11 Signs That You are Burning Out

Welcome to the Leadership Talk Podcast! In today’s episode Pastor Priji shares from the book ‘Didn’t See It Coming’ by Carey Nieuwhof on the different ways that burnout occurs within us and the different signs in which we can identify it.

Transcript:
Greetings in Jesus name & Welcome to today’s Leadership Talk Podcast!

This is a podcast that is designed to equip and strengthen the leadership skills that God has deposited on the inside of you. Some of you may be in church ministry leadership, some in family leadership and others in leadership roles in your respective careers. Whatever the Lord has entrusted you with, He wants you to do it with utmost care and a great amount of faithfulness.

For this mornings’ episode, I would like to share a particular chapter from a book I have been reading, it’s titled ‘Didn’t See It coming by Carey Nieuwhof’. Carey is an influential Pastor, podcaster and thought leader and he has a podcast exclusively for leaders called the Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast which you should check out. He does a lot of interviews and conversations with amazing influential people around the world and it will inspire you, provoke you and make you think differently about your leadership style, structure and any areas of concern that need to be fixed. His book “Didn’t See It Coming” is a book that every leader needs to read to receive fresh inspiration from.

Let us tune into the reading of Chapter 11 from this book Like Falling Off A cliff – How to know when you are burning out.

It was 2006, my family and I had just landed back in Toronto after being in North Point church (it is to the north of Atlanta). Known for pioneering an amazing ministry, this church had been on my radar for a few years. In 2005 I met Reggie Joiner, a brilliantly creative thinker and leader, we became friends and he introduced me to his boss Andy Stanley who had become a hero to me as I followed him from thousand miles away. In my view and the view of many others, Andy is one of the most gifted communicators and leaders of this generation.

Reggie invited me to speak at a conference in North Point and I made it in May 2006. At first, I thought he would want me to do a breakout session at the event but then he told me he had bigger plans. Could you do a keynote? he asked. If you know the church world a little bit, that’s kind of being invited to play the Super bowl. I can still vividly replay in my mind the day I spoke. Refining and practising my speech for the hundredth time, ironing my shirt to perfection in the hotel room; I thought I was ready but my nerves went a little ballistic during the soundcheck the staff handed me the mic and it had Andy written on it.

I got introduced and as I took the stage in front of twenty-five hundred leaders from around the world, I looked at the front row; my wife and boys were sitting next to Reggie and Andy. Talk about intimidating – by most accounts, the talk went well, more than a decade later people still talk to me about that keynote. A few people referred to it as the talk of my life which is a wonderful mixed bag compliment, in many ways. I felt like I was at the top of the world, I had just spoken at one of the most influential churches in America and apparently, I had done well.

I was leading one of the fastest-growing and largest churches in our denomination in Canada and our ministry was attracting national and international attention. Nothing prepared me for what happened next, when the plane touched down in Toronto, I felt like I fell off a cliff. Throughout my thirties, people told me that if I wasn’t careful, I would burn out. I wasn’t the best listener because I thought I was smarter than they were, other weaker people might burn out but I knew myself well, the work I was doing was important and that it would never happen to me.

I had come to the edge of burnout many times but I had managed to come out of it, got some rest, took a vacation and I thought I could do that forever and then finally I couldn’t. That’s the thing about burnout, once you fall off the cliff, you have nothing to grab onto, you are in freefall and all the grasping and clamouring you do, doesn’t help one bit.

Burnout is complicated – so what exactly happened to me in that summer of 2006, I still ask myself that question. Who really knows what corrodes the soul to the point where it disintegrates. Burnout is complicated but I do know this in caring for others, I do know that I hadn’t cared adequately for my own heart and soul. I spiralled down for 3 months before I hit bottom; I had been running hard for over a decade…maybe for 3 decades. I was a teenager who worked 3 jobs not because I had to but because I wanted to, I was the A student who completed 3 University degrees while holding multiple jobs, getting married and starting a family. I was the young pastor who didn’t understand the word NO, all the while thinking sleep and exercise are for people who have time for those things.

My accumulated fatigue played a deep role but Burnout is deeper, in addition to the physical component, there were spiritual, emotional and relational components as well, those are things I didn’t pay attention to until my life came to a screeching halt.
Spiritually, I found myself in a bizarre territory, I never lost my faith or stopped reading scriptures and praying. It is just that in the numbness that accompanied my burnout, I couldn’t feel my faith anymore. I prayed but it felt like my prayers bounced off the ceiling, I read scripture that I felt that the scripture was no longer reading me. Relationally it felt different, I felt people had taken small slices of my life over a decade, that’s what leadership and life can be if you are not careful and you give and give…without replenishing and eventually there is nothing left.

I was going through counselling and although in the long run, it was helpful, in the interim it was deeply painful. Over a period of years, I realized so much of my interior life was skewed, thankfully it didn’t attract any headline… no affair, no stolen money but there was an abundance of insecurities, jealousy, fear and a deep misunderstanding of identity and fulfilment.

At some point in my childhood, I had concluded that love was earned by performance, the better I did, the more loved I would be, but that’s not how love works at all. This distorted perspective lead me into an unhealthy cycle of performance addiction – a bad disease for a public speaker. I would finish a message on Sunday and ask my wife how it was and would keep asking her for feedback constantly. The insecurity was deep enough and no words were big enough and comprehensive enough to fill that void. There would never be enough thank you, enough appreciation. Apparently, it wasn’t enough to see my wife, my kids, Reggie and Andy waving at my talk along with thousand others. It doesn’t matter how much water you pour into your bucket if your bucket is filled with holes.

A long dark summer, all of that and much more went into my collapse in that summer of 2006. My energy dropped to a historic low, so did my motivation and my mood. The drive that used to motivate me to wake up in the morning disappeared and there were days I thought I could be on the bed all day long. My productivity dropped and most of my work as a Pastor is dependent on the mental and spiritual energy I bring into my work. I found writing sermons difficult, interacting with people challenging and writing emails next to impossible.

I started to develop a fear of people which I never had before. I am naturally wired to be an extrovert but that summer I began to fear everyone and I became deeply antisocial. I didn’t want to talk to anyone other than my wife and children. When we did go out to be with our small group, I would try to hide behind my wife hoping she would be shielded against humanity. The most disturbing part of my burnout was the loss of hope. I lost hope that God could ever use me, I thought He was finished using me for ministry and I began to wonder if I would ever be of any help to someone.

My situation grew darker and I realized that the best way to get through this burnout was to not go through it because hope had died for me in those months and I began to wonder if that should be my preferred option as well. For the first time in my life, I began to think that suicide was the best option. If I have lost hope and I am of no good for others and I am causing all kinds of pain to others then perhaps the best solution would be to be no more.

By God’s grace, I didn’t own any weapons and I shudder to think what I could have done to myself in a weak moment, I knew the kitchen knife would have been a horrible option. In my mind, my preferred path was to use my speeding car against a concrete bridge and end things that way and in a twisted way it was about getting back at God and a life that I thought was letting me down. As I look back after a decade, on how I felt at that time, it seems like it was someone else who struggled with those thoughts.

Burnout messes with your thinking, its arena is your thought life, it can be a merciless savage beast. I am so grateful I didn’t listen to those voices but I share this in case you hear something similar. Do the people you love a favour – don’t listen, don’t give in, don’t give up, those negative voices are lying and suicide is not the solution. Its not a 40 something issue

A few years after my burnout experience ended, I nervously decided to talk about this with leaders to help others. The first time I spoke about my burnout experience, and I introduced it by saying that if you are in your twenties or thirties, this talk may not mean to you or it may not be relevant for you but someday it would be helpful to you or a friend.

I wasn’t ready for the mass of young adults who stood to talk to me after my presentation, nearly all said, ‘I am feeling so much of what you described. I had no idea, Burnout has become an epidemic, the more people I meet, it feels like many more people are suffering from burnout or low grade burn out by that I mean the joy of life is gone but the functions of life continue.

You are not dead but you are not fully alive, the symptoms are not enough to stop people in their tracks as my burnout did to me, but they are present enough to sap the meaning and wonder of everyday life.
More than a few of you listening to this are on the edge of the cliff we call burnout and probably a few of you are in freefall. What’s so perplexing about burnout and low-grade burnout is that more than a few of the symptoms strike people as normal. So how do you know you are heading towards burnout?

I’ll describe 11 signs and symptoms of burnout, I had experienced. if you recognize 1 or 2, consider them as warning signs, if you identify with 6 to 8, you are in low-grade burnout or heading for the cliff, if you resonate with most or all the signs you are likely in full-fledged burnout. I hope these signs can help you see the edge.

1) Your passion fades: Everybody struggles with a lack of passion from time to time but burnout moves you into a place of sustained motivation loss. Passion is what makes you fall in love, jump up and down when you get into the college of your choice and cry when you saw your firstborn. Passion makes life and leadership wonderful. For a long period of time when I burnt out, my passion set like the sun. I knew what I was doing was important leading a local church and raising a family but I couldn’t feel anymore, my passion had died.

2) You no longer feel the highs or lows: If you are healthy, you feel fit, you experience highs and lows. When I burned out I couldn’t feel either. My main emotion was numbness, it was like my emotion had become like a long drive through the plains, flat for endless miles.
If a friend had a baby, intellectually it was an important moment that was supposed to generate joy but I couldn’t feel it. Conversely, if someone ended up in a problem, I didn’t feel that either. Burn out numbs your heart. The numbing of my heart I had battled 3 or 4 years before I fell headlong into burnout. You are designed to celebrate when people are celebrating and mourn when people are mourning, if that’s not happening, something is not right.

3) Little things make you disproportionately emotional: It is not that burnt-out people experience zero emotions but they experience inappropriate or disproportionate emotions, little things will set you off, like a missed deadline or a dishwasher that didn’t get empty on time. It may be a 1 or 3 out of 10 on a problem scale but your reaction would be like 11.
Treating small things like big things and big things like small things are both signs that something deeper is wrong.

4) Everybody drains you: People are a mixed bag, some energize and some don’t. When I burned out, nobody energized me. I knew my family and friends were good people but my heart couldn’t feel it. If nobody energizes you, they are not the problem, you are.

5) You will become cynical: You could be a cynic for a long time before burning out, if you find your cynicism progressing rapidly you are burning out. Cynicism never finds a home in a healthy heart.

6) Nothing satisfies you anymore: When I was going through burnout, nothing satisfied me; sleep didn’t, prayer didn’t, good people didn’t, food and vacation didn’t, that’s a sign of depression and burnout.

7) You can’t think straight: Your heart messes with your mind and you lose the ability to think clearly. I had a daily conversation with myself which boiled down to 5 words, ‘Just don’t do anything stupid; that would include not shouting at people.

8) Your productivity is dropping: I am usually a fairly productive leader in person, some would say highly productive but my productivity dropped, even writing a simple email would take an hour, my thoughts wouldn’t come together, my pace dropped significantly. If you are working long hours but producing little value, pay attention.

9) You are self-medicating: This includes overeating, overworking, sexual addiction, compulsive shopping, drinking or drugs. When this occurs you have chosen a path of self-medication instead of self-care to deal with pain.

10) You don’t laugh anymore: You don’t laugh like you used to, this is small but important. When you are burning out you don’t find anything funny and you begin to resent people who enjoy life.

11) Sleep and time-off no longer heal you: If you are just tired, good sleep and a week off will help most healthy people bounce back with energy. But when you burn out, you can take an entire month off but it will still not make a difference.

Some of you are really alarmed right now because you are registering 8 out of 11 symptoms, or maybe 11 some of you are concerned for your spouse or best friend because you recognise the symptoms in him or her.

In my view, if you show any signs of burnout, you should immediately take the help of a medical professional and an excellent trained Christian counsellor. A medical doctor will help you find how severe your symptoms are and a skilled counsellor will help you identify the reasons for your burnout.

Tony had urged me to go for counselling years before, I was too proud to go. I sent people to counselling but I didn’t want to go myself. My wife and others saw issues I couldn’t see and they were right, I was hurting others unintentionally.
The truth is we all have unresolved issues and the sooner we deal with them, the better off we are and everyone around us will be. Your unresolved past will sink your future unless you deal with it.
I became a performance addict and God needed to speak into that space for me to use the gifts He has given me in a healthy way. Christain counsellors helped me to get to the bottom of that.

Why do I recommend a trained Christian counsellor? Look for credentials and seek recommendations from a friend. The essence of burnout is a spiritual problem and you need to include Jesus. If you leave Jesus, you are leaving much of the potential healing.

How do you move out of burnout? Believe it or not, you can come back out of burnout and come back more fully alive, that’s what happened to me.

Pastor Priji: A big Amen to that when you treat your burnout, you are going to come out of it fully alive and with even more productivity than you had previously.
I hope you will find time to read the entire book and subscribe to his podcast.
Thank you for subscribing, it is a joy to bring leadership episodes to you once every three weeks. On that note, I would love to invite you to our upcoming leadership conference in Mumbai from 25th to 28th January 2022.