Author: Robert Bogue

This excerpt is adapted from Extinguish Burnout (SHRM, 2019) by Rob & Terri Bogue. It is the third in a three-part series on the effect of burnout at work.

Our belief that we’re personally able to change our world, that we have control of our results in life, is a deep-seated belief that some might call a delusion. It allows us to proceed through our days without the fear that we’ll be wiped out by an asteroid tomorrow. Belief in our personal agency needs to find a place in the middle between powerless and omnipotent. We need to find an understanding of what we can and cannot do. 

In one view of burnout, you believe that your personal agency is depleted, that somehow you have given all you have, and there’s nothing left to give. Personal agency is our actual ability to get things done, though this may be vastly different from our perception of this ability. It’s both a measure of the time available to do things as well as our physical and emotional ability to get things done. Consider a man with a shovel and lots of time. He has the personal agency to move a mountain—or, at least, a hill of dirt. Similarly, a man with a backhoe and a bit less time can move the same hill. Personal agency is the ability to move the hill of dirt, whether with a shovel or a backhoe.

Think of personal agency as a bathtub with three main sources pouring in: results, support, and self-care. The demands placed on us by ourselves or by others acts as a drain on our reservoir of personal agency.

Results can help us perceive our effectiveness and personal agency accurately. By leaning on the support of others, we can gain more personal agency than we might have alone. Self-care not only refills your personal agency, but it can help you increase your capacity for personal agency, too.

Managing Demands

Everyone has demands made upon them. From the routine electric bill to the extraordinary support demanded by your best friend in a time of need, demands on our abilities are a part of the human condition. Managing our reservoir for personal agency is as much about limiting the way we respond to the demands placed on us as it is about ensuring a steady supply of resources to replenish ourselves.

Often, the demands placed on us are unreasonable—or rather the way we want to respond to the demands is unreasonable. Certainly, if you have a best friend who needs you to take them to the airport you should—unless it represents a substantial sacrifice for you and means a relatively small benefit to them. We sometimes fail to test to see whether the demands that are being placed upon us personally, socially, and occupationally are reasonable.

Many who have a compassionate heart attempt to alleviate the suffering of others with no concern about how this depletes their own resources or reduces their own capacity to help others. We must recognize that we have a finite personal agency, and because of that, we can’t afford to invest too much in everyone. Managing the demands that are placed upon us is perhaps the most difficult part of maintaining our personal agency and avoiding burnout. 

Rob and Terri Bogue write, speak, and consult on improving workplaces, managing organizational change, and developing talent.

Originally published on SHRM.org. 

This excerpt is adapted from Extinguish Burnout (SHRM, 2019) by Rob & Terri Bogue. It is the second in a three-part series on the effect of burnout at work.

In the light of cynicism and the idea that nothing you can do will make things different, it’s easy to see why the lack of perceived personal effectiveness may be the start of burnout. Before it has reached its full development, where nothing is possible any longer, burnout starts as the feeling of not doing enough.

At the most basic level, the engine that drives burnout is the feeling and belief that you’re not making progress toward your goal—even when you don’t know what the goal really is. It’s a simple statement, but unpacking it isn’t easy. Even if we call it “perceived personal efficacy,” in these three words there is a challenge.

Our perceptions are notoriously fickle things. There are a host of psychological biases that prevent us from seeing the world as it is. Biases like “what you see is all there is” may be a holdover from our pre-toddler days, but they haunt us still. Our eyes may capture images of the world around us, but our brains construct the world around us from incomplete information provided by our limited view and often make up the answers when the answers aren’t forthcoming. As a result, we must know that our perceptions are not reality. The way we perceive the world is necessarily incomplete. This can be due, in part, to the fact that our perceptions view only one side of a world composed of multiple aspects. To address perception, we are led down the road of psychology, neurology, and, occasionally, ancient wisdom.

Personal is our second word, and it should be easy. After all, we’ve lived with ourselves our entire lives. No one should know more about us than ourselves. In one sense, this is absolutely true. We are the authority on our experience. However, in another sense, there is so much about us that we don’t know and don’t realize. When we measure ourselves, what yardstick do we use? How do we account for our capacity to work with others to get things done? These questions and others make it hard to pinpoint where our personal capacity should end and another’s begin.

Efficacy is a loaded word. In it is the idea that something is effective. Effective for what and at what scale? A spoon is effective at moving dirt when you’re planting a tiny cactus in a terrarium. A spoon is completely ineffective when trying to build a road. Efficacy relies on context. In the case of humans, we establish what we want to get accomplished and work toward those goals.

In the word efficacy, we must consider how reasonable our expectations of effectiveness are and whether we have defined the right measurements to indicate progress.

Rob and Terri Bogue write, speak, and consult on improving workplaces, managing organizational change, and developing talent.

Originally published on SHRM.org. 

Steve Jobs dropped in on a calligraphy course at Reed College, and it changed the world of computers.  Jobs took the knowledge of calligraphy to design the font system for the Apple Macintosh system, and that’s helped to transform computers from green-screen typewriters to the beautiful design systems that we have today.  Sometimes, what you learn randomly can be powerful in your life and the life of others.

Just one of the lessons that every pilot is taught can help you prevent burnout in yourself and others.

Perception of Burnout

Burnout has classically been defined as exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy.  However, your actual efficacy makes little difference to whether you’ll be in burnout or not.  What matters is your perception of your efficacy – not reality.

If your perception is connected to and grounded in reality, then you can accept that your actual efficacy would impact your burnout – or not.  In most cases, you and your people are effective it’s just that you don’t believe you’re productive – or productive enough – and that can lead to a crash.

A Pilot’s Instruments

Even visual pilots are taught like instrument-rated pilots.  A visual pilot can only fly when they can see outside the windows.  Instrument-rated pilots are taught to safely fly in nearly any kind of weather.  However, there’s a recognition that visual flight pilots may find themselves in bad circumstances, so they receive basic training on how to use their instruments when they get in trouble.

The first part of the training – and every part of the training after it – focuses on the need to trust the instruments.  Trust the instruments when your internal perception of what is happening doesn’t match what the instruments are saying.  Your own internal sense of what happening doesn’t have the precision the instruments have.

The common complaint is “What if the instrument fails?”  Though failures are rare, they do happen.  That’s why aircraft have multiple instruments that can communicate the same information.  They are sourced off from two different sets of inputs.  If you have two instruments saying you’re descending or turning, they’re right, whether you like it or not.

Relationship to Efficacy

When it comes to our efficacy, we don’t have the kind of precision that aircraft flight instruments offer, but we can leverage the feedback we receive from others to cross-check how we feel we’re doing with our efficacy.  If we’re getting feedback from our manager that our facilitation skills are great, whether we feel good about them or not, we know that we’re effective.  If our presentations are met with high marks and positive comments, then we know that they’re good – even if we don’t feel it.

Of course, just like instruments in an airplane can fail, so, too, can our feedback fail us.  Some people, including managers, won’t give us the candid feedback we need.  Sometimes, people may feel as if they’re competing with us and will give us negative marks to bring us down.  However, for most people, the feedback we receive will cluster around the right answer.  By cross-checking the feedback from different people, we can figure out what data might be bad – and, like a bad flight instrument, we can learn to ignore it.

Testing Efficacy

If you’re struggling with burnout, the path forward relies on trusting your instruments – the feedback that you’re getting – instead of how you feel.  On July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy, Jr. left on a flight to Martha’s Vineyard.  According to the official NTSB report, he encountered low clouds.  He stopped trusting his instruments and instead began to rely on his own flawed perception, resulting in a crash.  How do you learn to trust your feedback, so you don’t crash into burnout?

This excerpt is adapted from Extinguish Burnout (SHRM, 2019) by Rob & Terri Bogue. It is the first in a three-part series on the effect of burnout at work.

Burnout is classically seen in three factors: exhaustion, cynicism, and lack of personal effectiveness. Of these three components, which are candidates to cause burnout? In other words, which came first: the proverbial chicken or the egg?

Teasing out causality is notoriously hard in research circles. Indicating correlation—that two things tend to occur together—is statistically straightforward. Causation requires the introduction of time as an isolating variable, and, given the constraints of research grants, that can be challenging.

However, much like the proofs that we all hated in our geometry class, we can evaluate each of the criteria to evaluate whether it’s a reasonable candidate to cause the condition.

Exhaustion

“Overworked” and “overwhelmed” describe many American families today. It’s more difficult to find someone who doesn’t describe themselves as overworked and overwhelmed in their job, their personal life, or in general than it is to find someone who does. We’ve become obsessed with success, material objects, and the experiences we simply must provide for our kids to the point where we leave ourselves exhausted.

Strangely, however, many of the people who are the most overworked, overwhelmed, and physically exhausted can’t be said to be suffering from burnout. People who work the hardest on their jobs, for their communities, and with their families aren’t the ones that seem to be suffering. However, this does not mean that those who work hard cannot experience burnout.

Certainly, there are those examples of high-performing people who seem to hit a wall and burn out, but the incidence of this happening is incredibly low. We probably all know a few people who are burned out. However, this is a small number among the thousands of people that we know, from near-strangers to friends and family. If we apply this ratio to the people we know best, in whom we feel confident we would notice burnout, the rate of burnout is very low, particularly among those who are working hard. Hard work doesn’t seem to correlate with burnout in most people’s experiences.

If you think about it, in our own lives, the times we’ve worked the hardest are often those we find the most fulfilling. The times we’ve poured our heart and soul into that project to make it perfect or successful or amazing aren’t when we’ve felt the worst; in most cases, it’s when we have felt the best. It isn’t the work that drives our feelings—it’s the perception of results. So, while it is true that people who are burned out feel exhausted, it doesn’t seem to follow that, if you’re striving, challenging yourself, and pushing for more, you’ll necessarily feel like you’re all used up.

Cynicism and Low Personal Effectiveness

Look around. Of the people around you right now, or the people who you were last with, who are the cynics? Are the cynics the young people, whether they are the newest workers at the office, the Starbucks server, or your children? Are they older people who have battle scars from long-forgotten battles, both imagined and real?

Cynicism arrives when people are let down. It happens when expectations of their lives, other people, or the world in general aren’t met. Cynics accept the belief that there is no way to change the world, so it’s okay to just complain about it.

Cynicism represents a clue to burnout since it is formed by the belief that nothing can ever change. It’s having reached the stage of learned helplessness where you believe nothing you can do could possibly change the world or your corner of it. If you can’t change things, how personally effective are you?

Rob and Terri Bogue write, speak, and consult on improving workplaces, managing organizational change, and developing talent.

Originally published on SHRM.org.

Learning how to manage the multiple demands placed on you is an important part of managing your personal agency and guarding against burnout.  Managing demands is sometimes as easy as saying no – and sometimes it’s more complicated.

Burnout

In the first blog in our series, Thrive, Don’t Just Survive, we first defined burnout as the perception that you cannot change your environment and thus have no personal agency (your ability to get things done).  Burnout is frequently defined by exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy.  It’s what happens when we feel we have depleted our personal agency.  It’s when we feel like we don’t have any ability to make a change.  While our results, the support we receive, and our self-care fill up our personal agency, demands drain us.

The Valve on Demands

It’s commonly overlooked, but there is a valve on the demands that drain us.  We can say no, and we can manage our demands, so they don’t overly deplete our agency.  Often, we forget that, just because someone wants something from us, doesn’t mean that we must give it.

We don’t have to join the PTA, host the neighborhood watch meeting, agree to work overtime, or any of the other dozens of things that may ask for our assistance.  You can decline requests and save your ability to get things done for another situation or another cause to ensure you have enough reserves.

It gets harder when you need to say no at work to a peer, a manager, or someone on the team.  The reasons for saying no are different.  Some of the reasons for saying no are appropriate but have nothing to do with your need to manage personal agency.  When things are wrong or you can’t agree, then no is the right answer.  In business situations, after a polite no, it’s a good idea to start a dialogue about what is possible, whether your no is due to a disagreement or a need to maintain your agency.

When You Shouldn’t Say No

While it’s true that we can always manage our demands by saying no, there are times when this isn’t the right answer.  Sometimes the right answer is to persist, meet your commitments, and decide how to manage your demands in the longer term.  If there’s a crisis that your job requires you step into, it’s not a good time to say, “No, I don’t think I have the personal agency to support this.”  As healthcare providers, we are frequently required to act urgently for our patients, even if the condition isn’t life-threatening.  It’s incumbent on you to maintain reserves so that you can be ready for these circumstances.

The time to say no isn’t in a moment of crisis.  The time to say no is when you’re planning your activities, when you’re making the decision to pick up that extra shift, fulfill that extra committee role, or take on an extra project.  Once you’ve made the commitment to take care of a patient, you’re committed, whether you feel you have the capacity or not.

There are times when it feels like there is a gray area of what you can refuse and when you really cannot say no.  Where do you turn for help if you are unsure if you have the right to refuse?  Refer to your state’s Nurse Practice Act, your employer’s legal team and official policies, and Nursing Scope and Standards of Practice and Code of Ethics for Nurses.

Over Your Head

Just because you can’t say no in a moment of crisis doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask for help – you absolutely should.  It is important to remember that asking for help is not a sign of weakness.  In truth, it is a sign of self-awareness and strength.  Whatever your capacity in a crisis is, the answer isn’t to stand alone or tough it out.  Instead, you should ask for support, so that you can share the load with others.  The more help that you can get from others, the less you have to carry.

Of course, you should equally be willing to support others when they call for help – even if they’re not good at calling for help.  Sometimes, supporting others means watching for situations where they may need help and proactively offering or providing support.

Learning how to manage the multiple demands placed on you is an important part of managing your personal agency and guarding against burnout.  Managing demands is sometimes as easy as saying no – and sometimes it’s more complicated.

Burnout

In the first blog in our series, Thrive, Don’t Just Survive, we first defined burnouts as the perception that you cannot change your environment and thus have not personal agency (your ability to get things done).  Burnout is frequently defined by exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy.  It’s what happens when we feel we have depleted our personal agency.  It’s when we feel like we don’t have any ability to make a change.  While our results, the support we receive, and our self-care fill up our personal agency, demands drain us.

The Valve on Demands

It’s commonly overlooked, but there is a valve on the demands that drain us.  We can say no, and we can manage our demands, so they don’t overly deplete our agency.  Often, we forget that, just because someone wants something from us, doesn’t mean that we must give it.

We don’t have to join the PTA, host the neighborhood watch meeting, agree to work overtime, or any of the other dozens of things that may ask for our assistance.  You can decline requests and save your ability to get things done for another situation or another cause to ensure you have enough reserves.

It gets harder when you need to say no at work to a peer, a manager, or someone on the team.  The reasons for saying no are different.  Some of the reasons for saying no are appropriate but have nothing to do with your need to manage personal agency.  When things are wrong or you can’t agree, then no is the right answer.  In business situations, after a polite no, it’s a good idea to start a dialogue about what is possible, whether your no is due to a disagreement or a need to maintain your agency.

When You Shouldn’t Say No

While it’s true that we can always manage our demands by saying no, there are times when this isn’t the right answer.  Sometimes the right answer is to persist, meet your commitments, and decide how to manage your demands in the longer term.  If there’s a crisis that your job requires that you step into, it’s not a good time to say, “No, I don’t think I have the personal agency to support this.”  As healthcare providers, we are frequently required to act urgently for our patients, even if the condition isn’t life-threatening.  It’s incumbent on you to maintain reserves so that you can be ready for these circumstances.

The time to say no isn’t in a moment of crisis.  The time to say no is when you’re planning your activities, when you’re making the decision to pick up that extra shift, fulfill that extra committee role, or take on an extra project.  Once you’ve made the commitment to take care of a patient, you’re committed, whether you feel you have the capacity or not.

There are times when it feels like there is a gray area of what you can refuse and when you really cannot say no.  Where do you turn for help If you are unsure if you have the right to refuse?  Refer to your state’s Nurse Practice Act, your employer’s legal team and official policies, and Nursing Scope and Standards of Practice and Code of Ethics for Nurses.

Over Your Head

Just because you can’t say no in a moment of crisis doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask for help – you absolutely should.  It is important to remember that asking for help is not a sign of weakness.  In truth, it is a sign of self-awareness and strength.  Whatever your capacity in a crisis is, the answer isn’t to stand alone or tough it out.  Instead, you should ask for support, so that you can share the load with others.  The more help that you can get from others, the less you have to carry.

Of course, you should equally be willing to support others when they call for help – even if they’re not good at calling for help.  Sometimes, supporting others means watching for situations where they may need help and proactively offering or providing support.

Are you a trusting person?  The question isn’t whether you’re trustworthy but rather how easy do you find it to trust others.  The answer to this question may be the key to why you’re stuck in depression or why you’re relatively resilient to it.  The reason is all about your beliefs.

Trust is a Belief

Whenever you say you trust someone, you’re stating a belief.  Your trust, properly understood and tested, has limits and conditions.  When you say that you trust your accountant, you’re saying that you trust them to do your taxes.  When you say that you trust your babysitter, you’re saying you trust them to safely watch your child.  However, you likely wouldn’t let your accountant watch your child or your babysitter do your taxes.

Does your belief mean your accountant can’t make a mistake?  Of course not.  However, trusting your accountant is a simplification.  If you can’t trust your accountant, you’ll have to learn enough about your taxes to verify their work.  The desire to offload the responsibility for understanding the complicated tax code is why you hired an accountant in the first place.

Trust with Betrayal is Better

If you know that, at some point in your life, your trust will be unfounded, and someone will definitely betray your trust, should you still trust?  The answer is still yes.  The benefits that you get from appropriate trust outweigh the occasional betrayal.  The value of trusting others is that you don’t have to verify everything, which is time-consuming and exhausting.

Certainly, if you’ve recently been betrayed, it’s hard to accept that you should have trusted in the first place.  Surely the consequences of the betrayal mean that your net psychological gain-loss statement is negative.  It can be – and at the same time, overall, your trust has served you well.  Think of all the things that you didn’t have to verify.  How many meals at restaurants did you not have to prepare?  How many airplane flights ended successfully without you having to fly the plane?

As painful as a betrayal is – whether intentional or unintentional – it often doesn’t stand up against the weight of the verification and loneliness that becomes the only other option.  Betrayal is an important signal to improve whom you trust, for what, and for how long.  At the same time, it’s important to not sink into the belief that you’ll never trust again.

Trust That It Can Get Better

Burnout is only developed or sustained when there is a belief that things will not get better.  Burnout says that nothing you do matters, because you don’t have control or influence over the outcomes.  However, the alternative belief, that the current situation is temporary and things inevitably will get better, can immunize you from being infected by burnout.  The belief – the trust – that things will get better means whatever negative you’re enduring today, including a betrayal, is brief and temporary.

Trust Touches Everything

If you’re struggling to develop positive beliefs, you can start with beliefs that are easy.  You can believe in gravity, or that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow.  For most people, these are certainties that are easy to believe in.  From there, we move to the things that we inherently trust.  While this varies based on individual backgrounds, you may believe your parents will always love you, your friends will always accept you for who you are, or you’ll always “land on your feet.”  From there, it’s possible to extend trust, slowly and carefully, into areas where you’ve been betrayed, and into the space that it will get better, thereby using the power of trust to ward off burnout.