How a Guidance Counsellor can help with Career Burnout

‘Stress is a reality – like love or electricity – unmistakeable in experience yet difficult to define.’[i]

Career Burnout is a form of stress.  It is a gradual building up of work-related stress to the point where it is having chronically negative impacts on your life.   

The Lobster Pot

Burnout is hard to recognise because what can often start as high job satisfaction becomes over time a waning optimism and eventually chronic stress.  You can’t quite figure out what’s wrong but something is wrong.  It’s the lobster pot metaphor: it heats up gradually and you can’t quite tell whether the problem is with you (the person) or with the pot (the context).

Burnout is depicted as having three strands: if you are feeling exhausted in your work, cynical about your work (and losing your sense of identity with it) and feeling reduced in your ability to do your work, you are exhibiting warning signs of burnout.

Fuzzy Thinking

The trouble is that stress can lead to fuzzy thinking which makes it hard to define and even harder to imagine that the solutions available to you will help.  You are being asked to think clearly at a very moment where you are feeling unable to do so.  It is difficult to live through something and make sense of it at the same time.

Here are the ways that I think a Guidance Counsellor can help:

1.       Making Sense of What is Happening to You

Life is made up of everyday individual actions and interactions.   Guidance counsellors are trained to help you bridge the divide between who you are and the world in which you exist.  By making sense of what is happening to you, your understanding increases.  By making meaning from your experiences,  you become able to separate what you need to respond to and what is outside of your control.

Life experiences can feel like fact but the very act of talking them through with someone else can change them.  This act can help you to reframe your understanding of yourself and think more clearly how the world in which you exist is impacting on you. 

2.       Adding in Objective Information

Sometimes an objective assessment such as a Career Assessment provides useful information to add to the context of your experiences. Tools such as an Interest Profile, a Personality Quiz or an assessment of your Career Values can help you make sense of your career issues and why your current context is no longer working for you.  You can also reconnect with forgotten career aspirations and begin to consider whether your current work is still meeting your needs.

Whether you need a big change such as a change of career, or a small change such as a change in your hours, your responsibilities or your communication with direct management, assessment helps you to gain awareness of your skills and how you can use them to change your context and ultimately help you to cope. 

3.       It’s not You, it’s Them

Many coping strategies for stress and burnout focus on developing personal resilience.  These elements, while helpful, don’t suit every person and every situation.  There needs to be a recognition that sometimes people are being asked to deliver beyond what would be considered reasonable. 

Example of an approach that focuses only on personal resilience. Source: hellodriven.com

This HBR article quotes a survey by Gallup that found the top five reasons for burnout are:

1. Unfair treatment at work

2. Unmanageable workload

3. Lack of role clarity

4. Lack of communication and support from their manager

5. Unreasonable time pressure

While a focus on personal resilience is a valuable tool, workplace practices and expectations feed into personal burnout and a person’s context needs to be addressed if they are to break the cycle.  Burnout is a system problem and most likely things at work will need to change.

Knowing Yourself Better Helps You Plan For Change

The process of guidance counselling can help you to bring yourself to an a-ha moment of what kind of change you are looking for.  Clarity – the very opposite of fuzzy thinking – is a major component in planning for change.  By taking a step back, you begin to explore options which you have not been considering because you have been feeling overwhelmed from your current work context. 

Sometimes a dilemma enhances our freedom to choose.  The process of guidance counselling can give you a new vocabulary for breaking down your old coping routines and building new ways of developing your career.

i Eugene Kennedy and Sara Charles. On Becoming a Counsellor. Gill & McMillan 1977

Why Adults need Career Guidance Too

It’s funny how an idea has taken hold in society that career guidance happens in school and that once you are an adult, you are on your own.

This is so strange when you think about it. The idea that at 18, before you have ever taken a step into the labour market, you have finished receiving career guidance. You were expected to come up with an answer then, and if you didn’t you missed your chance.

If you were lucky enough to go to college, you may have received some career guidance there. Or perhaps you were aware of a college career guidance service which may have reminded you that questions like ‘what do I want?’ were important ones to ask yourself. If you saw a college guidance counsellor, the chances are that you saw them once.

Now as an adult, you’re wondering about career guidance. Is it something you should have sorted when you are young. You’re wondering if it is OK to be thinking about going for career guidance now?

But times have changed. We are getting more used to the idea of asking for help. We are getting more used to the idea that it’s OK to not feel OK.

Understanding is everything

Career guidance is the act of admitting that everything is not OK in your career. There is a feeling of unhappiness or a lack of purpose permeating your everyday experiences.

When you come to see me, it means you have a career-related problem that you can’t seem to solve on your own.

You have decided to make time and space in your life to sit down with a person who is listening to you, who is fully present for you. Someone who is ready to hear your problem and how it is impacting on you, and how that impact is happening in a negative and harmful way, and preventing you from living the life you want.

As a career counsellor, I can’t take responsibility for your problem or promise you that we can fix it. What I can promise you is that I will hold a mirror up to you and help you to find the belief that you can fix this for yourself.

My hope is that you will feel clarity; after our sessions, you will feel clear about what you want and how you are going to get there.

You can build the life you want

The key word here is ‘build’. Building requires a little bit of work and patience and self-awareness. You cannot build until you know what you want.

Our sessions follow a simple format.

We will work through key questions during our sessions.

• What is going on for you?

• What do you want?

• What is it within your control to change?

• Are the things you are doing now bringing you closer to (or further from) what you want?

• What can you do differently to get what you want?

• How are you going to do it?

• How are you going to know it when you get there?

Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference

Change happens slowly. It is not easy to change. It is not easy to look at an old problem alone and come up with new solutions. I am here for you.

You can do it. You can make time for you. One session at a time.