The Sunday evening dread that sat there for years, crusting up, layer upon layer until now when it becomes impossible to ignore.
So, the alarm goes off and that same instinct that served you for years becomes tiresome. What was once an incendiary driving you forward is now a damp decaying ember.
This may not be telling you that you are broken. It may be telling you something about the conditions you have been operating inside. The weight on your shoulders rounds you and the look in the mirror is almost too painful to bear.
This isn’t the confines of a hospital but a regular Monday morning faced with another day into the vortex of someone else’s life.
And then the day’s meetings - another one sat through and you feel nothing, again.
And the conversations, meaningless now. All adding to the layers of crust.
All you need is some time out, isn’t it?
If this is your first time then let me enlighten you on the process. You simply overdid it. You need time out. Maybe a retreat here and there. A recommended management book. Oh someone knows this coach - maybe that’ll sort you out. You didn’t optimise enough, you need a new productivity system. Or maybe this is your second time around in which case you need therapy, sleep, rest and medication. Then… return back to your post to do it all over again.
I have seen this in action many times in others and I have also experienced it first hand. And some of that stuff works, for a brief period anyway. Recovery is necessary, but what exactly are you recovering towards?
Buried by the structure that made you
I have studied people and systems my whole life. I have designed architectures, played out people engineering and I’ve also been buried underneath the systems and structures. So what exactly is the system response of burnout pointing to?
Sometimes burnout looks less like failure and more like a system that can no longer be sustained on the old terms. The question is, what might something deep within you be refusing?
The role that became the performer? Staying busy to avoid a question or a fear? Priorities that belonged to a younger version of you that now don’t seem so relevant any more? For me, it felt like a refusal. Something worth listening to and learning from.
Sounds pretty grim, right? Some may say, ‘...that’s not me!’ Yep, I’ve been there too.
After all, I wasn’t just competent, I was the authority in the room. Respected, admired - it couldn’t possibly be happening to me. But the more I stuck to it and the more rigid I became as the performer, the more the gap inside, between the performer and the person beneath it, widened. It becomes unsustainable. Especially when you’ve been around the block a few times.
It isn’t a weakness and there is no accusation from my side. But it’s all too common - the greater your responsibility, the fewer people you can show uncertainty to. That’s not a weakness but it is the cost of the position and it accumulates.
So why isn’t recovery the sole answer?
Can’t we just regenerate and kick-on again? Of course you can, but like every system protocol, you will appear yet again as a plot point on the graph. One axis is time and the other is satisfaction/dissatisfaction.
Recovery programmes can be pretty good if I’m completely honest. I loved some of them. I have to say, a hammock in Mexico or the tranquility of the west coast of Barbados does wonders for the body and mind. As good as they were they had very little to do with purpose.
Any man can return from six weeks of rest and improved sleep feeling physically better. But then return to the same conditions that produced the burnout in the first place. I can predict the next collapse. Because we are tough, because we’ve learned discipline and to push through, and because it’s part of our identity - we do it again. It is our own habit. But the destination was never truly ours. Maybe we thought it was, or maybe we loved the feedback of achievement and acknowledgement, but we didn’t intrinsically own it.
The easy option
Going back to how it was just before the burnout is easy. Seductive even. It’s easy to explain, it’s familiar, it doesn’t put an excessive tax on others and it doesn’t renegotiate your years of identity production.
I know that you already know what I’m about to say - Ultimately it isn’t a resolution - it is a deferral. And you feel the ache.
Time to reflect on what the burnout is really pointing to then. This is the tough one and it requires the courage of an already isolated man. It points to something that had been true for far longer than the burnout. Only you know this and only you can answer it with careful direction.
But how do you know if the next target is yours and do you still truly want it?
Most of my targets were set before I fully knew myself and I didn’t revise them until the third decade. That’s a heck of a lot of time.
And what of the isolation and loneliness? You can’t exactly spill this to the board or your direct reports now can you? You may have tried saying something to your wife, but she doesn’t or can’t understand, maybe because she’s dealing with the shifting sands of identity too. And your friends - they can’t or won’t listen. Perhaps because it pulls the rug out from underneath them too. And after all, they need your stability for the group to remain. God forbid you should fall off. More finger pointing. How lonely.
So the one vital question that sits in the background - what is this burnout pointing to? - is being faced entirely alone by you, probably late at night and there’s no one who can truly relate and hold it without being concerned for their own edifice or their own gain.
The right questions to ask
Have a think on this for a moment - instead of asking “How can I recover?” Or “How do I get myself back just before all this?”, maybe the right questions are
What is the burnout a verdict on?
What is it pointing to?
Am I willing to take it seriously?”
A final thought.
We often polarise our position from fear and into thinking that the identity we have built is a sham. Perhaps we start thinking that it is of no use to us and it must be destroyed if we are to move on.
Not so!
You have experience, skills, talents and ideas. It is entirely possible to make use of these on new solid foundations, that you own, and with your own compass bearing.
If you want to examine what your work is asking of you, what matters now and where you go from here, Private Direction gives you somewhere to do that with one man outside your usual world.
