune into that feeling, we see that we might be caught up in some thinking about our circumstances or situations, about our job, or about the current state of the economy and be concerned about that.
Instead of focusing on the external, we can turn our attention back to the mind and see the self-constructed ‘reality’. When we see our reality as a construct of thought, we have the potential to experience it in a different way.
At this point, I'd like to step back and talk a little bit about thought and what it does and what it is. If we look at this from a neuroscientific perspective, thought is just neurological energy passing down neural pathways. It's tiny impulses of energy. That's all it is. And what it very cleverly does, the mind very cleverly does is it groups all of these impulses, these millions of neurological signals together to create ‘our experience’. We live immersed in this experience. It's so clever. The thought creates our experience, and it feels totally real. It's ‘our’ reality, but it's actually not real. It's just what thought is creating for us.
So, if we think about this, two people can be looking at exactly the same thing and have totally different realities about it. You can think something's amazing, a brilliant movie for example, and I can walk out of the same movie and have totally different thinking and a totally different experience.
You can think the economy right now is exciting and it's an opportunity and I can think it's terrible and frightening. And whatever it is that thought's doing for you, or I is the reality and the experience that we live within.
Now, why is that so important?
I’m wanting to help you observe the role that thought is playing and be somewhat dissociated from what it is creating.
Of course, there will be all sorts of ‘realities’ that your thought is creating that are working for you. You might have a reality about yourself that you're good at your job, or you're good as a leader.
But where burnout comes from is when the mind is creating realities that you're living within that cause you to clog up the psychological system and feel stress and fear and overwhelm and frustration and upset.
The more that we can step back and observe thought and see that it is not the truth, the greater perspective we can have. Being detached from what it is creating can have you avoid burnout entirely always.
Our own experience varies
Our own experience varies enormously too. One day we can walk into the office and look at our inbox and feel completely and utterly overwhelmed and yet on another day there's the same number of emails in the inbox, there's the same amount of stuff to do and yet our perspective on it, how we see it, ‘our reality’ is completely different and so it all feels different. That variability in our own experience points to the role of the mind plays in creating the reality that we're experiencing in any moment.
Our relationship to thought
It's nothing to do with the emails. No, it just looks like it is. But it's simply to do with our relationship to thought and the experience we're having in the moment. The opportunity for psychological freedom comes from shifting our relationship to our thought, not from finding a way to get rid of the emails.
We are never directly experiencing our circumstances or a situation or another person. We are only ever experiencing thought.
This means that we can actually live in the times that we live in today with everything going on in the outside world. We can live with psychological freedom, peace and clarity.
It reminds me of the Star Wars movie, Rogue One. There’s a particular scene where there’s a blind man and he's in the heat of the battle. There are all sorts of battles going on around him. He's being shot at by many different people. This is a sort of metaphor for what's going on in the world outside. It feels like there's loads going on and we need to duck, swerve, run and even fight.
But actually, what this Chinese guy does is - he goes inside, he's calm, he's not impacted by the outside world. He has a different relationship to the power inside him that enables him to be grounded and operate with peace and power. So, it enables him to access his superpowers.
He's able to pick things up, he's able to dodge, he's able to move, he's able to shoot in a way that he wouldn't be able to if he was caught up in his thinking. And I’m suggesting to you, that this is available to you regardless of what you've got going on. This clarity, this power and effectiveness is available to all of us when we're not caught up in our thoughts.
So, you might be listening to what we've been talking about so far and thinking, okay, well, if the outside world, if circumstances and situations don't cause my experience, if I can have psychological freedom from that, then it must be something within me. And therefore, if I can't control the outside, then actually what I need to do is control and manage my own thoughts and feelings. And that's what's going to potentially give me that freedom. There are lots of ways of trying to do that, but I guess in the work that we do with our clients, what we've seen is that there's a much greater, deeper transformation that can happen for people when they truly start to inquire and explore the nature of the mind and the role of the mind and how it creates our reality and our experience.
There's lots of techniques out there like NLP, or cognitive behavioural therapy or mindfulness, and a number of these techniques are working at the level where - I need to change my thought, I need to control it or manage it or do something with it. And what we're pointing at is not that. We're working one level below that, really, let's just understand how the mind is working. By understanding how it's working and the nature of thought, many of the problems, almost all of the problems that we're creating in our lives can dissipate and not have the impact to cause the burnout in the first place.
Another key element to talk about here is the nature of how our thought and our experience changes. So, I found myself caught up in my thinking last week. It was late in the evening; I'd had a very busy day and I felt immersed and overwhelmed. I felt stressed. I was caught up in a whole lot of things that my thinking had been doing. What tends to happen at that point is we can analyse, we can try and want to work things out, we can make bad decisions, we can go, oh, my God, yeah, I'm going to give this job up, I've had enough of it.
We can have all sorts of negative and unhelpful thinking. And one of the things that we also point people to in terms of how the mind works is to just look at the experience and how it changes. Because the very next day, my thought had changed and my experience of everything that I was thinking the night before had changed dramatically. Now, when we're in the heat of the moment, having all those thoughts, we feel totally immersed in the experience we're creating, and that's what creates the burnout. But there's something to just trust and remember and say, hang on a second, this is going to change. Let me just let the mind settle. Let me have the weekend. Let me go on holiday. Let the experience and let thought pass. Because then I end up getting to a stage of more equilibrium and more balance, where I have more measured thinking and I get more sort of wisdom, intelligence coming through as opposed to what I was caught up on that evening. So, the key that we're suggesting to, whenever you're in overwhelm is to notice what thought's doing and to let it pass, to let things settle.
There are times in our lives where we can really feel quite overwhelmed and almost it's a little bit like our noses are pushed so closely to the window that we can't see our reflection in it. And often just taking a step back and giving ourselves that time and space to allow thought to just move through as it's designed to do. The way thought moves is means that we're never totally stuck in a reality. Thought is constantly moving and changing. By taking that step back, we're able to see the reflection in the window and just sort of see a different perspective.
The distinction that I'd like to make here is that there is a difference between feeling overwhelmed and having loads on. Burnout happens because of what's going on in our psychology, not having lots on.
When we're feeling overwhelmed, our aperture for fresh perspective and fresh thinking is quite narrow. So that's when it can feel hard to be able to have ideas about what to do or just have a different perspective.
We may of course have too much going on, right? So, it may well be that we've got a lot going on in life and we're juggling ten balls, and we don't quite know where they're going to be landing and whether we can catch them. What I'd like to point you to do is just to notice that the difference in the feeling. So, when we're feeling overwhelmed, often the feeling that comes with that is heaviness. We feel all caught up, and we feel like we're really pulled quite closely to that window.
There can also be a lot going on with a lighter feeling. There are too many balls to juggle for sure. But there's a lighter feeling with that and our aperture to fresh thinking, a new perspective is much more open. Being able to notice where your feeling is in all of that will allow you to access that fresh thinking and hopefully have some insight as to what you might need, some of the changes that you might need to make.
So, I’m asking are you overloaded, have you just got too much going on or are you overwhelmed? The latter is all about your relationship to what's going on and the thinking that you've got about it.
I'd like to talk about a client example that we had a couple of years ago:
This was an extremely successful partner in a venture capital firm. It was a sizable firm; he was senior, and he had an incredible track record of success. But as you may know, those environments have high stakes. And he made a mistake on a transaction that cost the firm millions. It was very high pressure, it was very high profile, many people were involved in the situation. And over an extended period of time, he felt like he’d ‘lost his mojo’ - he lost his confidence. He started to question everything about himself.
He got to the point where he had to take some time out of the business. And during that time out, he was questioning whether he could do it anymore, whether he was actually any good or not. Thought has this incredible capacity to question us and beat us up and challenge everything and drain our confidence and drain our power.
I had the pleasure of working with him during that time - teaching him some of the things that we're pointing at here. Over a three-day period, we taught him some fundamentals about the mind, and what happened was he had some epiphany moments. He saw what thought was doing and what it had been doing to him, what stories he had been making up, that he was believing about himself. He got it in an instant and actually, very quickly he realised he'd been making it all up himself. So, he pretty quickly went back into the very same situation and totally shifted how he saw himself and the business and was able to go back and, as he states, totally get his mojo back. And he's totally unrecognisable from the person that he had become.
This is what's available when you shift your relationship and your understanding of what thought is doing and your relationship to what it's creating for you.
