I met a very successful social entrepreneur last week for coffee. She asked to meet me when she read my blog. She told me how delighted she was that she had avoided burnout in the last two months.
When I probed her, it was clear that this was the repeating of a pattern she had seen all her life. She has constantly avoided her burnout.
I reminded her that she needs to face and embrace her burnout. She needs to release and unleash her resilience. She realised that she will only discern and learn when she faces her burnout and that will allow her to comprehend and transcend what it is telling her.
I offered to do some work with her on it and I hope she comes back.
Watch this space
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Transformational Burnout and Meta-Resilience
Transformational Burnout and Meta-Resilience
Transformational Burnout is the guided experience of embracing Burnout to release Resilience. The transformation that takes place is from an old perception of the self which is unable to cope with the present, to a new realised self which has ample resources to relish the ups and downs of life. This process of change leads to transformational learning; which allows us to access enhanced and transcendent leadership capabilities in both personal and organisational contexts.
Meta-Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity by developing a self oriented spiritual understanding and being aware of, and prepared for, shocking events. It is about making choices and accepting one’s position in life while at the same time making sure to diminish the effect of negativity or toxic relationships. Meta Resilience teaches us to rationalise failure and uses appreciative inquiry to develop a philosophical attitude to life and work. Importantly, it uses emotional intelligence as a frame of reference.
Resilience4Enterprise, the founders of the Meta-Resilience model have developed a twelve action development framework. We use this to help our clients to understand their value system and use the process to help us to release energy to leverage success as well as unleashing the vigour and vitality to exceed expectations. Meta-Resilience, once released, helps us to live by a newfound transcendent leadership paradigm.
Our clients who have used this process have come from all walks of life; CEO’s, Managing Directors, Entrepreneurs and Social Activists. The one thing they have in common is Burnout. However, those who developed their Meta-Resilience attained it only when they experienced it as a gift. During the programme they were invited to embrace their burnout, they were guided to burn their desire to be in control without capability, helped with abandoning their desire to be effective without the resources, and helped to burn the desire to be right without dissent.
The meta-resilience programme then helped them to develop their ability to burn their relationship to material gain without a larger intent, destroy their self importance without a cause and burn the urge to dominate others without their approval.
Burnout arises out of the imperfection of being human, even though we have to accept that we are all imperfect. This imperfection manifests itself in the gap between intentions and results and Burnout is what happens when an individual is constantly trying to fill this gap when it cannot be filled with they are currently using. Being human is often about feeling incomplete, and even though we search for completion, our attempt to find this fulfilment without our Meta-Resilience, can often accelerate our Burnout.
Despite our addiction to work or our addiction to success, Meta-Resilience can and does come in through our errors and our failures, provided we are open to it. When we refuse to learn from setbacks, our burnout happens more quickly and if we do fall short, we do need to try again. Embracing our burnout can transform us into the person we were supposed to be but which we were not allowed to be.
The good news is that Meta-Resilience is like health, we cannot avoid having it. We burn out while we are trying to be perfect, but just like the relationship between spirituality and religion; Meta-Resilience is more about the imperfection associated with spirituality rather than the perfection associated with religion. While spirituality and Meta-Resilience are fluid, Burnout and Religion are more solid. Where burnout has boundaries, Meta-Resilience on the other hand is boundless. Thankfully Meta-Resilience is not therapy, but it does offer forgiveness where no explanation is needed and while therapy can provide explanations, it is not designed to forgive. We all need to forgive ourselves and forgive others.
Meta-Resilience is concerned with human weakness and natural flaw while burnout which manifests itself as illness is more concerned with unnatural perfection. It does not matter how much we travel on our Meta-Resilience journey as long as we do not stop. It does not matter at what speed we burnout, as long as we continue to walk towards our Meta-Resilience. If we are burning out, it is more likely to denote our strength rather than our weakness. It shows our spiritual aliveness and it is our spirit drawing attention to itself.
As long as we are bound to the conditions which are creating our burnout, our refusal to embrace burnout does cause a certain death. It does not help with the three stages that have to be released during the Burnout Phase of Meta-Resilience: 1. the release from the addiction to burnout ; 2. the release from the self centeredness of burnout and ; 3. the release from the denial of burnout.
In releasing our Meta-Resilience, it is accepting that we are real but limited and we have to accept those limitations as the reality. The way to Meta-Resilience is to surrender; giving up our little self only to discover that there is a much greater Self waiting for us. Yes, it requires risk, and we must release ourselves from the attachment of our own chains, even if they have fallen off already. We cannot experience Meta-Resilience by being in the process of letting go, we must have let go already.
Meta-Resilience can be a wonderful way of life. It can frame what we see, how we feel and tell us why we choose what we do. It cannot be experienced in isolation, it needs burnout to come alive and while it can be discovered alone, it requires a community for it to be fulfilling. Rather than being a set of propositions, Meta-Resilience is a way of life in which understanding, acceptance and commitment emerge together in a single act, connecting the person and the organisation in which we work, and the community in which we live. Like the wind or the smell of a rose, we can experience Meta-Resilience, but we cannot command it.
Meta-Resilience springs from shared vision, shared goals, shared memory and shared hope. That is why it is mutually beneficial for an employee and an organisation. We depend on each other. The process suggests that Meta-Resilience comes when we are healed and we are healed by wanting to heal others. If we soak Meta-Resilience up like a sponge and keep it to ourselves, it is useless. Meta-Resilience is essential, but everyone experiences it differently than they imagine it to be. While it is open ended, it cannot be grasped and it is more at home with questions than answers, thus making it perfect for a new coaching paradigm. When it is discovered, it can pervade all aspects of our life, thus proving it is not a theory, but a lived experience of life.
Some people ask if Meta-Resilience is about re-framing. It is not. It is about finding a new map and breaking away from being who we were told we were. It is helping us and our organisations to figure out who we are, and what it means to be us. It requires willingness, honesty and open mindedness and requires no technique other than time and a good Meta-Resilience Coach. It uses the power of story to show us that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. By the same token, our organisations are not problems to be solved; they are secrets to be uncovered.
Meta-Resilience is not about perfection, preferring instead to deal with progress and we do this in three ways; we listen, we ask questions and we tell stories.
There is a story about a founding member of AA who was asked about spirituality. He was in a log cabin and he looked at the fireplace for an age. When he looked up, he said “it is like that fireplace over there. It is the mortar. Without it, there is just a collection of rocks and marble. The mortar turns it into a thing of beauty. Meta-Resilience is like that – something which binds us and provides us with a definition and identity.
While Meta-Resilience is lived in a forward manner, it can only be understood by looking back at it. Meta-Resilient people live in the now and we can unite our past and our future - we prefer to “do it” rather than fantasise about it. We live it. In living it, we find release and gratitude, we are filled with humility and tolerance and in doing this we experience forgiveness and we are “at home” with who we are.
Meta Resilience influences how we live by shaping what we experience and it cares less for the wrong type of achievement. Rather, it is about seeing what we did not see before and seeing the world differently. Meta-Resilient people detach without resenting what we detach from. For us, it is a gift that we receive freely and we give it spontaneously, not requiring any special occasion to give it away. The reality is that Meta-Resilience helps us to release our serenity, experience tolerance and friendship and through the community of those we work with, we even experience love. It includes joy and sorrow and is not concerned with what happens to a us; it is what a we do with what happens to us that signifies our Meta-Resilience.
Meta-Resilience calls for us not to take ourselves too seriously when our real need is to discover the self that calls for the abandonment of who we thought we were. It knows that strengths make us different, while weakness makes us the same. It is shared sorrow, where two people in a designed alliance realise that we are in the same story and that we both must first accept our imperfections before we are able to accept the imperfection of others. The distance travelled on our Meta-Resilience journey needs to be measured in one day and it does not matter how far we travel as much as the experience that we gained.
We can only find Meta-Resilience when it is being looked for and by searching only where it can be found and that is within. When found, this new map gives us a sense of place, relationship and identity. While it is found in the present, it bears the scars of the past for it knows that those without a past also have no future. Meta-Resilience is not thinking less of ourselves, even if it is thinking of ourselves less, and while honesty gets us there, tolerance keeps us there. This tolerance begins with a vision of how things might be different and which sees helplessness in advance, building the bridge for others to cross when their time comes.
Of course, it has its paradox too. It is only by embracing burnout that we release our Meta-Resilience. Our failures become our successes and our sorrow becomes our joy. It is only possible to do it ourselves, but we cannot do alone. Meta-Resilience transcends the ordinary but only through the ordinariness of burnout.
Meta-Resilience creates new meanings for our old experiences as we know that the mind does react to stimuli, it reacts to meaning. Meta-Resilience helps us not to worry what other people think for that is none of our business. It releases our own personal wisdom and it detaches us from the material. It knows that there is no growth without pain but crucially, Meta-Resilience helps us to discover the purpose of our pain and finds the passion for our growth.
Meta-Resilience knows that there is a difference between wishing for it and willing it to happen. It knows that it is not the imitation of other people’s toolkits, rather it is an origination of our own. It knows that demanding to be Meta-Resilient is pointless as the willingness to become Meta-Resilient is the only commitment that we need.
We can burnout in the attempt to gain knowledge but without Meta-Resilience we will not achieve Wisdom. We can experience pleasure, but we may not experience happiness. We may congratulate others, but not admire them. We may read and listen but we might not understand. We may go to bed, but we might not sleep in peace. We may practice being meek, buy we may never experience humility. We may play the game well, but that does not mean that we will become the champions.
Without Burnout, Meta-Resilience lay dormant within us. We embraced it and we released it. And we are thankful.
Inspiration for this description of Meta-Resilience came from “Storytelling and the Journey to Wholeness” by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
Transformational Burnout is the guided experience of embracing Burnout to release Resilience. The transformation that takes place is from an old perception of the self which is unable to cope with the present, to a new realised self which has ample resources to relish the ups and downs of life. This process of change leads to transformational learning; which allows us to access enhanced and transcendent leadership capabilities in both personal and organisational contexts.
Meta-Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity by developing a self oriented spiritual understanding and being aware of, and prepared for, shocking events. It is about making choices and accepting one’s position in life while at the same time making sure to diminish the effect of negativity or toxic relationships. Meta Resilience teaches us to rationalise failure and uses appreciative inquiry to develop a philosophical attitude to life and work. Importantly, it uses emotional intelligence as a frame of reference.
Resilience4Enterprise, the founders of the Meta-Resilience model have developed a twelve action development framework. We use this to help our clients to understand their value system and use the process to help us to release energy to leverage success as well as unleashing the vigour and vitality to exceed expectations. Meta-Resilience, once released, helps us to live by a newfound transcendent leadership paradigm.
Our clients who have used this process have come from all walks of life; CEO’s, Managing Directors, Entrepreneurs and Social Activists. The one thing they have in common is Burnout. However, those who developed their Meta-Resilience attained it only when they experienced it as a gift. During the programme they were invited to embrace their burnout, they were guided to burn their desire to be in control without capability, helped with abandoning their desire to be effective without the resources, and helped to burn the desire to be right without dissent.
The meta-resilience programme then helped them to develop their ability to burn their relationship to material gain without a larger intent, destroy their self importance without a cause and burn the urge to dominate others without their approval.
Burnout arises out of the imperfection of being human, even though we have to accept that we are all imperfect. This imperfection manifests itself in the gap between intentions and results and Burnout is what happens when an individual is constantly trying to fill this gap when it cannot be filled with they are currently using. Being human is often about feeling incomplete, and even though we search for completion, our attempt to find this fulfilment without our Meta-Resilience, can often accelerate our Burnout.
Despite our addiction to work or our addiction to success, Meta-Resilience can and does come in through our errors and our failures, provided we are open to it. When we refuse to learn from setbacks, our burnout happens more quickly and if we do fall short, we do need to try again. Embracing our burnout can transform us into the person we were supposed to be but which we were not allowed to be.
The good news is that Meta-Resilience is like health, we cannot avoid having it. We burn out while we are trying to be perfect, but just like the relationship between spirituality and religion; Meta-Resilience is more about the imperfection associated with spirituality rather than the perfection associated with religion. While spirituality and Meta-Resilience are fluid, Burnout and Religion are more solid. Where burnout has boundaries, Meta-Resilience on the other hand is boundless. Thankfully Meta-Resilience is not therapy, but it does offer forgiveness where no explanation is needed and while therapy can provide explanations, it is not designed to forgive. We all need to forgive ourselves and forgive others.
Meta-Resilience is concerned with human weakness and natural flaw while burnout which manifests itself as illness is more concerned with unnatural perfection. It does not matter how much we travel on our Meta-Resilience journey as long as we do not stop. It does not matter at what speed we burnout, as long as we continue to walk towards our Meta-Resilience. If we are burning out, it is more likely to denote our strength rather than our weakness. It shows our spiritual aliveness and it is our spirit drawing attention to itself.
As long as we are bound to the conditions which are creating our burnout, our refusal to embrace burnout does cause a certain death. It does not help with the three stages that have to be released during the Burnout Phase of Meta-Resilience: 1. the release from the addiction to burnout ; 2. the release from the self centeredness of burnout and ; 3. the release from the denial of burnout.
In releasing our Meta-Resilience, it is accepting that we are real but limited and we have to accept those limitations as the reality. The way to Meta-Resilience is to surrender; giving up our little self only to discover that there is a much greater Self waiting for us. Yes, it requires risk, and we must release ourselves from the attachment of our own chains, even if they have fallen off already. We cannot experience Meta-Resilience by being in the process of letting go, we must have let go already.
Meta-Resilience can be a wonderful way of life. It can frame what we see, how we feel and tell us why we choose what we do. It cannot be experienced in isolation, it needs burnout to come alive and while it can be discovered alone, it requires a community for it to be fulfilling. Rather than being a set of propositions, Meta-Resilience is a way of life in which understanding, acceptance and commitment emerge together in a single act, connecting the person and the organisation in which we work, and the community in which we live. Like the wind or the smell of a rose, we can experience Meta-Resilience, but we cannot command it.
Meta-Resilience springs from shared vision, shared goals, shared memory and shared hope. That is why it is mutually beneficial for an employee and an organisation. We depend on each other. The process suggests that Meta-Resilience comes when we are healed and we are healed by wanting to heal others. If we soak Meta-Resilience up like a sponge and keep it to ourselves, it is useless. Meta-Resilience is essential, but everyone experiences it differently than they imagine it to be. While it is open ended, it cannot be grasped and it is more at home with questions than answers, thus making it perfect for a new coaching paradigm. When it is discovered, it can pervade all aspects of our life, thus proving it is not a theory, but a lived experience of life.
Some people ask if Meta-Resilience is about re-framing. It is not. It is about finding a new map and breaking away from being who we were told we were. It is helping us and our organisations to figure out who we are, and what it means to be us. It requires willingness, honesty and open mindedness and requires no technique other than time and a good Meta-Resilience Coach. It uses the power of story to show us that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. By the same token, our organisations are not problems to be solved; they are secrets to be uncovered.
Meta-Resilience is not about perfection, preferring instead to deal with progress and we do this in three ways; we listen, we ask questions and we tell stories.
There is a story about a founding member of AA who was asked about spirituality. He was in a log cabin and he looked at the fireplace for an age. When he looked up, he said “it is like that fireplace over there. It is the mortar. Without it, there is just a collection of rocks and marble. The mortar turns it into a thing of beauty. Meta-Resilience is like that – something which binds us and provides us with a definition and identity.
While Meta-Resilience is lived in a forward manner, it can only be understood by looking back at it. Meta-Resilient people live in the now and we can unite our past and our future - we prefer to “do it” rather than fantasise about it. We live it. In living it, we find release and gratitude, we are filled with humility and tolerance and in doing this we experience forgiveness and we are “at home” with who we are.
Meta Resilience influences how we live by shaping what we experience and it cares less for the wrong type of achievement. Rather, it is about seeing what we did not see before and seeing the world differently. Meta-Resilient people detach without resenting what we detach from. For us, it is a gift that we receive freely and we give it spontaneously, not requiring any special occasion to give it away. The reality is that Meta-Resilience helps us to release our serenity, experience tolerance and friendship and through the community of those we work with, we even experience love. It includes joy and sorrow and is not concerned with what happens to a us; it is what a we do with what happens to us that signifies our Meta-Resilience.
Meta-Resilience calls for us not to take ourselves too seriously when our real need is to discover the self that calls for the abandonment of who we thought we were. It knows that strengths make us different, while weakness makes us the same. It is shared sorrow, where two people in a designed alliance realise that we are in the same story and that we both must first accept our imperfections before we are able to accept the imperfection of others. The distance travelled on our Meta-Resilience journey needs to be measured in one day and it does not matter how far we travel as much as the experience that we gained.
We can only find Meta-Resilience when it is being looked for and by searching only where it can be found and that is within. When found, this new map gives us a sense of place, relationship and identity. While it is found in the present, it bears the scars of the past for it knows that those without a past also have no future. Meta-Resilience is not thinking less of ourselves, even if it is thinking of ourselves less, and while honesty gets us there, tolerance keeps us there. This tolerance begins with a vision of how things might be different and which sees helplessness in advance, building the bridge for others to cross when their time comes.
Of course, it has its paradox too. It is only by embracing burnout that we release our Meta-Resilience. Our failures become our successes and our sorrow becomes our joy. It is only possible to do it ourselves, but we cannot do alone. Meta-Resilience transcends the ordinary but only through the ordinariness of burnout.
Meta-Resilience creates new meanings for our old experiences as we know that the mind does react to stimuli, it reacts to meaning. Meta-Resilience helps us not to worry what other people think for that is none of our business. It releases our own personal wisdom and it detaches us from the material. It knows that there is no growth without pain but crucially, Meta-Resilience helps us to discover the purpose of our pain and finds the passion for our growth.
Meta-Resilience knows that there is a difference between wishing for it and willing it to happen. It knows that it is not the imitation of other people’s toolkits, rather it is an origination of our own. It knows that demanding to be Meta-Resilient is pointless as the willingness to become Meta-Resilient is the only commitment that we need.
We can burnout in the attempt to gain knowledge but without Meta-Resilience we will not achieve Wisdom. We can experience pleasure, but we may not experience happiness. We may congratulate others, but not admire them. We may read and listen but we might not understand. We may go to bed, but we might not sleep in peace. We may practice being meek, buy we may never experience humility. We may play the game well, but that does not mean that we will become the champions.
Without Burnout, Meta-Resilience lay dormant within us. We embraced it and we released it. And we are thankful.
Inspiration for this description of Meta-Resilience came from “Storytelling and the Journey to Wholeness” by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
Casserley is out of the Transformational Burnout Movement
Tim rang me today and told me that his board had decided not to participate at this time in the Transformational Burnout Movement. He said that as soon as their own positioning was clear, that they would reconsider.
Although he agrees that we have different approaches to the market, we do fundamentally agree that burnout can be transformational.
I look forward to welcoming him back to the fold soon
Paul
Although he agrees that we have different approaches to the market, we do fundamentally agree that burnout can be transformational.
I look forward to welcoming him back to the fold soon
Paul
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Transformational Burnout - A Womans Story
Transformational Burnout -
A Woman’s Story
By Paul MOONEY
Founder Resilience4Enterprise
Eighty percent of the people who suffer with depression are women, but eighty percent of the people who take their own lives are men. Each gender handles their burnout differently. Where women work in a male dominated environment, signals are mixed and women in senior positions, can often become confused and unclear about how they should handle burnout.
In this article on transformational burnout, Paul Mooney, founder of Resilience4Enterprise speaks with Louise, a self made entrepreneur with a twenty five year background in the corporate sector. Coming close to suicide and then turning this into transformational learning, this is the story of Louise.
Louise was born to a working class family on the north side of Dublin in 1962. Although she had little encouragement from her hard working parents, she was a high achiever in school. She says the reason for this was that she actually enjoyed working hard and doing things well. However, she was “always seeking approval” and that is why she believes that she was working so hard, to get some kind of recognition from her mother and father.
She was driven, but did not really know why. She was always busy and hardworking. As the eldest in the family and with her mother working to make ends meet; from the age of 13, she looked after her three siblings after school, cooked the dinner, cleaned up afterwards and then went to her room where she studied for a further three hours. When she was leaving school, she achieved the best results in her school in the state examinations, but because there was no money for education in the family, she was unable to go to university to capitalise on her already significant intelligence. At that time, she did not qualify for state grants as both of her parents were working.
Even though she could not go to university , Louise continued to have a strong work ethic and spent a year doing an IT diploma. At the age of eighteen, she took a job in an insurance company as a programmer. Knowing that she could now look after her own education, she began a night time degree course in information technology and soon she was working a forty hour week, spending twenty hours in college and another fifteen hours studying and preparing for her work and college assignments. She did not sow any of the wild oats that most teenagers do and she recalls at that time, although she was not aware of it, that there was a distinct lack of fun in her life. She was intellectually strong but emotionally under-developed. Her awareness of herself and her self-knowledge was poor and she very often did not know how she felt about issues, waiting first for those more senior than her to provide a viewpoint to validate her own opinions.
Even though she still had a huge appetite for work, romance came along at the age of eighteen when she met a twenty six year old colleague and soon, they were engaged.
At the time, mildly abusive things were continuously happening in the relationship. However, the lack of attention she received while she was growing up and her state of emotional underdevelopment caused her to accept a lot of this negativity without reaction. Soon, she was suffering from major episodes of disrespect such as her boyfriend always being late for dates, not turning up to pre-arranged meetings and other demonstrations that she was not really respected by her fiancée in any significant way
Looking back, she did not trust her own judgement and she now realises that she was suffering from low self esteem. She viewed her boyfriend’s coldness as acceptable because it was what she had experienced from her father and other colleagues to whom she looked up. As a result of this behaviour, her pain threshold went up and soon she was able to exist without the attention she craved but did not receive. She calls this her “love recognition strategy”. She loved her father and knew that he loved her, but the way he showed his love was by with-holding the affection she so badly needed. His favourite phrase was “what do you know?”
She knows for certain that he, in turn, had been shown love in this way by his own mother. She found out later in life that he had also heard phrases like this spoken to him as a young boy. He was simply repeating his own experience of love. He, himself, was an under-achiever. So it was not surprising that he showed his love for Louise by behaving towards her and speaking to her in this same way. Nevertheless, it resulted in self doubt despite her own obvious intelligence. Because she mistook these incidents as models of fatherly love, her fiancée’s behaviour seemed to her to be the behaviour of someone who loved her. Was it not?
Louise charged on in her life and in her career. She was a marvellous trier and she persisted to the best of her ability. Her career moved along at a steady pace, being promoted from junior programmer to senior analyst. Over the following years, she had her first two children, first a boy and then a girl. By the time she was thirty years of age, she had worked with several poorly trained managers. With hindsight, she sees that these managers saw their staff as threats rather than assets. An intelligent, achieving woman like Louise was a particular threat.
The organisation in which she worked operated very much as an “old boys” network where relationships were built on the golf course rather than in the workplace. For seven years, other than product courses, she had no personal development training and no leadership development courses which would have worked on her attitudes. Even when she was put in charge of a large team, she received no people management training. This certainly became a contributing factor on her journey to burnout. Still, Louise believed she was doing pretty well – two children, keeping a nice house going, and having a full time job. She was a busy woman!
After a few years, the insurance company that she worked for was taken over by another company and she was delighted to find herself after nineteen years in information technology moving into a human resources role. What amazed her most in this new organisation was that she saw women of her own age and background with the same education that she had, doing very well in their own careers at higher levels in the organisation than she had achieved. What fascinated her even more was that these women had managed this with husbands and children.
There was no doubt that she was burned out in the IT field. She had come to hate her job. She woke up far too early every day, worrying about the job, dreading the bus journey to work each morning. She realised that her great passion was people, but she was getting very little chance to exercise her natural leadership qualities in the IT department of the “old boy’s” insurance company.
Needless to say, she loved the challenge in HR and she was soon re-engaged with the new organisation. She got lots of training and development, and had many leadership challenges as part of her new role. Not only did she become aware of her own potential but also that of the organisation, if only they could really engage people in their work
At home, however, the marriage which had limped along for years was now becoming worse. Her husband was now more passionate about his sports club than ever. Louise and her children grew more disconnected from him, as he continued to provide little or no support to her in her rapidly progressing career. She was soon the highest earner in the family, while her husband was content to devote all his energies and passion to his sports club. Looking back now, Louise says his priority was anyone outside of her. She calculates with a sad smile that she and their relationship were about sixth on his list.
Her children were now teenagers, and as teenagers can, they made life less than easy. Louise wore one mask at work and another at home but neither were actually who she really was. At work, she had a positive and encouraging environment, but home was a negative space which wore down her energy. She kept it to herself but her performance soon began to suffer. She began to suffer from chest infections and her sick leave increased. Her response to this turn of events was to choose a part time option from the company and at the age of 39, she was astounded but delighted to discover that she was pregnant with her third child.
Working part time, she soon realised that she was leaving the office at 2pm every day, having done the same amount of work that she had done under a full time regime. She was determined to show her manager and colleagues that her commitment had not diminished just because she was working part-time so she remained focused. Even though she was working less hours, her income per hour had actually increased. In her full-time job, the culture was one where you had to be seen to stay late regardless of how early in the morning you came in. Now she could happily leave at 2pm with a full day’s work done.
The additional personal development opened her eyes to new options in work and in life. Most importantly, it opened her eyes to how bad things were in her marriage. Her husband’s behaviour was now worsening and both she and her children were regularly being subjected to long moods of sullen silence and being emotionally abused in general. She was functioning, not living. However, from the outside, it all looked like the perfect marriage. She had three lovely children; there were two cars in the driveway; she worked part time while her husband had a full time permanent and pensionable job in a blue chip organisation. But when the front door was closed they all knew that it could not continue. She was tired. As she walked to the bus stop each morning, she passed a bench on a green field near her house, she used to see an old woman feeding the birds and she asked herself each morning “do I have to keep doing this till I am 65”? She did not want to.
Between 2003 and 2004, she returned to work full time for a special project, but when the opportunity arose to take a voluntary redundancy, she jumped at the chance. While she saw this as a chance to begin again, she had still not faced the reality that the core of her life, her relationship with her husband, was actually making her ill.
She had always been interested in health and so started an alternative medicine degree programme which brought her into contact with people she would never have met before. Although they all spoke English, she soon realised, that they were in fact speaking a different language from her. For over twenty years, she had suppressed her emotions and spent her entire life thinking and talking in a non-emotional way. Looking back she says she “was never too happy, but also never too sad either”. She even went as far to say that “I never felt depressed, but I also know that I never felt any joy”.
However, this group of people were talking about how they felt, how they treated themselves, how they took care of themselves; they even spoke about their spirituality and about God. Most of all, they spoke about the relationship they had with themselves and their relationships with others. She had never heard this language before having spent her childhood, her work-life and her home life in an environment of robotic functioning devoid of real or lasting pleasure.
As her awareness grew, she knew that the marriage would have to come to an end. Thinking back, when her eldest son was five years of age, she remembers planning to leave her husband, but here she was sixteen years later, still stuck in a relationship which did not fulfil her and which also shut her down from her true self. Frustratingly, she did not know how to end it. It was an unhappy survival. She realised that her life was unbearable and that she was not in touch with the real Louise. In spite of her achievements in her family and in her job, her self esteem was very low indeed. She had subjugated her real emotions. Her family and children were the most important things in her life, but the truth was that her home-life was awful. Her father’s advice had always been “to keep your head down and to keep ploughing on and be thankful for what you have” and that was just what she was doing. The fact that it was killing her slowly did not seem to be important.
She turned to her catholic religion and asked God to make her husband appreciate her and to love her. She wished for God to make her husband see her. But he did not. Another wish not granted. Her belief in her God dissolved as had her hopes and dreams for a wonderful family life. It was now clear to her that she was burned out, and one of the consequences was that she lost her faith. She was burned out emotionally and she was rapidly approaching physical burnout lacking the energy to keep going. Philosophically she burned out the things that supported and perpetrated the myth of her happy life, which was the opposite of what she was leading but that meant little at the time.
She felt alone. Her work and her gym were her escape. Even though she loved her children, they were hard work. She was not the mother that she wanted to be. She realised to her dismay that she was becoming like her own mother had been – worn out from work with little left for her children. A moment of realisation.
Louise was continuously suppressing her real feelings, she was tired, overwhelmed and the responsibility was weighing her down. She began to fight back against her husband’s behaviour as her teenage children began to point out to her that she should not have to put up with his moods. She knew that she must have been a terrible role model, especially for her daughter. When they went on a family holiday in 2005, her husband was missing so much of the time that she was mistaken for a single parent by more than one person staying at the resort.
One night, shortly after they returned from the holiday from hell, she was having another argument with her husband. She describes what happened next as an “out of body experience”; as she stood and watched this vivacious, attractive and capable woman accepting the abuse that she was seeing happening in front of her eyes. “You stupid woman”, she said to herself. “You are wonderful, gorgeous and fabulous, what are you putting up with this treatment for?” In that moment, her lungs filled with air and she felt her power returning. She told him to get out of her life. In an amazing turnaround, once she emotionally released herself from the marriage, the abuse from her husband reduced. It had no hold on her and she did not respond to it. She asked for a divorce.
They lived together for another two years, and the household workload continued to spiral ,she still had no real help and no significant support. She qualified as a life and business coach and she began a new coaching and training business. While she got support with words, she got very little practical help from anyone in her family. Starting the new business was hard work with long hours and unrelenting effort, so the relationship deteriorated further. The business results disappointed her and not surprisingly it seemed that her choice of business partners was not the most inspiring. During 2007, Louise became depressed although she did not realise it. Her first year in business produced a loss and the little support she had at home continued to wane. Even though she met with positive people during her business development phase, when she came home, she was met with conflict, criticism and negativity. She soon became suicidal. She viewed herself as a failure. Her marriage was a failure. Her business was a failure. She felt a failure as a mother. She felt a failure as a daughter. She knew she was loved but she did not feel it. Her burnout was not yet complete. But behind the clouds, the sun was still shining; she just had to wait until the clouds broke for the sunlight to peek through.
She was at a coaching training course in July 2007 and she met with another male coach who was the complete opposite of her husband. He was physically striking, emotionally aware, spiritually open and mentally challenging. The words she uses to describe him were that he was like a “warming summer breeze” eager to seduce her and to be the partner that she had always wanted. Paul was comfortable in expressing his emotions and he encouraged Louise to share hers not only with him, but with herself. Even though he was open and encouraging, his positive view of life was challenging to her.
Even with this wonderful new energy in her life, the suicidal ideation did not go away. The love and positivity she felt when she was with this man was marred by the darkness and loneliness she felt when she went back to her house and family. She knew that she was unbalanced but she was in so much pain that she could not do anything to stop it. She had become almost completely disconnected from all those in her life whom she had previously loved with all her heart, and her new ties with Paul were not yet strong enough to make her want to fight the pain. She had soon gathered enough potent medication that could end her life.
Paul spotted the tablets in her handbag, and having been trained in suicide prevention; he removed them from her bag and intervened not only with her but with her parents and siblings. Louise was not happy to have her family know that she was not the perfect woman that she was trying to be. She did not think they would be able to deal with it and did not want to worry them. However, it showed her that her family truly cared about her. She could see how twisted her thinking had become. She did not want to worry them but, on the other hand, she was quite ok with them finding her dead by her own hand in her lovely home. She faced the facts about how bad things were, but she still struggled as she began her transformational burnout coaching with a new coach.
She was encouraged and supported to visit her medical doctor and she visited her legal counsel to arrange the divorce that she so badly needed. Her father provided her the deposit for an apartment for herself and her youngest son and soon she was in counselling and coaching to help her through. She says that she is still going through the process. She does not know what the future will bring and is still only getting to know herself and what it means to be in touch with her true self. She is still only beginning to feel comfortable in letting other people see and hear her true self.
She feels that her burnout has transformed her. She now accepts herself and her humanity. Prior to her burnout, she did not feel any of her emotions. She doubted herself continuously. Nobody in her family of origin was comfortable with crying and she had adopted this behaviour herself. In listening to her emotions, she finally found her voice. She found strength in herself. She began to live for herself.
With her new partner, she is now growing all the time. It is still not easy. There is still a lot of pain but now Louise accepts this as a sign that she is alive, redeveloping and re-birthing. Relationships remain difficult even with the daughter who told her to leave the family home. Her youngest son is reacting badly to the separation and is not sure of where he sits in the new two home situation. He has become violent and disruptive and Louise has had to call in an educational psychologist to help her manage the relationship.
Louise knows now that transformation is a process. She knows that there is no transformation without pain. Before her burnout, her pain was silent and insidious. After the burnout, her pain is clear and transparent. She cries a lot but that’s all right. Previously, she could count on one hand the number of times she cried in her adult life. She had never cried for the loss of her marriage and that old life. Now she feels her emotions. She welcomes them. She knows that they are trying to tell her something from her subconscious. She has had a shift in how she handles her pain.
She looks at her five bedroom house when she leaves her youngest son there and is sad that she had to leave. When her children and her ex-husband have Sunday dinner, she is not there. This hurts her, but she knows that she could have died by her own hand in that kitchen had she stayed there
While this grieving affects her experience of the joy in her new relationship with Paul, she at least can feel the joy in herself for the first time in her life. She knows there is more pain around the corner. The family home will be sold and assets divided. The life that she had led for over twenty years will be disentangled but she knows it is transformational.
Louise’s business has now taken off. In the last 60 days, she generated more revenue than she had in the previous two years. She is a more authentic coach and her work rate is starting to get back to her previous levels. Customer reaction to her work is excellent and referrals are consistent and quality driven. Things are looking up.
She feels her true self more than she ever did. She is a better brand than she ever was. She realises that she did not need the business partners that she first chose. Looking back, she realises that she was suffering from the same authority complex in her choice of business partners. She now realises that she is just as good as they are. She has begun to win her own deals and they are bigger and better than before. Her self confidence is returning. She has been offered work in the UK, the EU and in the Middle East. She was asked to join a global forum on the future of coaching. Her authenticity is making a difference and this difference is generating business for her.
While she admits to experiencing a real and holistic happiness for the first time in her life, she cries a lot more. But this time, she says she can afford the luxury of a good cry and the toxins in her tears carry away some of the frustration. She feels she could never afford that before, but with her new partner and her new business, it is all part of the daily ups and downs of a fulfilling life.
She regards her burnout as transformational. She wishes it had come sooner in her life to tell her not to judge herself. She sees that her burnout helped her to realise that she was envying what other people had, or appeared to have. Her burnout made her realise that she had wonderful friends and family. Her burnout made her realise that she is now able to ask for help before it is too late. It helped her to focus on herself and on what was important to her; that she had to look after herself in order to be good for the other people in her life – her children, her family, her partner, her friends and her customers
She realises that she wanted to set her own standards. Her burnout led her to the conclusion that she had to live her own life, not the one that was conditioned for her. She realises the importance of real love. Her burnout has allowed her to be true to her self. Louise’s story is a common one that we that we meet on the Resilience4Enterprise programme. The meta resilience model that we have developed contains four factors which need to be increased in order to release resilience; personal persistence, personal efficiency, experience of adversity and openness to change.
For Louise, her Personal Persistence continues. She has more self belief. She knows the value of hard work, but this time, its meaning has changed for her. She persists with her new partner, her children her business and her other loving relationships. She has not lost hope. She is optimistic about her future. She is not sure of the outcome, but she keeps trying. She is now learning from failure all the time.
Her Personal Efficiency has also increased. She sets her targets lower and makes smaller demands on her abilities and capacity. She is still astounded by how much she gets done, but this time, the workload is not killing her. Her focus has changed. Her expectations have changed but so has her output. It is now more balanced.
Her Experience of Adversity has helped her cope. She knows the very high cost of “doing nothing”. Old patterns are hard to break but she struggles to break them slowly. Her experience of facing tough times both in the distant and recent past gives her confidence that she can face tough times in the future. She knows that she has the resilience to survive and even thrive.
Louise’s Openness to Change is now a powerful factor in her growing resilience. She says the main change has been with how she sees herself. That has made her world change enormously. She has become the change that she wanted to see. It is a powerful aphrodisiac and she wants more.
The Resilience4Enterprise model also includes four factors which need to be decreased in order to increase resilience; Obstacles to Adaptation, Instability of Environment, Personal Vulnerability and Low Self Esteem.
The Obstacles to Adaptation for Louise are more internal than external. Yes, her husband was an obstacle and her dead marriage was an obstacle. But she was the most stubborn obstacle herself and it was not until she was able to change herself that things began to move. The near death experience of suicidal ideation was her lowest moment, but it was the moment of truth in her burnout story. Thankfully, Paul was there. “There is a God. He sent me Paul” Louise says quietly.
The Instability of her Environment was mostly about negativity and lack of support. She only noticed this when she moved into her new apartment with her partner and son. She now receives stable and loving support not only with the housework, which is a genuine issue for women with families and households to run, but with her business challenges and commercial objectives. She is encouraged to think big and to act proud and confident. She is encouraged to fight back and she does. Once the negativity was destabilised, the optimism poured in and her life began to be a happier place to live in.
Her Personal Vulnerability was mostly to do with finances. Even though she was the biggest earner in the marriage, she had forgotten that she had uncapped potential. She felt like she had an economic dependency on her spouse. Having shared all the bills for twenty years, bought the cars, arranged and paid for the holidays, she soon realised that it was the other way round. Louise is now looking at a six figure salary in her third year of business. Her children were also a point of vulnerability. They continue to be her biggest weakness, she loves them dearly but she is beginning to feel less guilty. She does not model herself on other ‘perfect’ mothers; she is just herself. She does what she can which is her best. She continues to decrease the effect of her own vulnerability
Louise’s Low Self Esteem has also decreased. She feels much better. She went back to the gym. She now demands that her invoices be paid on time. When she asks for payment, she gets paid. She is adding value and clients want to keep her on board. They give her more work and
she gets more respect. She values herself more and she realises that her low self esteem serves her no longer.
At this point in the interview Louise started to cry. I asked her why she was crying. “I am crying for the six year old girl who was told by her daddy that she had a big mouth for having an opinion. I am crying for the seventeen year old girl who had no money to go to university. I am crying for the little girl who was told to keep her trap shut because she was putting her foot in it and “ What did she know?”.
“I am crying because that is what people pay me for now. I ask the hard questions. I do put my foot in it, but I am usually the only one who is brave enough to see the elephant in the room and I say what I see. I am crying because that authentic little girl was suppressed a long time ago but she is now coming alive again”.
George Bernard Shaw once said that all truths start with a blasphemy. Louise’s blasphemy has turned out to be the truth.
On burnout, Louise has this to say. “I wish it had come along sooner and sent me a messenger much earlier in my life. It should have told me when it was ok to give up the fight and to try something new. I was flogging a dead horse but I did not realise that I was just as dead myself. My pain was high, but so was my pain threshold. After my burnout, because I am in touch with my emotions, my pain threshold has come back to normal. I now allow myself to be emotional and it is serving me better than I ever thought possible. I cry a lot now and I like it!”
Burnout has transformed Louise and thankfully, Louise has transformed her burnout.
© The Alchemism Foundation 2006-2008
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Paul MOONEY is the founder of Resilience4Enterprise and The Alchemism Foundation. He is also the founder of the Transformational Burnout Movement http://transformationalburnout.blogspot.com
He can be contacted by emailing paul@resilience4enterprise.com or on www.alchemismfoundation.org
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A Woman’s Story
By Paul MOONEY
Founder Resilience4Enterprise
Eighty percent of the people who suffer with depression are women, but eighty percent of the people who take their own lives are men. Each gender handles their burnout differently. Where women work in a male dominated environment, signals are mixed and women in senior positions, can often become confused and unclear about how they should handle burnout.
In this article on transformational burnout, Paul Mooney, founder of Resilience4Enterprise speaks with Louise, a self made entrepreneur with a twenty five year background in the corporate sector. Coming close to suicide and then turning this into transformational learning, this is the story of Louise.
Louise was born to a working class family on the north side of Dublin in 1962. Although she had little encouragement from her hard working parents, she was a high achiever in school. She says the reason for this was that she actually enjoyed working hard and doing things well. However, she was “always seeking approval” and that is why she believes that she was working so hard, to get some kind of recognition from her mother and father.
She was driven, but did not really know why. She was always busy and hardworking. As the eldest in the family and with her mother working to make ends meet; from the age of 13, she looked after her three siblings after school, cooked the dinner, cleaned up afterwards and then went to her room where she studied for a further three hours. When she was leaving school, she achieved the best results in her school in the state examinations, but because there was no money for education in the family, she was unable to go to university to capitalise on her already significant intelligence. At that time, she did not qualify for state grants as both of her parents were working.
Even though she could not go to university , Louise continued to have a strong work ethic and spent a year doing an IT diploma. At the age of eighteen, she took a job in an insurance company as a programmer. Knowing that she could now look after her own education, she began a night time degree course in information technology and soon she was working a forty hour week, spending twenty hours in college and another fifteen hours studying and preparing for her work and college assignments. She did not sow any of the wild oats that most teenagers do and she recalls at that time, although she was not aware of it, that there was a distinct lack of fun in her life. She was intellectually strong but emotionally under-developed. Her awareness of herself and her self-knowledge was poor and she very often did not know how she felt about issues, waiting first for those more senior than her to provide a viewpoint to validate her own opinions.
Even though she still had a huge appetite for work, romance came along at the age of eighteen when she met a twenty six year old colleague and soon, they were engaged.
At the time, mildly abusive things were continuously happening in the relationship. However, the lack of attention she received while she was growing up and her state of emotional underdevelopment caused her to accept a lot of this negativity without reaction. Soon, she was suffering from major episodes of disrespect such as her boyfriend always being late for dates, not turning up to pre-arranged meetings and other demonstrations that she was not really respected by her fiancée in any significant way
Looking back, she did not trust her own judgement and she now realises that she was suffering from low self esteem. She viewed her boyfriend’s coldness as acceptable because it was what she had experienced from her father and other colleagues to whom she looked up. As a result of this behaviour, her pain threshold went up and soon she was able to exist without the attention she craved but did not receive. She calls this her “love recognition strategy”. She loved her father and knew that he loved her, but the way he showed his love was by with-holding the affection she so badly needed. His favourite phrase was “what do you know?”
She knows for certain that he, in turn, had been shown love in this way by his own mother. She found out later in life that he had also heard phrases like this spoken to him as a young boy. He was simply repeating his own experience of love. He, himself, was an under-achiever. So it was not surprising that he showed his love for Louise by behaving towards her and speaking to her in this same way. Nevertheless, it resulted in self doubt despite her own obvious intelligence. Because she mistook these incidents as models of fatherly love, her fiancée’s behaviour seemed to her to be the behaviour of someone who loved her. Was it not?
Louise charged on in her life and in her career. She was a marvellous trier and she persisted to the best of her ability. Her career moved along at a steady pace, being promoted from junior programmer to senior analyst. Over the following years, she had her first two children, first a boy and then a girl. By the time she was thirty years of age, she had worked with several poorly trained managers. With hindsight, she sees that these managers saw their staff as threats rather than assets. An intelligent, achieving woman like Louise was a particular threat.
The organisation in which she worked operated very much as an “old boys” network where relationships were built on the golf course rather than in the workplace. For seven years, other than product courses, she had no personal development training and no leadership development courses which would have worked on her attitudes. Even when she was put in charge of a large team, she received no people management training. This certainly became a contributing factor on her journey to burnout. Still, Louise believed she was doing pretty well – two children, keeping a nice house going, and having a full time job. She was a busy woman!
After a few years, the insurance company that she worked for was taken over by another company and she was delighted to find herself after nineteen years in information technology moving into a human resources role. What amazed her most in this new organisation was that she saw women of her own age and background with the same education that she had, doing very well in their own careers at higher levels in the organisation than she had achieved. What fascinated her even more was that these women had managed this with husbands and children.
There was no doubt that she was burned out in the IT field. She had come to hate her job. She woke up far too early every day, worrying about the job, dreading the bus journey to work each morning. She realised that her great passion was people, but she was getting very little chance to exercise her natural leadership qualities in the IT department of the “old boy’s” insurance company.
Needless to say, she loved the challenge in HR and she was soon re-engaged with the new organisation. She got lots of training and development, and had many leadership challenges as part of her new role. Not only did she become aware of her own potential but also that of the organisation, if only they could really engage people in their work
At home, however, the marriage which had limped along for years was now becoming worse. Her husband was now more passionate about his sports club than ever. Louise and her children grew more disconnected from him, as he continued to provide little or no support to her in her rapidly progressing career. She was soon the highest earner in the family, while her husband was content to devote all his energies and passion to his sports club. Looking back now, Louise says his priority was anyone outside of her. She calculates with a sad smile that she and their relationship were about sixth on his list.
Her children were now teenagers, and as teenagers can, they made life less than easy. Louise wore one mask at work and another at home but neither were actually who she really was. At work, she had a positive and encouraging environment, but home was a negative space which wore down her energy. She kept it to herself but her performance soon began to suffer. She began to suffer from chest infections and her sick leave increased. Her response to this turn of events was to choose a part time option from the company and at the age of 39, she was astounded but delighted to discover that she was pregnant with her third child.
Working part time, she soon realised that she was leaving the office at 2pm every day, having done the same amount of work that she had done under a full time regime. She was determined to show her manager and colleagues that her commitment had not diminished just because she was working part-time so she remained focused. Even though she was working less hours, her income per hour had actually increased. In her full-time job, the culture was one where you had to be seen to stay late regardless of how early in the morning you came in. Now she could happily leave at 2pm with a full day’s work done.
The additional personal development opened her eyes to new options in work and in life. Most importantly, it opened her eyes to how bad things were in her marriage. Her husband’s behaviour was now worsening and both she and her children were regularly being subjected to long moods of sullen silence and being emotionally abused in general. She was functioning, not living. However, from the outside, it all looked like the perfect marriage. She had three lovely children; there were two cars in the driveway; she worked part time while her husband had a full time permanent and pensionable job in a blue chip organisation. But when the front door was closed they all knew that it could not continue. She was tired. As she walked to the bus stop each morning, she passed a bench on a green field near her house, she used to see an old woman feeding the birds and she asked herself each morning “do I have to keep doing this till I am 65”? She did not want to.
Between 2003 and 2004, she returned to work full time for a special project, but when the opportunity arose to take a voluntary redundancy, she jumped at the chance. While she saw this as a chance to begin again, she had still not faced the reality that the core of her life, her relationship with her husband, was actually making her ill.
She had always been interested in health and so started an alternative medicine degree programme which brought her into contact with people she would never have met before. Although they all spoke English, she soon realised, that they were in fact speaking a different language from her. For over twenty years, she had suppressed her emotions and spent her entire life thinking and talking in a non-emotional way. Looking back she says she “was never too happy, but also never too sad either”. She even went as far to say that “I never felt depressed, but I also know that I never felt any joy”.
However, this group of people were talking about how they felt, how they treated themselves, how they took care of themselves; they even spoke about their spirituality and about God. Most of all, they spoke about the relationship they had with themselves and their relationships with others. She had never heard this language before having spent her childhood, her work-life and her home life in an environment of robotic functioning devoid of real or lasting pleasure.
As her awareness grew, she knew that the marriage would have to come to an end. Thinking back, when her eldest son was five years of age, she remembers planning to leave her husband, but here she was sixteen years later, still stuck in a relationship which did not fulfil her and which also shut her down from her true self. Frustratingly, she did not know how to end it. It was an unhappy survival. She realised that her life was unbearable and that she was not in touch with the real Louise. In spite of her achievements in her family and in her job, her self esteem was very low indeed. She had subjugated her real emotions. Her family and children were the most important things in her life, but the truth was that her home-life was awful. Her father’s advice had always been “to keep your head down and to keep ploughing on and be thankful for what you have” and that was just what she was doing. The fact that it was killing her slowly did not seem to be important.
She turned to her catholic religion and asked God to make her husband appreciate her and to love her. She wished for God to make her husband see her. But he did not. Another wish not granted. Her belief in her God dissolved as had her hopes and dreams for a wonderful family life. It was now clear to her that she was burned out, and one of the consequences was that she lost her faith. She was burned out emotionally and she was rapidly approaching physical burnout lacking the energy to keep going. Philosophically she burned out the things that supported and perpetrated the myth of her happy life, which was the opposite of what she was leading but that meant little at the time.
She felt alone. Her work and her gym were her escape. Even though she loved her children, they were hard work. She was not the mother that she wanted to be. She realised to her dismay that she was becoming like her own mother had been – worn out from work with little left for her children. A moment of realisation.
Louise was continuously suppressing her real feelings, she was tired, overwhelmed and the responsibility was weighing her down. She began to fight back against her husband’s behaviour as her teenage children began to point out to her that she should not have to put up with his moods. She knew that she must have been a terrible role model, especially for her daughter. When they went on a family holiday in 2005, her husband was missing so much of the time that she was mistaken for a single parent by more than one person staying at the resort.
One night, shortly after they returned from the holiday from hell, she was having another argument with her husband. She describes what happened next as an “out of body experience”; as she stood and watched this vivacious, attractive and capable woman accepting the abuse that she was seeing happening in front of her eyes. “You stupid woman”, she said to herself. “You are wonderful, gorgeous and fabulous, what are you putting up with this treatment for?” In that moment, her lungs filled with air and she felt her power returning. She told him to get out of her life. In an amazing turnaround, once she emotionally released herself from the marriage, the abuse from her husband reduced. It had no hold on her and she did not respond to it. She asked for a divorce.
They lived together for another two years, and the household workload continued to spiral ,she still had no real help and no significant support. She qualified as a life and business coach and she began a new coaching and training business. While she got support with words, she got very little practical help from anyone in her family. Starting the new business was hard work with long hours and unrelenting effort, so the relationship deteriorated further. The business results disappointed her and not surprisingly it seemed that her choice of business partners was not the most inspiring. During 2007, Louise became depressed although she did not realise it. Her first year in business produced a loss and the little support she had at home continued to wane. Even though she met with positive people during her business development phase, when she came home, she was met with conflict, criticism and negativity. She soon became suicidal. She viewed herself as a failure. Her marriage was a failure. Her business was a failure. She felt a failure as a mother. She felt a failure as a daughter. She knew she was loved but she did not feel it. Her burnout was not yet complete. But behind the clouds, the sun was still shining; she just had to wait until the clouds broke for the sunlight to peek through.
She was at a coaching training course in July 2007 and she met with another male coach who was the complete opposite of her husband. He was physically striking, emotionally aware, spiritually open and mentally challenging. The words she uses to describe him were that he was like a “warming summer breeze” eager to seduce her and to be the partner that she had always wanted. Paul was comfortable in expressing his emotions and he encouraged Louise to share hers not only with him, but with herself. Even though he was open and encouraging, his positive view of life was challenging to her.
Even with this wonderful new energy in her life, the suicidal ideation did not go away. The love and positivity she felt when she was with this man was marred by the darkness and loneliness she felt when she went back to her house and family. She knew that she was unbalanced but she was in so much pain that she could not do anything to stop it. She had become almost completely disconnected from all those in her life whom she had previously loved with all her heart, and her new ties with Paul were not yet strong enough to make her want to fight the pain. She had soon gathered enough potent medication that could end her life.
Paul spotted the tablets in her handbag, and having been trained in suicide prevention; he removed them from her bag and intervened not only with her but with her parents and siblings. Louise was not happy to have her family know that she was not the perfect woman that she was trying to be. She did not think they would be able to deal with it and did not want to worry them. However, it showed her that her family truly cared about her. She could see how twisted her thinking had become. She did not want to worry them but, on the other hand, she was quite ok with them finding her dead by her own hand in her lovely home. She faced the facts about how bad things were, but she still struggled as she began her transformational burnout coaching with a new coach.
She was encouraged and supported to visit her medical doctor and she visited her legal counsel to arrange the divorce that she so badly needed. Her father provided her the deposit for an apartment for herself and her youngest son and soon she was in counselling and coaching to help her through. She says that she is still going through the process. She does not know what the future will bring and is still only getting to know herself and what it means to be in touch with her true self. She is still only beginning to feel comfortable in letting other people see and hear her true self.
She feels that her burnout has transformed her. She now accepts herself and her humanity. Prior to her burnout, she did not feel any of her emotions. She doubted herself continuously. Nobody in her family of origin was comfortable with crying and she had adopted this behaviour herself. In listening to her emotions, she finally found her voice. She found strength in herself. She began to live for herself.
With her new partner, she is now growing all the time. It is still not easy. There is still a lot of pain but now Louise accepts this as a sign that she is alive, redeveloping and re-birthing. Relationships remain difficult even with the daughter who told her to leave the family home. Her youngest son is reacting badly to the separation and is not sure of where he sits in the new two home situation. He has become violent and disruptive and Louise has had to call in an educational psychologist to help her manage the relationship.
Louise knows now that transformation is a process. She knows that there is no transformation without pain. Before her burnout, her pain was silent and insidious. After the burnout, her pain is clear and transparent. She cries a lot but that’s all right. Previously, she could count on one hand the number of times she cried in her adult life. She had never cried for the loss of her marriage and that old life. Now she feels her emotions. She welcomes them. She knows that they are trying to tell her something from her subconscious. She has had a shift in how she handles her pain.
She looks at her five bedroom house when she leaves her youngest son there and is sad that she had to leave. When her children and her ex-husband have Sunday dinner, she is not there. This hurts her, but she knows that she could have died by her own hand in that kitchen had she stayed there
While this grieving affects her experience of the joy in her new relationship with Paul, she at least can feel the joy in herself for the first time in her life. She knows there is more pain around the corner. The family home will be sold and assets divided. The life that she had led for over twenty years will be disentangled but she knows it is transformational.
Louise’s business has now taken off. In the last 60 days, she generated more revenue than she had in the previous two years. She is a more authentic coach and her work rate is starting to get back to her previous levels. Customer reaction to her work is excellent and referrals are consistent and quality driven. Things are looking up.
She feels her true self more than she ever did. She is a better brand than she ever was. She realises that she did not need the business partners that she first chose. Looking back, she realises that she was suffering from the same authority complex in her choice of business partners. She now realises that she is just as good as they are. She has begun to win her own deals and they are bigger and better than before. Her self confidence is returning. She has been offered work in the UK, the EU and in the Middle East. She was asked to join a global forum on the future of coaching. Her authenticity is making a difference and this difference is generating business for her.
While she admits to experiencing a real and holistic happiness for the first time in her life, she cries a lot more. But this time, she says she can afford the luxury of a good cry and the toxins in her tears carry away some of the frustration. She feels she could never afford that before, but with her new partner and her new business, it is all part of the daily ups and downs of a fulfilling life.
She regards her burnout as transformational. She wishes it had come sooner in her life to tell her not to judge herself. She sees that her burnout helped her to realise that she was envying what other people had, or appeared to have. Her burnout made her realise that she had wonderful friends and family. Her burnout made her realise that she is now able to ask for help before it is too late. It helped her to focus on herself and on what was important to her; that she had to look after herself in order to be good for the other people in her life – her children, her family, her partner, her friends and her customers
She realises that she wanted to set her own standards. Her burnout led her to the conclusion that she had to live her own life, not the one that was conditioned for her. She realises the importance of real love. Her burnout has allowed her to be true to her self. Louise’s story is a common one that we that we meet on the Resilience4Enterprise programme. The meta resilience model that we have developed contains four factors which need to be increased in order to release resilience; personal persistence, personal efficiency, experience of adversity and openness to change.
For Louise, her Personal Persistence continues. She has more self belief. She knows the value of hard work, but this time, its meaning has changed for her. She persists with her new partner, her children her business and her other loving relationships. She has not lost hope. She is optimistic about her future. She is not sure of the outcome, but she keeps trying. She is now learning from failure all the time.
Her Personal Efficiency has also increased. She sets her targets lower and makes smaller demands on her abilities and capacity. She is still astounded by how much she gets done, but this time, the workload is not killing her. Her focus has changed. Her expectations have changed but so has her output. It is now more balanced.
Her Experience of Adversity has helped her cope. She knows the very high cost of “doing nothing”. Old patterns are hard to break but she struggles to break them slowly. Her experience of facing tough times both in the distant and recent past gives her confidence that she can face tough times in the future. She knows that she has the resilience to survive and even thrive.
Louise’s Openness to Change is now a powerful factor in her growing resilience. She says the main change has been with how she sees herself. That has made her world change enormously. She has become the change that she wanted to see. It is a powerful aphrodisiac and she wants more.
The Resilience4Enterprise model also includes four factors which need to be decreased in order to increase resilience; Obstacles to Adaptation, Instability of Environment, Personal Vulnerability and Low Self Esteem.
The Obstacles to Adaptation for Louise are more internal than external. Yes, her husband was an obstacle and her dead marriage was an obstacle. But she was the most stubborn obstacle herself and it was not until she was able to change herself that things began to move. The near death experience of suicidal ideation was her lowest moment, but it was the moment of truth in her burnout story. Thankfully, Paul was there. “There is a God. He sent me Paul” Louise says quietly.
The Instability of her Environment was mostly about negativity and lack of support. She only noticed this when she moved into her new apartment with her partner and son. She now receives stable and loving support not only with the housework, which is a genuine issue for women with families and households to run, but with her business challenges and commercial objectives. She is encouraged to think big and to act proud and confident. She is encouraged to fight back and she does. Once the negativity was destabilised, the optimism poured in and her life began to be a happier place to live in.
Her Personal Vulnerability was mostly to do with finances. Even though she was the biggest earner in the marriage, she had forgotten that she had uncapped potential. She felt like she had an economic dependency on her spouse. Having shared all the bills for twenty years, bought the cars, arranged and paid for the holidays, she soon realised that it was the other way round. Louise is now looking at a six figure salary in her third year of business. Her children were also a point of vulnerability. They continue to be her biggest weakness, she loves them dearly but she is beginning to feel less guilty. She does not model herself on other ‘perfect’ mothers; she is just herself. She does what she can which is her best. She continues to decrease the effect of her own vulnerability
Louise’s Low Self Esteem has also decreased. She feels much better. She went back to the gym. She now demands that her invoices be paid on time. When she asks for payment, she gets paid. She is adding value and clients want to keep her on board. They give her more work and
she gets more respect. She values herself more and she realises that her low self esteem serves her no longer.
At this point in the interview Louise started to cry. I asked her why she was crying. “I am crying for the six year old girl who was told by her daddy that she had a big mouth for having an opinion. I am crying for the seventeen year old girl who had no money to go to university. I am crying for the little girl who was told to keep her trap shut because she was putting her foot in it and “ What did she know?”.
“I am crying because that is what people pay me for now. I ask the hard questions. I do put my foot in it, but I am usually the only one who is brave enough to see the elephant in the room and I say what I see. I am crying because that authentic little girl was suppressed a long time ago but she is now coming alive again”.
George Bernard Shaw once said that all truths start with a blasphemy. Louise’s blasphemy has turned out to be the truth.
On burnout, Louise has this to say. “I wish it had come along sooner and sent me a messenger much earlier in my life. It should have told me when it was ok to give up the fight and to try something new. I was flogging a dead horse but I did not realise that I was just as dead myself. My pain was high, but so was my pain threshold. After my burnout, because I am in touch with my emotions, my pain threshold has come back to normal. I now allow myself to be emotional and it is serving me better than I ever thought possible. I cry a lot now and I like it!”
Burnout has transformed Louise and thankfully, Louise has transformed her burnout.
© The Alchemism Foundation 2006-2008
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Paul MOONEY is the founder of Resilience4Enterprise and The Alchemism Foundation. He is also the founder of the Transformational Burnout Movement http://transformationalburnout.blogspot.com
He can be contacted by emailing paul@resilience4enterprise.com or on www.alchemismfoundation.org
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Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Transformational Burnout - the road to resilience
Just to get you started on where I am coming from, here is a sneak preview of an article that I have just published.
Transformational Burnout – the road to Resilience by Paul Mooney
In this article on transformational burnout, Paul Mooney, an opinion leading author on the practice of resilience development, suggests the radical view that burnout is not only beneficial in personal learning, but it is crucial in the transformational development cycle of the human being.
Having suffered from a major burnout episode in 2006, he has transformed his experiences into a powerful programme called resilience4enterprise which is now delivered in Europe, the USA and the Middle East.
My own experience of burnout is well documented in my book “Your business is not worth dying for – releasing meta-resilience in your enterprise” published by the alchemism foundation as an e-book and also in hardback. In it, I describe my journey as a rise in corporate responsibility, followed by a period as a parallel entrepreneur, followed by a crash and burn period where I lost my business, my job, my marriage and my self esteem. It came to head in July 2006, when I had two near-death experiences in one weekend and I ended up in a local psychiatric hospital, diagnosed with reactive clinical depression.
After almost 12 months in recovery, I started to take some tentative steps in discovering what contributed to my burnout and in understanding why I met so many men and women just like me while in hospital. On that journey I began to realise that the very adversity which I was going through was one of the most important contributors to my learning. It gave me credibility for creating a programme to help others and in many ways, it was the core of my experiential awakening.
I realised that my suffering included some beautiful gifts and in those gifts was a richness that I simply could not find in any other way. My attraction to the term alchemy came about not as a result of studying Carl Jung, but when I recently read his words “creativity is the alchemy of making art out of suffering”, I was delighted to feel in such august company when I founded the alchemism foundation in 2007. For me, the journey that I took, helped me to create a credibility and rapport between myself and my new clients that simply was not there between my psychologists and myself when they were chatting to me while I was in the care of the mental health community.
Over the past few years, as I got the opportunity to speak to other people who were facing burnout, my experience made them less afraid of me, and then less afraid of themselves and resulted in a significant change to the way that I had done business in the past. I found that I was able to help fellow travellers to see their suffering and pain or burnout as transformative and helped them to face the truth and to imagine a new purpose for their pain. I have even come to realise that without burnout, that purpose may never be uncovered.
I discovered that in helping others and being compassionate with them, that it helped to ease my own self consciousness and negativity and made some of my own pain tolerable. In discovering my own resilience, I was able to free myself of some of my suffering and I discovered a larger context for my survival which made sense to me.
My own story of burnout and resilience contained ugly and painful abuse, trauma, loss and betrayal, but it was all followed by inspirational resilience which is now the core ingredients of the resilience4enterprise programme which I have developed ; namely help, hope and meaning.
I now help people who are high achievers to develop flexible coping strategies and adaptive attitudes to their burnout. Where once I would have tried to help people to avoid burnout, I now help them to embrace it for the learning that it contains and the richness that it brings.
In some ways, my transformation began in the middle of my terror and when I eventually began to structure my thoughts, I began to see that my life had potential meaning greater than my story of surviving a few near-death experiences. My optimism began to grow. My persistence began to improve. My efficiency began to increase. I began to be able to use my adversity as a way of learning and my openness to change began to reveal new opportunities to help, heal and create a new field of transformational burnout.
I realised that during my life, my personal resilience was affected by low self esteem, lack of self determination and hopelessness in some of my personal relationships and business relationships that eventually brought me down. Many of the factors that grow resilience were missing in my case.
I was not having positive engagement with challenge, I was facing setback after setback. I did not see that my efforts were working and if I ever felt that I was pushing a rock up a hill, I was certain that there were people on the far side, pushing it back down on top of me.
Resilience requires kindness and love and I saw very little of that. It requires self respect and enough return for me to give more. I had very little of that. Resilient people understand their pain and they turn it into meaning combining compassion with power. During my burnout, I experienced very little of that too.
I fought for a long time with myself. I fought against change. I did not realise that I had to die to my old identity in order to move forwards. When the change came, everything that I valued went with it. But it was only after the most excruciating pain that I realised that the values that I was living were not mine at all. They were someone else’s. They were taught to me, and I needed to learn what my real values were. In the end, change was not enough. That was only the motivation.
I realised that I had to change my attitude and it took a long time for that to happen. But it eventually did and in the end, it was not the mental health service that helped me, I transformed myself. I incorporated my burnout into my new identity without resentment and I developed a curiosity about burnout and depression.
The great expectations that I and others set for my career threw me off balance when my vision for what I wanted became more important than what was actually facing me. I fantasised about establishing and selling a mobile technology company. I got it from a standing start to a top-line revenue of €4m in three years. I got it valued at €7.6m on revenue of €96,000. It looked like it was going to work. But when my fantasy was taken away from me, I was flooded by resentment and self pity and my negative spiral began.
With no support at home and nowhere to turn, my suicidal ideation began and in a matter of weeks, I was a shadow of the vibrant entrepreneur that I used to be. What I was missing was the right opportunity to change. That opportunity was walking away from a 100 miles per hour head-on crash on a national highway.
Several months after my release from hospital, the value of my meaning began to appear and when I shared this meaning with others, it began to have even more meaning. I have realised in the last two years that I have had to recreate meaning in many new contexts and I have had to redefine my own meaning time and time again. In many ways, I have been able to modify my lenses and filters and that is what has helped me become resilient in ways that I did not think even possible a few short years ago.
Through the development of the resilience4enterprise programme, I have been able to transform a negative emotional state into compassion and new meaning. First, I was able to help others and then, I was able to let my old self die. I let my pain and adversity expand my knowledge and compassion. I created a space where I let the meaning emerge.
During my time of extreme stress and crisis, because I had built myself into an island, my disconnection was too big to bear and when I compared myself to others, the pain and grief took on new meaning and dragged me deeper into my depression. I wanted to disappear as a response to my shame and as a release from my personal responsibility. There is no doubt that I wanted to die. However, the universe had other ideas.
In one way, an old me died in that car crash in July 2006 and in that death lay my development. It was only at this point that my real freedom emerged. I found that my physical, cognitive and emotional capacity increased and I found new opportunities to break through into greater consciousness. I began to find new books that I would never have found digestible. I met people whom I never would have had the opportunity to meet. I opened my eyes and my heart and into that space appeared the unconditional love that I had been looking for all of my life.
The unconditional love started with myself but it also came into others. I lost friends and family along the way, but I also met people who have become dear friends and welcome supporters. I suppose you would call it swings and roundabouts. My own pain connected me to a particular kind of knowledge and compassion. That knowledge was in the field of transformational burnout and resilience and knowing how they are connected.
I used to strive for financial freedom. On that journey, I went from earning ten times the industrial national wage to having ten times the debt of the average industrial worker. The freedom that I experience now is to accept new suffering, to be interested in it for what it connects me to in terms of new meaning and new compassion. I find that I can now very quickly create a coherent and meaningful story from any misery that comes my way. I can turn hardship into helping. I can turn trauma into therapy and I can turn abuse into appetite for life.
Above all, I have realised that burnout affects everyone. It is not random and it does have something important to say. While it is a state of being and it will pass, the overwhelming panic, anxiety and suffering was like nothing that I had ever experienced. My ratio of giving to receiving was off balance, my toxic relationships were draining me of vital energy and I was blind to the shafting and abuse that was going on all around me.
I learned that it was a misalignment of fulfilment, balance and meaning. My old ways of doing things no longer produced results and my conditioning to avoid fear made me stuck. My circumstances had changed but I had not. My normal commitment was nowhere to be seen and I was left feeling confused lethargic, exhausted irritated and unable to cope.
Paradoxically, it was still the best thing that ever happened to me. I finally heard the cry of my soul to break free, to be true to itself in the world. I no longer wanted to be identified by objective criteria, and I heard the demands from my deepest source to find my true path. That path is clear now and I no longer struggle for meaning and joy in my relationships or in my work.
As an entrepreneur, my burnout was in direct proportion to my project. I made big plans and I fell hard from a high place. My significance, my nourishment and my self esteem were wrapped up in the success of my company. When it liquidated due to the betrayal of a business partner, this affected my self -image and the business failure was reflected back at me as a personal failure.
I was still trying to be Mr. Perfect, holding on but not knowing why. I was following the cheerleaders and engaging in risky behaviours. I escaped in my fantasies but I ended up in a psychiatric hospital; the ultimate nightmare.
Now, the resilience4enterprise programme that I have developed helps people bounce back from adversity. It prepares them for shocking events and develops a deeper understanding of their choices and position.
It diminishes negativity and toxicity and it helps to find the lessons in failure. It provides energy for success and provides the vigour to exceed expectations but on a transformational path to leadership instead of using the old rules and under the old paradigm. The programme helps high achievers to different levels of transformation, choosing to be a hero over victim, to cope over crumbing, to respond rather than reacting. It seeks authenticity over plasticity and thrives on hope over doom.
Resilient people make choices and they accept responsibility. They don’t blame others and they remain calm problem solvers. They retain their sense of humour and they are positive learners. They are totally present and they blend their positive traits in a paradoxical way to keep them curious and independent as well as empathic and emotionally self aware.
They are self motivated, self aware and they become powerful goal setters and questioners expecting change but relishing failure. While they are still daydreamers, serendipity happens more often and they accept that with joy and happiness. Resilience is a real buzz.
I have identified eight key factors in resilience development. Four of them need to be enhanced and four of them need to be diminished. The factors for enhancement are personal persistence, personal efficiency, experience of adversity and openness to change. The factors that need to be diminished are obstacles to adaptation, instability of environment, personal vulnerability and low self esteem. These factors form the core of our Meta-Resilience Factor Analysis.
It has been a strange journey but a journey nevertheless. The journey still continues but now I feel more prepared and more equipped not only for the failure that I will face, but for the success that I learn along the way.
Hail to transformational burnout. I encourage you to embrace yours so that you can release your resilience.
Paul MOONEY can be contacted on paul@resilience4enterprise.com or www.alchemismfoundation.org
Transformational Burnout – the road to Resilience by Paul Mooney
In this article on transformational burnout, Paul Mooney, an opinion leading author on the practice of resilience development, suggests the radical view that burnout is not only beneficial in personal learning, but it is crucial in the transformational development cycle of the human being.
Having suffered from a major burnout episode in 2006, he has transformed his experiences into a powerful programme called resilience4enterprise which is now delivered in Europe, the USA and the Middle East.
My own experience of burnout is well documented in my book “Your business is not worth dying for – releasing meta-resilience in your enterprise” published by the alchemism foundation as an e-book and also in hardback. In it, I describe my journey as a rise in corporate responsibility, followed by a period as a parallel entrepreneur, followed by a crash and burn period where I lost my business, my job, my marriage and my self esteem. It came to head in July 2006, when I had two near-death experiences in one weekend and I ended up in a local psychiatric hospital, diagnosed with reactive clinical depression.
After almost 12 months in recovery, I started to take some tentative steps in discovering what contributed to my burnout and in understanding why I met so many men and women just like me while in hospital. On that journey I began to realise that the very adversity which I was going through was one of the most important contributors to my learning. It gave me credibility for creating a programme to help others and in many ways, it was the core of my experiential awakening.
I realised that my suffering included some beautiful gifts and in those gifts was a richness that I simply could not find in any other way. My attraction to the term alchemy came about not as a result of studying Carl Jung, but when I recently read his words “creativity is the alchemy of making art out of suffering”, I was delighted to feel in such august company when I founded the alchemism foundation in 2007. For me, the journey that I took, helped me to create a credibility and rapport between myself and my new clients that simply was not there between my psychologists and myself when they were chatting to me while I was in the care of the mental health community.
Over the past few years, as I got the opportunity to speak to other people who were facing burnout, my experience made them less afraid of me, and then less afraid of themselves and resulted in a significant change to the way that I had done business in the past. I found that I was able to help fellow travellers to see their suffering and pain or burnout as transformative and helped them to face the truth and to imagine a new purpose for their pain. I have even come to realise that without burnout, that purpose may never be uncovered.
I discovered that in helping others and being compassionate with them, that it helped to ease my own self consciousness and negativity and made some of my own pain tolerable. In discovering my own resilience, I was able to free myself of some of my suffering and I discovered a larger context for my survival which made sense to me.
My own story of burnout and resilience contained ugly and painful abuse, trauma, loss and betrayal, but it was all followed by inspirational resilience which is now the core ingredients of the resilience4enterprise programme which I have developed ; namely help, hope and meaning.
I now help people who are high achievers to develop flexible coping strategies and adaptive attitudes to their burnout. Where once I would have tried to help people to avoid burnout, I now help them to embrace it for the learning that it contains and the richness that it brings.
In some ways, my transformation began in the middle of my terror and when I eventually began to structure my thoughts, I began to see that my life had potential meaning greater than my story of surviving a few near-death experiences. My optimism began to grow. My persistence began to improve. My efficiency began to increase. I began to be able to use my adversity as a way of learning and my openness to change began to reveal new opportunities to help, heal and create a new field of transformational burnout.
I realised that during my life, my personal resilience was affected by low self esteem, lack of self determination and hopelessness in some of my personal relationships and business relationships that eventually brought me down. Many of the factors that grow resilience were missing in my case.
I was not having positive engagement with challenge, I was facing setback after setback. I did not see that my efforts were working and if I ever felt that I was pushing a rock up a hill, I was certain that there were people on the far side, pushing it back down on top of me.
Resilience requires kindness and love and I saw very little of that. It requires self respect and enough return for me to give more. I had very little of that. Resilient people understand their pain and they turn it into meaning combining compassion with power. During my burnout, I experienced very little of that too.
I fought for a long time with myself. I fought against change. I did not realise that I had to die to my old identity in order to move forwards. When the change came, everything that I valued went with it. But it was only after the most excruciating pain that I realised that the values that I was living were not mine at all. They were someone else’s. They were taught to me, and I needed to learn what my real values were. In the end, change was not enough. That was only the motivation.
I realised that I had to change my attitude and it took a long time for that to happen. But it eventually did and in the end, it was not the mental health service that helped me, I transformed myself. I incorporated my burnout into my new identity without resentment and I developed a curiosity about burnout and depression.
The great expectations that I and others set for my career threw me off balance when my vision for what I wanted became more important than what was actually facing me. I fantasised about establishing and selling a mobile technology company. I got it from a standing start to a top-line revenue of €4m in three years. I got it valued at €7.6m on revenue of €96,000. It looked like it was going to work. But when my fantasy was taken away from me, I was flooded by resentment and self pity and my negative spiral began.
With no support at home and nowhere to turn, my suicidal ideation began and in a matter of weeks, I was a shadow of the vibrant entrepreneur that I used to be. What I was missing was the right opportunity to change. That opportunity was walking away from a 100 miles per hour head-on crash on a national highway.
Several months after my release from hospital, the value of my meaning began to appear and when I shared this meaning with others, it began to have even more meaning. I have realised in the last two years that I have had to recreate meaning in many new contexts and I have had to redefine my own meaning time and time again. In many ways, I have been able to modify my lenses and filters and that is what has helped me become resilient in ways that I did not think even possible a few short years ago.
Through the development of the resilience4enterprise programme, I have been able to transform a negative emotional state into compassion and new meaning. First, I was able to help others and then, I was able to let my old self die. I let my pain and adversity expand my knowledge and compassion. I created a space where I let the meaning emerge.
During my time of extreme stress and crisis, because I had built myself into an island, my disconnection was too big to bear and when I compared myself to others, the pain and grief took on new meaning and dragged me deeper into my depression. I wanted to disappear as a response to my shame and as a release from my personal responsibility. There is no doubt that I wanted to die. However, the universe had other ideas.
In one way, an old me died in that car crash in July 2006 and in that death lay my development. It was only at this point that my real freedom emerged. I found that my physical, cognitive and emotional capacity increased and I found new opportunities to break through into greater consciousness. I began to find new books that I would never have found digestible. I met people whom I never would have had the opportunity to meet. I opened my eyes and my heart and into that space appeared the unconditional love that I had been looking for all of my life.
The unconditional love started with myself but it also came into others. I lost friends and family along the way, but I also met people who have become dear friends and welcome supporters. I suppose you would call it swings and roundabouts. My own pain connected me to a particular kind of knowledge and compassion. That knowledge was in the field of transformational burnout and resilience and knowing how they are connected.
I used to strive for financial freedom. On that journey, I went from earning ten times the industrial national wage to having ten times the debt of the average industrial worker. The freedom that I experience now is to accept new suffering, to be interested in it for what it connects me to in terms of new meaning and new compassion. I find that I can now very quickly create a coherent and meaningful story from any misery that comes my way. I can turn hardship into helping. I can turn trauma into therapy and I can turn abuse into appetite for life.
Above all, I have realised that burnout affects everyone. It is not random and it does have something important to say. While it is a state of being and it will pass, the overwhelming panic, anxiety and suffering was like nothing that I had ever experienced. My ratio of giving to receiving was off balance, my toxic relationships were draining me of vital energy and I was blind to the shafting and abuse that was going on all around me.
I learned that it was a misalignment of fulfilment, balance and meaning. My old ways of doing things no longer produced results and my conditioning to avoid fear made me stuck. My circumstances had changed but I had not. My normal commitment was nowhere to be seen and I was left feeling confused lethargic, exhausted irritated and unable to cope.
Paradoxically, it was still the best thing that ever happened to me. I finally heard the cry of my soul to break free, to be true to itself in the world. I no longer wanted to be identified by objective criteria, and I heard the demands from my deepest source to find my true path. That path is clear now and I no longer struggle for meaning and joy in my relationships or in my work.
As an entrepreneur, my burnout was in direct proportion to my project. I made big plans and I fell hard from a high place. My significance, my nourishment and my self esteem were wrapped up in the success of my company. When it liquidated due to the betrayal of a business partner, this affected my self -image and the business failure was reflected back at me as a personal failure.
I was still trying to be Mr. Perfect, holding on but not knowing why. I was following the cheerleaders and engaging in risky behaviours. I escaped in my fantasies but I ended up in a psychiatric hospital; the ultimate nightmare.
Now, the resilience4enterprise programme that I have developed helps people bounce back from adversity. It prepares them for shocking events and develops a deeper understanding of their choices and position.
It diminishes negativity and toxicity and it helps to find the lessons in failure. It provides energy for success and provides the vigour to exceed expectations but on a transformational path to leadership instead of using the old rules and under the old paradigm. The programme helps high achievers to different levels of transformation, choosing to be a hero over victim, to cope over crumbing, to respond rather than reacting. It seeks authenticity over plasticity and thrives on hope over doom.
Resilient people make choices and they accept responsibility. They don’t blame others and they remain calm problem solvers. They retain their sense of humour and they are positive learners. They are totally present and they blend their positive traits in a paradoxical way to keep them curious and independent as well as empathic and emotionally self aware.
They are self motivated, self aware and they become powerful goal setters and questioners expecting change but relishing failure. While they are still daydreamers, serendipity happens more often and they accept that with joy and happiness. Resilience is a real buzz.
I have identified eight key factors in resilience development. Four of them need to be enhanced and four of them need to be diminished. The factors for enhancement are personal persistence, personal efficiency, experience of adversity and openness to change. The factors that need to be diminished are obstacles to adaptation, instability of environment, personal vulnerability and low self esteem. These factors form the core of our Meta-Resilience Factor Analysis.
It has been a strange journey but a journey nevertheless. The journey still continues but now I feel more prepared and more equipped not only for the failure that I will face, but for the success that I learn along the way.
Hail to transformational burnout. I encourage you to embrace yours so that you can release your resilience.
Paul MOONEY can be contacted on paul@resilience4enterprise.com or www.alchemismfoundation.org
First Posting
Today has been a good day. It sees the start of the Transformational Burnout Movement which is a concept that I shared with Tim Casserley and David Megginson just yesterday.
We were on a conference call to discuss their upcoming book "Coaching and Burnout" which will be published in October and when we discussed our various experiences of burnout and the transformation which occurred in our own lives and in the lives of our current clients, we just knew we had to do something about it.
We have proposed that we have an International Virtual Symposium on Transformational Burnout in November 2008.
The movement starts here. We want to hear from you and we want to know if you believe what we believe, that burnout can transform you.
The lines are open...
Paul MOONEY
Founder
Transformational Burnout Movement
We were on a conference call to discuss their upcoming book "Coaching and Burnout" which will be published in October and when we discussed our various experiences of burnout and the transformation which occurred in our own lives and in the lives of our current clients, we just knew we had to do something about it.
We have proposed that we have an International Virtual Symposium on Transformational Burnout in November 2008.
The movement starts here. We want to hear from you and we want to know if you believe what we believe, that burnout can transform you.
The lines are open...
Paul MOONEY
Founder
Transformational Burnout Movement
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