Running Into the Petri Dish of Burnout: A How Not-To Guide

Laurie McGinley

Copyright © 2025 by Laurie McGinley

All rights reserved.

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The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

Book Cover by Rich Rizzo

First edition 2025

ISBN: 979-8-9927329-0-0

Contents

Acknowledgments

Read this intro.

Lesson 1: Running balls-out* feels amazing, but you won’t get anywhere.

Lesson 2: Your safety plan could be the real threat to your safety.

Lesson 3: You can really frack yourself up when you work in sustainability.

Section 2: Four laps

Intro

Lesson 4: Perfectionism can be a form of avoidance(the Olive lesson).

Lesson 5: Heroism can be a form of self-destruction (the Trip lesson).

Lesson 6:Researching can be a form of delaying (the Fiona lesson).

Lesson 7: Motivation can be a form of antagonizing (the Eisen lesson).

Outro

Section 3: Cooldown

Lesson 8: Burnout has an opposite.

Lesson 9: Who you are is GOOD.

Prologue

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the love of my life, Amelia, who has helped me be more me for over two decades and has endured more BS from me as I’ve transformed and healed than anyone deserves in a lifetime.

To the littles, it is you who inspire me, every day, to find new ways to do better and be more present.

Thank you to my coaches and teachers– especially David, Kate, and Sharleen – who have pushed me, lovingly, towards discomfort and growth.

Thank you to MJ, who carried this book to term while maintaining my truth, my voice, and my story. I could not have done this without you.

Read this intro.

Hey you.

Yeah, you.

You don’t have time to waste.

That’s why—and this might sound counterintuitive—I want you to slow down.

I’d like you to read the intro, even if you skim the rest of the book. I knooooow, it’s the 21st century, and we’re all doing what we can with goldfish-quality attention spans, but please hear me out for the next brief explination.

I want to tell you about how I face-planted into the Petri Dish of Burnout when I was only 31.

I had ascended into my dream role at a great architecture firm. I was young, high-achieving, and on my way up. Sure, I was spending my evenings and weekends working. Sure, I was firing on all cylinders in every area of my life. Sure, my efforts to revolutionize the industry were feeling futile and existential. But this was what I always wanted. Right?

Well, then, I had a frickin’ stroke.

At the time, the stroke caught me completely by surprise, but looking back, it’s obvious to me that having a stroke was a completely predictable consequence of how burned out I was. I understand now that I not only let burnout happen, I manifested that burnout. I conjured it. I brewed up a giant potion of burnout, without realizing that I was following a very predictable recipe.

Friend: I wrote this book because if you haven’t burned out yet, I don’t want the same thing to happen to you. And if you have already burnt out, I don’t want your experience to have been for nothing.

I burned out because I cared a lot: about my work, about my values, about the planet, about being good and doing good. In the 16 years between my stroke and writing this book, I’ve made it my goal to help passionate people like me. I created a business in which I serve as a speaker and guide, helping them to harness their energy like a hyper-sensitive and powerful solar panel and do awesome things with it, instead of accidentally using it to turbocharge their collision into the pavement when they faceplant. Others in my line of work use the word coach, but I prefer guide for reasons I’ll get into later.

In my work, I get to meet and support a lot of other people who also care a lot. Some of them burned out before I met them. Some of them burned out right before my eyes. Others were at risk of burning out, but made smart choices and escaped that fate.

Over the years, I’ve realized that those of us who lead with love and who care about doing good in the world are susceptible to a unique type of burnout, different from the kind that afflicts get-rich-quick schemers or that haunts corporate drones. It’s a kind of burnout that I haven’t seen written or talked about directly.

Our strain of burnout is deeper and more existential, a world-weariness that can only come from committing one’s life to addressing global challenges (like championing climate solutions) that deserve and require our focused minds and whole hearts.

We don’t have time to not address that type of burnout. The people who experience it are too important to this world. That’s why I can’t waste my time or talent, and why I’m sharing everything I know about this theme. I’m super not in the mood for climate change to interrupt my plans to watch my children grow up, and I’m assuming you have your own plans that don’t involve continuously being displaced by climate-related catastrophes.

You can’t waste time, either. We can’t afford for you to run around in circles, wasting your unique talents. If you’re part of a team that isn’t meshing or reaching its potential—and especially if you are the one leading that team—you have a responsibility to help break that cycle. Leaders who burn themselves out do worse than waste their own time and talent—they waste the time and talent of everyone on their team, too.

People with bright ideas, benevolent values, and high ambition have the ability to change the world. Heck, I’ll say it: they’re the only people with the ability to save the world. (Yes, this world, the one that’s spinning wildly out of control under the force of the climate crisis, insurmountable international conflict, systemic oppression, and our collective inability to respond to any of them.)

The thing that’s so nefarious about this strain of burnout is that it’s caused by an abundance of love, a spilling-over of conviction, and the dysphoria of pushing forward an initiative that societal inertia is trying to reject.

In other words, the qualities that make people

capable of leading the world into a brighter future are unfortunately the very same qualities that inevitably lead them directly into what I call

the Petri Dish of Burnout.

This book is not a comprehensive manual on overcoming burnout, and it’s not trying to be that. Lord knows, there’s no shortage of books and resources out there that fit that description. Let me save you some time and tell you the two key ways that this book is distinct from others, so that you can know if and how to use it:

It’s focused specifically on people who are working in climate (and other values-based sectors) and the unique challenges they face.

Instead of making generalizations about why burnout is similar for everyone, we’ll look at why burnout is different for everyone who experiences it, including the burnout styles of four common personality types among people who lead initiatives in climate.

Who this book is for

Read closely, dear reader. This section is especially important.

The too long; didn’t read (tl;dr) is that this book is, broadly, for and about ambitious leaders, especially people who are working on climate initiatives. But it will be useful to anyone who is a member of a team with these key qualities:

Your team is trying to do something important and positive in the world. It might be guiding climate direction at a corporation, a campaign or office of an elected official, a one-person team, a non-profit organization, or even an intentional community. What matters is that your team is (at least theoretically) driven by a mission and a set of values.

Your team is being led in a way that is either putting the team at risk of burnout, or that is already past the point of burnout. Your team should be open to changing things—even if the members of the team don’t agree on what those changes need to be.

Your team is led by a person who, on good days, we’d call motivated and ambitious and, on bad days, we’d call mercurial and harsh. These qualities are both what makes them such a great leader, and also what makes them likely to overwork themselves and/or their team.

You are personally motivated to support the success of the initiative you are working on.

This book is also for you if you’re willing to indulge my ulterior motive here: that you pass this book around to people who need it. There are a few types of people who I hope will find it helpful, and this book will be at its most useful when people help each other to access the tricks I’ve learned for overcoming burnout.

The first type is the broadest, but also the most important: I’m talking about leaders. By that I mean C-suite employees, founders, and directors—as well as the folks who are forging ahead courageously in supporting roles within climate-oriented initiatives. Leadership is relative. You are leaders, too, even if your role, current responsibilities, and paycheck don’t reflect that fact. In any event, this book will give you food for thought about how you carry yourself as a leader, and how to work well with other leaders, including the person you report to.

The other types are more nuanced and subjective. By identifying these four types, I’m attempting to help you recognize yourself and the people you work with—and the ways in which burnout (and its opposite) can play a role in your journey. I’ll introduce them quickly now so that, if you want, you can skip right to the part about your type, where I’ll go into much more detail.

These types are Perfectionists, Heroes, Researchers, and Motivators. There are lots of ways I can describe them, but the quickest way for you to self-identify is the thing that you feel is slowing you down.

For Perfectionists, it’s a sense that you have too many tabs open on your browser and tasks you need to button up — often combined with a lack of sleep. For Heroes, it’s frustration that you can’t do everything you want to, but you are resistant to scaling down. For Researchers, it’s feeling that no one on your team understands you or your vision. For Motivators, it’s impatience with people who can’t keep up.

It’s possible you may not recognize