I burned out.
I burned out so hard.
I could feel it coming, I tried to stop it, but inevitably it happened. I became an extra-crispy, deep-fried, burnt out leader.
It took many years before I could appreciate the mistakes I made. That, in many ways, my burnout was my own doing.
Had I known then what I know now, I may have been able to stop it.
At the very least, I could have managed it better than I did.
If you’re starting to feel burned out at work, or if you’re already a little crispy and need some help, today’s blog is for you.
In a recent blog, I posed the question: Can you be successful and happy at the same time?
As I explored this question, one of my key realizations was a simple concept I wish I’d paid more attention to earlier in my career.
Your career is a marathon, not a sprint.
Ummm …
Ok, we’re not exactly breaking new ground with that one, but hang with me for a minute.
Your career, like many challenging endeavours, is structured in a way where the lion’s share of the effort comes at the beginning, and the lion’s share of the rewards come at the end. There are often many years separating the two.
Imagine two intersecting curves, where the effort curve starts high and very gradually reduces over time, and the rewards curve starts very low, stays low, and then rapidly increases in the final stages. This is probably the best visualization of how your career will likely progress, and why you cannot allow yourself to burnout early.
If you do, you will miss the most lucrative and enjoyable years of your career. You must be there, with all your energy, at the end of the race, or you will have made all the sacrifice but never reap the benefits.
I am a sprinter. I always have been. I suspect many of you are as well. I’ll find a new job, or a new project, or a new promotion opportunity, and I will chase it like my life depends on it. I will come out hot and stay hot until I get the win. Wanna do a call at 11 pm? I’m already on the line. Pull an all-nighter? Why not? I will sacrifice everything to achieve a goal. But what about the next goal? And the next? And the goal five years from now? Or when it starts feeling less like a shiny new goal and more like the same thing we’ve done for a while? What then?
Don’t get me wrong, sprinting is a useful skill. I love to hire sprinters – they make big things happen fast. It’s just not possible for most of us to sustain that pace for two, three, four decades. Sprinters are vulnerable to setbacks too. When you’ve sprinted after your sixth goal in five years only to discover you need to start a new sprint, it’s hard to find the energy. It gets a little harder each time until you discover there is nothing left in the tank to draw from. You’re officially burned out.
The good news is you are not powerless against burnout. You can still be a great sprinter and preserve enough energy to make it to the finish line. As a burnout victim myself, I’ve explored many techniques over the years to build my resistance. These are a few of my favorites – I hope they’re helpful to you.
1. Build a win-shield
A win-shield is an exercise in ruthless prioritization and delegation. It is designed to dramatically reduce your total energy expenditure at work without sacrificing your performance or reputation. It can protect you when you’re feeling burned out and need to decompress. It almost certainly prolonged my career by several years and allowed me to reap the late-career benefits we spoke about earlier.
When you feel you’re at risk of burnout, take these steps to build your own win-shield:
a) Identify 3-5 major wins your boss will use to evaluate your success this year.
b) Aggressively and fully delegate all other projects to your team.
c) Dramatically cut all meetings related to these non-win projects.
d) Reallocate saved time to create large calendar buffers to help you recharge.
e) Execute your major win projects to maintain career trajectory while recharging.
Essentially, you are temporarily cutting all activity that doesn’t directly relate to your success-defining wins to build space for you to decompress. You do significantly less work for a while, without sacrificing your reputation. And as a bonus, you strengthen your team by delegating more aggressively and staying focused on the most important projects only.
2. Proactive vs. reactive wellness
Too many of us wait until we’re completely burned out before we take care of ourselves. Skipping vacations, forgoing diet, sleep, and exercise, missing out on the joys of life. As easy as it is to fall into this trap, it’s honestly just lazy and misguided behaviour. If our favorite athletes ran themselves into the ground and couldn’t finish the season strong, we’d be the first to criticize. But when it comes to our careers, we willingly burn ourselves out before we get to our most important games.
My advice is to treat your personal wellness with the same respect you’d expect from a professional athlete. Build routines, be proactive, pace yourself. Acknowledge the reality that your career is a marathon, and design a life and work style that accumulates strength and energy for the final stages.
3. Find motivation in the work itself
For many of us, burnout comes when we’ve run out of interesting sprints to pursue. We’ve had a few promotions, we’ve taken on some big projects, we’ve accomplished some major goals. As the years go by, it can get harder to find fresh, exciting things to get your energy level running high again.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently studying the happiest and most successful leaders I know, and one thing they have in common is they find real joy in their daily work. They tend not to burn out because they aren’t motivated by sprinting towards external things like promotions and praise. They’re motivated everyday by doing great work and building a great team. They don’t burn out because they find energizing fuel in the work itself.
If you’re susceptible to burnout like I am, I recommend investing more time in mastering your craft, developing your team, and other similarly steady-paced endeavours. You’ll find something energizing everyday, but at a pace that can be sustained for much longer.
A lot of high-performing leaders are susceptible to burnout. I can think of a few times where I flamed out in spectacular fashion. It took a few of those major burnouts and some deliberate reflection for me to build the techniques I relied on so heavily in the later stages of my career. They were extremely helpful for me, and I hope they will help you too.