Burning Bright Without Burning Out: The anti-burnout workbook for busy professionals

Copyright © 2023 Michael Drayton

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ISBN 9781805145981

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

To my wife Angela, and my children Jenny and Guy,

whose unwavering love and support sustained me

through the long hours of writing this book.

Contents

Introduction

1.What Is Burnout?

2.Personality and Burnout

3.Energy, Vitality and Burnout

4.Overcoming Obstacles to Tackling Burnout

5.Burnout and How Work Is Organised

6.Minimising the Risk of Burnout in Others

7.Burnout and Remote Working

8.Organisational Culture and Burnout

9.Leadership and Burnout

10.Burnout-proofing Yourself, Your Staff and Your Organisation

About the Author

Introduction

Imagine this: sometimes you feel so tired that you can barely string two words together. You feel exhausted but at the same time agitated and unable to switch off. You feel tired and go to bed, but as soon as you close your eyes your brain goes into overdrive thinking about the events of the day and what’s in store for you tomorrow.

Other people think that you have a great career, but you sometimes feel sick of your job and wonder what the point of it all is. Sometimes you even cry, or feel like crying, because you feel so overwhelmed.

You don’t feel like this all the time. You have good days and bad days, but lately the bad days are outnumbering the good days.

If this strikes a chord with you, well, you are on the long and winding road to burnout.

This book is all about burnout. I am going to describe what burnout really is – it’s a lot more than just feeling tired and overwhelmed at work. I will tell you how you can recognise the early-warning signs of burnout in others and yourself. You will begin to see that burnout isn’t just an individual experience – the roots of burnout are in your organisation’s system and culture. We will also explore the reasons why some people experience burnout whilst others in the same environment seem to thrive. Finally, we’ll look at some practical ways to minimise the risk of burnout in you and in people you manage or work with, and how you can contribute to building an anti-burnout culture in your organisation.

This is a book for those on the road to burnout or recovering from burnout. It’s also a book for leaders and managers who want to create a culture where people want to come to work and a culture that does not make people ill. It’s a practical book that will give you the latest scientific thinking on burnout and evidence-based ideas about how to make things better at work. This book will help you to become part of the solution, not the problem.

How this book is organised

The only way to really understand burnout and how to prevent burnout is to see it as an organisational and systemic problem rather than just an individual problem experienced by ‘weak’ people in the organisation. This book will help you to see and understand burnout from the individual perspective, the team perspective, and the organisational/systemic perspective.

The book is divided into three parts.

Section One: You

If you want to change anything in life, the place to start is by changing yourself. That is what the first part of this book is about. I’m going to tell you what exactly burnout is and take you through a short checklist to see if you are experiencing any of the signs or symptoms of burnout.

We will then go on to answer two questions:

1.Why do some people seem more vulnerable to burnout than others?

2.Why is it that a particular situation, or task, that would make one person very stressed wouldn’t bother another person?

To answer these questions properly, you need to understand personality and how it can protect you or make you vulnerable to experiencing stress and burnout. I’ll tell you, in plain English, about the ‘Big Five’ theory of personality. This is, by a long way, the most respected, reliable and valid model of personality. You will do a short personality profile which will help you to understand what kinds of situations are likely to make you stressed and also, taking into account your personality, the best ways to manage stress.

One of the most common misconceptions that I come across as an executive coach and psychologist is the idea that burnout is caused by individual weakness. It isn’t. It’s actually caused by external stress that is poorly managed. There are two causes of burnout. The first one is the organisation not organising the demands of work well enough. The second is the individual struggling to manage the overwhelm of badly organised work. I will cover both aspects in this book.

A second misconception is that resilience is a single factor that a person might possess or not possess or a factor that some people have more of than others. People say, ‘Oh, she’s far more resilient than the other members of the team!’ That’s only true to a certain degree. Resilience isn’t just a single factor; it’s actually made up of four factors: physical resilience, emotional resilience, cognitive (mental) resilience and spiritual resilience. At the end of the section, we’ll explore each of these four factors and think about how you can increase your resilience. I’ll show you some practical exercises you can do that will significantly increase your overall ability to manage pressure and stress.

We will end this section by doing an exercise to help you develop your own individual anti-burnout plan.

Section Two: Your team

This section is about the culture of the team in which you work. Once you have a good understanding of what burnout is, how it affects you and what you personally can do to protect yourself, you need to start looking at the people you work with. If you are a leader or a manager, what can you do to minimise the risk of burnout in those you manage? We will explore some simple