[00:00:00] Hi everyone. My name's Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout Recovery Podcast where I teach professionals to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work.

[00:00:22] Hello, my friends Dex with you again today. Let's talk habits, shall we? 'cause sometimes they're our friends and sometimes they are not.

[00:00:33] One of my clients, a lawyer, came to me paralyzed by overwork, overwhelm, and fear of failure. Her brain insisted there was only one right answer to every legal question and that she probably didn't have it. And she wanted appreciation for her endless hours of work but didn't get it. At her firm she felt like an imposter, unable to protect herself from criticism, and she didn't stand up for herself. When I met her, she'd ground to a halt in self-doubt, wondering if she was in the wrong career.

[00:01:09] This flavor of "I can't win, I'm exhausted, but I can't stop working" is a really common burnout story. Perhaps you can relate to it yourself?

[00:01:22] Type A people are highly committed to results and will always work diligently until they find solutions. But working harder, when you are overwrought, exhausted and scraping the barrel of your mental resources, is not really a solution. You are digging yourself in a deeper hole.

[00:01:44] So what if it's not your fault? What if it's the system that you are in? You're probably all silently nodding hearing that, thinking about your aggressive boss and your toxic work culture. Well today, then, let's explore professional burnout through a new lens Systems Thinking. And for those of you who are not familiar with systems thinking, it's a way of seeing how parts connect and create patterns and how best to work with those.

[00:02:18] It focuses on feedback loops, delays, and leverage points, much more than individual events or choices. I'm drawing concepts here from the book, Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows, but we'll stay grounded in applying these to real life burnout situations.

[00:02:40] So how does this help in burnout recovery?

[00:02:45] Well, burnout feels like "I'm failing". It's personal, isn't it?

[00:02:50] Whereas systems thinking, reframes it as "i'm stuck in a loop. Let's find it."

[00:02:58] And this really creates three potential powerful shifts.

[00:03:04] Firstly, it removes blame. You are not broken. The system is producing predictable outcomes.

[00:03:12] Secondly, we can find and name the loops. For example, here's one.

[00:03:17] Perfectionism leads to overwork, onto exhaustion, onto missed deadlines, and onto guilt and shame. So then you repeat the loop, back to perfectionism.

[00:03:28] Thirdly, it finds small changes you can make with big impact, not harder work, but leverage. Infinitely preferable in burnout as far as I can see.

[00:03:41] The feedback loop of perfectionism is core to burnout. We could take another example from almost any physician I've worked with who gets stuck with charting. Seeking to provide exemplary patient care, many doctors will want to respond to patient questions before spending more time on patient history and treatment plans.

[00:04:05] It's a bottomless task, with doctors keeping one eye on the clock and the other one on patient ratings. Every doctor I've worked with strains every nerve to provide the best result they can. And in your industry, you will have broadly similar pressures and loops that reinforce your choices and behaviors.

[00:04:28] A typical reinforcing loop is "The harder I work, the more blame I avoid, so I keep going." A reinforcing loop compounds the effect whether positive or negative.

[00:04:41] A balancing loop with a delay is "I try to rest. But I feel guilty, so I go back to work. The relief never comes." A balancing loop tries to resist or counter the effect.

[00:04:58] If you think about surfacing your own burnout loops, ask yourself: What system am I in that keeps me in overwork? For example. And you'll likely find many.

[00:05:10] Examine each one more closely, writing down your answers for clarity.

[00:05:16] Where is the delay? What is the feedback loop, and where's my leverage point?

[00:05:21] Another perfectionism loop might be: You promise yourself you'll do better. Then you set unrealistic expectations of yourself. You're paralyzed by the need to be perfect, and you procrastinate, and then you blame yourself, and then you go back to promising yourself you'll do better.

[00:05:42] Can you find any leverage point in that loop?

[00:05:45] If that was my loop, I would reset the expectations I set on myself to B- level, allowing myself to begin the task without delay. In my experience, finishing at B- tends to produce a quick result that satisfies other people's A+ or even A++ requirements.

[00:06:08] Perhaps other people aren't as hard on you as you?

[00:06:11] So let's just look quickly at a simple tool that you can use. It's introducing a basic mental model. So the systems thinking model is, in any system you will have an input. So this is the resources, the raw material, the information, whatever comes in. Then you'll have a process. Which is a set of operations that transform the inputs.

[00:06:37] These are the action steps of your model. And then we have an output, which is the results, maybe it's goods and services. And then we have feedback, which is an information used to feedback into the system to improve the process.

[00:06:55] So to use the physician example, maybe the input is a patient appointment. The process is the physician listens to, examines, questions the patient, reviews previous notes and completes the treatment plan and charting. So the output could be the new or updated treatment plan for the patient. And the feedback on this process could be the patient rating. Doctors are under a lot of pressure there.

[00:07:25] If a physician is fearful and overly focused on patient ratings, which of course many are encouraged in their system or even compelled to be, it will actually inhibit the provision of service and heavily impact the time taken to complete appointments and charting. See where I'm going with this. I'm sure you have many examples that pop into your brain about your work.

[00:07:47] We could look at another one. Here is an example about a professional's workload and productivity trade off. So the input is the workload, the tasks assigned to that person. The process for the professional is to prioritize and action tasks, to meet deadlines. The output is tasks completed and productivity maintained.

[00:08:14] The feedback. Well, if the workload becomes too heavy, the employee may experience stress or burnout even to decrease productivity.

[00:08:24] So what leverage would you go for in this loop? I'd be looking at the prioritization of tasks and not overfilling my schedule in a way that almost predicts failure. And I would also look at sticking to action times on each task.

[00:08:43] Perfectionism, not saying no, and procrastination do tend to steal a lot of time from most people who are in burnout. So you might want to think about loops on any one of those. So if you want to do that, just journal on it, just jot down your ideas. What is your input, process, output and feedback?

[00:09:04] How are you getting stuck in that loop? So "What is the pattern that I'm caught in?" is a question to ask yourself where you have a repeating pattern that's causing you stress or worry. What is reinforcing this pattern and what strategy am I using to survive the thing that's happening? Then of course, finally, what would happen if I stopped feeding that loop? If I didn't give my normal response, what would happen then?

[00:09:36] So you can map out your entire burnout dynamic like this, looking for leverage in each of those situations and changing the response that you have that perpetuates each of the loops.

[00:09:51] If that was a little bit conceptual for you, as a coach, how I use this is, I use these concepts to acknowledge, number one, that the system you work in may not be perfect. You might even experience it as counterproductive, antagonistic, or unrealistic. It might impede or prevent your best work efforts and reward based on metrics or feedback that are not obviously in your best interest.

[00:10:20] So we can take note. Okay, the system may not be perfect. However we can try to work within that system, not against it. Because usually we've got a pretty low leverage to change the system itself, but we've got some leverage in each of the internal processes and expectations within the system. And as a coach working with clients, I'm not fixing people, there's nothing wrong with people.

[00:10:49] I'm actually just helping them redesign their experience of the system they're in, in a way that promotes them floating and being at their best, not sinking and being in burnout. So here's an example of how this helped a leadership client of mine shift from stuck back to empowered.

[00:11:09] He talked to me about his loop of waking up in dread every morning, feeling overwhelmed, overburdened -another very common experience in burnout. He'd wake up thinking about his overstuffed schedule and think that it was all his fault, that he'd kept cramming it more and more full. Nonetheless, he dreaded starting the day, and this was causing him severe procrastination, worry, inadequacy, guilt, shame, and self blame, circulating in his head.

[00:11:42] He was just freezing up solid, and he said that although he was a very driven person, lately he'd been unable to do anything about the procrastination and it was causing even more of a log jam in his schedule. So the leverage here was not to keep telling himself he was at fault.

[00:12:03] I encouraged him to think about his work more objectively. Tasks he had finished, were they being criticized or well received by others? Of course, he reported back that others were perfectly happy with his completed work. He's a highly competent and well respected leader, and his boss was willing to cut him some slack as well since he was new to leadership and still learning.

[00:12:31] So I asked him: how do you feel about your own work when you complete a task? He said he wanted to see it as contributing to his team's performance and success. He wanted to empower his team, and when I pushed him, he could see that that was the way that he was behaving when he was working.

[00:12:52] So when he switched his thinking about his workload to, in his own words, "I can make a meaningful impact today", that freed him up with a new sense of purpose, and it released him from this stuckness in procrastination. It allowed him to start his tasks, that gave him more impetus. That's just one example, and I think there's plenty of scope here for you to run through your own inventory of examples.

[00:13:24] But just remember if you are in burnout, burnout feels like you are the problem.

[00:13:30] You are not, you're stuck in a system that almost certainly rewards overwork and punishes everything else. So systems thinking helps you see the bigger picture, how your habits, beliefs, and environment are feeding burnout in a loop. And once you spot the pattern, you can break it. And small, smart shifts can change everything.

[00:13:58] Using your innate skills and intelligence just become successful within the system. The moment you name the loop, you get power back.

[00:14:08] So here's a couple of insights to, to take away.

[00:14:12] Firstly, you can't control systems, but you can understand and work with them.

[00:14:20] You can focus on patterns rather than single events or choices.

[00:14:25] You can look for leverage points and don't push too hard on low leverage areas.

[00:14:32] And be humble, our models are always incomplete. Failure is part of the system.

[00:14:39] And of course, encourage yourself towards resilience, learning, openness to adaptability.

[00:14:45] And never take the system personally.

[00:14:48] It says nothing about you and the potentially glorious contribution that you make naturally to the world. You remain intact, self-defining and self actuating. When you claim that power, yet work within the limits of the system, your talents have room to breathe and shine.

[00:15:09] Hope something in this episode resonated with you today. It's a little bit off the beaten track, in terms of system thinking being a very high level theoretical process, but it does apply actually very well to the nitty-gritty of burnout. So if it interests you, please do take a look at Thinking in Systems by Donella H Meadows, and please also share this episode with others who might benefit from hearing it.

[00:15:37] If you need a bit more help applying the techniques to your stress, overwork or burnout, come and talk to me at dexrandall.com. My coaching program guarantees burnout recovery, and it could be the very thing you need.

[00:15:55] Thank you for listening. I leave you with this: What's one loop you are ready to interrupt this week?

[00:16:01] Take care of your mind and heart. Until next time.