Summer reading
Our Community Matters • 13 •
Bringing back the spark: how to avoid burning out BY STEPHEN WRIGHT
Everyone has a story about work-related burnout. It might be your own story or that of someone close to you, of feeling chronically drained and emotionally exhausted, of cracking under the pressure of work, of confronting what feels like a professional disaster. The community sector, in particular, is notorious for burning people out.
In my own work, in a program that intervenes when men use violence and abuse in the home, and that supports women who live with violence, the pressures can be intense. Nearly all violence against women and children (and men) is carried out by men, so in working faceto-face with men who use violence, workers can feel as though they are right at the source There are fewer stories about how burnout can of the problems that so many women and be stopped, and even fewer stories to help us children experience. The safety of women and children, the precarious nature of many to understand why burnout arises at all. of their lives, the ways in which institutional Avoiding burnout is often framed in terms of responses fail them, are front and centre, in looking after yourself. Get more exercise, more the office, in its interview rooms, every day. sleep. Eat more vegetables, drink less alcohol. And so burnout can – and in my own Practise yoga, talk to a friend, meditate. workplace did – come from several sources: Burnout then becomes an individual failure, from feeling powerless when violence against a list of all the ways we didn’t look after women and children is still endemic; from ourselves. the knowledge that women die every week because of male violence; from the anxiety Community services workplaces are often induced by funders that keep funding communities in themselves, though perhaps precarious and short-term; and from the basic this isn’t acknowledged as often as it should grind of continual close interactions with men be. I didn’t acknowledge it myself until a who don’t take responsibility for their violence. few years ago, when the problem of burnout became apparent in me and my colleagues. As the manager of the service I work in, I felt The approach of burnout is a weird feeling. You my responsibility for my colleagues’ wellbeing keenly. This sense of responsibility, if have an increasing sense of being stretched out, or become plagued by feelings of guilt, or it is accompanied by inflammatory guilt and start to feel hardened or cynical. But burnout shame, can itself be an indicator of burnout. can also manifest as an addiction to work, an When a number of crises occurred at work, it inability to switch off to office politics, a kind became obvious to me that we needed to reof inner revving that just keeps ramping think a whole lot of things. My workplace, like up. And you can’t really remember what the most, was organised hierarchically, so as the turning point was when it all started to go manager I could begin to make changes that south, when work became so joyless.
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