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You Can’t Self-Care Yourself Out of Burnout
A couple of days ago at work, our entire division participated in a workshop about burnout and its impact on our ability to be fully present in our work. Dr. Kate Steiner, author of the book “Feeling Crispy: A Guide for Burnout Recovery,” led us through several reflection activities that challenged us to look at our ‘burn events’ that cumulatively add to our burnout and think of strategies to either remove or mitigate them.
Today, I listened to some of my colleagues who sat through the workshop process their feelings and reflections on the material covered. Some of it was positive, in that we can address our perfectionism expectations of ourselves and others or we can look at our boundaries to do more work than is required for our jobs.
But not everyone had a positive experience talking about burnout. I can only suspect that without solutions offered that match their feelings or needs, the time spent talking about burnout just added to their lack of time to complete the tasks that led them to feel the burnout in the first place.
And I’ve been there, so my empathy for them was high.
Having been there before, I know how that can feel. But it also made me think: can we address all of these triggers for burnout with self-care techniques or are some of them systemic or organizational?
