Summer 2009

Can You Be on Fire without Burning Out?

I first learned about burnout by doing it. It was 1975, I was not long out of graduate school, a counselor to disabled people, having entered this field thinking I would change lives and be appreciated for it. Instead, I was depressed, angry, and feeling like a failure. Coming home from another snappish, frustrating day, I heard Christina Maslach being interviewed on National Public Radio, reciting the symptoms of burnout. She was talking about me.

I started learning everything I could about burnout, starting with what it is: the downward slide toward physical, emotional, mental and spiritual exhaustion resulting from chronic high stress. After I pulled myself out of it, I started giving talks and workshops on how to bounce back from burnout – mostly to people in the helping professions – reaching more than 20,000 people over the next 5 years.

Fast forward to today, and my career – hardly a straight line – has taken me in a somewhat different direction, through the Center for Creative Leadership, and some of the greatest names and companies in leadership development. And yet this matter of burnout now seems more relevant than ever: life is faster, organizations have downsized, people feel like they have fewer options because of the economy, and a ton of global competition has entered the marketplace that didn’t exist 30 years ago. All the demands are greater. I talk to an awful lot of leaders who are stressed out, worried, angry, and feeling like they’re failing. They also describe people who work for them who feel even worse.

Fortunately, there are also better approaches to managing burnout today. For example, we now know that burnout is a paradox to manage, not a problem to solve once and for all. (Back in 1975, my “solution” to burnout was to quit my job, which turned out to be not only draconian, but short-lived, as the symptoms came creeping back in my next job). We know more about how to fully engage, and the importance of diet, exercise, and relaxation techniques in managing one's energy. There is also a new technology for measuring personality that connects mind and body; some personality preferences make one prone to burnout; others reduce the risk quite a bit. We now know how to help people balance their personality so as to become burnout resistant.

I’ve been out of the burnout business for 20 years. But what I’ve learned in that time, and what I see in these times, makes me want to return to it now. I've begun to offer day-and-a-half workshops to help people stay on fire without burning out, or recover their flame if I've arrived a bit too late.

-Mark Kiefaber

And the results are… 

Our readers voted on which energy pattern President Obama calls Home. The winner was Visionary with 58% of the vote, Collaborator was a strong second with 33%, and Organizer had a following at 9% with Driver being a big goose egg.