Welcome to the PMO Strategies Podcast + Blog, where PMO leaders become IMPACT Drivers!

Today we are talking about a very important topic that applies to every single one of us at some point or another. We’re talking about how to avoid burnout or recover from it if you’re already experiencing burnout while achieving your goals, especially your big, scary audacious goals as we start getting closer to the end of the year.

There is no one better to talk about this topic with us today, then my dear friend Beth Genly. Beth is a Yale-educated coach and speaker and the heart of her company Burnout Solutions. She’s co-author of the groundbreaking book, Save Yourself from Burnout: A System to Get Your Life Back. Beth supports hardworking professionals who are really killing it and nearly killing themselves in the process to build a life that optimizes their careers and their wellbeing. Beth, thank you so much for being here.

Laura: Before we dive in, I would love if you could tell the audience a little bit more about you because I know you, I know your story and your background. I just think you are absolutely fabulous and have so much goodness to share with this audience. Before we dive in, can you tell me a little bit more about who you are and how you got to this place then running burnout solutions?

Beth: Sure, so it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was actually a French major in college then I worked in corporate for a while because being a French major doesn’t really prepare you for anything in this country. I thought that I wanted to go to the top in my area in corporate, but I’d get home at night and I think, you know, if this company slid into the ocean tonight, I wouldn’t look back. I had fun all day at work, but didn’t really care.

And then somehow I heard a nurse-midwife interviewed on the radio and thought that’s it. That’s what I want to be when I grow up. So that’s why I went to Yale. I did a program for non-nurse college graduates, which was, oh my goodness. So intense. That was my first experience with burnout, which is unfortunately common for grad school. But anyway, I got through it and I loved my work. I loved being a nurse midwife more than I can possibly tell you. There’s something about receiving a newborn into your hands. Wow. And watching that child take its first breath in your hands, it’s, it’s beyond great. There is, there is no higher high for me. And I knew I wanted to die with my boots on. I thought this is just it. I will do this forever.

Even when my pager would wake me up in the middle of the night, which it often did, cause that’s the nature of the work. I’d be like, “Oh I get to do this. I’m so excited.” And you know, driving in, I was just thrilled and you know, my kids were growing up and it was hard on my whole family and I felt bad about that, but I loved my work.

I got to the point where when my pager went off at three in the morning, I wanted to fling the damn thing out the window. And when I was driving to work, I would see the sign for the lottery. I don’t even buy lottery tickets, but I’d see the sign for the lottery and how many million dollars you could win this month, and I’d start to cry because I didn’t even know what I would do that I could be happy doing. That wasn’t this. And I think maybe I could just like run off the road and wreck my car and break my leg so I wouldn’t have to go to work.

It was crazy. Wow. It was crazy. I tried really hard. I stuck with it for years when I was feeling that way and I finally quit. I quit my career. It caused me a lot of grief, quite literally grief. I spent the next 10 years or so trying to figure out what happened to me and going through the medical literature on burnout to say, how does this happen to people? And how can I help people who love their work and are great at what they do and are making a huge difference in the world? How can I help them stay with it like I was unable to do? And that’s how I ended up with Burnout Solutions. So that’s, that’s sort of kind of the short version.

Laura: Wow, it’s so true that many of us start businesses based on our own experiences and going through a journey like that and surviving a journey and a process like that. And then once you figured it out, you want to share that with others and you want others to see that solution and not experience the pain you experienced.

Beth: Right. Absolutely. And as a nurse where I went was to the medical literature and I discovered that there were 40 years of studies on burnout and there’s still lots of more of them being published. So there was a lot of material to draw from that I had just missed. And because they don’t publish those studies in OB GYN journals, they publish them elsewhere. So I had missed them while I was working. All my work is based on this research.

Laura: That’s great. And you know, that point really resonates with me of the having the experiences, finding a better solution and then wanting to share that with everybody you possibly can. That’s literally why I built my company PMO strategies. That’s why I do this podcast is why offer so many, so many free training programs and webinars and the more advanced programs that I offer is all because I’ve been there. I’ve done that. When I first started doing PMOs, it was 1999 and you couldn’t just Google how to set up a PMO and get the answers. There weren’t that many books. And if there were books, a lot of them were so heavy and technical. It just overwhelmed me completely. And so I felt like there had to be a better way. And then once I uncover those better ways and then I saw others of my peers struggling, I was like, this is ridiculous. I know how to do this. Let me help you.

Don’t go through the headaches and the pain that I’ve been through. And the same thing applies here with burnout.

I feel like it’s a constant battle for me personally not to get burned out. And it’s because I feel so strongly about this work. The work is so personal for me. So for me, running my company, serving my students, I just had another group coaching call for the IMPACT Engine System™ training program. I do my big signature program and I just feel so attached to these students. I feel their pain when they’re experiencing pain, I feel their frustrations and I just want to help them. And unfortunately what that means is that I will go overboard with wanting to serve and wanting to do more and wanting to give back more and wanting to create a new thing and wanting to get more content out to them and wanting to solve their problems.

I can get burnout myself. So I completely understand that whole concept. And it’s something I work on regularly.

When I learned about your stuff and when I saw your speech and all of your content and of course you’re part of the PMO IMPACT Summit this year. It was just light bulbs went off for me and it’s really helped me think through better ways to avoid burnout, especially when you’ve got big goals you’re trying to accomplish.

I feel like that’s where our PMO leaders, those that are in, all of our folks that are listening to this podcast, they probably clicked on it because it said burnout and it’s something they’re experiencing. And PMO leaders in particular I think really struggle with all the things they have to accomplish and trying to accomplish those big goals while dealing with burnout and trying to find a balance.

That can play out in especially this time of year, right? Because they might have an annual plan that they have for their PMO and certain things that have to get accomplished. And those things always seem to take longer to accomplish than the time we’ve allowed for them. Sometimes I feel like we’re our own worst enemy. We’re really good at planning, but then we really have what I call “Thanksgiving eyes.”

We just want to add more to our plates and more to our plates and there’s no way we or our organization can digest it. All right? So you’ve got people in the high achievers, these are high achievers, these are what I call IMPACT drivers, these PMO leaders, and those wanting to leverage the power of project management to make a big IMPACT, want to make a big IMPACT. So they’ve got so much to do and they’ve got so many different people that they’re trying to serve.

For me, I didn’t really recognize that I was burnt out until I was really, really burned out until I was just, there was the last straw. Right. And so how would our audience listening today avoid that? Like how can they recognize burnout sooner? What are the typical signs of burnout?

Beth: So I just wanted to say before I get into that, just for a moment, you call your people IMPACT Drivers. I think of them as “community heroes” because you are such an example of the kind of person that wants to give and give and give because you have such a big vision for what’s possible and such a big vision for helping people and making a difference for other people. It’s what leads us into just using ourselves up.

Let’s talk about how to recognize burnout.

First of all, there’s recognizing burnout when you’re in it big time. In those cases I just read a post from someone locally who makes a huge difference, and she said, “you know, I think I’m losing my short term memory.”

She just was having trouble tracking everything. This is a super organized person who makes a huge difference in the world. So crankiness, memory issues, being accident-prone. You know how when you bang your elbow against the corner of your desk and it really hurts? On a good day, it hurts and you swear and you move on. On a bad day, you feel like you’re just gonna burst into tears.

In fact, there was a day I was headed for clinic and I was late and I decided to run up the stairs to the clinic because the elevator was too packed and I just wanted to get there on time. I tripped on the second stare and banged my shin and ended up sitting on those stairs and sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. They eventually took me to the ER because I wouldn’t stop crying and it was a hospital and they didn’t know what else to do with me. It was just that I was exhausted. Right?

The thing is to recognize it before it gets that far. When you start being unable to manage small issues without losing it, when you get clumsy, when you forget important dates over and over, when you begin to feel like it doesn’t really matter, that no matter how you work at how hard you work, it doesn’t really matter. Those are all signs of burnout.

The thing to understand about burnout is that it does not mean that you’re a wimp. It does not mean that you’re a bad person or have bad values or bad character. It means that you need to recharge. Yeah. And you need to step back and take a look at what your resources are and how you can recharge. It’s just a thing that happens. It’s just a thing. And we know what to do.

When a thing happens, you step back, you assess it and your regroup. If people are saying, boy, you look tired. Well, its because that’s what goes first, right?

Laura: Yes!I I know my audience needs this -II was one of them. I’m talking to them all the time and that’s the first thing that goes. They just stay up a little extra late or back in and check their emails or work on a presentation or work on a plan after they put the kids to bed. Or they feed their families or they, you know, um, take their dog for a walk, whatever it is. They’ve got all these obligations in their personal lives and then they get back to work late at night. And before, you know what, it’s midnight and they have to get up at 6:00 AM or something like that.

Beth: And I’m sorry, but for most people, six hours of sleep is not enough on a regular basis. So that’s definitely one. I know that they experience a lot and that is the first sign. I can usually tell myself, because I’ll start getting the dark circles under my eyes. I’m definitely not getting enough sleep and burnout is about to hit.

There’s a really interesting set of studies on people who get six hours of sleep a night where they compared them to people who had a couple of drinks and they did the same kind of assessments that they would do for driving. In other words, are they making good judgment quickly? How were their reaction times and how safe are they? And what they found is that people who are getting six hours of sleep a night consistently flunk those tests. But the really weird thing about that is that they don’t know that they are are not safe for themselves and other people. They’re not safe to drive. They’re not safe to make important decisions. They’re not safe to operate heavy machinery like cars.

But if you ask them, how are you doing? They’ll say, “you know, I’ll sleep when I’m dead. I’m, I’m pretty tough. I’m doing okay.” They don’t notice that deterioration. And there are very, very few human beings who are actually able to function well on that little sleep. It is just a fact.

Laura: Yeah. Oh my gosh, that’s such a good one. And I really want to emphasize that point because I can imagine that most of the people listening are thinking they wouldn’t dare get behind the wheel after having a few drinks. And especially now when we have Uber and everything else. Yet every morning when they’re commuting to work with five hours of sleep at night or six hours of sleep consistently, that’s essentially what they’re doing.

Beth: And even more, would they show up for work having had a couple of drinks first thing in the morning? Well, I hope not. We shouldn’t laugh because it’s so stressful. But yes, exactly.

When you consider yourself as expendable in the process of getting everything else done, then your money doesn’t match the month, your resources don’t match the month, you’ll end up at the end just not quite getting through.

Laura: Can you get good sleep and still be burned out?

Beth: That’s a good question. I have a friend who has a particularly brittle form of diabetes. She is a very high achiever. She’s the kind of person that make lists and then makes lists of her lists and just gets a ton of stuff done every day.

What happens because she has this chronic illness and lots of people have chronic illnesses of various kinds and because it’s, it’s brittle, it, it, it changes from day to day. Her needs for insulin and exactly how many carbs she has to eat and all of that has to be tracked as diligently as everything else. And it gets weird on her really easily.

The point is that she does all the right things. She is so careful about how she sleeps in what she eats and how much insulin. But if she takes on an extra project without thinking through the stress of it really carefully, her sugars will go haywire and she’ll end up sick. That is a form of burnout because she has an Achilles heel right there. And so many of us have Achilles heels around, some kind of illness or another. For me, actually one of my first signs would be that I’d sprained my right ankle again. Yeah. You know, I get tired and I’d stopped carrying myself as well and I’d step off a curb and go down. Yeah. And there’d be like, Oh no, I have pushed myself way too hard. And the place that was weakest in me was my ankle. Later on when I kept pushing myself, then I started to get asthma on top of that. But that’s, that’s a whole nother story.

Laura: The reason I asked the question is it’s not just sleep. That is one big thing and it’s usually where we sacrifice, but there’s other signs and even if you are sleeping well. You can sleep eight hours a night and work all the rest of the hours of your waking hours and still be burned out.

I feel like there’s other things like just really pushing it too hard at work, not giving yourself time to take breaks. There’s other factors that I think contribute to burnout. Are there any other signs that you would want our audience kind of looking for before we go on to making it even more complicated?

Beth: I think we’ve pretty much covered it. I think we’re good.

Laura: On top of the typical burnout of just being a hard-driving or IMPACT driving kind of a person like this audience is, we’re in a really complicated time of year right now when this is going live, we are just beginning the big holiday season, everyone is doing their self-evaluations for their reviews at work. They’re trying to achieve last-minute goals for their PMOs or for certain projects. Projects are needing to wrap up. They’re in a really intense time. So we’ve got the holidays coming up and we have people trying to accomplish the rest of their goals, end of the year, stress and strain, big goals that we still have to accomplish before the end of this decade, by the way, we’re coming into a new decade. That’s a lot of pressure and stress.

Sometimes times it’s not the time to take on a big goal, sometimes it’s not the time to push yourself to the stretch goals. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s not. But you and I have talked about the fact that you’ve got to know when and how you can effectively use stretch goals and these big audacious goals you want to accomplish to get to the outcomes you’re trying to achieve and when are they just going to cause a lot of additional burnout without getting to the outcome we’re expecting.

Beth: Exactly, and since we’re talking about the holidays, one of the things I want you to look at as a stretch goal are your plans for the holidays, both your plans for your PMO and how your PMO organization is going to celebrate the holidays or mark them for your customers and yourselves and personally in your family and your community.

This is a wonderful example of a stretch goal that may or may not make sense and from the description that you just gave, it may not make sense to set big, hairy audacious goals for how absolutely perfect your holidays are going to be. So I want to, I want to jump in here with a study that was published in the Harvard business review a little while ago that talked about when stretch goals are something that creates greatness for a company or a person, and when they create failure.

The biggest problem is when there’s a mismatch between resources and the goal set, you’re, and if you’re talking about someone that is already strongly super stretched and then they want to add the stretch goal of doing something amazing for the holidays, it may be something that ends up creating more burnout and creating far less than the experience you want to create.

What do we do about that? Why do we do about that? So two things. I have a questionnaire. It’s designed for the kind of person who likes to make lists and lists of lists to really look at will your resources support what you’re trying to accomplish so that you can specifically identify what needs to get fixed, what needs to get rearranged so you know whether to delay, delete or to move ahead. So it looks at your own resources.

It looks at your community resources, it looks at your morale, it looks at your burnout shield, which is the areas that I look at and to strengthen yourself so that you are the strongest to achieve what you want to achieve.

Laura: Okay, so let’s talk about this burnout shield because this sounds fantastic and exactly like what this audience needs as we’re going into the holidays. What is the burnout shield? How do we use the burnout shield to protect ourselves while we’re handling all of the priorities that need to get accomplished? All of these goals that need to get accomplished and all of the requirements we have personally, it’s really a personal and professional, not just balance. I don’t know that there’s such a thing as balance really as much as there is incorporation and integration of your personal and professional lives, how do you do all the things and still protect yourself from burnout, especially in the holiday season?

Beth: The burnout shield has five areas that have been shown in the research to protect you from burnout. And I’m going to start with reflection and recognition, which is the easiest area to do something about because it basically just involves thinking and taking a moment to think about what’s important to you.

So that’s the reflection part. What are your values and what is most important to you and how is something you’re doing today or something that you did do today? Reflecting and forwarding that value. So it can be very simple that you, you know, you helped someone figure out how to get a goal done so that supporting other people may be one of your personal values and you can say, you know, I made a difference to someone today. Or you can say I got enough sleep and my value is that I will still be standing at the end of this year.

Also recognition, I think the nature of a lot of PMO work is almost like housework. There are a million tasks that have to get done and then have to get done again and then you have to do them again. It’s not like you do it and it’s done and you go onto the next thing. It’s a, it’s continual around the wheel of, okay, it’s done for today and now I have to go back and redo it. Setting small goals and praising yourself, allowing yourself to celebrate, Hey I got done today. I got this little thing done today because all of us can use more recognition.

Laura: That’s a really important point. Reflecting, I think one of the things, I have a tool called the One Hour Business Manager and the idea with it is that you take time to reflect and you incorporate reflection into your schedule and make sure that you’re taking the time to reflect on where have we been, what did we expect to accomplish, what do we actually accomplish, what do we need to accomplish and what order do those things need to happen in?

And taking the time to celebrate our wins, especially all of us that are list makers. I actually make lists like crazy and then I go ahead and I just erased that list and then start a new one. And I don’t even take the time to reflect on, okay, what are the things that I did that actually, okay, I got a win here, let’s acknowledge that before we move on. And so I’ve been trying to get better about that because it does. I think for me personally help prevent burnout because I get burnout when I feel like I’m spinning and not getting things done.

I get a high from accomplishment and I know a lot of my IMPACT drivers feel the same way. They get a high from an, you know, a good strong feeling motivation by accomplishing something. So we do need to take time to acknowledge that we did accomplish something and reward and recognize that even in ourselves and especially with our teams, that’s so important to all of you listening that have teams and you have teams whether you think you have teams or not because whether they report directly to you or not, your PMO community is your team.

Making sure that they’re also feeling rewarded and recognized, especially right now. And you can’t do that unless you take the time to reflect on what has been accomplished and take a minute to look around you and see what others are doing. So I think that’s really, really important and applies so directly to this audience.

Beth: I have a really simple hack for this thing of erasing things from your list, which I used to do all the time. I, it would make me feel like nothing was ever done and like I’d never ever accomplished anything. Yeah. Instead of erasing it, highlight it and mark it as a strike-through, Oh, it still disappears from your list in terms of something you have to read again. But at the end of your day or the end of your week, you’ve got this long list of stuff with strikethroughs.

You can just look at it and say, wow, my list is still long, but look at all the stuff I’ve crossed off. It makes a huge difference to your sense of achievement.

Laura: Okay, so the next thing is self-care and we’ve already mentioned one of the most important ones for community heroes or IMPACT drivers and that is getting enough rest.

Beth: Yeah, I would say the next one is hydration. Just make sure you’re drinking enough fluids. It makes a huge difference. And the next one after that is remembering to pee. You just say that. I did just say that as a nurse, I can tell you that it’s not good for you to hold it for a really long time. And I know a lot of people that won’t drink enough fluids because then they say, I end up in the bathroom a lot. But I’m telling you, your brain doesn’t work right if you’re not drinking enough fluids.

Laura: Yes, you’ve gotta be hydrated. That is so true. I drink probably at least a gallon of water a day and if I don’t, I just can’t function.

Beth: Yes, exactly. I feel tired if I don’t get enough water. So, and that’s the thing. All of you caffeinated is out there with your coffee, your tea, your sodas, that’s fine. But every time you drink one of those things, you’ve got to double the amount of water you need to take in as a result because all of those are dehydrators and it doesn’t count as those fluids. You still need to get eight, eight-ounce glasses. I think I, you know, I think you’ve got to go a lot more than that. If you’re a hard-driving person, you’ve got to add more water to keep feeding you. Just like a plant needs to keep growing. If you’re going to be going a hundred miles an hour, you’ve got to make sure you’re staying hydrated just like an athlete would.

Here’s, here’s another couple hacks with that. One is that if you’re not drinking enough, your body may make you hungry before it makes you thirsty.

It just, you find you’re snacking ridiculously, you know, and you’re wondering, why the heck am I snacking when I know I don’t need these calories or I don’t need this kind of calories? Try drinking a glass of water and giving it 10 minutes and see if it was really that you were thirsty rather than hungry. That is one.

Yeah, so that that may be something that really, and then the next thing that I would add in self-care, normally exercise goes on this list and I’m going to be a little counter attic to it. If here, if you’re that tired, if you’re that close to burned out, be very careful about exercise because that’s a place that you can get injured. So think first, right? And then exercise, right. It’s not that I think exercise is bad. I think exercise is wonderful, but you can put yourself at risk if you try.

If you make exercise just another thing you have to push yourself through. Well, and you don’t have to run a marathon or go to a body pump class in order to exercise. You can start by just taking a walk. And I can tell you when I feel burned out, when I feel tired, when I feel like I am just pushing it too hard or you know, I can’t think if I go take a 15-minute walk around the neighborhood, around the office, depending on what I’m doing. Or sometimes when I’m with my clients I’ll say, let’s go outside and get a walk. If we’re stuck on a problem and that can give you an entirely new perspective, get your brain flowing again, get your thoughts flowing and you know, help kind of counteract that burnout. So that’s one of my top tips for when you’re feeling that and you’re in the middle of the day and you don’t have time to go take a nap onto your desk, go get 15 minutes of exercising, just walk.

You don’t have to run, you don’t have to run in your heels or your suits. Just go take a walk around the block and you’ll feel the fresh air. And all of that I think will help. And if you possibly can go somewhere where there’s some greenery, some nature, because even if it’s a potted plant or looking out the window at greenery and nature, wherever you can find it, that really does make a difference to your ability to think and to your ability to, to regroup and come back to a problem fresh.

Next is capacity. And that means how full is your bucket. And this is where you get to look at some of these projects that you’re, you’re thinking of adding on or increasing your scope or doing more for the holidays or whatever it is.

How full is your bucket already? How, how full is your plate. And if you are already feeling like you are not managing everything as well as you like the thing to do is what can you delay or delegate or just drop. So delay, delegate and drop are your friends here. If you’re feeling like you’re at capacity rather than adding still more things, that’s great.

Laura: You know with that I, cause I don’t feel like I can ever delay anything or drop anything or delegate anything that’s like my nature.

But what I’ve done is I’ve learned to ask some really pointed questions of myself. Like if I’m afraid to delay something, what happens if I delayed us right now? What happens if this doesn’t happen right now? What is the IMPACT if I wait a week to do this? And often I find that I am my own worst enemy. And so the things that I am just like has to happen right now and it’s so important and it really wouldn’t make an IMPACT or a difference at all if it waited a week except for I would have more sanity. So I have learned to use the delegate delay tactics to help myself kind of avoid burnout.

Beth: I’m going to skip in the order that I usually do it because the last area, and we’ll come back to the fifth one in a second, is coping skills and the coping skills area really has to do with asking better questions, right?

We have certain go-to ways that we cope with difficult situations and backing up and saying, does this really make sense to do right now or to take on right now or to get upset about right now, is this really necessary for my wellbeing or the wellbeing of the project? And so for this one, besides asking great questions, the other one that I would suggest is looking for a way to take a moment to be grateful.

A lot of times it’s very hard to be negative and be grateful at the same time. So finding something to be grateful about. And I’ll tell you, there was a very, very low point in my life when someone asked me to find something to be grateful about. And at the time, the only thing that I could think of to say was I have thumbs. I mean, seriously, I was in a bad way, but it actually did take me a half a notch up. I am glad I have thumbs and it works at whatever level you’re coming at it from. If you can find something to be grateful for, it takes you up a notch and then you can look for one more thing to be grateful for and it takes you up a notch. So that’s a coping skill I strongly recommend.

Laura: That’s great. I love it. And it doesn’t have to be big things, which I think is your point. Yes. I have to say, well, you know, I’m grateful for all of these big things. It can just be, I’m grateful that it’s sunny outside today. You know that actually, I was experiencing some pretty serious burnout this summer as you know because I was in the middle of doing recordings for our Summit.

We had some major delays with our move and we’re pretty much left homeless for a month while I was trying to record all of these videos for the summit and you know, deliver some things for clients and I was feeling pretty frustrated and we moved our whole family and our business a thousand miles and it just felt like hadn’t just come to visit. He literally moved in with us, Murphy’s law affected all of the things, everything, silly little things to huge things.

And it got comical quite frankly because there was just so much of it. And then on top of all the things, there was a hurricane coming right at us, a category 5 hurricane heading directly towards us. And it was just like, are you kidding me? I was going to dare a Dorian to come near us because we were just in such a way.

I remember, and I may even said it to you when we recorded your session, I’m just happy there’s Palm trees outside. I’m just happy there’s beautiful fluffy clouds and the weather here is so wonderful. I had to find little things that would help me remember that. It’s all okay and that this is just a moment. This isn’t the way things are going to be forever. So yes, although things are stressful and exhausting and all this is going on, it really does help you cope with the tough times because there will be tough times and that will continue.

That’s a guarantee that they, you know, things will change, you’ll have good times, you’ll have bad times, that’s life. But how you find those moments to cope with it when it’s chaos, when Murphy has moved in with you, if you can find a way to just be grateful for the Palm trees, I think it can make all the difference in the world. And maybe for you, it’s the beautiful mountains. Maybe it’s that you can go stand outside barefoot under a tree for five minutes, whatever the thing is, go find your thing that makes you happy to be alive.

And it can be as simple as Palm trees or fluffy clouds outside, whatever it takes. But that’s definitely my, my 2 cents based on what you’re hearing and what I tried to do myself when things got completely out of control this year. Absolutely.

Beth: I would add one more thing to that is when you’re looking for self, looking at your self-soothing behaviors, are they restorative or destructive?

So you’re in Florida right now, so you can go stand barefoot under a Palm tree if you want to dig North West. And if I were barefoot outside right now, that would not be a restorative behavior.

Laura: So it’s all relative, right? Well, maybe it would wake you up a little. Maybe it would.

Beth: The last one is community and, and I think it strikes at some of the heart of what you were talking about a little while ago. I think an essential piece here is asking for help. Yeah. Asking for help. We are so good at being self-sufficient. We are so good at deciding that the easiest way to get it done is to do it ourselves. Yeah. And being able to ask for help at home.

Even starting with what level of holiday would be enough for us to feel like we’ve celebrated without feeling like any of us have poured out energy. We haven’t got to make it happen and then how are we going to do that together.

Laura: That’s really great and I think that for PMO leaders, this is a really good one because many of us are naturally in a position to be a community builder because we are creating a culture of project management in our organizations. We may or may not have people reporting directly to us, but as I mentioned earlier, you still have a team, you still have a community, you have all of the people that are managing projects in the organization, either formally or informally. They’re there and they need your help and your support. So what can you do to build a culture of collaboration and community and supporting each other? I think that that is an incredible opportunity for us to kind of step up as PMO leaders step up into the role of community builder. And quite frankly you’ll get as much from it as they will get from it as well.

I can tell you with my IMPACT Engine System™ training program, the coaching level allows for people to be in a community together. And like I mentioned, we had a group coaching session this morning. Half of the time was spent with them supporting each other and it was so beautiful to watch. One of the students had a question, they needed a resource. One other person jumped in saying,”Hey, I uploaded that to the community, you know, to our forum, you go check it out. Here’s how you can use it. Let me show you. Can I share on the screen?”

I mean they like took over the meeting, it was awesome. And another one said, “Hey, I’m using that resource that so-and-so posted and it’s awesome and it’s working for me this way.” And so they just, it the, the community has taken over it’s own support system for each other, especially for us that are PMO leaders.

That’s a very lonely role, right? So in more organizations, many times they’re the only person in that role in the whole company. And even if there are others in that role, there’s not many that are in the leadership role. They might have big teams, but it’s usually all falls on their shoulders, the PMO leader. So if they can find a way to communicate and to support each other, they’re going to jump on that. And there’s so much reward from that. The student that did the sharing said that she just felt like it was so wonderful for her to share with others in the program and to be able to give back and share her learnings because she’s learned so much from me and from, you know, from, from the program. So I, I see that all day long. And for me, I find that incredibly rewarding as a community leader. And so I think that all of the PMO leaders listening, this is an incredible opportunity for you to foster recovery, reward recognition, coping with the tough times, getting each other’s back, building up your energy stores for all of those in the community, but also the firm for yourself.

Beth: I love that. That is such a strong Testament to how community can make a difference, to really strengthen your shield and, and keep you away from burnout by giving you the help and support and recognition that you need.

Laura: Absolutely. Wow, this is great. Okay, so there were five components to this. There was reflection and recognition capacity and managing your capacity. We talked about self-care, which is important. And I know everybody that’s listening is saying, “yeah, yeah, yeah, I know self-care, but are you doing it right?”

Beth: Well I would say on the reflection and recognition thing as well, people think that’s so simple. Yeah. How can it possibly be strong enough to make a difference? It makes a huge difference. It’s worth it. And it’s so easy.

Laura: Exactly. Exactly. And then on top of that, we’ve got our coping skills, right? And finding ways to cope and healthy ways to cope and find the, find the silver lining and then community and being a community builder and finding your own community, finding your tribe that can help support you and all of those components together make up what you called the burnout shield.

Right, right. Exactly. So this is awesome. Now for all of those that are listening and these thinking, I need this, I need, I need this Burnout Shield. I want to find out more about both protecting myself and building my burnout shield as well as, uh, you also have a resource to help them with assessing the, stretch goals and their audacious goals and if those goals are going to help actually move them forward or become more of a hindrance, right?

Beth: Yes, exactly. So, the handout is called Is Now a Good Time. It’s your big, hairy, audacious goal, self-assessment, and it’s actually three assessments. It looks at what your resources are for you, for the goal that you’re setting. It looks at your burnout shield and then it looks at how trying to take on another big goal will affect your burnout shield, how likely you are to be able to manage it.

So there’s a lot of great questions on there. It’s also got the resource, it’s got um, a short assessment for the burnout shield and it will have, it does have a link to a more complete assessment of the burnout shield that you can do online. So there’s a lot of great resources in here and it might be something to share with your team as well.

Laura: Oh, that’s great. Yeah. So can you tell them how they can download this resource?

Beth: Oh, sure. Burnout-solutions.com/stretchgoals

Laura: Thank you so much, Beth. I really appreciate your time and walking through all of these different ways that we can help protect ourselves and make sure that we avoid burnout and still accomplish our big goals as we head into this holiday season (or really any time of the year.)