Author: Robert Bogue

While today most municipalities have professional, career firefighters, fire departments initially formed as cooperatives of neighbors who wanted to collectively protect themselves from fires.  Many rural fire departments still run on a volunteer basis – as concerned citizens caring for each other.  These brave men and women are committed to helping protect life and property.  While preventing burnout isn’t the same as saving a life or protecting a home, it can be a great assistance to your peers, colleagues, and family.

Forming

At the core of the fire department is the concern for your fellow man and an understanding of how fires work.  By learning more about your own burnout and how it can consume you, you become more capable of helping others avoid it – and recover from it.  Forming the volunteer anti-burnout fire department starts with identifying those with the same desire to help others and enough personal experience with burnout recovery that they can share with others – or the training to develop some expertise.

Find those who are concerned about their friends and colleagues lives and assess and develop their skills in burnout prevention like you’d train a set of volunteer firefighters.

The Call Out

In volunteer fire departments, a call goes out for assistance with a fire.  Those who are available to deploy and help do so.  Not every volunteer goes to every event.  With any individual who is reporting burnout, it may take fewer people to help put the fire out, but there tend to be more of them.  They’re more like brush fires than house fires.  The key is that there’s a mechanism in volunteer fire departments to send the message that there’s a need.  In your anti-burnout team, the call may be more subtle and quiet than a radio call sent out to everyone, but having a clear mechanism where people can call upon the team is important.

Also, unlike a fire department, an anti-burnout team shouldn’t be lights and siren blaring to gather everyone’s attention, the response is likely slower and much more subdued.  Because of the nature of burnout, it’s much more like grabbing a hose and helping the homeowner put out their own fire than taking command and control of the situation.

Smoke Detectors and Fire Drills

Many fire departments offer public service announcements to have smoke detectors on every level of your home and ensure that the batteries are changed often.  Your anti-burnout fire department can also offer public service announcements about the signs of burnout – and what can be done to get help or help yourself escape.

Fire departments also help schools and families with small children plan for fire and run drills, so they know what to do when a fire happens.  So, too, can your volunteer anti-burnout fire department have training events, in which people who have had – and recovered from – burnout can share their experience and what it felt like to them.  Knowing what to expect – particularly in a practical way from someone you know – can mean the difference between them being able to escape burnout – and getting stuck.

As we touched down in Iceland, our phones blew up.  The world had changed in the few hours that we were on the plane.  The United States was closing its borders, and people had hours to get back.  However, Rob still had a keynote to deliver the next day, and it didn’t apply to citizens, it was only for foreign nationals.  We made the decision to stay and keep our eye on the situation that was being caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.  Rob gave his keynote, and we proceeded on a mini-vacation around the island country.  It was an amazing trip until the following Thursday.

After a peaceful day in hot springs, an amazing meal with fresh food, and a return to our hotel where the manager had shared the history of the property and some secrets about the surrounding area, we got a call.  It was Rob’s father letting us know that the United States was closing its borders.  Old news, we thought, until we checked and realized the US State Department had issued a global level four warning – DO NOT TRAVEL.  That’s it.  We tapped out and got home.

Meanwhile at home, our eldest daughter, an ER nurse, had gone to work – not to start a shift but as a patient.  She was admitted while we were on our flight home.  Though her COVID-19 test was negative, everyone believes she’s one of the 40% of false negatives that the test produces.  Three weeks later, she’s still not fully recovered, but thankfully she seems to be out of the woods and is anxious to get back to the fight against the virus.

Our son continues to wage war on the virus as a paramedic.  He’s on the streets every day helping stabilize and transport patients to the hospitals.  So far, he has not been physically affected by the virus – though we have no way of knowing if he’s been infected and is just asymptomatic or if he’s managed to avoid being infected thus far.

Terri came back to an request to reduce her hours at one of her clients but also to a new need: to teach long-term care nurse practitioners and nurses how to respond to the COVID-19 crisis in a nursing home.  For about an hour, the thought was that we’d have time on our hands before we were drawn into the fight ourselves.

The world changed.  Whether it was on the flight to or from Iceland doesn’t matter.  It was different.  Our other children were disturbed.  They struggled to learn all they needed with college courses now presented online.  How could they complete labs from home?  How was it possible that there was no toilet paper?  What was going on that there were entire aisles in the stores that were empty?  What happened that people cleaned out the baking supplies?

Terri quickly gained an understanding of how helpless many of our healthcare providers felt.  They were giving their all, but somehow it didn’t feel like enough.  They were afraid for their families and worried for themselves, and suddenly what was best practice changed.

In the clamor of rapid content development, we didn’t see what was happening outside healthcare.  People became idle and therefore ineffective.  Having written Extinguish Burnout: A Practical Guide to Prevention and Recovery, we knew what this would mean just as surely as we knew that people would start hording nearly everything.  Eventually, the reality of inefficacy would convert to feelings of inefficacy and, ultimately, to burnout.

The only additional thing we knew that we could do to mitigate the suffering was to make the Extinguish Burnout course available for free.  There wasn’t much to our conversation.  A few knowing looks and a statement to make the course available to everyone for free for a year.  Rob called our hosting company and let them know they might see a surge of traffic.  We created the code COVID-19 that discounts the course from its normal cost of $99 to free.

While we’re doing other things to fight COVID-19 personally and in the family, we felt like we could get ahead of the curve on burnout and help more people prevent it.  If you want to learn how to prevent burnout – or recover from it if you’re already there – go to https://ExtinguishBurnout.com/get-the-course, press the Buy the Course Now button, and enter the code COVID-19 at checkout.  You won’t need a credit card or anything else.  After you sign up, you’ll have the arsenal of tools that we’ve developed to help you prevent burnout.

As a society, we’ve become less socially connected than we used to be.  We have Facebook friends, but rarely can we spend face-to-face time with our real friends.  We text, snap, and tweet to each other but fail to tell our innermost fears and secrets – and we fail to touch one another.  Touching one another means more than physical contact. We’ve had to realize that even touching surfaces someone who is infected has touched can infect us.  However, we can “touch” someone without literally coming in contact with them.

The Need for Connection

Humans are created with an inherent need to connect with other humans.  We were designed this way.  We’ve survived this way.  We’ve thrived this way.  Our digital world makes it easier than ever to communicate with others, but somewhere along the line, we’ve confused communication with connection.

Connection is about knowing someone else.  It’s about celebrating them in their triumphs and supporting them in their losses.  We believe that we have thousands of Facebook friends, but far too few know the stories about being bullied as a child or even something as simple as your favorite color or movie.  Knowing other people has become a lost art.

Physical Touch

One of the proxies we use for knowing someone is knowing where they are by sight or touch.  Touch is a powerful tool that helps us feel connection with another person.  We literally share the same heat, and in doing so, we generate warmth between us.  While physical touch alone is not the same as a deep connection, it’s what we often use when we can’t find a connection.

Feeling connected helps us to feel supported – or like we can be supported if we have a need.

Burnout and Support

Burnout may be identified by exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy, but it’s created by a lack of personal agency.  Our personal agency is increased by the results we get (and accept), the support we receive from others, and the self-care we do.  Our tangible results may be hard to change (though we can shift our perceptions of those results).  How we perceive support, however, is much more malleable.

To get to support – someone being willing to do something for you – you must have some degree of connection.  You must have a belief that you know something about the other person – even if all you know is other people saying they’re a good person.  The tricky part comes when we expect that the only connection comes through physical touch – even in something as simple as a handshake or a hug.

Support without Touch

Whether you’re able to touch others on a regular basis through the kinds of social contacts that are culturally appropriate or not, you can form connections and receive support in other ways.  You may have seen people doing elbow bumps to make a safer physical connection.  But more powerfully, you can seek to understand the other person without any sort of touch.

Here are five questions you can ask if you want to develop a better understanding for others, so that you may support them or feel comfortable asking them for support:

1. What’s your dream vacation?
2. If you had all the money that you could ever want, what would you do?
3. If you could leave one mark with your life, what would it be?
4. What’s your greatest fear?
5. Who is your favorite hero?

Listening to these questions – and the follow up questions that you ask for clarification – can illuminate who the other person longs to be and will help you understand how your request for support may actually help them fulfil their deepest desires.

Burnout is all around you.  What are you going to do about it?  How can you be a part of the fire brigade that eliminates the burnout in others?  The same skills that have freed you from burnout can be used to help others escape burnout as well.

Fire Safety

There are two factors that will help others come to you when they’re experiencing burnout.  The first is for them to see you as safe, and the second is for them to see you as fireproof.  People are safe if they’re non-reactive and it feels like they’ve gone through the same thing.  The more you can share your experience, including how you were in burnout and how you’ve overcome it, the greater that people perceive you’ll be safe.  Coupled with a general sense of being safe, most people will reach out for help.

Being perceived as fireproof is a bit more difficult.  Others don’t want to make things worse by pulling you into burnout instead of you pulling them out of it.  They want to know that you can share their load if they bring it to you – instead of adding to it.  However, being fireproof doesn’t mean the fires will never come, and you won’t occasionally succumb to them.  Fireproof means that you can resist a degree of fire for a time.  Fireproof doesn’t mean you’ll never experience burnout again.

Making it clear to everyone that you’re able to accept a degree of their burnout without becoming cynical yourself goes a long way towards improving how safe you seem and making it possible for them to come to you.

Putting Out the Fire

Just as a fire department has tools for putting out fires, you also have tools to stop burnout.  Having learned that burnout is driven by a lack of personal agency, you can help others realize their personal agency.  Because you’re there to help them get out of burnout, you’re already filling their capacity with the support you’re providing.  More than that, your willingness to step in reinforces that their requests for support from others may be accepted as well.

You can’t completely resolve burnout in someone else by just being present and supportive – though it’s a good start.  You’ll also want to share your third-party feedback about all the things they’re getting accomplished.  By helping them more appropriately appraise their real results and helping them set realistic expectations, you can provide invaluable support for their belief in their own personal agency.

If self-care regimens are a part of your burnout recovery journey, you can share what you do to take care of yourself.  From the simple things like getting good sleep and staying hydrated to the more complex exercise and diet regimens, your experience helps them see what may work.  Even if they don’t accept your self-care approaches, the idea that everyone does self-care normalizes it and makes it more reasonable and possible for others to find a way to take care of themselves.

Last, but not least, you can share how you manage your demands and your realization that many of the demands that you feel are ones that you’ve placed on yourself – they’re not coming from other people.  It’s a difficult lesson to realize that, often, the standards we hold ourselves to for deliverables are higher than what our managers or peers expect.  Teaching this reality gives them an opportunity to calibrate their perception of the demands on them to what is really being asked for – and learn when to push back when the external demands aren’t reasonable.

You may not be able to help everyone escape the fires of burnout, but you can be of help to many people.

Who do you believe is successful?  Whose success would you most like to model?  The first question may be hard, but the second one is harder.  Most people could point to successful people – actors, presidents, captains of industry, startup entrepreneurial successes, etc. – but that’s not an answer about your beliefs or what success looks like for you.  It’s a generic statement and an ability to reflect what society says success is.  The harder question is what success means to you.  If you can’t define clearly what success means to you, you may find that you end up burned out instead of successful.

Success Measures

For some, money is how they measure success.  While many people will tell you that money doesn’t buy happiness – and it’s true – that doesn’t mean some measure of success can’t be found in making money.  (By the way, money will make you a hell of a deal on a long-term lease of happiness, if you do it right.)  Money is likely to be an aspect of the way you want to measure your success – however, it’s probably not the only measure.

Fame is another candidate for a success measure, but it’s fickle.  One moment, you’re on a nationally syndicated television show, and the next, you’re scraping by and trying to figure out how to make a living.  Some icons of fame have sustained their popularity – but very, very few.  Many of the candid interviews with famous people have them lamenting the stalkers, the paparazzi, or the industry for making them conform instead of being allowed to be themselves.

Happiness is a great success measure, except few people know how to achieve it.  We are, in fact, lousy at predicting the things that will bring us happiness and lasting joy.  So, while it’s great in concept, we often marvel at the people we see who are happy but whose happiness we can find no way to replicate.  Often, we find reasons why the life they have – that they’re happy with – isn’t one we’d like to lead.

The Moving Goal

Without a specific, targeted measure of success, we’re likely to move the goal post.  Money is easy.  If you’re like most people, you want to make just a little more money to be happy.  The problem is that when you get that next raise or that little bit more money, you’ll want just a bit more.  Think about how much money you wanted to make when you first got out of school.  You’re likely making much more than that now – and are still looking to make more, just like the rest of us.

Fame can follow a similar trajectory.  If you have a hundred followers, you’d love a thousand.  If you have a thousand, you’d love to have ten thousand.  If you’ve got ten thousand followers, you’d love to have a hundred thousand.  You’re never famous enough.  There’s always someone more famous than you and some opportunity that wasn’t offered to you – no matter what the source of your fame is.

The thing we’ve got to do is nail down what we personally mean by success, so we can prevent burnout.

Defining Burnout

Burnout is typically defined as exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy.  The key to burnout is the feelings of inefficacy – that there is no way to get free from your current situation.  It leads to exhaustion and the question of why you’re bothering to try.  It also leads to cynicism, because people are cynical about the things they can’t change.

The problem with failing to define what success means is we keep moving those goals and therefore never reach them.  We feel like we’re a failure or simply not able to get to our goals, because we never see ourselves achieving our goals.

Defining Success and Preventing Burnout

When you can define what success means to you in clear and concrete terms, you’ll give yourself something to measure and a way to show that you are indeed making progress, and that will help to prevent burnout.

When you’re defining what success looks like, I’d encourage you to look not at your finances or the neighborhood you live in but instead about how you spend your time.

• Do you get the choice of what to do – or do you have to do things to make money, support an appearance, or remain in good social graces?
• How much do you get to do the things you enjoy?
• How are you impacting others and improving their lives?

If you can answer these questions – and adjust your expectations as situations change – you may find that you’re already on your way to success.

It’s not the holiday music.  It’s not the sappy movies with predictable endings.  It might be the endless running from shop to shop (or site to site), but it feels like more than that.  It’s the emptiness you feel when you leave your extended family, and you realize that you just don’t like them.  You know you or your spouse are related to them, but you’re not sure how.  It’s that nagging feeling that you can’t be you.

Burnout is defined as exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy, and of these, the inefficacy criterion is key.  When you feel like you don’t have any control, and you can’t make it better, you’re going to feel ineffective.  You’re never more keenly aware of that than when you’re under stress.

Stress

Stressors come at you from many angles during the holidays.  There’s the financial impact of the added expenses.  There’s the time impact of shopping for everyone.  More than that, there’s the stress of being around family.  Though evolution designed stress for situations where our survival was threatened, as humans, we’ve adapted it for non-survival related things.

If you’re worried how you’ll be able to buy gifts for all the children, you’ll experience the same stress that our ancestors felt when they discovered there was a lion nearby.  The only mitigating factor for us is our assessment of our capacity to address the stressor.  If you believe you’ll be able to afford all the holiday gifts, then you won’t stress about their costs.  However, nearly everyone has some form of stressor at the holidays, even if the stressor is called “in-laws” or – in some families – outlaws.

The big problem with stress is that it’s like a payday loan.  It gets you what you need in the moment, but it comes at a high cost.  Stress physiologically shuts down long-term processes – like digestion and immune system – to allow all your resources to be used for short-term challenges.  The costs to our bodies to restart these processes – or run without them – is generally much more than leaving them going all the time.

Assessment

It doesn’t exactly matter what you tell yourself about the relative degree of risk there is during the holidays.  Except for a relatively small percentage of families, the gatherings don’t result in a call to the police or fire department (burning the food and setting off the smoke detector notwithstanding).  Despite this, gatherings can be stressful.  There’s the uncomfortable conversation you’d prefer to avoid that every cousin who hasn’t seen you will start.  There are the overbearing parents who will ask you about when you’re going to have children, get married, get a job, or move out of the basement.  These conversations may be uncomfortable enough to qualify, to your mind, as a threat to your survival.

It’s easy to say that you shouldn’t care about what your family thinks, but you grew up with the knowledge that you needed to care what they thought, because you depended upon them for your survival.  The result is a deep-seated belief that a conflict with the family can be life-threatening to you – regardless of how true that is today.

Alone

The opposite side of the coin are those “still, dark moments” when you’re completely alone, and loneliness tries to creep its way into your consciousness.  Loneliness isn’t about being alone.  It’s about feeling like you’re alone.  The underlying fear is that you will remain alone – forever.  We feel the loss of relationship to others, whether it’s grandparents, parents, or estranged friends.  That loneliness can feel pervasive and overwhelming even when it’s not.

It can feel like you’re always going to be alone.  It can feel like no one can really know who you are and love you for who you are.  It’s in this loneliness that some descend through burnout – a lack of hope – into despair.  (If you believe that you might be or become suicidal, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or visit https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org for assistance.)

However, the perception that anything will remain forever is just an illusion.  The burnout you experience from the holidays, whether from the hustle or the hush, will fade away if you can realize that you’re not in danger, and the challenges you’re facing will fade.  We can’t stop the stressors, but we can change the way we assess them.

Mom never used to be this way.  She used to be the vibrant force that kept the family together.  Now she’s in a memory care facility, and as I go in every day, I wonder if she’ll remember me.  It’s a scary place – for me and for her.  I feel so out of my element and unprepared.  I don’t know what will happen next or how things can get better – even though I know, in my heart of hearts, this is as good as it gets, and even it will only last so long.

The days and weeks drag on to months and years, and I wake up to realize that I resent going to the facility.  It feels like I’m stuck, like my life is on hold.  It feels like – and I hesitate to say it – I’m waiting on her to die for me to get my life back.  In a flash, I feel shame and guilt wash over me.  How could I think that about her?  What kind of monster am I?

This isn’t my story, but it’s a story that plays out in every city and town, where good, honest, and loving children are faced with caring for their elder parent.  Like a Hollywood remake, the story also plays out for parents who have special needs children, the spouse who cares for someone who brought light to their lives, and for those who have chosen to bring troubled children and adults into their lives to care for them.  It feels like burnout.  It feels like there’s nothing left to give.

Defining Burnout

Burnout has been most frequently described as exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy.  However, of all of these, inefficacy is the most challenging.  It’s the point of losing hope and feeling like you have no control.  Everyone experiences periods of exhaustion, and it’s possible to experience exhaustion at some of the highest points of our life but feeling ineffective can really bring us down.

We can be a caregiver when we know that things are going to get better, but, more frequently, we don’t know the ending – or we know the ending won’t be good.  If we define our progress through the lens of recovery, we know that we won’t be successful.  However, if we redefine our service as an opportunity to reduce the suffering, we have a chance of being successful.

Compassion

Compassion is seeing the suffering of another and trying to do something about it.  When we’re entering the role of the caregiver, that’s what we’re doing.  We’re intentionally deciding to be compassionate and try to make the world a better place, even when it doesn’t seem like we make it much better or for many people.  Our expectations of how compassionate we “should” be or how much of an impact we “ought to” make get in the way of us feeling good about what we are doing and accomplishing.

Compassion isn’t absolute nor without end.  Compassion is a decision to use our capacity to help others, but that capacity has limits, and that’s why it’s important to get relief.

Relief

Cynicism seeps in when we’re unable to cope with the reality we find ourselves in.  We can’t change the ultimate outcomes, and we don’t feel like we’re individually capable of carrying the load.  The solution is to ask for help.  Maybe there’s someone who can take one weekend a month of load off your plate – or even someone who can help for a few hours to take an uninterrupted bath, go to a store without fear, or one of the thousands of other things that can provide a short reprieve.  This space can allow you to see that what you’re doing is possible, and you can continue.

Caregivers who experience exhaustion and cynicism need to know that this doesn’t make them a bad person.  The caregivers around you need your support.  Caregivers aren’t always good at asking for help and have resigned themselves to an unhealthy level of burden for far too long.

If you’re a caregiver who is struggling, ask for help to get some time off.  If you know a caregiver who’s struggling, don’t wait for them to ask.  See if there’s a way that you can help.

Are you tired of hearing about the president?  It doesn’t matter whether you are a supporter or a detractor, are you tired of all of it?  If you’re a supporter, the political opposition is trying to take the president down.  If you’re a not a fan, you can’t believe that he’s gotten away with so much, and it continues.  In the end, you feel like nothing that the people like you and me are doing is making a difference to the people, the system, or the outcomes – and it has us burned out.

Politicians and Political Pundits

The job of the politicians and political pundits seems to be to speak louder than their opponents, ignore what they’ve said, and speak their own rhetoric again.  This behavior seems to happen repeatedly on news channels and media of all sorts.  Neither side concedes the other’s point, and the result is the kind of incoherent noise that you find in a social gathering without any sort of unifying performance.

It’s no wonder that people need a break from this noise.  Even people who are directly in the political circles are unable to persuade people towards reason.  How is it possible for a citizen to make a difference?

Take a Timeout

If you’re getting frustrated by the lack of civility and respect necessary to listen to the opposing side, then perhaps the best response is a temporary timeout.  There’s time before the next election.  You can choose to stop listening to the political rhetoric and plan to pay attention again in enough time to be well informed for the next election.

Citizen Society

The power of the people resides in the capacity for each of us to change the course of the political discourse by choosing the actors in the discussion.  While we do not, ourselves, get to walk that stage, our ability to persuade our fellow citizens about who should best represent us, and our own vote do decide who gets to represent us.

While the process is very slow, there is a great deal of power wielded by the citizens of a community in their ability to choose their representatives.  While we can be frustrated by the course of the conversation, we are not powerless.  In fact, simple steps like changing the channels we listen to influence politicians greatly.

Change the Channel

While the politicians are set in their roles until the remainder of their term, the political pundits retain their throne by being relevant.  When people stop watching, pundits lose their power.  If you don’t believe a pundit is adding value to a conversation, stop watching or reading.  Change the channel or don’t read from websites that aren’t moving the conversation forward.  That is not to say that you shouldn’t read the opposing viewpoint, you most certainly should.  However, if you find there’s a source that’s unable to articulate both sides of the story with equal clarity, perhaps it’s time to stop using that source.

Change the Community

If you can change the channel, you can change the community.  By building bridges of understanding and working with others to improve understanding of the issues – and your perspectives – you can change the world, or at least your little corner of it, and that may be enough.