Battling Burnout and Reengaging with the "Why" of Your Work
Helping professionals like you might be feeling the effects of burnout after this year+ pandemic. Let’s band together to lift each other up.
Hello, Talking About Money Community, I hope that you are well. 🤗
In this post I’d like to talk about your well-being … because I care about you. For those of you who have chosen a career in the helping professions in general, and in financial capability in particular, you have pursued this path because you care about the well-being of others. You want to see your clients, participants, or students become the best version of themselves, and you want them to be able to enjoy a financially secure future.
You were working your heart out and making real change. And then came March 2020, when everything changed forever. You immediately shifted your focus to emergency financial services and seemingly overnight you became an expert in helping your clients apply for unemployment insurance, food assistance, and rent relief. You double-downed and continued to provide the exceptional service that you always have, now in a more focused and immediate way.
Now we live in a new world. The federal and state governments have come through for their constituents in some respects, while in other areas they left households hoping for more. The stimulus checks certainly helped workers through some trying times, and advance payment of the Child Tax Credit provides some relief to families with children through the end of 2021. At the same time, people are feeling more strain at the gas pump and notice that a gallon of milk costs more than it used to. Others continue to feel insecure about their housing, not knowing if their current rental or owned home is going to be theirs for the long term.
But this post is not about your clients, this post is about you. How are you feeling about your work? Are you still ready to face the day each morning, eager to continue to make the world a better place? Or would you rather bury yourself under the covers, ignore the alarm clock, and snuggle with your dog while drinking coffee and reading a trashy novel? It’s okay if you feel that way, and it’s important that you recognize it, because it is a sign of burnout.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have written on a couple of related topics:
Self-Care for Financial Capability Professionals: Friends, This is a Marathon, Not a Sprint
Now that we are in this new normal, now what? For advice and guidance, I turned to one of my favorite thought leaders, Simon Sinek. For those of you unfamiliar with his work, click on that link and check out his website. You can also take a look at his wildly-popular Ted Talk from 2009, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” or at this April 2021 Ted Virtual Conversation called “How to Discover Your ‘Why’ in Difficult Times.” Here are some of the takeaways I gleaned from this recent talk:
Focus on your mental health
If you are human (and I am guessing that you are), in the past year-plus you have been worried about others. You have an aging relative in another state for whom a visit would require a plane flight – and you are not yet ready for airports – and that person lives alone and is more susceptible to disease. Or you have school-age children who suffered through a year of remote school, and you fear for their development growth, and also for what’s in store for them this fall. Or you find yourself disconnected from your broader community, because once in-person gatherings have been put on ice until “everything gets back to normal” and you don’t know when that’s going to be. How are your compatriots doing?
What about you? How are you doing? Like me, you may have followed some or all the self-care advice you see on the internet (or in that above blog post that I wrote in May 2020 – BTW it was very popular). You are trying sure that you are go to bed and get up at the same time each day. You schedule yourself in your Google calendar to “take a walk,” and if the sun is out you drag yourself away from your computer to take a stroll, gazing at the flowers in bloom and smiling at your neighbors’ dogs. You eat your broccoli on some nights, spinach on others.
Is this working? Sometimes sleep and walks and vegetables can help you feel better, and sometimes you need a little more. Humans are hardwired to be social animals, and sometimes you need to lean on others so that your clients, participants, or students can lean on you.
Focus on maintaining safe relationships
Research shows that the most successful companies thrive because they promote psychological safety within their workforce. This applies to your personal relationships as well. Have you noticed who in the past year you leaning on more? And who you are reaching out to less? Once the intensity of the pandemic fades and we begin to gain perspective, I think that we will start to reflect on this great re-organization of our social circles.
There is a vicious cycle between burnout and loneliness, because burnout can cause you to not want to reach out to your friends, and that can lead to increased feelings of being all alone (even if you are in a household full of people), and that can lead to deeper exhaustion. And if you are working at home, these feelings can creep up on you. For months you may be able to say with confidence, “Really, I am doing okay. I’m sleeping and walking and eating broccoli and seeing my friends when I can.” And then one day you wake up and something has switched. You are no longer okay.
For time time-being, push through your exhaustion and reach out to the people that you can lean on and reach out and check on those who you haven’t head from in a while. And if you can take a walk or share a salad with that person, all the better. Being together is so much better than being apart.
Focus on your “why”
When you are experiencing burnout, you might feel the compulsion to turn around, throw a lit match over your shoulder, and walk away from the burning building (or is that just me?). What feels insurmountable today may be a symptom of pandemic-related burnout. Instead of destroying what you have built in your work, you might feel better if you get a more nuanced understanding of why you have chosen to work in the field of financial capability in the first place.
In the April 20201 video conversation linked to above above, Simon suggests something he calls the “Friends Exercise” to get to your “why” in hard times. This is not for the feint of heart! To try it out, you can open and print the instructions here.
In short, this is how it works:
Make a list of three friends who you feel like you could call in the middle of the night (not spouses, not family members, but friends)
Tell them that you are completing this exercise, then ask them, “Why are you friends with me?”
Listen to their answers, and as they stretch to explain themselves, they will eventually start describing how they feel when they are with you (have a tissue on hand to receive this!)
Use your skills with powerful questions to clarify what they mean
After interviewing your three friends, compare your notes to find the common themes
This exercise illustrates the why that you bring to your work as a financial capability professional. These are the traits that your clients, participants, and students most likely value in you. They might be what you need to think about when you are contemplating not getting out of bed.