Am I coming down with a cold or is it just that I'm on the edge of burnout?
I asked one of my clients ‘How are you?’ at the start of our call.
‘I’m in that moment,’ he said, ‘where I’m wondering ‘am I coming down with a cold, or is it just…’
And before he could finish the sentence, I heard a thought, loud in my mind: ‘…that I’m on the edge of burnout?’
The end of his sentence was actually ‘is it just allergies?’ but I’d already heard the thunderclap and couldn’t unhear it.
It felt like a story for our age.
The confusion and knowledge that the gradual sum of our way of life is - for many of us - sailing so close to the wind of exhaustion as to feel like a physical illness.
I found myself saying, with absolutely no research to back this up, that that thought came to mind because it’s the situation that 80% of working people in the UK find themselves in.
Am I coming down with a cold or is it just that I’m on the edge of burnout?
That’s my gut feeling.
We live in the world where the pandemic happened, with everything it and our responses to it ripped away from us for years. The social connection, the changed risk profile, the habits and paths our lives will never return to.
We live in the world of technology, where it’s possible to be connected across the world in seconds. The majesty of that, and what we lose if we lose sight of the unnatural side of it.
We live in the world of entertainment - where, as I heard Robert Holden speak about recently, entertainment abounds, but most of it is not inspiration.
In the call where my client told me about his cold (or his allergies or his burnout), we checked in using one of my favourite ever reflection exercises: what three things should we use to call you back from another dimension? I love the mythological context of it and the function in connecting us to aliveness.
Another powerful frame is one that Holden shared recently in a meeting of his membership programme, Purpose Club. What is inspiring me right now?
That’s pretty much (by complete coincidence) the check-in we use at every The Coach’s Journey team meeting. What has inspired you in the last week?
These, too, are connections to aliveness.
Just like the things that would call you back from another dimension are the antidotes to burnout.
So are the sources of inspiration.
They are never insignificant, even though they may be small.
They are never unhuman, even though they may be things done alone.
They are never only entertainment, even though they may be entertaining.
I once heard Michael Neill asked what he thought about Social Media. He said, ‘You have to ask yourself as you’re using it: is it an expression of aliveness, or is it a tool to deaden?’
That frame is a powerful one.
Use it as a compass.
I feel the burnout close, just like the other (fictional) 80%.
I felt it this morning - too many zoom calls, not enough garden, I thought.
Then I had a zoom call and my energy was transformed.
It was an expression of aliveness.
It was inspiration.
More of that, please.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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