I’m going to talk about burnout a lot on this blog. It’s the thing I’ve watched really harm people in my generation, and I think it’s a pandemic of sorts. I’ve felt it myself. I’ve watched employees go through it. And I think I’ve started to find some clarity around why it happens and what to do about it.
Before we can talk about how to fight burnout, we have to ask a simpler question: why do we work in the first place?
I’ve drilled it down to three things. They all start with P, and I promise I wasn’t trying to be cute.
Paycheck. Passion. Purpose.
When one of these is missing, or when one of them starts to feel invisible, that’s where burnout lives.
Paycheck
We go to work to get paid. That’s the whole deal at the base level. Your job’s job isn’t to make you happy. It’s to be there, so you can bring money home to your family.
Sometimes we chase the money too hard. People climb ladders so aggressively they lose everything else that matters. But I think more often, we’re not grateful enough for the money we already earn. If you have a job that’s average, that’s boring sometimes, that’s hard sometimes, but it puts food on the table, that’s enough. That’s a real thing to be grateful for.
Here’s a gratitude practice I do: All of our companies run on Shopify, so I can pull up sales on my phone anytime. And there are days I look at it and think, oof, we’re not going to hit our number this month. So I’ve started saying instead: “Thank you for the $10,560 that our customers have trusted us with so far today.” Even if the number is zero because it’s early: “I’m grateful for the 3,000 people who visited our website this morning.”
Try it with your own paycheck. Look at the exact number, whatever it is. Say out loud that you’re grateful for it and for what it lets you provide.
I know some of you are rolling your eyes. That’s fair. But there’s real science here. Your brain takes in about 11 million inputs per second and processes about 50 at a time. That means you’re constantly choosing what to notice. Gratitude isn’t woo-woo. It’s an intentional choice about which inputs get through. Shift your focus and you literally shift your reality.
Passion
This is the one that gets buried when you’re deep in burnout.
The times I’ve burned out, it’s because I got bogged down in parts of my job that aren’t the reason I’m here. For me, that’s usually the nitty-gritty accountability stuff, or systems I’ve built that don’t get followed. As much as I love spreadsheets, operations isn’t my highest and best use. My unique ability is problem-solving. I need a problem to solve. When I’m doing that, I’m in flow. When I’m not, I’m leaking energy.
I know I’m saying this as a business owner, which comes with more control. But I don’t think employees have as little control as they think.
If you’re in a role where the thing you’re really good at is being underutilized, and you’re spending your day babysitting or putting out fires, you have more power than you realize. Go to your boss. Say: “I feel underutilized here. I want to focus more on X because I believe it benefits the organization.” A good boss is almost never going to say no to that. They might help you figure out what to delegate. They might help you decide something can be done monthly instead of weekly. And if they do say no and tell you to get back in your lane, then yeah, maybe it’s time to find a different job.
If you can spend 80% of your time doing the thing you’re uniquely good at, and 20% on the rest, you can hold burnout at bay for a long time.
And if the passion feels totally gone, try this. Think back to why you chose this work in the first place. There was a moment where you picked it. What connected you to it then? You don’t have to relight the whole fire. You just have to remember what it looked like.
Purpose
Purpose is the hardest one, and I think the most important.
Purpose is your connection to who you’re actually serving. At the end of every job, no matter how many layers deep you are, there’s a human being on the other end. I can’t think of an exception. Even if you make a rubber part that goes into a larger product that goes into a machine that ends up in a hospital, there’s still a human at the end of that chain.
The problem is, the further you are from that human, the harder it is to feel connected to them. And the disconnected feeling is what leads to purpose-based burnout.
A quick story on this: I recently had to call a bank to sort out a closed checking account. Called the call center, got bounced around three or four times, hold music forever, ended with someone telling me to call a local branch. I didn’t even know they had a branch in town. Sure enough, one was a block from my office. I called. The woman there was warm, personable, and had my problem fixed in fifteen minutes.
The difference was that the woman at the branch sees her customers. The call center employees never do.
That’s a purpose problem. And it’s not just a call center problem. It’s the reason working from home is contributing to burnout for a lot of people. Face-to-face with the humans you’re serving, or at minimum face-to-face with the humans you’re serving alongside, matters more than we admit.
If your job puts you close to customers, use that. If it doesn’t, get creative. When I worked at a Courtyard Marriott in college, I got so tired of answering the phone the same way every time. So I started stealing the JW Marriott greeting: “It’s a beautiful day at the Flagstaff Courtyard, this is Courtney, how can I help you?” My manager didn’t love it, but the callers did. It shifted their mood and mine.
You can bring humanity to your work even when the company hasn’t figured out how to help you feel it.
An Invite:
Paycheck, passion, purpose. If one is off, the whole thing wobbles. If two are off, you’re burning out. If three are off, you’re already gone.
I’m going to dig deeper on each of these in future episodes. I’d love to hear from you if you’re burned out right now, or if you’ve come back from it. Find me on Instagram, drop a comment, or reply to the newsletter. And follow the podcast if you want to keep working through this with me.
Most days, this is the real work.