S4 E63: Creating deep connections in burnout recovery
with burnout coach, author and comedian Dad Jim Young
Key Takeways
For me my burnout journey probably starts when I was nine years old, I was bestowed the man of the house mantle by my mom who had a live-in boyfriend who she had kicked out cuz he was abusive and difficult. It was time for me to take out the trash cause I was a man of the house and I was scared and didn't really know what to do, but I didn't have a voice for that. And in the Man Up culture that we're in, I just did it. And that metaphor really has played out for a long time for me, and that's what led me into burnout was this notion that I just had to do it no matter what the circumstances were. I had to be tough. I had to not ask for help or reveal what my feelings were and just do it. That carried through my adolescent years, my adult years into the working world, until I really reached a point in my forties when it became unbearable and I collapsed under its weight.
My burnout was really a series of probably thousands of decisions over several years that got me to this point of depletion where I was recently divorced. That was the model of success that I had taken in from the culture, and I just kept working harder and harder. Tons of client responsibilities, tons of employee responsibilities, being an executive, trying to learn how to be a single dad, and I just literally hit a wall. One day I walked into my CEO's office and I said, I have to go. I have to not come to work for a while. I don't care if you pay me or not. And I took a month long leave for my own mental health and I didn't know that it was burnout. I just knew that I was falling apart. I would collapse on the floor in tears when I was at home at the end of the day, exhausted. And I knew I couldn't do that. I knew it was gonna end badly if I continued trying to go down that path.
Really the core of it was I needed to stop trying to fit my life into my work schedule and rather invert that and say, my work has to fit into my life schedule so that I can be a good parent and I can have social connection, and I can have partnership, and I can have rest, and all of those. So my strategies were connections and deprioritizing work as the number 1, 2, 3, and 4 priorities.
It was being in organizations where there was no recognition of what people's needs were. There was no conversation about it and there wasn't room. It was everybody had to follow the same model of work, and it was 60 hours a week full engagement was the way to prove your medal. And, for me as my own experience as a man in the culture was achievement was such a big part of it. And I know that's true for a lot of men that I've worked with and a lot of my peers, was that the star performer syndrome perhaps, I think is a big piece of that in the culture is that we elevate work and the accomplishments and the status and the roles and the salaries to such a high degree, and then we don't allow people to talk about when they're struggling. And because that becomes a sign of weakness and now I can't succeed. And the model of success to me is just way too narrow and doesn't allow room for us to thrive as humans.
We're all suffering under the patriarchy. It's not that men have it easier under the patriarchy necessarily. Yes, more privilege, but the conditions are harsh for everyone. I see this is not a male versus female issue by any stretch. It's a system issue that we're all suffering in different ways based on our personalities. And our gender is one factor in that, based on the expectations we're given.
I hadn't thought about this facet of my own burnout story until just now, is that the organization I was in and all the organizations prior to that when I reached burnout, was run by a white man who was enculturated in that experience and a very important part of my burnout is that I didn't know how to be an effective parent. I didn't know how to be the nurturer that I wanted to be for my kids with those demands. And it wasn't a conversation I felt like I could have. I just had to figure out how to fit my stuff around my job or my parenting around my work. And that condition definitely was a piece of my burnout. It was personal and professional burnout.
I loved being a parent from day one, and I knew intuitively how to do it, and I love spending time with my kids. My deficit felt imposed because I have to be this provider. So when I was able to shift and I made a big career change about five years ago, it allowed me to reshape what my roles are, and so now I only have my kids half the time. I'm very amicable with their co-parent, with their mom, and we split time with our kids 50 50, and we always have, and I love that. And then also go do work that is important to me and feels purposeful and the challenging part as an entrepreneur, the challenges of that and it's a tough road to ride the ups and downs.
I still hold a little bit of shame around I'm not doing a big corporate job. I'm not earning tons of money. I should be doing better, right? The word ‘should’ starts to come into my mind. And I know that those are consequences of the choices that I made to have balance around doing purposeful work that I love being around my kids, being available to my partner. So , have the balance that I've always been seeking and it's balancing, it's not balance. And so I'm always looking for how do I smooth it out a little bit and I know it's always gonna be rough.
I wanted to write how this notion of expansive intimacy, creating these trusting connections across all areas of your life to hold your stress and your celebrations and everything in between. But that was the antidote I had found for burnout. Shame is such a barrier for us when we face something like burnout, because it's like we're supposed to run through every wall and climb every mountain. And we're not supposed to take a step back. And when we do, when we reveal any sign of weakness, perceived weakness, here comes shame. And so it just invites us into this loop of burnout. And similar to perfectionism we use perfectionism, to hide our shame. We outwork our shame as well, and it gets us burned out.
What I saw was that men have a struggle with intimacy. They define it, and our culture defines it very narrowly around sexual, romantic relationships. And what I realized was that over the course of my previous few years as I recovered from burnout, it was developing intimacy in a lot of different ways, spiritual intimacy, intellectual intimacy, having conversations with people where I got stimulated about things I cared about. Experiential intimacy, going up and doing stuff with people. Physical, sexual, there's this whole panoply of intimacies that we get to explore with different types of people in our lives.
So I can have intimate relationships with my kids and with my partner and with my ex-wife, and with my colleagues, and with my friends. And now I have this huge container where when I'm having a challenge with something, I can go to an appropriate person who's open, available, trusting, wanting to support me because I support them too. It's a bidirectional relationship. I think when we're in a space where we have all that intimacy in our lives, all that social emotional connection that we trust, I don't think we can get into burnout because we have people who take care of us and who check in on us and hold us accountable to what we say we want and who can help us process things when they get really difficult.
I think my experience of expansive intimacy is that it's perfectly messy, and that's one of the beauties of it, because my perfectionism runs deep and I'm allowed to be messy and not know the answer, not have it, and get to work it out in dialogue with people. I've found it easier as I've opened up. I've found more people who are already there and wanna have that kind of connection. So my friendships have expanded. So I have so many friends nowadays that I never had before, who all are willing to run deep with me in one way or another.
Part of the recovery and prevention of burnout is talking about things like emotional intelligence, right? How do we create the openings for emotions to be part of the conversation? And in the corporate world, emotional intelligence has become accepted because there are studies that talk about emotional intelligence as the primary differentiator for great leaders. We want great leaders. We understand that's a conversation to have. We'll even invest resources in that. We create conditions where leaders are able to step back and let other people into the conversation where we can balance out assertiveness or we can have emotional expression.
All these things that emotional intelligence teaches us how to use, and there's skills we have and I always want to then bring in, and these are skills that help you in life as well. They're gonna help you have better conversations with your kids. That's gonna make you a better dad. It's gonna make you wanna be more present at home. It's gonna wanna make you a better partner. And so I like to approach it more from the holistic standpoint. And I've found emotional intelligence is it is just a door that can be opened to get into those conversations.
You take the toughest of tough guys the biggest boldest CEO you can imagine, and you bring his daughter into the room and watch him change, or his son. It's remarkable to then be, oh, there's this range of this person. It's not just this, A type get it done kind of personality that there's this other side, and how do we bring those more into balance so that people can see the humanity of each other and recognize that guy has a tough day every once in a while too, maybe more often than that. And how do we take care of each other? How do we bring empathy?
It's one of the biggest emotional intelligence skills that I like to teach and bring into organizations. And the other thing that I think today there's so much, rightfully so, conversations around DEI and that's another place where emotional intelligence, bringing people into their full humanity, which means for some people let me take a step back and be more of a dad than a CEO, for example, and let me trust that I have the people in my organization, I can create more equity where people get to step forward. I get to include more people in the conversation.
One of the things I love most about improv is that it encourages authenticity. And that's maybe a paradox, right? You're pretending to be something else. Except when we do it from an authentic place, that's when the audience loves it. That's when our scene partners love it. And yeah, for me, it's so much of a practice of being authentic. What's my emotion in this moment? How do I recognize that? How do I accept somebody else's offer and be genuine about it? It's really great practice for me.
When we think about something as difficult as burnout and how it affects all of us in different ways, is that we need this whole array of strategies and they don't come always from within. In fact, a lot of times they come from without. And so expansive intimacy as a concept is really designed to say, how do we reach out and create these places where we have a big network, a big net underneath us for when life gets difficult.
Bio
Jim Young is an executive coach, facilitator, and speaker who leverages his experiences from the corporate C-Suite to cure burnout for leaders and organizations. His book, Expansive Intimacy: How "Tough Guys" Defeat Burnout, helps men create a roadmap for more fulfilling lives. You can learn more about his work at www.thecenteredcoach.com.
Links to Additional Resources
