Weekly Challenge #3: Avoiding Burnout
This post is part of my Weekly Challenge series: a collection of micro-coaching tips and calls to action to enhance your leadership. If you’re joining me for the first time - welcome to your leadership development journey! Get started by clicking on that red box below. From there, I promise to do everything possible to provide the pathways to make you that much better and more effective as a leader.
I've coached many leaders who've come close to burnout and others who, unfortunately, crossed the line and had to take time off to recover from burnout that could have been avoided.
To prevent that from happening to you requires a different mindset. It’s a mindset that sees the experience of work differently. How do you experience work? Does it bring you joy and excitement? Or does it suck the life out of you?
As you reflect on that, let's focus on a very basic question to move you forward and give you some steps to implement:
What fuels your energy? And what depletes it?
Hint: Having your hands on every problem rather than delegating it to those people on your team who are perfectly capable of doing the job will suck the life out of you. So will perfectionism – like everything has to be done your way. 👎
Good energy comes from three things:
Healthy collaboration, where there’s synergy, generosity, and sharing of resources, and people are moving in the same direction.
Engaging with positive people with shared values like trust, respect, and honesty.
Getting results doing what you love! 👍
THIS WEEK’S IMPLEMENTER CHALLENGE ➡️
Do MORE of what brings you energy and makes you come alive, and do LESS of what strips you of your energy and joy.
Start by making a list for each.
Write down THREE things that bring you energy (what you want to do MORE of).
Write down THREE things that deplete your energy (what you want to do LESS of).
Now, delegate!
You have capable people on your team - speak to them about taking over the items on your list that deplete your energy. But be careful to make sure those things don’t deplete their energy either, or you’ll have another problem on your hands.
Even if you’re unable to delegate everything that depletes your energy, you’ll still benefit from doing this with one or two things on your list.
As for the things that do bring you energy, carve out time to make them a priority, and then protect that time. The more you do this, the better protected you will be against burnout.
Good luck this week! As always, let me know how I can help in the comments!