We know that one of the major causes of people leaving their jobs is burnout. And right now, 50% of managers are still experiencing burnout – and you might be one of them. I was one of them. In 2013, I had an entire year plus of suffering through burnout. To the point where at the end of that year I said, “I’ve got to quit my job, I cannot do this anymore. I have to quit to save my family, save myself.” You probably know the story, I did not quit. I ended up recovering from burnout, I stayed at my job for four more years, I stayed married, and I raised kids.
But you may be right in the middle of where I was at that time, where the burnout just keeps getting flamed and flamed and flamed, to the point where you are really considering quitting your job. Before you make that decision, I want to offer one question for you to answer. And that one question is, what is the root cause of my burnout? What is the root cause?
Now if you would’ve asked me that back in 2013, I would’ve said, “Oh, all of my accounts I call on, all the travel I do, the house cleaning, the laundry, the grocery shopping, picking up my kids from school,” literally, I can still rattle the list that I rattled all those years ago. But when I really sat down and challenged myself to say, but what’s that root cause, what’s at the foundation of all of those things?
It was me; I was the root cause of my burnout.
I was the one who said yes to that promotion that meant I had all of these accounts and did all of this travel. I was the one who said, “No, I don’t need help,” with the laundry. I was the one who didn’t ask for somebody else to do something. It was all me. So I’m going to challenge you. What’s the root cause of your burnout? It’s you. Now, this is painful. I was in so much pain. But here’s the good news. When you’re the root cause of something bad, it means you can be the root cause of the change of the good on the other side!
So this is where we want to get to. We’ve got to first identify that you’ve caused it, but now you can create the change. And the number one action that you’re going to take from here is communication. A huge mistake that I’ve seen too many executives, especially middle managers, make, is that they assume their boss, their manager knows all of the workload that they have, knows everything that they’re working on. And it’s completely false. Your manager is tied up in their own stuff, they don’t have any idea everything you’re doing day in and day out.
They have no idea, even if you’ve communicated, “Hey, I’m feeling burned out, this is a lot,” they don’t understand the details. So you’ve got to come up with a communication plan professionally, and for some of you personally. If you are interested in knowing how we work with organizations, teams, and executives on their communication plans, how to communicate, whether that’s out of burnout or anything else that’s happening in the organization, message me, let me know! But your first step today is to really come to terms with the fact that you are the root cause of your burnout, and the good news is you get to be the change.