Burnout: Are You Treating the Symptoms or the Root-Cause

A huge pet-peeve of mine is seeing bad advice for burnout. There’s so much of it. It’s usually about self-care or vacation, which are obviously good and important things that you should do, but I don’t think they’re the cure for burnout, just a bandaid. I propose that the key to fighting burnout is to find out how you lost all the agency you had in your job or maybe even in your whole career. Did you ever even have it? If not, why?

We posted an about-page on agency recently, and it got me thinking about my own career experiences. I can pinpoint exactly when I started burning out of all of my jobs, from even my teenage years. But with that burnout always came a grapple for more agency in whatever I pivoted to as a result of the burnout.

With the beauty of hindsight, I can see that I was collecting all the data I needed about myself to understand what my idiosyncratic strengths were that I just had to share. And I was testing each role to see if it supported me as much as I would support it in order to do my best work.

Learning from my burnout

Cameraperson

It was a university gig producing distance learning classes (on VHS and DVD) for the university’s engineering department, and I was so bored videoing the classes. I wanted to be in the master control room controlling several different rooms at once, pushing all the buttons and moving levers, and making it all happen. But I couldn’t get them to take me seriously because I kept falling asleep in class. The boredom was a serious problem for me. I lost agency over which of my skills I was able to leverage for that job, so I pivoted my mindset.

I realized sitting idly by while my skills got wasted was not an option for me. So I buckled down as a cameraperson and suffered through one last boring semester of camera room duty, putting my best foot forward, staying awake, and proving what I was capable of. I was the regular master control operator after I set my mind to it.

Casting Director

I was in my twenties, getting to work on anything from local commercials to Academy Award winning films (just the one, but still), and I should have been loving it, but the market was crap and some producers weren’t paying their invoices in a very timely manner, to put it politely. I lost agency over my financial situation, so I pivoted. I decided that the uncertainty of film life wasn’t for me, and I brainstormed about how the skills I learned in film would not only translate into other careers but be very valuable.

Cloud Automation Engineer

I loved this job. I was learning things every single day and bringing my unique contributions to the table. It was difficult but satisfying. There came a time at that job, however, when I really wanted to expand my learning into software development, but the consultancy I worked for didn’t need that from me, and I didn’t really have the time or energy to learn it outside of my job.

We had a young family, and I was stretched thin already. I felt like it was an important piece of the career puzzle for me, though, so I felt stuck. I lost agency over my learning and development which felt like I lost agency over my career trajectory, so I had to pivot.

I wasn't willing to give up that much control over my trajectory. I found a job that would leverage my current skills while allowing me to grow the ones I wanted to along the way.

Software Engineer

This job was a perfect transition because I was able to leverage my current skills to add value while also adding the new ones I felt were important to my trajectory. It was going great, and then I was placed on a very aggressively scoped project that left out of scope all of the things that I was interested in working on and felt were pretty important. I lost agency over what I was able to work on, because I wasn’t able to convince anyone that it was worth working on simultaneously.

I did my best to convince them, but I did feel like I lost my agency to be able to work on things that I valued because we didn’t have alignment. I didn’t pivot right way; I did what I needed to do, but it was a red flag that I had lost some agency in that position because I had lost alignment in values.

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Those are just the times that I remember getting burnt out. But it doesn't include the many years of very satisfying work when I managed to avoid it. But stuff happens! The key is to learn from all of it. Each role revealed more and more data about what I needed to bring to the table to both feel fulfilled and do my best work and how I needed to be supported in order to do that.

I’m pretty confident that most people reading find themselves falling into a similar cycle every few years or so. Maybe you’re thinking about all of the times in your own career when you’ve felt stuck, when you weren't able to bring your unique strengths to a job and use them to fill needs in your idiosyncratic way. What agency did you lose that was non-negotiable for you?

So how do you get more agency in your career?

Well, in all of the examples above, I learned from all the things that got me stuck. I changed my situation in order to have more agency and control over my life and career. I tried to remain in the driver’s seat, best I could, however I could.

Growth is not a question of trying to gain ability where we lack it but figuring out how to increase impact where we already have ability. - Nine Lies About Work

It started with gaining an understanding of what my uniqueness was, at the time, and cultivating it intelligently. There were times early in my career where I didn’t know how to do that. I either didn’t know what made my particular strengths unique or I just didn't know how they could fill a specific need within my role. Understanding both of those things unlocks a whole new level for us.

So how do you figure out how to increase impact where you have ability?

What are your unique strengths?

It starts with being in tune to what you really like, what you’re really good at, and what energizes you. Take note of those things. And take note of whether other people think those things are unique to you and valuable, too.

If you do a project that really jazzes you, figure out why it did, specifically. Was it...

• the strategic planning?
• building the architecture?
• getting all of the necessary stakeholders involved and getting buy-in?
• the day to day grind of executing and delivering?
• leading a team through difficult interpersonal dynamics to see a project through and get the job done?
• working with a particular technology? What was it specifically?

You may even be able to see patterns throughout your whole life of when you really enjoyed bringing that skill to the table. Great data points!

How can you increase impact?

And then always be on the lookout for how you can best leverage those strengths to solve the problems that you and the people around you care about and need solving. It sounds so easy, but, practically speaking, it requires a lot of focus and intentionality.

The world is never at a loss for problems. The real problem is that we can get so bogged down by all the distracting problems screaming at us that we fail to focus on the ones that we’re uniquely suited to solve. The server is down, and we’re filling out Jira stories.

So talk to people

Figure out what keeps them up at night. What are they struggling to solve? When we get into the habit of being truly, authentically, and empathetically curious about others’ problems, we start to get our feelers out for how we can help along the way.

Someone will describe a problem that you actually get excited about helping solve because you understand what it requires so clearly.

Because you’re uniquely suited for it.

But if you never ask, you never really know.

Try it out

If you’ve never gotten super introspective about this, try it and tell me how it goes!

• Did you find any impostor strengths along the way that were overshadowing unique strengths?
• Did you find a way of bringing a common strength to the table in a unique way?
• What makes these things difficult for you to find out?
• What makes it easy?
• What were your blockers along the way?
• How did you unblock yourself?

I hope this gets you excited about figuring out how to find out where your unique offerings can bring the most impact. It’s your secret sauce, your winning formula, your competitive advantage. And the reason it makes you so successful is because you’re happiest when you’re exercising your career in that way. You feel like it’s right.

I wish everyone reading that kind of career, where you feel like it’s just right where you fit in.