If you didn’t know there are TWO pandemics going on, this could be the wake-up call you need to keep yourself safe.
Jennifer Moss is an author, journalist and workplace expert who discovered something shocking in 2020.
She found evidence of a major increase in a devastating condition that affects knowledge workers, entrepreneurs and millennials at higher rates than nearly all other groups except healthcare workers.
In a survey supported by the Harvard Business Review and conducted by Ms. Moss and noted experts Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter, 1,500 people in 46 countries reported on their work life experiences during the pandemic.
The study revealed that 89% of respondents were negatively affected by this condition at some level, and 62% had experienced it “often” or “extremely often” in the three months prior to the survey.
It’s also a condition I’ve suffered from personally, one that took me over a year to actually recognize, and that took even longer to resolve since I had to figure out treatment on my own.
The first sign was exhaustion.
It’s not so much that I was physically tired, but that I was emotionally weary in the work I was doing.
At that time I was a pastor, pouring myself out in preparing and delivering messages and pouring myself into people.
The work was meaningful, but each day left me feeling a little less energized than the one before.
The second sign was a growing sense of detachment.
It’s not that I didn’t care about people anymore, but that I wasn’t able to be fully present emotionally.
At times I even found myself starting to resent the demands placed on me by the people I’d chosen to serve.
Now the work felt less meaningful than it once did, and I started getting concerned.
The third sign was a deep discouragement.
I started to wonder whether or not my work was really making a difference, and whether I was even doing a good job.
What started as concern about my work became a deeper concern about myself.
What I didn’t know until much later is that I was suffering from the same condition that reached epidemic proportions in 2020.
That condition is burnout.
If you’re feeling
• exhausted from your workload,
• cynical and detached from the people you’re serving, and
• discouraged about your effectiveness,
you might be experiencing burnout, too.
Now, here’s the thing about burnout: it’s easy to ignore until it’s too late.
What most people miss when they talk about burnout is that it never stays in the realm of work!
It affects your health by disrupting your stress and lowering your immune system, your wealth by sapping your energy and focus and making you less productive, and your relationships by lowering your levels of patience and empathy.
Left unchecked, burnout can damage your most important relationships, destroy your business or career, and even decrease your lifespan.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
What the research showed and what I experienced both personally and in helping clients is that there ARE highly effective steps we can take to make sure burnout doesn’t get the best of us!
And the good news is, they’re not that hard to do if we know what we’re doing.
Of course, it’s one thing to think you might be experiencing something, it’s another thing to know it, and quite another thing to take action on the right steps to get free.
So, if you want to get some deeper clarity and explore some ways to beat burnout once you’re in it or stop it before it starts, please reach out and let’s make some time to talk.
It could be your first step toward freedom.
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