This post is part of my Be Your Own Manager series. Click here for an overview, and links to all other posts.
I’ve often compared burnout to a repetitive use injury. The obvious solution is to rest for a bit, but I realized after my second major burnout episode that if I didn’t re-train how I was approaching my work, I was just going to keep re-injuring myself doing the same things.
That’s what led me down this path – learning how to be a better manager for my own health and happiness.
The most important mental shift has also been one of the hardest. Early on, after burnout, I struggled with a major question: How hard do I push myself? I knew that I didn’t want to push so hard that I would burn out again. But I was afraid that if I didn’t push hard enough, I would let myself off too easy. I would “slack off” instead of working.
That fear still comes up sometimes, to be honest. Everything I’ve learned since then hasn’t been able to completely rewrite an untrue cultural assumption. People have done interesting research, and even more interesting thought exercises about whether “laziness” is even really a thing. And I’m not pretending to understand all the details. But I do understand that behaviors that look (or even feel) like laziness are often, in fact, other things entirely, including learning disability, mental illness, or something as simple as fatigue.
But it’s one thing to understand that, intellectually, and another thing entirely to apply it to your own dialogue with yourself.
I know I’m not the only one who adds guilt and self-blame to the frustration of a bad productivity day. Even though I know it only makes things worse. To quote a friend of mine, “if being hard on myself worked, it would have worked by now.” But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t willing to keep trying.
For me, the breakthrough moment came in remembering something I learned about performance reviews almost twenty years ago:
The best way for constructive feedback to be effective is for both the giver and receiver to have that exchange in good faith. The person receiving feedback can only really take it in if they believe that it’s being given with their best interest in mind. And the person giving the feedback has to assume that the receiver can and wants to improve.
Let me rephrase that part as your self-management lesson of the day: A good manager has to assume that their employees want to perform well.
Sure, once in a while, a manager will find out that their employee DOESN’T want to do well, and they can deal with it when it comes up.
But when you’re talking about managing yourself, you should already know.
Right?
You already know that you want to do your best as an artist, because you chose this creative path for yourself. You have dreams about what you might accomplish. You enjoy it. Right?
I know all those things are true for me. And if I accept that, I also have to accept that there must be some other obstacle standing between me and the work I sometimes fail to get done. Sometimes it’s a simple lack of time or energy. Sometimes it’s fear. Sometimes it’s because the dishwasher broke and everything’s a mess, and I ran out of “coping techniques” about thirty minutes ago. (true story.)
Whatever the real cause, I can only find it if I let go of the guilt and assume good intentions. Once I do that, I can take care of myself in a positive sense, instead of contributing to the load of guilt or shame that’s slowing me down.