I have never pretended that this burnout thing is easy. In point of fact, I believe that there is a special circle in hell for the people who sell simple, 6 step solutions online that promise the world and deliver about as much wisdom as your average fortune cookie.

I have never pretended that it is easy, I’ve never tried to sell you a simple solution. Burnout is a real life choose your own adventure novel, with many different pieces that slot together for each individual’s story. A touch more imposter syndrome here, a struggle with responsibility and shame there…. what I do is shine the light on all the different areas that could have come together to cause your current struggles.

So here’s one of mine.

I’ve been doing this for nearly four years, which in many ways I know makes me sound like a barely formed child, but the truth it that four years in business is a little like dog years. You learn so much and grow, change, develop so quickly.

And sometimes, I wonder what in the actual fuck I am doing and who I think I’m kidding trying to help anyone.

Sometimes? On a frequent basis. Like, you could set your watch by it.

Now, this is where some of my oldest clients are going to laugh at me before they give me a verbal slap. I most often feel this way when I talk to someone, a friend, a client I have known for a while, often they blur the lines, maybe even someone I used to work with … and when they tell me how they are struggling, or that they are backsliding in some way, old problems raising their head.

Well, I start wondering if I’ve ever even helped. Whether I’m just a failure and a fraud, because surely if I was good at what I do then the people around me, my clients, my community… well they wouldn’t be struggling? They’d be fixed!

Here’s where each of my teacher-clients slides in my messages with a ‘wtf Leah? You know better’. Because god knows I have been telling them for years that their students’ results do not determine their worth as teachers or people. And yet today I found myself wondering it again, whether I had even had an effect if my people weren’t ‘cured’.

So why am I sharing this momentary wobble (which, by the way was resolved with an absolutely perfect telephone conversation with a client, serendipity strikes again)?

Because if you’ve read this far, it’s most likely that you’ve felt the same struggles.

That your patients aren’t cured or that the same problems keep cropping up with multiple patients.
That your students are going through a plateau in the learning curve and you wonder why you bother.
You’ve have a string of truly terrible client meetings and wonder if you’ve ever known anything.
You feel like you’ve been sucked into quicksand and you’re slowly but steadily sinking.

And when you’ve been working so hard for so long, pushing a metaphorical boulder up a muddy hill, going over the same ground again and again in a battle for that finish line, you’re exhausted. Demoralised. Demotivated. Devoid of all hope and seriously lacking in clarity around why you’re bothering to get out of bed and beast yourself like this in the first place.

When that happens, it’s easy to give in to the voice in your head that says, it’s never going to change, give up now. Or the voice that says ‘you’re about to get found out, quick, you’ve got to move on’ or the one that tells you it will be better somewhere else, anywhere else, because you can’t take it any more.

In those moments, the panic blinds you to the self-evident truths that you’re doing a good job, that you got into this for the process not the ticker tape parade at the finishing line.

No teacher got into the job because they really loved exams.
No successful lawyer puts a judgement or costs above the needs of the client.

We got into it for the process. For making a difference. For pushing forward. For creating a difference. Yes, of course there are outcomes that we want, but we’re never going to be done and taking a snapshot of any one day and trying to extrapolate meaning, worthiness, value from it? You’re doomed to failure.

Here’s what I know about those moments when you’re down, tired, on the floor, feeling like a failure and a fraud.

They are an opportunity.
They are the beginning of a new chapter.

You get to learn and grow, reflect and rededicate yourself, cut the crap and focus on the future.

They are not a sign of failure; it’s simply part of the cycle.
These are the moments that we come back to the foundations. We make adjustments. We get clear. We ask for help.

I don’t believe that it is possible to ‘cure’ burnout, because that would mean never trying, never stretching, never growing. I’m inordinately suspicious of anyone who claims to be ‘beyond’ it in some way because driven, ambitious, heart-led and empathetic professionals are always going to want to do more, be more, achieve more, help more, create more.

The trick is in doing it in a mindful and supportive way. Caring for ourselves as much as we care for others, talking to ourselves with as much kindness as we do our friends and clients. Seeing ourselves in that best possible light, giving the benefit of the doubt and seeing the whole picture, not the narrow, negative slice that we focus on.

Most importantly, it’s about shifting our career metrics from external outcomes that we really have very little control over, to more internal and manageable metrics. Remembering why we do what we do and focusing on every little win, instead of the IT issues and that difficult client and the work of other people.

Teachers, your worth is not in your pupils’ results.
Doctors, your value is not in the overrall health of your patients.
Lawyers, your work isn’t about the judge’s ruling.

And for me, well, I’m rewriting my own job description and determining what makes me ‘good’ at my job. If you want to take a sneak peek, head over to the Free Members’ Vault where I’m uploading a copy of my journalling from today, so you can see how I dealt with this issue as it came up.

PS I wasn’t lying when I said going back to the foundations is where the work is. Whether you’ve been following me for four minutes or four years you know that the core of my work is all around burnout and it’s time we went back to the basics.

Next week I will be hosting a one hour workshop focusing on what burnout is, how to identify it, manage and reverse it. This one workshop is the culmination of more than four years of work and hundreds of client hours - all distilled down for you to take away with you.

My primary focus is making work a part of our lives without it dominating them, and creating small manageable strategies and mindset shifts that will take you a long way to reversing burnout in only a few minutes a day.

I’ve never suggested that it’s easy, but this is absolutely foundational and the insights I will be sharing will go a long way to helping you get a handle on burnout, wherever you are on the burnout spectrum.

This workshop will be taking place live online on a date tbc next week, but the workshop will also be recorded and yours for life, together with a pdf workbook of my notes and processes for you to adopt.

Want to find out more and join us? Click here to reserve your place, a maximum of 25 are available.