Beyond Burnout: Recognizing & Navigating Your Career Tipping Point, Part II

In Part I, we met Dave, learned his situation, and started some exercises to help him see things more clearly. If you haven’t read it, it’s not only worth a read, but it’ll help this post make much more sense! This one picks up, right where the last one left off…

On average, per day, Dave had around 6 to 7 marks.  In the beginning, however, there were only 2 or 3.  As time went on and he acclimated to the practice and continued with some mindfulness exercises, the numbers increased.  As he became more mindful in general, Dave was able to notice more times each day that he needed to redirect his mind to the more positive aspects of his work.

Even if you feel like you’re drowning in stress, there is always a way out

There were, however, a few days on which his tally of marks surpassed 15.  I asked him about those days, and he shared that they were truly awful.  Meetings that went no where, followed by frustrating conversions with co-workers and his boss, followed by deadlocked decision making that kept him in a holding pattern and translated into having to work late to meet deadlines.  And then there was also the one day with no marks at all, which he confessed was a day that was too just frustrating and demoralizing to face, so he took a half day off and let go of his practices all together.

I reassured that he had made the right choice.  Dave recognized that things were really not working and he needed some space.  He gave himself what he needed in that moment and that is truly something to be applauded.

I asked him if there were any days that were relatively without frustration.  The answer was a resounding no.  In sum over the course of 3 weeks, he had accumulated 104 marks.  In less than a month he had encountered 104 instances in which he noticed he was unhappy enough to necessitate redirecting his thoughts toward something more positive.  And so I asked him how many marks would be necessary before he knew it was time to make some changes.  Was his threshold 110? 150? 300?

As we talked Dave shared that he felt that the mindfulness practices he had begun to work with were helping him feel more level headed about his work.  The exercises, simple as they were, offered him the mental space to put things in better perspective and they went a long way in soothing his nerves, which made his work easier.  But at the same time, he was also able to more clearly see the myriad of times that he struggled in the day-to-day flow of his job.

When we take concrete steps to see our reality more objectively (like the exercise Dave did), we can begin to see things more clearly.

At our next session, Dave brought more marked up pieces of paper.  This time, however, the papers were of two kinds.  The first were more of the same, he had continued the project of noticing frustrations and redirecting them toward value.  The second set of papers he brought had the same marks made for the same reasons, BUT these were from his time spent outside his work.

In the time between our sessions, and through his continued work with mindfulness practices, Dave had come to realize that negativity from his experiences at work were also plaguing his mind at home.  Even after work was done for the day, it was difficult for him to separate his time and let go of work when he was done for the day.  Dave noticed that he would fluctuate between unhelpful thoughts about work to apathy to actual focus on the things he wanted to focus on—like his family, a tv show, errands, etc.

It was great to see Dave expand his awareness and then expand his practices and exercises accordingly.  And together we found that his average number of marks was, in reality, much larger than he had previously noticed.

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Check back for Part III, the conclusion.

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