Identify Burnout

Identifying Burnout Pressure Points

As we have already discussed, part of the cause of burnout lies with your situation. The other part comes from within yourself: From your ideals, your ambitions and your goals.


This simple tool gives you the opportunity to think about what you want to get out of your job, and then to compare this with the reality of your situation. This helps you to identify possible areas of mismatch, as these mismatches are possible pressure points that may develop into burnout. Knowing these pressure points helps you to manage the situation to avoid burnout.


Using the Tool:
To start using this tool, list the things that give real meaning to what you do.


Write down what attracted you to your current job or profession in the first place. List the things about it that you find fulfilling now. Include the value of the profession to humanity and what excites you about it. Think about what you want to achieve within it, and what you think is important to doing the job well.


This will give you a long list of things that are good about what you do. From this list, identify the five things that give the greatest meaning to your work. These should be the things about the job that most inspire you. Write these down in order with the most important item at the top of the list. This list shows you the things that you should protect as much as you can.


Next, write down the things that frustrate you most about your work. This may involve things like inadequacy of resource, lack of recognition, or bureaucracy. As well as this, list the factors that are causing you difficulty and which are likely to cause stress in the future.


Now work through the list of things that give you meaning item-by-item. For each item, look at the list of frustrations. Where these threaten the things that are most importnat to you, note these down: These are particular pressure points that you need to monitor.


Think these through carefully, and plan in advance how you will handle build-ups of stress in these areas. Our article on avoiding burnout can help you to do this.


Summary:
You are most vulnerable to burnout when the stresses you experience impact negatively on the things that you find most fulfilling in your job. Not only do you experience the unpleasantness of stress, you lose the job satisfaction that counter-balances this.


This simple tool helps you to identify the things that give meaning to the work you do. It then helps you to understand where the stresses that you experience undermine these. These are often the stresses that are most likely to cause you burnout.


As well as this, by understanding what gives meaning to your work, you know how to steer the development of your job to give yourself the greatest job satisfaction.