You are not a lazy person. You work hard. You give your very best every day; and still, every time the alarm clock wakes you up you wish you had a mace to smash it and keep sleeping. And you know what’s the weirdest part? Some time ago you didn’t even need an alarm to wake you up. You used to do it by your own means, because you enjoyed going to work. What happened to you? You might have gotten stressed out, or worse, burnt out.
Every institution and company works in a very effective, yet invisible way on your mind. They are mental energy pumps. They pumps out energy from you and require you to invest that energy in them. And the higher up you get in the chain of command, the more energy is required. That’s a normal result of wearing your “company’s jersey”. You play for that team, and at a certain point, you merge and become that team. Think about when you started working, you must have probably referred to your job as “the company”, “the university”. As time went by the “the” was replaced with “my”. My job, my team, my company.
That is what every institution does to your mind. And that’s what your mind does with every organization. You get identified with it. You start sharing values, jargon and goals until the difference between you and it becomes blurry.
But it doesn’t end there. The organization will provide you with tools to cope with the stress and demands that you are subject to. These tools can range from your salary, to the free snacks you get (hail Google!) or the support from your peers and superiors. As long as there’s a balance between the energy that gets pumped out of you and those things that help you deal with the intrinsic stress of your job, everything’s cool. But when that support is withdrawn or vanishes you are left alone.
Think about the worst case scenario: losing your job. Let’s say you are having a platonic relationship with your job and one good day you arrive to your office only to find out that you were laid off. At that point, all the identificatory scaffolding that your job provided you suddenly vanishes. You “were” the boss, you “had” a company, you “were” someone (in that place… though it can expand until you actually believe you are “no one”). That slap can leave you flopped in your living room for months, unable to recover.
But let’s say that you weren’t fired. There’s an economic crisis, the market becomes volatile and unpredictable and the way you used to do business no longer works. At the same time your boss starts getting distant from you, you are no longer given the resources you used to count with and things start spiraling out of control. All that obviously will translate into stress, but that’s not the bottom of it, you are potentially at risk of getting burnt out.
What’s that, how is it detected and how can you counter it?
Follow the jump and read this highly comprehensive and easy to read article and also this one from helpguide.com that will knock out your doubts and quench your thirst for knowledge.
Image credit wthr.com
Article by Fernando
The guy in charge of this blog - husband, Psychologist, former Manager, Blogger, Job Coach, Recruiter and Information Junkie. Yes, I am all that.
Fernando has written 237 awesome articles for us at FT Careers Blog
| Blog → Careers Blog
{ 4 trackbacks }