How Striving Can Help Us Thrive.
Since being in the field of wellbeing and burnout, I’ve asked a lot of people the question of “How are you feeling?”.
Lately, the most common response I hear is “I have never felt so tired in my life.
This sentiment has been backed up by multiple researchers and publications that have reported the significant increase in burnout experienced by corporate employees in the last two years. Considering what we have been through, this is hardly a surprise.
We have faced fires, flooding, a pandemic, and flooding again. Add to this multiple lockdowns, huge changes in the way we work, reduced capacity to go away on holidays and stress around not being able to see loved ones. It's no wonder the burnout rates are increasing. However, with this being said, how much do we really understand about burnout?
Burnout is a complex syndrome that consists of three dimensions:
Emotional and physical exhaustion,
Disengagement and cynicism about work,
Reduced sense of achievement.
Although, the first dimension is the most obvious one we think of when it comes to burnout, it is in fact more than just feeling tired.
The cynicism comes from huge levels of disappointment. Every time we thought that life was going to return to some sort of normality, the rug was whipped out from underneath us and the chance of travel or a normal life was taken away.
In our research, people had stated that they got to a point where they no longer put their hopes up because it seemed as they were rolling from one disaster to the next.
Over the last two years, we have gotten into the habit of not letting ourselves paint pleasurable future states as we don’t want to tempt fate or be disappointed again.
In support of this, we saw the following in our research:
An increase in resilience - We have had to deal with so much.
An increase in confidence - I can handle all this crap and cope with what comes next.
A drop in optimism - Finding it hard to focus on the good things in life.
A drop in hope - Every time something is going to get better, something else goes wrong.
The reduced sense of achievement is due to many of our strategic plans being disrupted. We have had to abandon many of our goals and future plans in order to take care of the immediate crisis that presented itself. These goals and aspirations kept having to be put on the back burner as rules and regulations kept shifting. We had to mop up the fall out of all this change and we got to the point where we felt we would never get to the strategic and aspirational goals.
In our interviews, we asked “what strategies are you going to put in place to manage your burnout”. We received various answers, but they all had one theme in common. They all revolved around doing less and not stretching themselves too far:
“I will manage that when I get to go on holidays again”.
“I am going to try and take it easy at work and not overwhelm myself”.
“Try to reduce my workload or take some time off to re-energise.”
We have been conducting research which showed that these people were missing a very important piece of the burnout prevention pie. It all started with a project we were doing in Lismore where we were working with educators in that region. This region has not only had to deal with COVID-19 but had also been hit by multiple devastating floods.
Our focus was to work with these people to support their mental health and wellbeing. However an interaction with a school principal in the region reminded me of the complexity of burnout. He said “What we are finding is that people want to support us and we really appreciate this, but the conversations just focus on how hard things have been for us and that we need to do less and take care of ourselves. To be honest, we are tired of this conversation. I know their intention is good but we just want to get back to doing what we find meaningful - helping transform the learning experience that children have at school.”
Following this conversation, we decided to do a series of projects to see if people who felt burnt out could re-energise, not just by focusing on self care but by also giving themselves challenging and meaningful goals to focus on.
We worked with a number of different industries ranging from education, tech start ups, medical and finance. What they all had in common was:
Their work force felt like they were in a rut and
The leaders said that because things have been so difficult and stressful for so long they were not sure if they could challenge their team too much and talk to them about focusing on growth.
We had Managers meet with their direct reports and help them come up with a strive goal that they wanted to achieve. It had to be a goal that they found meaning and purpose in and one that challenged them but didn’t overwhelm them. They then had a monthly check in with their Manager, and using a ‘striving frame work’ tracked their progress towards that goal.
The results were quite staggering. We saw significant reductions in burnout scores across the groups, improvements in engagement and enjoyment of the role. Another encouraging finding was that connection to leader increased dramatically. The process of guiding and supporting their team members through setting a challenging goal, as well as taking the time to reflect on and track progress is not only engaging but also creates bonds with the manager and team member.
The other benefit that we saw was that both optimism and hope increased. This came from the Manager and team member focusing on something that was in their control and reflecting on their progress.
What we learn from this is that the prevention of burnout is not just about doing less but it's also about adding in challenging goals that inspire us to be better and evolve.
The ability to tolerate being uncomfortable while focusing of growth is known as STRIVING. Even though it sounds counterintuitive, striving hard towards a meaningful goal can be the tick out of a rut which can protect us from burnout.