Burnout. The word even feels horrible. Burnout people are wounded. It happens – and it’s likely to happen at least a few times over the span of your working years.
You need rest and recovery time. This will be longer than you might imagine. Don’t believe this lie: “Just a few days away will make me chipper again.”
The point of rest and recovery time is to put you in a place to begin healing. The healing process takes time, solitude, reflection, and being with emotionally healthy people. Smart people get help at this stage. You’ll always be leading from your woundedness if you don’t pursue healing after a recovery time.
Once the healing process is underway you have two basic choices:
- Return the role or job you had before
- Enter into a new role or job (most common)
Key point: You must work differently in either #1 or #2, or else you go back into burnout. If you don’t learn to work differently (and this probably includes working with and around healthy people), you’ll continue to be miserable and fill up your narrative with lies and blame. This is a crumbling foundation for effective leadership.
The lesson to absorb from burnout is that you must learn to work sustainably, healthily, for the right reasons.
The saddest way to “work differently” is to stop caring. It’s just a job. You defend yourself by risking nothing of yourself in the role. You’re better than this.
