Revisiting burnout

It’s been quite a year already. My family is finally out of quarantine, three out of four of us having tested positive for covid over the holidays. I’m still reeling a bit from the experience, even though we were lucky and only had mild/asymptomatic cases. It was more psychologically demoralizing than anything, and I’ve been trying to share thoughtfully about it when I can, because I know it helped me to hear of the experiences of others.

I won’t lie - I’m tired, although it comes in waves, and it’s hard to know if its from covid or just... all this. It’s coming up with some of our clients too, especially those on the frontlines of putting DEI to practice in their organizations. The work is tiring, and it can be hard to pinpoint what exactly is exhausting us the most.

I think, to some extent, it doesn’t really matter, or if you need an answer but can’t figure it out, it is probably all of the above. Figuring out the source can be helpful, but only to a degree, because what if we can’t change the source?

What I’ve found most helpful is to focus on needs. What do I need in order to be better resourced to navigate some of these conditions that are beyond control, and to have the strength to impact change where I can? What can I do so I’m working from less of a deficit, and then what needs can I advocate for with others? How can I set up small experiments to test out different strategies to see what works?

I’ve also found it very helpful understand how burnout works physiologically when you don’t “complete the stress cycle.”

This is obviously a much longer conversation, one that we are building into our staff and DEI facilitator workshops more and more, and can also offer as a standalone workshop. It’s not that I think we’re any better at dealing with burnout than anyone else, but as DEI consultants working on DEI full time with a variety of clients, we’ve had to develop strategies to make our work more sustainable, always a work in progress.

For now, I’ll leave you with a question - what is one small thing that you could integrate into your day-to-day life that will take no more than an additional 15 minutes per day that would help to mitigate stress and burnout? Again, the blog post on burnout has simple but effective suggestions, many of which you may already be doing without realizing why or even that they are helpful.

Banner photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash

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