How To Tackle Career Burnout And Determine If You’re Ready For A Career Change
Before you take the leap into a new role or make a career change, consider doing these things to overcome and tackle your career burnout.
As a coach and executive resume writer, I have executives come to me at varying stages of their job search — some realize they’ve hit the ceiling at their current firm or company and acknowledge it’s time for an upward shift in their career, whereas others desire a career change as the cure to their career fatigue.
Career burnout is often accompanied by chronic stress with a barrage of symptoms that include exhaustion, depleted energy, decreased motivation, and negativity surrounding your work. You may experience the infamous “Sunday Scaries,” which is often characterized by an impending sense of doom about the work week ahead. You may feel lost, deflated, or irritable around family and friends. You might even become withdrawn in social situations outside of work because your anxiety is zeroed in on your to-do lists and other pending work. You might have gained weight due to decreased time investments in your own self-care and personal health.
How do I know these are the typical symptoms of career burnout? It’s because I’ve personally experienced them, which resulted in a major health scare and a serious wake-up call.
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When you’re an overachiever and deeply dedicated to your craft, it’s easy to fall into a trap of being overworked. Most of the time, career burnout occurs because we’ve overfilled our own personal plates with extra tasks, assignments, and projects, leaving us personally deprived of much-needed sleep, exercise, and time to decompress. With career burnout, you lose the ability to differentiate the weekdays from the weekends, you feel overwhelmed and irritable due to the immense size of your workload, and you begrudgingly decline social invitations. More significantly, you begin to resent your career choice and current role, so you oscillate between looking up new positions, fiercely applying, and questioning if a new role will bring you the desired balance and career happiness you want and need.
Before you take the leap into a new role or make a career change, consider doing these things to overcome and tackle your career burnout:
Prioritize Your Workload
In the beginning years of your career and business, you operate from a “must respond ASAP” mode and treat everything like an emergency. You want to impress your clients, the managing partners, and everyone else in between. You put in the early mornings, late nights, and even weekends. At some point, you come up for air and realize that not everything requires an urgent response or immediate attention, and frankly, it’s impossible to treat it all as such.
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Prioritizing your workload is key. Acknowledge (and accept) that not everything may or will get done in a single day (because as we all know, true emergencies do pop up and calls go for longer than planned). Make a list of three or four non-negotiables on your to-do list that day. Rank them based on order of importance.
Set And Communicate Clear Boundaries
One of the key repetitions in my legal career and business was that I failed to set clear boundaries around my time and communicate them effectively. I overextended and stretched myself to the point of utter exhaustion, yet to the outside world, I was “killing it.” Internally, I was falling apart. I was severely sleep-deprived, and my thyroid was out of whack. My physical health took a backseat. I can’t tell you how many times I felt “guilty” taking time off to go to the doctor or how I postponed doctor’s appointments because I was juggling too much work. But, if you’re not operating at your physical best, how can you be operating at your mental best?
Your physical health is a priority and setting work boundaries is key. Maybe that requires you to put a hard stop to scheduled calls at 4 p.m. so you can spend that last hour or two wrapping up your work and sending out the last few emails of the day. Or perhaps, it’s letting the client know that you’ll look at their contract tomorrow morning after you’re back from a doctor’s appointment (as opposed to feeling pressured to read it that evening on strained eyes).
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A client recently expressed to me her level of exhaustion and fatigue from her role. “But I’m making great money, more than I’ve ever made, shouldn’t I just suck it up for a few more years?” She hadn’t been to her favorite Pilates class in months, and she had been ordering takeout more than she cooked (cooking and baking were her favorite things to do on the weekends).
When you lose sight of those hobbies and outside interests that keep you balanced and fulfilled, your mental health is bound to suffer. Consider using some PTO just to give yourself a break, disconnect, and rejuvenate both your mind and body.
Most importantly, don’t be afraid to work with a coach or a therapist who can provide the needed support and outside perspective. Sometimes, people are so centralized on emotions that they cannot see themselves in an objective manner. An executive coach is there to see the 30,000-foot view of your career and provide support, counsel, and guidance to not only help you identify your career or leadership roadblocks and strategize on ways to create positive action for your future career benefit. A therapist will focus on getting to the root of the things holding you back, identify the source of your emotional or mental health concerns, and look into your past from your childhood up through the present.
Determine Your Presence And Focus
Sometimes you’ve come to the realization that your role is making you feel stagnant in your career ladder. Perhaps you’ve just become complacent, but you have other goals you want to achieve as time continues to move. Some of the first questions I ask a client include: What do you want to focus on next? What’s most important to you for your next role? What’s lacking in your current role that you want to change?
I often suggest the idea of pursuing additional skills and training to create more engagement and interest in the current work, but also to create a future opportunity and enhanced value. Even once you’ve reached the C-suite, there’s always room to learn and grow. Make a list of those concrete goals and don’t be afraid to pursue them. With risk comes great reward, but you have to prepare adequately.
Have a career-related question? Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and join in on the career conversations on my posts.
Wendi Weiner is an attorney, career expert, and founder of The Writing Guru, an award-winning executive resume writing services company. Wendi creates powerful career and personal brands for attorneys, executives, and C-suite/Board leaders for their job search and digital footprint. She also writes for major publications about alternative careers for lawyers, personal branding, LinkedIn storytelling, career strategy, and the job search process. You can reach her by email at wendi@writingguru.net, connect with her on LinkedIn, and follow her on Twitter @thewritingguru.
