Burnout Runs Deeper Than “Too Much Work,” Are You at Risk of a Mid-Career Rut?

Find synergy between mastery and belonging without sacrificing your autonomy.

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 This is one of the reason why I quit my job mid career burn out & stuck in a rut, withing a toxic environment, which resulted in a minor stroke. What saved me was low dose aspirin regiment and bpm meds.

Burnout — a state of physical and emotional exhaustion often followed by apathy and illness — is ubiquitous across industries. Physicians, businesspeople, artists, teachers, and athletes all have high rates of burnout. As a matter of fact, most studies show that between 40 and 50 percent of people are experiencing burnout at any given time. This is cause for great concern. Research shows that burnout and underperformance go hand-in-hand. Physical (e.g., speed, strength), cognitive (e.g., alertness, focus, creativity), and emotional (e.g., patience, resilience) ability all decline. And this is to say nothing of individual human suffering and lost potential that accompanies burnout.

The most commonly discussed way to reduce burnout is to change how we work. We need to take more breaks, disconnect from our digital devices, get more sleep, and exercise. All of this can be true, no doubt. At a bare minimum, if you aren't respecting the cycle of stress + rest = growth, you probably won't last long, at least not too long. But there's another driver of burnout that isn't discussed nearly as often and is every bit, if not more, important. It's one of the main findings we uncovered in The Passion Paradox: the difference between harmonious and obsessive passion. This is much more about why we work.

Harmonious passion is when an individual becomes completely absorbed in an activity because they love how the activity itself makes them feel. Obsessive passion is when an individual gets hooked on something because of external rewards; read: fame, fortune, a promotion, or in this day and age, social media followers. Obsessive passion is firmly linked with burnout.

When we are obsessively passionate, we are constantly striving for things that are outside of our control. Other’s opinion of our work, not our work itself, fulfills and satisfies us. We become hooked on hitting the highest metric, getting the promotion, or being seen as relevant in the organization or in the department we work. But leaving our professional — and perhaps even personal — self-worth to others in this way is a recipe for disaster, a recipe that often results in burnout. When it's not firmly grounded in a strong foundation, striving leads to craving, and craving leads to suffering. 

The answer isn't eliminating passion. It's cultivating harmonious passion in our organizations (and ourselves).

This runs counter to a “results first” and "pay for performance" and “selfie” culture. Yet when people are encouraged to engage in an activity for the love of the activity itself, they rarely, if ever, burnout — even when they log long hours and neglect other elements of their lives (for a period of time, anyways). They are happy to spend their hours “working” because they love their work and they have removed themselves from the emotional roller coaster of external validation.

This sounds easy, but it's not. Here's why.

Harmonious passion requires three main things. This has been studied for over 45 years and the evidence is highly replicable across diverse fields of practice:

1) Autonomy: the ability to have a significant control over one's work.

2) Mastery: the ability to see improvement and progression in one's craft.

3) Belonging or relatedness: a feeling of connection and community.

If you think about the fields where burnout is especially prevalent (e.g., medicine, teaching, corporate work, and sport) you see that at least one, if not more, of these critical attributes is missing.

• Physicians, especially in big systems, feel they no longer have autonomy. Some lack mastery (or at least creativity, thanks to rigid guidelines—which may work for patients but not for docs) and also belonging as medicine becomes more siloed and electronic.
• Teachers have hardly any room to adjust curriculum, which is delivered by administrators in suits who rarely are doing the work.
• Corporate workers struggle to feel mastery, since the more complex the knowledge economy becomes the harder it is to see clear cause-and-effect impact based on one's actions.
• And in a day and age when social media masquerades as real community, athlete's spend so much time on the internet (to get sponsorship deals) that they don't feel as connected to their actual communities.
• Young people (millennials) in any field, really, that have grown up in a world where their "personal brand" replaces true belonging and community. This is such an undercurrent of burnout because if unless you have the most followers on social media nothing will ever be enough. And your time will be spent there instead of doing meaningful work and making meaningful connections. Burnout. Burnout. Burnout. 

What's interesting and what we learned in researching, reporting, and writing The Passion Paradox is that when one or more of the big three (autonomy, mastery, belonging) are missing, the intrinsic motivation and harmonious passion it supports either shifts to extrinsic motivation and obsessive passion or just plain old disgruntledness.

If autonomy, mastery, and belonging are solid, however, people can still care about external validation, metrics, and results, but they don't become obsessed with them. If autonomy, mastery, and/or belonging are missing, people replace those key things with an obsession for external results—be it promotions, relevance, twitter followers, etc. This only lasts for so long, especially in fields (like medicine or teaching) where once you hit mid-career the options for external progress and promotion become more limited. At that point, if you don't love the craft itself, you're liable to burnout. So these fields have got to make sure the traits that support loving the craft are always in place throughout one's career.

Taking a passionate person and putting them in a big system where they feel like a cog and lack real connection never, ever works. 

The key takeaways and implications:

• Burnout isn't just about how people work, but also about why people work and what drives them.
• Harmonious passion is linked with high-performance, life-satisfaction, wellbeing. People with harmonious passion can work long hours without burning out.
• Obsessive passion is the opposite. It's linked with anxiety, depression, and burnout.
• To create harmonious passion you need autonomy, mastery, and belonging.
• If you lead an organization and one or more of these elements are missing, before you force your people to meditate and list their core values, fix what's getting in the way of these things. 
• If you yourself are feeling burnt out, evaluate whether your passion is harmonious or obsessive and whether or not you have autonomy, mastery, and belonging (true belonging, not social media). If one or more is missing, figure out how you can work toward to it. If you have a boss, talk to him or her about it.

We've worked in health care (Brad) and education (Steve) for a long time. It's complicated. We know. Sometimes what is best for the overall system gets in the way of autonomy, mastery, and belonging. But the system doesn't work without its key people (in these examples: doctors, teachers, and copaches). If burnout is a problem for you personally or for your organization, start by evaluating some of the above. If you want to learn more and really get into the details, we spent three years writing our book to open up this discussion. We encourage you to read it.

Are You at Risk of a Mid-Career Rut?

 

It might sound odd, but people need the most help not at the beginning of their careers, but in mid-career — especially when it comes to making decisions. That’s a key finding from a research study coordinated by one of us (Julia). The study asked 500 college-educated adults in professional careers (representative of 16% of U.S. adults) to indicate the degree of their agreement with statements about their behaviors when making important work decisions throughout their careers. The questionnaire also asked them to assess each decision’s degree of success.

The results were startling: Less than 50% of decisions made in mid-career were rated as successful. People are most susceptible to making decisions that lead to less-than-successful outcomes between the ages of 40 and 48, according to respondent assessments. The people reporting less-than-successful outcomes strongly agreed with such statements as:

• “When making this decision, I was so busy with day-to-day work that I didn’t have enough time to think strategically.”
• “At the time I constantly second-guessed myself and tried to talk myself out of making a change.”
• “I found the whole process of making the decision stressful and unnerving.”

In other words, at the very time when people attain management roles and need to make the decisions that could improve the enterprise — as well as decisions that could advance their career — many become trapped in the status quo. Focusing on the tasks of managing the day-to-day, managers stay in their comfort zones rather than setting new directions.

At the start of their careers, people generally understand that their lack of experience means they need to identify how to become an effective contributor, by learning a company’s processes, practices, and culture. As they gain experience and skills, however, they get more — and more complex — responsibilities tied to enhancing the enterprise’s revenue, profitability, or brand reputation. In other words, mid-career professionals are evaluated on more than simply working within the status quo. They are expected to create and drive purposeful change. The danger is not realizing this shift.

We have found that one reason for not adapting to this meaningful shift in expectations is that — with increasing personal and family responsibilities, as well as higher positions and incomes — the average mid-career manager feels they have more to lose if they make a mistake. They talk themselves into making decisions that play it safe, where they feel in control. They put off decisions when they should be examining what needs to change. In decision-making moments, they overestimate the risks of change and underestimate the risks of preserving the status quo.

That’s not to say these managers are underperformers. They usually have years of hard work behind them in managing processes and producing results. But as they avoid new solutions and ideas for purposeful change, they get passed over for opportunities, promotions, and financial rewards. Feeling stalled in their career, they start feeling undervalued and overworked.

There are ways to break free of this trap. If you find yourself in this position, the first step is to get help from a trusted mentor — someone who has made difficult decisions, taken risks, and managed those risks, and who has the self-awareness to give good counsel. Many companies train supervisors to be more like a coach and a mentor, so start with them. Find someone in your organization who you trust and respect, but don’t feel that you need to stick with only one mentor over time. We have found that it is normal and healthy to seek new mentors throughout your career, people inside and outside your organization who have achieved what you aspire to achieve so that you enrich your learning.

Then find ways to have more exposure to that person. Ask for a meeting to discuss a particularly challenging or exciting work matter, or to learn about how the mentor went about making a difficult decision and helped an initiative become a success. Or invite the mentor to a meeting you’re orchestrating. Alternatively, you can take an indirect approach by observing the mentor from a distance, reading about the person’s career, or attending events where the individual is speaking.
You should always have an important reason each time you ask to connect with your mentor, whether it is a phone call, lunch, or an in-person meeting. Respect their time by reaching out no more than six times a year, and prepare your talking points and questions in advance. Focus on what they did, what challenges they faced, and how they overcame them. The best way to engage a busy person as a mentor is to have genuine curiosity and the desire to learn.

Beyond mentorship, consider getting help from an executive coach on a regular basis. An insightful coach can help you understand what’s holding you back, as well as define a better value proposition for what you bring to your organization. They can help you see the difference between reactive problem management and leading proactive change. Finally, a coach can help you explore options, assess risks, and understand ways to manage those risks.

For instance, consider John (name has been changed). Like many, John focused on today’s goals and problems, confident that evidence-based performance results would lead to promotions. John achieved his team’s target numbers 20 quarters in a row, but after being passed over for bigger jobs three times, he finally reached out to a coach to understand why his career had stalled. John’s boss gave feedback to the coach that he would rather see John take more risks and make a mistake than play it safe all the time. Coaching helped John understand that, while he was delivering results, his decision making around strategic questions needed work. His company was looking for leaders who could drive new ideas for sustainable growth in an intensifying competitive marketplace in addition to contributing to quarterly performance. Once John understood that the work of leading includes — but also extends beyond — the work of managing his team, he could connect his skills to ways he could lead a change in the distribution strategy.

If you’re a mid-career professional, take an honest look at what you are doing on the job. Ask yourself:

• Do you spend each day getting through what’s on your calendar and to-do list without asking if your involvement makes a difference?
• Are you critical of change without truly considering the likely consequences of maintaining the status quo or the potential rewards of change?
• Do you avoid or procrastinate making decisions that you perceive as creating more work for you or as taking on risk you would like to avoid?
• Are you seeking help to understand how the work of leading is different from the work of managing?
• Have you articulated what kind of leader you are and what kind of leader you want to become?

If you answered “yes” to any of the first three questions or “no” to the final two, you might want to seek support to ensure your career doesn’t become derailed. If you would rather avoid the subject than seek help, you’re abdicating your power to lead your career. Take charge. After all, you’re not doing your job if you’re too busy to think about the future.