Burnout is all too common among non-profit leaders. Fortunately, there is a mindset and and a methodology that will help you stay out of the burnout ditch.
The first step in dealing with burnout, once you’ve recognized the symptoms and are ready to change your life, is to increase self-awareness. Review the four practices needed to grow your self-awareness here.
The next step is to strengthen your understanding of who you need to be. Review the four ways to be here. Once your self-awareness is strong, and you are clear about who you need to be, you’re ready to do.
Five Life-giving Habits to Help You Avoid Burnout
1. Do self-care
Play, sleep, eat healthy, connect.
Do something stimulating and enjoyable every day. Find challenging work or leisure activities. Make personal time pleasurable. Try something relaxing you wouldn’t normally do. Have a little fun.
Keep your mind, body and spirit in top working order. Get at least seven hours sleep. Eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, cut back on sugar, coffee and alcohol. Make time to exercise regularly.
Schedule quiet time to think and reassess. Reevaluate priorities — career advancement, family or health. Say no to the good in order to make time for the best.
2. Do manage energy
More important than time management is energy management. A lot of well-organized people suffer from a lack of productivity.
There is no doubt that time management skill is important. That includes clear goals, priorities and daily action plans. What’s equally as important is to manage your energy in the midst of managing your time.
Energy is managed by finding ways to avoid distractions, getting up from your seat every hour, taking well timed breaks, saying no to long hours knowing full well your productivity goes down the longer you work.
One trick I have learning to practice is to make clean transitions between tasks — releasing the work I finish and then stepping into the next assignment or project.
3. Do clarify expectations
Expectations set people up to win by defining what needs to be done. Accountability creates the opportunity to give performance-based feedback to individuals and teams. Feedback from leaders significantly influences the future performance of those working with them.
Know what your goals are. Clarify the expectations others have of you. Focus your role and educate other on what that role is.
Explore ways to creatively redesign your job to work more effectively. List energizing and draining job components. Spend more time on energizing tasks and less on draining ones. Intersperse frustrating activities with short breaks and rewards.
If you expect nothing, you can never be disappointed. Apart from a few starry-eyed poets or monks living on a mountaintop somewhere, however, we all have expectations. We not only have them, we need them. They fuel our dreams, our hopes, and our lives like some super-caffeinated energy drink. — Tonya Hurley
4. Do partner with others
Part of doing good work is doing it with others. That includes developing support systems. It also means cultivating meaningful, supportive relationships that allow you to share frustrations with trusted individuals.
Partnering with others is about teamwork. Teamwork is built on the qualities of trust, respect, productive conflict, agreed-upon action, accountability, and tangible results.
A team can accomplish more than a group of individuals working independently because of the synergy they have as a team. For example, a single draft horse can pull a load of up to 8,000 pounds. Two draft horses hooked together can pull 24,000 pounds. That is the power of partnering with others!
5. Do build trust
Trust is all about having confidence in the character and competence of others (Steven M.R. Covey in The Speed of Trust). It is nurtured and developed when you keep the promises you make to each other. If you say you’re going to do something, you get it done. When that happens, trust grows.
If trust has broken down, the road back includes owning our part in the breakdown and taking baby steps to rebuild it once gone. Teamwork is build on the shoulders of trust so it’s not an option if you want to thrive in life and work.
Final thoughts
Burnout is common but not inevitable. You can take action both in who you seek to be and in what you decide to do that can change everything.
Refuse to settle for the status quo. Take back the opportunity to not only make a contribution to this work, but be a healthy and vital human being in the process.
What is your next step to continue building sustainable margin in your life so burnout doesn’t happen to you?
