Do you recognize burnout in yourself?

I received a red card for the first time ever coaching girls’ soccer – it was a warning that the symptoms of burnout can be almost undetectable.

Few high capacity leaders have the catastrophic, bridge-burning, massive crash and burn, self-sabotage of relationships or careers. But just because you can’t see the flames doesn’t mean there aren’t some unhealthy developments smouldering.

I hesitated to share this, but there’s a lot of us in leadership, responsible for caring for people, and whose passion and calling in their work can be toxic if they’re not listening and noticing the warning signs.

For me, it was a yellow card, followed by another yellow card 20 seconds later because I would’t let it go that an experienced referee didn’t stop play following an unfortunate elbow blow to another girls’ head. I didn’t swear, yell, scream or say anything regrettable. I was just impatiently persistent and exasperating to the point that the referee sent me off the field.

💡Driving home, I started getting curious. It wasn’t usual behaviour for me. I deal with unmet expectations all the time in the work I do. I coach young people and adults in strategies to deal with setbacks and relational challenges. Why did I fail to use one of those strategies?

💡My curiosity led me to notice a few other things that I made excuses for because the work and family demands in recent weeks have escalated – all for good things, but there were a lot of good things on my plate. I reflected on the two weeks previous and I noticed some patterns:

⚠️ Inconsistent eating and exercise habits
⚠️ Inconsistent sleeping patterns
⚠️ Impatience and irritability
⚠️ Some poorly executed decisions
⚠️ Struggling to listen thoughtfully

✅ I made a list of all the ways in the past that I experienced the emerging symptoms of burnout. It was clear that I was on a path in a toxic direction without some course correction.

✅ My turnaround in the last few days was a re-calibration of my sleep and exercise for starters, followed by a re-prioritization of my schedule focusing on the “great” needle-moving things, and delaying or deleting the “just good enough” things.

✅ I reset my family commitments, and revisited my routines. Burnout symptoms can be incredibly helpful if we know what to look for.

❌ We don’t need a long sabbatical, to quit on our commitments or make more “me time.”

❌ We don’t need long vacations or to check out. If you work with people, people need you to show up at your best as consistently as possible, but it can take its toll on the body – yellow cards can be helpful.

✅ We just need to know what our own warning signals look like and recalibrate in a more sustainable, healthy way so that our calling doesn’t become our undoing.