Career – Text
Check unknown vocabulary before you read the text:
to justify – show (an act, claim, statement, etc.) to be just or right; defend
thoroughly – with great care, attending to every detail
to betray – disappoint the hopes or expectations of; be disloyal to
passion – very strong feeling, especially of anger or love
commitment – a pledge or promise; obligation
to doom – condemn; make certain to come to harm, fail etc.
downside – a discouraging or negative aspect
precious – highly esteemed for some spiritual, nonmaterial, or moral duality
setback – a reverse or defect
trigger – anything, as an act or event, that serves as a stimulus and initiates or precipitates a reaction or series of reactions
dispassionate – free from or unaffected by passion; devoid of personal feeling or bias; impartial; calm
tainted – affected; corrupted; influenced
Avoiding Burnout
Going on a good, long vacation is one of the best ways of avoiding burnout. Choose a vacation that does not expose you to the stresses you experience at home or which distracts you from them. Leave your laptop and mobile phone behind. Forget about work completely until your return. Rest, and enjoy life. Being a workaholic is not something to be proud of.
Similarly, make sure you get enough sleep and rest, and that you frequently use relaxation techniques to calm down and relax.
One of the major causes of burnout is disillusionment with your job, particularly when you get a great deal of the meaning in your life from the work you do. The emphasis here is on protecting the parts of your job that give you meaning and satisfaction. If you have trouble in justifying this to yourself, then think about the people you serve: if you burn out, then they will not get the benefit of the energy and enthusiasm you can provide: You owe it to them to enjoy your job! It is also possible that the job itself is badly designed and that contradictions inherent within it are causing much of the stress you are experiencing.
There is a lot that you can do to avoid job burnout. Perhaps the most important thing is to recognize that you are at risk, and take this seriously. This article briefly shows you the sort of things you can do to avoid burnout. These mainly focus on managing workload, dealing with people problems, avoiding exhaustion and protecting the meaning of your work. If you can do these things, then you should be able to avoid burnout and continue to get satisfaction from the work you do.
It may be too late to talk about avoiding burnout. Maybe you've already reached the stage where you are thoroughly disillusioned with your job and where you no longer get anything of emotional value from it. You may feel let down or betrayed by your organization, and may be "going through the motions" just for the money your job brings in.
While you can deal with exhaustion by taking a good break, rest may not cure this sense of disillusionment. The passion andcommitment that you previously brought to your job may now have completely burned out. Without this, your career may not progress much further.
People deal with this situation in a number of different ways. Some are effective, while others are not so good:
· Doing Nothing: Often, one of the worst ways of dealing with burnout is to accept it and do nothing about it. By remaining in place, you risk becoming bitter and angry as opportunities pass you by. Your organization may come to regard you as “dead wood” and if things do not change, you may be doomed to a gradual or sudden decline. You need to change the situation in some way.
· Changing Career: If you have lost all interest in the values that led you into your profession in the first place, then career change may be the best option open to you. The first downside of this, however, is that you lose the benefit of the preciousexperience you have already gained within the profession. In entering a new profession, you will be competing equally with people much younger than you, and these people may be willing to accept much lower salaries. A second downside is that you risk a strong sense of failure in the way you handled things, whereas burnout will only have been a temporary setback if you succeed in turning the situation around.
· Changing Jobs: Job change within the same profession is usually less of an issue than full-scale career change, in that many of your skills and much of your experience will be transferable. Job change gives you the opportunity to rededicate yourself to your original goals. It also provides a fresh start in a new environment, without the painful reminders that come with staying in the same job. Changing jobs is an appropriate response where you are disillusioned with your organization more than you are with your career. What you risk, however, is ending up in the same situation again: In changing your job, you must make sure that you understand what led you to burn out, and ensure that history does not repeat itself. Looking at this positively, you should know what to look for, and have a good idea of how to avoid it!
· Using Burnout as a Trigger for Personal Growth: This is probably one the most positive ways that people manage burnout: By using it as a wakeup call to re-evaluate the way they want to live their lives and what they want to achieve. We look at this in more detail below.
An important first step in managing burnout is to deal with the sense of failure that you may experience following it. A starting point for this is to take a long, rational, dispassionate look at the circumstances leading up to it.
A good way of doing this is by talking to someone who you trust and who is experienced in similar situations in similar organizations (you may find a personal coach helpful here). Avoid people within your own organization, as these people will be tainted with its assumptions and thinking habits: These may contribute to the problem. Take the time to talk the situation through in detail, looking at the circumstances before your involvement, your workload, your actions and the actions of other people, and the situations that evolved.
If you are the sort of person who has been committed enough to your work to burn out, it is more than likely that you will have already done everything in your power to resolve the situation.
In reflecting, you will probably find that you made some mistakes, but you will most likely see that these are excusable under the circumstances. You will almost certainly see that a great deal of blame should be attributed externally to the situation, to people around you, or to the people who set up the situation in the first place. In your mind, make sure you place this blame where it fairly belongs.
Lessons that people typically learn through this process are that they are not superhuman, that hard work does not cure all ills, and that major achievements need the commitment and support of other people: In many circumstances, the intense commitment of only one person simply is not enough. They also learn to look at situations with skepticism as they go into them, and to trust their own judgment in spotting and communicating problems early on.
Learn the lessons of your mistakes so that you do not repeat them.