I've spent my career in fast-paced, high achieving organizations as a high achieving employee. I moved up the ranks, assumed more leadership responsibilities and along with those, more stress. This didn't, at first, phase me - I used to think that if I wasn't stressed out, I wasn't working hard enough. You're supposed to feel on the brink of exhaustion all the time, right?
A lot of us are conditioned to think this way, or have become so accustomed to working at this speed that we've trained our brains to ignore signs our body is trying to tell us to slow down. We're afraid of what it would mean to "slow down" or as a leader, what the impact would be if we make a choice to "do less".
What's the cost, however, of continuing to operate on the brink of burnout?
In this podcast, Eric Gong and I, a former CTO turned technical recruiter, discuss burnout. I coach him through some elements of burnout that he is experiencing and together, we talk about ways that leaders can recognize, and manage, stress.
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