Is burnout your fault?

Leaders take responsibility for success, but that very quality underlies the process that can end in burnout. By taking sole responsibility for feeling bad, they don’t self-diagnose burnout early enough and blame themselves for failing to sustain heroic effort.

Do you relate to this?

When you believe burnout is solely your fault, you dig yourself a deeper hole that’s harder to get out of, a hole that becomes despair and hopelessness. Since you got yourself there, it feels necessary but impossible to get yourself out by your own efforts. This toxic level of self-sufficiency hooks into an infinite sense of responsibility and trains others to lean in and reinforce your self-blame. Toxic self-sufficiency is blind. Blind to one's natural limitations and blind to the role others play in helping you to lead.

While admiring your stamina or perseverance or guts, your supporters feel disregarded, pushed away and incompetent. You train them to let you take infinite responsibility. And that’s doomed.

Blaming yourself for burnout ignores reality.

1. No matter how powerful and brilliant you are, some aspects of work are uncontrollable. Every heroic leader occasionally tilts at windmills. It’s good to recognise them as such.
2. Self-care, which looks like ‘doing nothing’ is a deeper form of professionalism than martyrdom.
3. Infinite responsibility means you’ve designed your role – quite unconsciously – to be impossible. Good design acknowledges the limits that make the role feasible.
4. When the environment changes, you must adapt. Burnout is a natural consequence of failing to shift your approach in the face of an unexpected crisis or a newly emergent priority.
5. Fear is the troll under the bridge. It pops out and shape-shifts. Fear of failing is code for fragile self-worth tied to gigantic goals. Fear of the catastrophe of ‘giving up’ which is code for clinging to your approach despite the signals to change.
6. And of course, no matter how much you’ve done it all ‘alone’, you need the support of others, especially those who are expert where you are incompetent.

If you detect signs of burnout, act quickly.

1. Recover deeply in proportion to the fatigue.
2. Reframe your purpose.
3. Accept all the skilled help that comes your way.
4. Connect with what’s important. Your passion is both hook into the future and a compass for getting there.
5. Let go. Relinquish toxic responsibility and accept your limits.
6. Live the bad feelings; it’s the only way out of them. They turn from monsters in to pets - and bring gifts.

I am in awe of professionals who sustain market-leading success for decades. Helping them steer around the burnout zones, I’ve learnt a lot about my own approaches and past flops. It is possible not only to reverse burnout but to make professional life more exciting, fruitful and fun.

Take The Burnout Test, a short set of questions to help you reflect on the core burnout zones. In a few moments you can start to resist burnout and find new ways to thrive. 

Take the Burnout Test