Three Steps Leaders Can Take To Avoid Burnout
If you want to help your team succeed, you must help each team member avoid burnout. But just as importantly, you, as the leader, must overcome and prevent burnout yourself.
No matter what our role in our business is, we are all leaders. If we want our teams to perform their best every day — and succeed at the highest levels — we must avoid burnout.
Burnout is a hot topic in the corporate world right now — for good reason. The World Health Organization recently recognized burnout as a legitimate medical syndrome.
A number of factors contribute to increasing rates of job burnout. We work long hours, often starting early in the morning and ending late at night. Our phones keep us permanently connected to our work, as we check email at night and on weekends. We work weeks and months on end without a vacation.
We feel the pressure to accomplish more in less time, to increase our company’s performance and profits, to lower overhead, and to raise customer satisfaction.
We are burdened by the frustration of not spending enough time with our spouses, our kids and our friends. We don’t exercise. We don’t eat well. We don’t sleep well.
And it’s not sustainable.
If you want to help your team succeed, you must help each team member avoid burnout. But just as importantly, you, as the leader, must overcome and prevent burnout yourself.
These three steps can help you avoid burnout and be the best leader you can be.
Find your passion.
“Fulfillment and happiness come only when you are pursuing your passion and are totally engaged because of your love of the game, whatever your game might be.”
– Augie Garrido, former Cal State Fullerton Titans and Texas Longhorns baseball coach, who won five College World Series titles
Losing passion for what we do — or never having passion for in the first place — is a common cause of burnout.
Jerry West is one of the greatest basketball players of all time. His silhouette makes up the logo for the National Basketball Association (NBA).
After a stellar college career at West Virginia, West played for 14 years in the NBA for the Los Angeles Lakers. He was a 14-time NBA All-Star. He won an NBA Championship and was named NBA Finals MVP in 1969, despite playing on the losing team.
Jerry retired from playing in 1974, at a time when many thought his game was peaking. How could he walk away when he was still playing at such a high level?
Jerry West might have been burned out.
One day, West met with head coach Bill Sharman and general manager Pete Newell to tell them he was retiring. They were shocked. They aggressively tried to talk him out of it. They believed he could play at a high level for several more years in the NBA.
But all of those years, all of the games, and all the pressure had taken a toll on him. “I can’t do it anymore. I just can’t make myself play anymore. There’s nothing left inside me,” West told them.
“Put everything you have into your passions, because one of the greatest gifts in life is to be able to do what you love.”
– Carli Lloyd, U.S. Women’s National Team star and two-time FIFA Player of the Year
Contrast West’s loss of passion for basketball with the greatest basketball player ever — Michael Jordan.
Jordan’s coaches in college, with the Olympic team, and with the Chicago Bulls all observed that his passion for basketball was unmatched. He loved practices. He loved games. He loved competing against the best players in the league.
Michael showed up earlier for practices and left later than any player on his team. He worked every offseason to improve some aspect of his game.
Jordan took a sabbatical from basketball to play baseball, but his love of the game brought him back to the NBA. He didn’t come back just to earn a paycheck. He won three of his six NBA Championships in those years.
In fact, after he retired from the Bulls in 1999, he returned to play for two seasons with the Washington Wizards.
There’s no greater privilege than being able to do what you love — what you’re truly passionate about — every day. But it’s unrealistic to think that you will love every aspect of your job.
There are parts of your job, though, that you do love.
Maybe you love connecting with customers. Maybe it’s giving presentations to your investors or the board of directors. Maybe you love crunching the numbers and studying your company’s financial reports.
Whatever the aspect of your job is that you do love, do more of it.
In medicine — a profession plagued with high rates of burnout among physicians and healthcare providers — studies have shown that burnout is 275 percent more likely among physicians who spend less than 20 percent of their work time on what they find personally meaningful.
Find what excites you about your job, what gets you motivated, what gets you out of bed in the morning. And then find ways to devote more of your time and energy to it.
Reconnect with your purpose.
“A vision gives a purpose to daily pursuits. A reason to push yourself out of bed each morning and do something. Without this purpose, it’s easy to drift through the days and weeks and months of life.”
– Bob Bowman, coach of swimmer Michael Phelps, winner of 23 Olympic gold medals
Professional athletes train for hours each day. It’s not just practicing their sport. It’s lifting weights. It’s sprinting, running hills and building stamina, speed and endurance.
If they want to be the best — and compete against the best in the world and their sport — they have to push their bodies harder than everyone else. But it’s hard for most people — even pro athletes — to push themselves day after day, month after month, and year after year.
The best athletes — who win championships and awards — focus on their purpose. They constantly connect with why they do what they do.
Carli Lloyd is one of the best players in the history of American women’s soccer. She has won two Olympic gold medals and two FIFA Women’s World Cups with the U.S. Women’s National Team, including winning the Golden Ball for best player while helping the U.S. win the trophy in 2015. She has twice been named the FIFA Player of the Year.
Carli played on the United States U-21 team early in her career. Toward the end of a camp with the team prior to a tournament in Brazil, U-21 team coach Chris Petrucelli sat Lloyd down to discuss her performance. He told her that while she was clearly talented, he didn’t feel she did enough work defensively and tended to take time off during the flow of the game.
Petrucelli believed Carli Lloyd was not performing to the level of a national team player, so he cut her from the team.
Rather than quitting, Carli was determined to make the national team. She hired a trainer and committed herself to becoming the best player in the world.
Carli and her trainer, James Galanis, worked together for years. As most would expect a great coach would do, he pushed his star player really hard, imploring her to be the best player she could be. But Lloyd also was determined to be the best on her own. And she proved it every day with her training.
When traveling with the national team, Carli often snuck away for extra runs or weightlifting sessions. She would work for hours on shooting or conditioning when other players were resting. She wanted to be faster than the other players and excel when everyone else was getting tired.
Nothing exemplified her determination more than the fact that she trained on Christmas mornings. Even on the biggest holiday of the year, she was committed to putting in the work she needed to be the best player on the field in every game.
Carli Lloyd wasn’t just training simply to do it. She was training for a purpose. She wanted to win a World Cup, and to be the best player in the world.
In fact, minutes after winning the World Cup final in 2015, she called Galanis to ask when they could start training again.
We often lose our passion in the day-to-day grind of our jobs. Professional athletes are no different. But we must all reconnect with our “why” — our purpose — to keep us moving forward instead of burning out and quitting.
“You can’t solve your personal issues until you define your purpose.”
– Lou Holtz, national championship-winning head coach at Notre Dame, college football TV analyst, and the only coach to lead six schools to bowl games
Andre Agassi became a tennis champion, but most people don’t realize that for most of his career, he hated tennis.
It could be due to his father pushing him to play at an early age. Agassi hit 2500 balls every day — close to 1 million per year — as a child. His father sent him to the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, which young Agassi hated, because he thought it would make his son great.
Years and years of playing a sport he despised wore him down, even as he won major championships.
One year during the U.S. Open, Brooke Shields — Agassi’s wife at the time — took him to a restaurant in Manhattan called Campagnola. Agassi loved it, sitting at the same corner table after every match. The manager would serve the couple meals even though the restaurant wouldn’t normally be open those hours.
Agassi loved the restaurant largely because of the manager, Frankie. Frankie always talked about his kids and how much he loved them. Over time, Frankie confided in Andre that even though his kids were still in grade school, he already worried about paying for their college tuition.
Andre was so moved that he asked his manager to set aside a significant amount of Nike stock in Frankie’s name. By the time the stock would mature and Frankie could open the account, it would pay for a large part of the college tuition.
Frankie’s lips quivered as Andre told him about the stock. Frankie told the tennis star he couldn’t believe Agassi would do that for him.
Instantly, Agassi received more satisfaction from that one generous gesture than he had in a lifetime of competitive tennis. He realized the value of helping others. He made it his mission in life to help kids in need to go to school.
Agassi donated millions of dollars to open the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas, a charter school for disadvantaged kids. He supported many other charities and started many of his own. In 1995, he won the Arthur Ashe Humanitarian award.
Finding his why — helping others — didn’t just excite him off the court. It sparked a revival in his tennis. He now had a purpose, and he used it to once again pursue tennis excellence. He went on to win five of his eight career Grand Slam championships.
Why did you choose the profession you did? Why did you start working at your first job? Why are you here?
Take a long time and reconnect with your “why” — why you do what you do, or for whom you do it.
Knowing and connecting with your purpose at work and in life will help propel us through the tough times we all face.
Focus on gratitude.
“People are generally very kind to me. And I consider those people to be my customers, the people who are supporting my life not just financially, but they’re supporting my artistic life and I’m grateful to them.”
– Harrison Ford, actor and star of multiple blockbuster movies that grossed over $5 billion.
To be a great baseball player, you have to focus for 162 games each season. You have to concentrate on every pitch as a batter, even though you come to the plate hundreds and hundreds of times. It would be easy to simply go through the motions.
Augie Garrido, one of the most successful baseball coaches of all time, used a concept he called the “circle of focus” to help his players succeed. Augie didn’t just want to help them concentrate in everything they did during the game. He wanted to help them overcome mistakes, ignore the pressure of a big game, and focus on their strengths and not get distracted by all of the challenges the long season presented.
He had each player create their own “circle of focus.” He had each player visualize stepping into a place of comfort, remove all distractions and fears, focus on the immediate goal, remember past successes and accomplishments, and encourage themselves.
Most importantly, Augie would challenge each player to feel and show gratitude for their chance to play baseball and use and show their talents.
This focus on gratitude is just as important in the corporate world as it is in the sports world.
Studies have shown that expressing gratitude, whether through verbally thanking someone, writing a letter, or buying a gift, can benefit the giver just as much as the recipient.
But in our long, difficult days, it’s easy to forget all the things and people we have to be grateful for.
Before winning a Super Bowl with the Indianapolis Colts, Tony Dungy was head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He was successful with the Bucs, taking them to the NFC Championship Game before being fired by the Glazers, the owners of the team, in 2001.
Instead of being angry at losing his job, Dungy remained grateful to the Glazers. He remembered that they gave him his first opportunity to be a head coach in the NFL, a chance no one else gave him. He was grateful that God put him in the position to be a football coach in the first place. Rather than being upset, he filled his heart with gratitude.
He soon got the head coaching position in Indianapolis. Five years later, he won Super Bowl XLI, becoming the first African American head coach to win the Super Bowl.
Find some way to include gratitude in your life every day.
Write down three people or things you’re grateful for every morning. Each time you open a door or enter a different room at your job, remind yourself that you’re grateful for your job and for your coworkers, that you’re grateful to help your customers. Carry a special object in your pocket, and think of something you’re grateful for every time you touch it.
Focusing on gratitude will help you through the struggles we face every day. Those thoughts will lift our spirits and fill us with positive energy.
Short moments can build us up and keep us from burning out.
Avoid burnout, and thrive in your work and life.
Work is hard, and our careers are long. With the demands and pressures of work today, it’s easy to grow more stressed, more fatigued, and more frustrated. Finding our passion, reconnecting with our purpose, and focusing on gratitude are essential steps each one of us should take to avoid burnout and thrive in our work and lives.
Hire Dr. Geier to speak to your organization.
Dr. David Geier is a popular leadership and burnout keynote speaker for corporate and medical audiences. Click here to learn more about how he can educate and inspire your audience.
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