Categories: Be You!BurnoutCoachingSelf-care

Is burnout a call from your soul?

Why are so many of us burning out?

According to an article published in the Guardian newspaper earlier this year, 3 out of 4 people surveyed, in the biggest survey conducted on the impact of stress in the UK, have felt so stressed in the past year that they felt overwhelmed or unable to cope.

While some stress can motivate us to work hard on a project, chronic, ongoing, unresolved stress creates havoc in our minds and bodies and can lead to burnout.

There are many reasons for burnout:

too much to do in too little time
trying to meet the expectations of others
an unwillingness to prioritise self-care
being a perfectionist
being an achievement junkie
trying to be Superwoman
an inability to say NO

“When you say Yes to others, make sure you are not saying No to yourself.”

Paulo Coelho

But might there be another reason?

Over the last year, coaching women who were burning out, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. For the majority of them, once they asked themselves the tough questions and got some clarity around the obvious reasons for their burnout, what re-surfaced was a long-ignored desire to do something completely different to the career that had caused their burnout.

This realisation usually came in response to my favourite coaching question:

What do you really, really want?

After they had told me everything they didn’t want, what I heard next was some version of “Well, I always wanted to be a photographer, a writer, run a charity, work with the homeless, be a poet, start my own business, you know, that was always my “thing” but …………”

Their eyes light up, their faces shine and their energy shifts, UNTIL they tell me all the reasons they could never do that, NOW.

It is true that when we acknowledge the “thing” that feels in alignment with our soul, we feel a simultaneous sense of joy and terror. It is like an internal GPS guiding us to the work we were born to do, but, for as yet unexamined reasons, we have stopped ourselves from doing.

This has been my journey too. I had a calling to work with women, that I ignored. In the 90s I set up an online business called Stella UK selling e-courses, with the tagline “Helping you be the star of your own life!”

Back then, self-development work online was in its infancy and rather than follow my passion, I got scared of visibility, listened to the “Who am I to do this” voice and retreated to the safety of my legal career. My first burnout happened shortly afterwards.

When I recovered physically, but without addressing the core reasons for my burnout, at the age of 43, I went to university, did a degree in Maths and became a teacher. My passion for working with women remained but I continued to ignore it, dismissing it as a fantasy because now I had a “proper job”.

I burned out again, for all the usual reasons, but primarily I now realise, because there IS work I am here to do in the world, no matter how much it scares me and ignoring it for almost 20 years wreaked havoc on my mind and body.

The wake-up call for me came in the back of an ambulance, being blue-lighted to hospital with a suspected stroke. It turned out to be a stress related migraine, but in that moment, I knew I had to follow my calling and stop playing safe.

The truth is we do know what we REALLY want to do, but it feels hard to admit it to ourselves and others and to take the steps necessary to bring our vision to reality. We are frozen in place by thoughts about what others will say, what will change if we do this “thing” that calls us. We tell ourselves it is unsafe or unwise or that we don’t have what it takes. We worry about the years of training and hard work we have already invested in our current career or business, that now increasingly feels like the wrong path. We worry about how we will pay the bills, we worry about failure and paradoxically we worry about success. We worry about stepping out of our comfort zone, of being visible, of abandoning the successful career or business we have built, even though it is making us ill. We worry about whether this calling is real or imagined, a bright future or a deluded fantasy.

But, we can’t deny that just as we know that we are burning out in our present situation, we also know the strange feeling of tingly joy and increased energy that arises when we do allow ourselves to think of doing our “thing”, even as our mind is simultaneously giving us a thousand reasons not to do it.

In her book “The Joy of Burnout”, Dr Dina Glouberman writes

“When we burn out, it is our old personality that burns itself out. Then our soul fire begins to light our way and to bring us joy.”

Whether you are burning out or not, do you know that something else is calling you. Is there a gift you want to bring to the world, but have backed away from in fear? The “thing” that both terrifies you and makes you feel alive. The “thing” those around you might object to, the “thing” that lights you up, the “thing” that never goes away no matter how many years you have tried to ignore it.

Invite it in, ask to be shown how to do it, tell it you are willing to listen and allow it to come through you. Imagine yourself doing it. How do you feel? Is there a rising joy when you allow yourself to feel the possibilities? Does your mind immediately rise up with a list of objections?

We are all repositories of blocked joy. Joy is not outside us, available when we achieve something or circumstances change. It is not contained in the “thing”. It is an inherent quality. Think of a baby or toddler, they are full of joy, until they are told

“No!”

“Bad girl.”

“Sit still.”

“Be quiet.”

“Stop doing that.”

“Be nice.”

We internalise those voices that tell us we can’t have what we want, can’t be who we are, until the voices don’t need an external source, they simply play on a loop in our heads.

But the joy is still there, buried under the mind chatter, calling us back again and again to the “thing” we are most scared to do.

Burnout gets our attention, stops us in our tracks and forces us to face the “thing” we fear the most.

When we can no longer fix things by trying harder, the only option we have is to slow down and listen to our inner wisdom.

Howard Thurman said

“Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who’ve come alive. There is something in everyone that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself”.

This, I believe, is the hidden reason behind burnout.

Don’t let it happen to you. Don’t waste your life ignoring your inner voice, caught on the hamster wheel of “normal”.

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.”