Are you close to burnout?

I am blessed with coaching so many wonderful human beings, from all walks of life. I wanted to share with you a recurring theme I am hearing a lot: How do you know when you are on the brink of burnout? Being close to a burnout or in it is not pleasant and it usually takes 6 to 8 weeks at least to recover from it. And with such high pace we are all living in, we need to be able to recognise the signs of burnout so we can better deal with it.

So here is a simple tool to help you assess how close you are to a burnout. David Rock - Author of the Quiet Leadership - has come up with this brilliant framework called SCARF. The brain does not differentiate well between real threats to our life (a lion, an attacker) and perceived threats to one of our SCARF needs.

Score yourself on each of the following dimensions, on a scale of 0 to 10 (0 being negligible, 1 being extreme): Status - Our relative importance to others (“I don’t feel valued”); Certainty - our ability to predict the future (“I don’t know what to expect”); Autonomy - Our sense of control over events (“I don’t have a choice”); Relatedness - Our sense of safety in others (“I don’t belong”); and Fairness - Our perception of fair exchange between people (“I am not treated with respect”). 

Your overall score will give you a big-picture sense of how well you’re doing at that moment. While the total number of points (out of 50) is important, what’s more useful are your scores in each of the five categories. You’ll likely find that you’re healthy in some dimensions and unhealthy in others. Once you identify your pain points, you can devise strategic interventions to target them.