768: Burnout After a Promotion: Why Your Strengths, Not Your Workload, May Be the Problem

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: Michael had lost 20 pounds. He couldn't sleep, couldn't eat. Instead, he managed financial projections worth billions of dollars at a major film studio that you've absolutely heard of.

[00:00:10] Michael: I felt like it was my duty to suffer through this job because I wanted to see my team advance.

[00:00:18] Scott Anthony Barlow: He was 18 years into the company, started as a senior financial analyst in 2001, and yet he had made vice president by 2012.

[00:00:27] Michael: The last year I kept saying, "It'll get better. It'll get better. It'll get better."

[00:00:30] Scott Anthony Barlow: His doctor couldn't find anything medically wrong with him. Instead, he told Michael that the job was killing him.

[00:00:36] Introduction: And it just got to the point where I would get out of there on Friday and just go into a coma for the weekend and drag myself in on Monday. This is Happen to Your Career. Most people let their career happen to them, falling into jobs by accident, staying longer than they should, and wondering if this is really all there is. But a few people decide to stop settling and do something different. This podcast is for you to take control, get intentional, and design your career to fit the life that you want to build. Real stories and real research so you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow.

[00:01:10] Scott Anthony Barlow: But for the most part, when he started out, he loved it. He loved the movies, loved accounting, the feeling of putting things in order, keeping the numbers in balance.

[00:01:19] Michael: The more you could handle, the more they would throw at you. I was very fortunate to have some great, like, bosses that really knew how to challenge you, and it just sustained me. It sustained me for almost 20 years.

[00:01:32] Scott Anthony Barlow: To him, it was like a Zen rock garden, except with numbers instead of rocks. But then he got this last promotion, and the rock garden stopped being all that Zen. This last role, the most recent one, was VP of Worldwide Distribution Finance. Large global team, trips to Europe, and by the way, this is LA, so, you know, you tell somebody you work at a major studio, you get invited to brunch.

[00:01:59] He was leaving the office past 11 at night. He was spending weekends at home alone, either catching up or just totally frozen with anxiety. This Finance job got to the point where he was in total burnout, and the doctor couldn't find anything wrong with him. But nobody asked him if he was okay. They just kept handing him more responsibility.

[00:02:18] Michael: You have this irrational sense of importance of the work. I felt like if I'm not there, stuff is gonna fall apart. If I'm not there, no one else is gonna be able to do these things, and they won't be perfect, and they won't be right, and they won't be on time. I have to keep going.

[00:02:34] And I did that until I physically couldn't do it anymore. And I did. I took a couple months off to get my health back, and having that space allowed me to go...

[00:02:45] Going back into that environment is not gonna serve me. It's not gonna work. It's not gonna work for them because I'm not gonna do better the second time around, right? Expecting that environment to change for me was ludicrous. It was never gonna happen.

[00:03:01] Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, so most people hear this, they reach for the obvious explanation, too much work, overload. And don't get me wrong, overload is real. But it doesn't explain what Michael was going through, because he'd carried enormous amounts of responsibility for years and been totally fine and even loved it. What changed, though, was what he was actually doing, what he was responsible for, the shape of the work. They moved him into a role that sat complete opposite of his strengths.

[00:03:28] Michael: Once I learned about my strengths, I was like, oh, wow, this is crazy. I can see exactly why I was successful there, right? And I can see exactly why I was miserable for so long.

[00:03:37] Scott Anthony Barlow: So same company, same industry, but the difference with this new role, besides just more prestige, more money, but his day-to-day tasks where he's spending his time literally were opposite the things that he was best at.

[00:03:50] Michael: My number one strength is harmony which is crazy, right? So, on the good side, it served me in that job because I was always looking to make things work and get people working together and systems working, and I wanted things to be handled and covered and no surprises. But in that environment, we didn't have harmony in anything.

[00:04:11] And so I was... It just, ugh, it just drove me crazy because you could never get anything working right or anybody on the same page. You know what I mean?

[00:04:20] Decide what you want your life to look like. Like, lay out, pick how you want your life to be structured before you start looking for a job at a company first. And I was like, "whoa. Like, who does that?"

[00:04:32] Scott Anthony Barlow: Fast-forward 24 months. Okay, Michael's in a totally different place, completely different work, and I met him at a diner in Pacific Beach, California, a few months after he started. Here's the thing that he told me. He still has trouble accepting that work can be enjoyable, that he could have fun at work.

[00:04:50] Michael: I always had a belief that work needs to be hard. If you're not suffering at work, then you're not working hard enough, right? I don't know where this comes from, boy, did I have to let that go? And that's critical. I think that's really important for people to just think about your attitude towards work, and do you have that belief, right?

[00:05:09] Because if work is fun, what I'm doing now, I find these moments when I'm like, it's 8:00 on a Tuesday night, and I'm like, "should I watch a movie?" I'm like, "No, I actually really feel like working," because I'm not... It's not work. It's fun. I'm having fun with it.

[00:05:22] I never wanna go back to sitting somewhere and getting paid by the hour, you know, or an annual salary because I am in control of my time now. I'm in control of my volume of business to some degree.I can take a break when I need to.

[00:05:38] Scott Anthony Barlow: Now, if you're wondering what changed, here's what I would suggest. I would suggest listening to his full story on the Happen To Your Career podcast. Michael's full story for how he went from a good job to completely burnt out to loving work in a brand new career is on the Happen To Your Career podcast, episode 395.

[00:05:56] Michael: Just take a chance. Take a chance on doing something different than you've done before, and don't just try to look for something similar to what you were doing, right? Try to shake it up because there's so much possibility out there if you can just give yourself that space to look.

[00:06:12] If you want help with that, by the way, then I would love to invite you to drop me an email, scott@happentoyourcareer. Put 'Conversation' in the subject line, and I'll connect you with the right member of my team, and we'll have a conversation. We'll understand what you're trying to accomplish. We'll understand some of the concerns that you have and help you figure out how to navigate through your exact situation. It's what we do, and it's what we love to do. Until next time, I'm Scott, and this is Happen To Your Career. Adios. I'm out.