Burnout Isn’t A Problem To Be Solved, But A Gift To Receive

I’m headed to New York tomorrow to sit on a panel where we will be talking about burnout and mental health to a room full of CEO’s and executives and I’m wildly excited about it because these are the conversations that I truly love.

On the pre-interview call, the moderator of the panel had asked me a question about my own burnout story and what I learned about myself and my life as a result of this season.

While there are so many different ways that I could have answered this question, the first thing that came to my mind is how important it is that we become intimately acquainted with the driving forces behind our lives.

In other words, what is the why behind the why behind the why behind the why? And then, what is the energy attached to that why?

Like so many others, I learned at a really young age how to internalize my pain, shame, despair and grief and use it as motivation to make something of myself—to prove to the world that I have what it takes—or whatever other story I wanted to tell myself. 

And the truth is, your pain really is a great source of motivation—until it isn’t.

What I’ve learned through my own healing journey and years of therapy is that as I look back on my life, it’s become increasingly clear that my pursuit of success wasn’t so much about the success that I was chasing as much as it was about the inner pain that I was avoiding.

In other words, it wasn’t so much about the ruthless ambition that I glorified and that other people celebrated as much as it was about the avoidance of stillness. Because in the stillness we have to fully face our whole selves.

Over time, when we live our life in avoidance to our deeper truths, what we’re really doing is living a life of self-betrayal. And it’s this self-betrayal and the disconnection from ourselves and from our lives that leads us to the type of soul tired that isn’t solved by more sleep.

Barbara Brown Taylor is one of my favorite spiritual teachers and she said it best when she said,

It’s not the sadness (or the shame, or the despair, or the depression) that will sink a person’s life, it’s the energy a person spends avoiding the sadness that will sink a person’s life.

As a look back, burnout wasn't a problem to be solved or an obstacle to overcome. Burnout was a gift to be received. It was the divine ambush that I needed in my life to help me restore my relationship with self. And, in restoring my relationship with self, I was able to reclaim my joy, my inner peace and my happiness.

I’m curious, if you’ve been through a season of burnout, what has it taught you?