REIGNITE (eBook)

Transform From Burned Out to On Fire and Find New Meaning in Your Career and Life

Dr. Clark Gaither (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
202 Seiten
Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press (Verlag)
978-1-946697-67-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Think about your job or career for a moment. Is your work pleasant, enjoyable, and inspiring? Does it provide you with opportunities to innovate and create using all of your natural talents and abilities? Does work energize you and bring you joy and happiness?

Or, do you instead feel emotionally exhausted and cynical with a lack of any sense of personal accomplishment? If so, you are probably burned out. One thing is certain, you cannot live a life of happiness and passion driven purpose if you are burned out. Instead of finding deep satisfaction and happiness in your work it is probably something you have come to dread, like going back to work on Mondays.

I should know. I became burned out once. I became burned out at my job as a family physician so I understand burnout. I know firsthand how personally and professionally devastating it can be and how costly it can become to organizations. I also learned what to do about it, how to FIX it!

Learn how to transform from being burned out to ON FIRE and find new meaning in your career and life. Within the pages of this book, I will show you how.

Textauszug

The Hallmarks of Job Related Burnout

The discipline of medicine is inherently difficult. There is a lot to know. Skill is required. The responsibilities are great. The ability to engender trust, demonstrate competency, and exude compassion are absolute necessities. An enormous amount of mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual energy is required for the job. All of this, and more, is needed to become “the good doctor.”

You know what? The same goes for a lot of other professionals—school teacher, fireman, police officer, social worker, airline pilot, personnel manager, and so on, and so on. Name one profession that doesn’t require those same attributes. True, burnout rates vary among different professions, but there is a detectable burnout rate in every profession, and the hallmarks are all the same. So, too, are the causes of burnout.

In my profession, medicine, burnout rates are among the highest. Naturally, you would want or expect a physician to be on fire with passion and purpose for the practice of medicine, right? Especially, if she/he were your doctor. Tragically, this is not the case for the majority of physicians currently practicing within the US.

The house of medicine is on fire, not with passion-driven purpose, but with a majority of doctors who are burning out. The flames of passion for our profession have been replaced by the all-consuming fires of job related burnout. We are in the midst of national medical emergency with physicians burning out.

What once began in slow motion is now rapidly accelerating. A recent study published by Shanafelt et al in the December 2015 issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings documented a rise to 54.4% from 45.5% in the number of physicians reporting at least one hallmark of burnout (out of three) in the span of just three years, from 2011 to 2014. Today, six out of ten physicians would quit medicine, right now, if they were financially able to do so.

I know firsthand how it feels to be burned out. It is a miserable feeling, almost one of complete helplessness and hopelessness. I had hit all three hallmarks of burnout.

The hallmarks of job-related burnout were succinctly described by Dr. Christina Maslach in 1981. She and her associate developed the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), which is still used as the industry gold standard for measuring burnout rates. A twenty-two item questionnaire using a 7-point scale for responses (“Never to Every Day”), the MBI yields consistent results with sensitivity (true positive rate) and specificity (true negative rate).

The three principal hallmarks of job related burnout are: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a lack of a sense of personal accomplishment. Let’s take a look at them one-by-one.

• Emotional Exhaustion – A feeling of being emotionally depleted to the point where you feel you can no longer give of yourself at an emotional or psychological level to your company or the people you serve. You feel you have nothing left to give. KEYWORD: Exhaustion

• Depersonalization – The development of negative and cynical feelings leading to a callous and dehumanized perception of patients, clients, or customers, which further leads to detachment and to the view that they are somehow deserving of their problems and troubles. KEYWORD: Cynicism

• Lack of a Sense of Personal Accomplishment – You feel so little reward from what you do that there is a tendency to evaluate yourself in negative terms, which leads to dissatisfaction and unhappiness in your work, creating a lack of a sense of personal accomplishment. In short, you feel that what you do no longer makes a difference. KEYWORD: Inefficacy

Men and women will register these slightly differently. Women will usually proceed through the three of these in the order presented. Men will usually become cynical first, followed by emotional exhaustion. Men may or may not hit the third hallmark, of a lack of a sense of personal accomplishment. Most men will always feel their work has some meaning, at least to them.

These hallmarks are the symptoms of burnout, not the underlying causes, which I will cover in another chapter. In varying degree, some combination of these hallmarks will always be present when someone is burned out at work, in a relationship, at home, or even on living.

One thing is certain: if an individual can identify the presence of these hallmarks, they are either burning out or burned out. As you will see, the costs of job related burnout are devastatingly high, not only for the individual employee but the organizations they work for as a whole.

Individuals who become burned out are at risk for chronic unhappiness, increased irritability, depression, anxiety, mood swings, suicidal thoughts, suicidal actions, alcoholism, and drug abuse. Besides the obvious consequences of these, there is also a potential for a great loss of knowledge, expertise, and innovation to a company, organization, or society at large.

Tragically, a person’s creativity can become stymied or destroyed by burnout, and someone’s passion and sense of purpose may be completely subverted.

In her book, The Truth about Burnout, Dr. Christina Maslach observes, “What started out as important, meaningful, fascinating work becomes unpleasant, unfulfilling, and meaningless.” She further adds, “The positive feelings of enthusiasm, dedication, security, and enjoyment fade away and are replaced by anger, anxiety and depression.”

How can you recognize if you or someone you care about is burned out or burning out? Listen for these statements of warning.

• I feel used up, empty, or dead inside.

• I feel hopeless, helpless, or lost.

• I feel I have nothing left to give.

• I go to work, and all I feel is frustration.

• I have lost enthusiasm for the work I used to love.

• I feel trapped, overwhelmed, overloaded, or overworked.

• Or, if “I love my job” has been replaced by “I hate my job!”

The individual experiencing burnout may view this as some sort of personal crisis of their own making, and in some circumstances, it is. But, burnout more than likely represents a dysfunctional work environment. Either way, there is much that can be done to alleviate and prevent burnout.

There are steps that can be taken to introduce or restore an individual to a state of engagement, the opposite of burnout, which I will cover in a later chapter.

If you are burned out in your job, there are warning signs and symptoms everyone should know. If you don’t know the symptoms of burnout, you may mistake them for something else. This can lead to a delay in addressing the underlying issues and needlessly prolong your suffering.

People who are burned out rarely recognize it as such. They may incorrectly ascribe their feelings to being ambivalent, anxious, stressed, depressed, sad, or irritable. Although burnout can lead to all of these mood changes, they are not the underlying cause. They are just symptoms.

Those around someone who is burned out may be left to wonder if the change in their behavior is due to stress, depression, drug use, relationship problems, money problems, or personality/character defects. Again, burnout is not usually suspected as the cause.

How can you tell if you are burned out or burning out? Your inner mood or feelings associated with job related burnout can include:

• Feeling more and more time pressured at work.

• A sense of dread associated with going to work.

• A sense of relief that the weekend has finally arrived.

• A lack of recognition or not feeling rewarded for good work.

• Feeling that job demands are unclear or unreasonable.

• Either work is no longer challenging or it has become overwhelmingly challenging.

• Work seems chaotic or too high pressure.

• A sense there is no time you can take off from work without consequences.

• Feeling that you have to be too many things for far too many people.

• Feeling as though you have no help.

• Feeling as though you no longer make a difference.

• Difficulty or inability to concentrate.

• You lack close and supportive relationships in both your work and personal life.

• Less patience. Less empathy. Less enthusiasm.

• More irritable. More intolerant. More exhausted. More cynical.

• Feeling disengaged, unmotivated, uninterested, or uninteresting.

• Feeling as though life is no longer worth living.

• A feeling you should be doing something else.

• A feeling you do not fit in your profession, or it does not fit you.

• Feeling as though you have nothing left to give.

• Continuously questioning yourself: “Is this all there is to life? Is there nothing more?”

Of course, there are other feelings, but these are the ones most often identified in people suffering from burnout. The great news about burnout is it’s 100 percent reversible, treatable, and preventable. When I realized I was suffering...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 20.3.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Psychologie
• Themenwelt: Medizin / Pharmazie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Medizin / Pharmazie ► Medizinische Fachgebiete ► Medizinethik
• Schlagworte: Burnout • Health Care • Medicine • Motivation • Professional Burnout • Stress
• ISBN-10: 1-946697-67-2 / 1946697672
• ISBN-13: 978-1-946697-67-7 / 9781946697677