Too Busy with Little Progress? Work These Four Things Out Immediately to Avoid Career Burnout
Do you find yourself on the back foot all the time? Reacting to whatever comes along? Does it feel like your schedule has control of you?
For those of us who love to have an impact and know that we are making a difference, busyness is the number one enemy.
Busyness creates confusion, erodes headspace and turns you into a headless chicken.
Your nerves become frayed, your patience low, and frustration rises as you wonder what there is to show for all your hard work.
However much you do, it never seems enough.
Investing so much energy with very little return is draining and debilitating.
But it is possible to combat busyness and experience a more impactful life where you’re in control of your schedule and your future.
Here are four big things to help you set your long term direction so that you can take charge of your moment by moment choices and get back in the driving seat of your career.
Big Thing #1 – What impact do you want to have during your time on earth?
Start with the end in mind.
Fast forward to your 90th birthday, and imagine all your friends and family, nearest and dearest, celebrating you and the impact you have had on their lives.
What are they saying about you? For what are they thanking you?
Answer these questions:
- What accomplishments do you think must occur during your lifetime so that you will consider your life to have been satisfying and well-lived – a life of few regrets?
- If there was one thing you could change about every person on the planet, what would it be?
- What would you want to be remembered for?
Money comes and goes but you can never get your time back. Don’t wait until it’s too late to bring your contribution to the world.
Big Thing #2 – Who do you most want to impact?
There are 7 billion people on the planet. Of those 7 billion, which group do you want to impact the most?
When you look back over your life, consider when you have felt alive. Whose lives were you working to change? What problems did they have?
If you had to choose one people group to impact in your lifetime, who would they be?
It could be single dads, sex-trafficked women, burned-out professionals, mumpreneurs; the list is endless.
Knowing the audience you can most powerfully serve will enable you to decide where to invest your precious energy and resources.
Big Thing #3 – What message would you like to bring your audience?
If there was one message that you could bring to these people you would love to impact, and you knew that it would change their lives, what would it be?
If you were given a 10-minute slot on the news communicating a message, and it just so happened that all the people you wanted to impact were watching, what would you say?
Imagine being commissioned to design an advert that would reach the whole world. What would you want it to communicate?
You may never communicate your message with your lips or even write it, but we all carry a message. We share this message through how we live our lives. As one of my clients described it, my life is like a song.
My message is: ‘you can trust the truth inside you’.
As a career coach, I am giving space to my clients to find out what is true for them. Instead of being informed by other people’s opinions, I long for my clients to discover what they want to do with their lives.
As a leadership development consultant, I am working with leaders to help them to learn to trust themselves – an essential part of leadership. When I play with kids, I love to give them space to discover and learn for themselves.
You will have a message that is core to who you are. Finding it will help you orientate your life towards it rather than fight it.
Big Thing #4 – What skills do you want to use to impact your audience?
There are many ways you can impact the people you most want to help. We often get caught up in job titles. But if you start with the things you do well, otherwise known as your strengths, you can’t go wrong.
Often our strengths are so innate that we can struggle to recognise them. They come so naturally that we barely realise they are strengths.
I find Strengths Finder an excellent tool for identifying and putting language to how you bring about the most impact to those around you.
Once you have a good idea of your core strengths, you can begin to look at the ‘containers’ that will enable you to make use of them.
My strengths of relating to people deeply, bringing order into chaos, facilitating and coaching have expressed themselves in several different roles throughout my career. I have worked as a youth development leader, a coach, a human resources advisor, and an operations director.
When you put your strengths together with your other 3 Big Things, you can start orientating your life towards them.
And one big note: You don’t have to find a specific job or role or label. We often get caught up in finding the name for our next career role. But simply knowing your message, audience, skills, and impact will help you recognise and build on opportunities when you come across them.
When Anna worked out these four big things, choice re-entered her life
When Anna came to me, she was overwhelmed with busyness. She was running around during the week as a recruitment consultant, and then at the weekend, she was running around doing church activities.
Her boss was asking her to be more assertive with clients, and she knew this was probably a weakness that came from her upbringing. However, she had no time to process this, let alone develop a solution internally.
Since identifying her big four things — impact, audience, skills, and message — Anna has clarified her long term direction. It has enabled her to decide what activities will serve that vision and which activities will not.
Impact – She wants to see education systems improved. Being in various environments, she wants to take the best of each. She can see better ways.
Audience – High school kids, especially from different cultures, countries, and religions. Having been a Malaysian growing up in Germany, and living in England, she experienced rough times herself.
Skills – She’s very good at networking, researching, and observing — and then communicating what she sees.
Message – There’s a different way, a way to make schooling richer.
While her current role isn’t directly linked to the future, success in it will enable her to become her own boss, giving her the freedom to travel, build new connections, and uncover opportunities to make that vision possible.
As a result, she has become more assertive, both in and outside work; she has created more space to reflect and is now getting a lot more done.
‘I don’t feel overwhelmed; there’s a flow; I am surfing on new heights. I close many more deals, and I am excited by new projects.’ Anna said to me.
You CAN be in charge of your career and life.
In summary, busyness is one of the greatest enemies of an impactful life.
Work out these four:
- the impact you want to make
- the audience you want to impact,
- the message you want to bring, and
- the skills by which you want to do that –
They will set your future direction, enabling you to get back in the driving seat and make rewarding progress in your career and life.
Do you want to experience freedom from busyness and overwhelm?
I love helping people overwhelmed by the busyness of a demanding career to gain direction and focus so that they can make a real difference.
Let me help you break down the task into bite-sized chunks so that you can get back on the front foot and reach your career goals.
If you are ready to take that first step, why not drop me a line, and let’s work out a plan to get you back on track.