Becoming Burnout-Proof
I’ve been doing a lot more thinking about burnout recently, and I’m coming to a place where I’m resolving a conflict I’ve had in my mind since starting Pilea. I’ve wondered, If our willingness and ability to hustle, over-work, over-deliver, and give ourselves fully to our work is our superpower, but it also leads to burnout, then what are we to do? I’ve struggled with this immensely in building our humble little business, and I see our clients struggle with this constantly.
We make empty promises to ourselves like I’m going to prioritize going to the gym, I’ll just close my computer at 5-6-7-8-9 PM, and This year I’ll take a vacation - a real one. But year after year passes, and the same things happen (or, rather, they don’t happen). I used to think this was the picture that led to burnout - and it can be! - but I’m seeing that there’s a new way of evaluating this. What if burnout isn’t a symptom of only working too hard or caring too much about what you do? What if burnout is actually the holistic failure of your system (your body, mind, emotions, nervous system, and relationships)?
The holistic failure of a system is far too large of a thing to be caused only by working too much, or to be triggered by this project or by that colleague. Burnout is caused by a full-scale mismanagement of our lives. There are outside factors and internal factors, and it’s a complicated web on which all collaborate to create our system-wide burnout.
“The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.” - David Whyte
I remember reading this about 10 years ago and thinking it meant that the way to become burnout-proof was to love my work more, to work harder, and to fully immerse myself in whatever I was doing. I won’t lie, this notion has served me well. But, I totally missed the point. He didn’t mean wholeheartedness in work; rather, David meant wholeheartedness in everything. With this understanding in mind and by exercising a bit of creative liberty, I’ve elaborated upon his quote so that it reads, “The antidote to burnout is living a whole and fulfilling life in every aspect of life that is important to you.”
Yikes. I liked the one where I just work harder better.
I liked the original version better because I knew how to deal with working harder, and because I had no idea where to start living a holistically fulfilling life. So, I got to work researching and me-searching, and I have come up with eight weeks of content that I think lay the foundation for making us burnout-proof. I say “lay the foundation” because this is a lifelong process, and even while creating this course I flirted with burnout.
Tune in over the next few months for little peeks into the content and practices from Pilea for becoming a burnout-proof founder.