704: What Career Burnout in 2026 Actually Looks Like (How To Fix It And Find Career Satisfaction)

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: 83% of corporate professionals report burnout right now. Among women in senior leadership, that number jumps to 43%, compared to 31% for men, a gap that has more than doubled since 2019. Crazy, right? The people behind those numbers, well, they aren't falling apart. They are performing. They're still delivering.

[00:00:23] They're still holding it all together somehow while something inside them that used to care about this work has quietly disappeared, and most of them couldn't tell you when it happened. They look like Lisa. Lisa was overwhelmed. She wasn't breaking down, though. She just stopped feeling anything about the work at all.

[00:00:43] She didn't care anymore, and that's the version of burnout the data is actually measuring right now. The quiet kind, the kind that doesn't match the picture, the kind that keeps going because nobody around you, including you, recognizes it for what it is.

[00:00:58] I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and this is Happen To Your Career, where we share real conversations and real strategies to help you design work and a life that you actually love.

[00:01:09] We've been talking to people who felt exactly what you might be feeling right now, and we've been doing this since 2012. The one thing that separates people from those who stayed burned out and the people who finally found work that fit them is that they understood what they were actually dealing with.

[00:01:28] Lisa spent seven years as a research project manager at a major university, a role that looked like a good deal on paper, was, you know, pretty low pressure. It was flexible, and she had a lot of autonomy to structure her own work. And from the outside, she was pretty successful. But underneath that narrative, Lisa's energy was quietly being drained.

[00:01:50] Turns out it's because she didn't fit the traditional picture of burnout. Lisa couldn't name how she was feeling, and because she couldn't name it, she stayed in her position for years, forcing herself well beyond the point where work had stopped feeling fulfilling. You might look at this and think, "Well, maybe this is burnout."

[00:02:08] Turns out it's not. The psychological term for what Lisa was experiencing, it's boreout. Boreout is a state of chronic intense boredom at work, and is caused by being severely under-challenged or underutilized, or when you lack meaningful tasks. While burnout happens when you're overstimulated and the demands of your work exceed your capacity to meet them, boreout is actually the opposite.

[00:02:32] When work is so understimulating, you disconnect from what you're actually capable of and slowly go numb. Now, here's the confusing part, because many people feel like, "Hey, I'm left exhausted and empty," and that's true of burnout as well. Boreout is almost never talked about because it doesn't look like suffering from the outside.

[00:02:52] It looks like having a good, stable job that no longer piques your interest. But the longer boreout goes unnamed, the harder it becomes to actually do anything about it. The key, of course, to understanding what to do about it is we first have to understand what's driving it, and it really comes down to three different forces, and they're quietly reshaping how work feels day to day.

[00:03:14] The first one, work stopped requiring you. For a long time, burnout was about having too much to do. But for many people now, the problem is the opposite. The work no longer demands your full ability. You're not being stretched. You're not being challenged. You're managing systems. You're sitting in meetings.

[00:03:32] You're filling gaps that shouldn't exist in the first place. Instead of doing meaningful, engaging work, your time gets consumed by fragmented tasks that might not require your best thinking. Or another way it shows up is instead of doing meaningful, engaging work, your time gets consumed by fragmented tasks that don't require your best thinking.

[00:03:52] And when your role stops feeling like it requires you, you slowly stop bringing your full self to it, not because you don't care, but because there's nothing there to meet you in the first place.

[00:04:02] Force number two, the meaning completely disappeared. Many, many years ago, I used to be a HR leader at many different levels.

[00:04:10] Long before I started Happen To Your Career, I used to be in HR leadership, and way back when, at that point in time, there was really just starting to surface a lot about recognition. And many people at that point in time started to recognize that recognition was linked to how people felt about their work.

[00:04:29] Now, there's a lot of confusing and nuanced pieces here that weren't represented in the research at that point in time. Now we know recognition isn't just about praise. It's about knowing what you're doing actually matters. And when that disappears, when your work feels invisible or interchangeable or disconnected from any real impact, then something really starts to shift. You kind of just stop seeing the point after a while.

[00:04:54] So even if the workload is manageable or the job looks good on paper, it starts to feel empty, and the emptiness is a very different kind of exhaustion.

[00:05:02] But let's talk about a third force and the way that this shows up, and that happens when you stay longer than you should. Bore-out doesn't push you out.

[00:05:10] It actually often keeps you in because from the outside, nothing looks wrong. The role's stable, the expectations are reasonable, you're probably working with good people. You tell yourself that you should be grateful. You tell yourself, "Yeah, you know what? This isn't that bad." And so you stay. Long past the point where the work actually fits you.

[00:05:28] In many ways, you've outgrown it. But the longer you stay in this space, under challenged, under engaged, and disconnected, the harder it becomes to imagine something different. This is the part where you start to disconnect from yourself. This is the part where you start to even blame yourself.

[00:05:45] Like, "Why do I want something different? This is a good situation." Here's the part most people don't talk about and the part that a lot of people don't know.

[00:05:52] First of all, bore-out isn't a term that's widely used yet. Hopefully, we can change that. And it doesn't just exist on its own. If left unaddressed, it can eventually turn into a form of burnout. Because when you spend enough time disconnected from your work, when you're not challenged and not growing and not fueled by meaning, it starts to eventually take the same toll as being overwhelmed constantly with overstimulation.

[00:06:16] And of course, we already acknowledged that the result is the same. You're already exhausted, you're already still depleted on a daily basis. You're still questioning everything. It's just happening for very different reasons, and this is why so many people can't really tell what they're actually experiencing.

[00:06:30] From the inside, bore-out and burnout actually feel very, very similar. But underneath, they come from two very different places, two different causes. And if you don't know which one you're dealing with, you keep trying to solve the problem wrong or you don't realize that it's a problem at all. Or even worse, what happens is people will really start to blame themselves because it feels like they're in this great situation, and why are they wanting something different.

[00:06:57] All right, so now that you have learned the difference between burnout and bore-out, then let's actually address a couple specific types of burnout. In fact, two distinct types, and knowing the difference can actually change quite a bit for you.

[00:07:12] Okay, the first kind is situational burnout, where the work itself fits, you know, you can do the work. You've got some of the right tasks, right conditions, you know, maybe even, you know, the meaning is there in one way or another, but the problem stems from the environment. Might be culture, might be, you know, some of the specific people that you're working with, the structure, or the way that the organization is run, that's the part that causes issues.

[00:07:35] When you think of a toxic workplace, but everything else is in alignment, then that's the type of situation that we're talking about.

[00:07:42] The second is what I would call function burnout, and this is where the work itself has not actually really fit. You know, the tasks that you're doing are not a fit for you, but sometimes you're good at it, sometimes very good, sometimes you're great at it. But it really doesn't energize you, and it certainly doesn't leverage your strengths the way that you want it to.

[00:08:01] So when people experience this, a lot of times their solution is to change companies or change managers or, you know, maybe they even get another role in the same organization.

[00:08:11] Sometimes they even change industries, and yet the emptiness follows you because the problem isn't necessarily the situation around the work, the problem is the work itself.

[00:08:19] So functional burnout is solved by what you're actually spending your time doing. Situational burnout is solved by changing the conditions around it, that situation.

[00:08:29] The wrong diagnosis here doesn't just waste time, it actually can cost years. I wanna give you a few questions that you can ask yourself to determine which one is it that you're experiencing, and you already might have an idea just in listening to some of these different examples.

[00:08:41] But if you imagine doing this same exact type of work at a company with a culture that you loved and a team that you respected and a manager, you know, or a leader who is actually supporting you, but would that cause you to feel much more excited about that Monday morning or spending time at work? If so, then that's gonna be situational burnout.

[00:09:03] Has there ever been a period in your career where the work kind of felt energizing, a time when you left the workday feeling alive, not just relieved the day was over. Now, if you've already changed companies or already moved to a different team, or you've already made some of those situational type of moves, and that same emptiness is still there following you from situation to situation, then that's probably more aligned with functional burnout.

[00:09:29] It could be some other things, too. However, then it's more likely that the burnout that you're feeling could be functional burnout because changing who you work for won't fix what you work on or the tasks that you're doing or how you're spending your time. What you do next depends entirely on answering these questions.

[00:09:46] And if any of that sounded like you, then what I might encourage you to do is go and take our eight-day mini course for free. It's called the Figure It Out Eight-day Mini Course. It's completely free. We'll link it in the show notes and in the description, or you can go to happentoyourcareer.com/8day.

[00:10:01] What it won't do is magically solve all your problems, but what it will do is ask you some really great questions to hone in on what you actually need in your work that you might be missing.

[00:10:15] That said, back to which kind of burnout you identified, if your answer's pointing to situational burnout, then the most expensive mistake you can make is leaving reactively. If the work fits but the environment doesn't, then grabbing the first role that feels like relief, the first company that interviews well, or the first manager who seems better than the last one is a huge mistake, and nobody means to do that.

[00:10:37] It feels like you're making an intentional move, but it tends to be driven more on what you're trying to move away from versus identifying the collective set of what you actually need, which might be hundreds of micro decisions in order to come up with an idea of what is going to be a better fit.

[00:10:55] Okay, so reactive moves don't produce better conditions. I think that part's probably obvious. They produce different versions of the same problem. What actually does work is getting specific, those micro decisions that I mentioned a moment ago. Before you move, I want you to get very specific with what your work environment needs to be, and I just want to give you a couple different examples here, you know, how you might start to break that down.

[00:11:17] We're usually looking to get four or five or six or seven layers deeper, and that's very often the work that we're doing with our clients. However, even in that 8-day mini course that I was describing earlier, it'll give you some of these questions to just get started on that type of work. Okay, now examples of that.

[00:11:31] What does collaboration actually look like in your day to day? How often do you need feedback to feel that you're getting the orientation and development that you want? What kind of manager relationship energizes you versus drains you? What does flexibility actually mean? For your actual schedule, actual life, and some of the reasons you want flexibility.

[00:11:54] Really interesting phenomenon that we've, you may have heard us joke about on the podcast for years, is when we ask somebody what they want, often they'll start with what they don't want. They'll say, "Oh, yeah, I know what I want. What I don't want is actually..." And it's funny that'll happen even in the same sentence.

[00:12:10] And then they'll have a list of things that they don't want, because it's easy for us to point to what we're running away from. It's much more difficult to figure out and do the hard work towards what we're building towards. And running from something is how you end up six months into a new role at a different company with a different set of people, a different set of problems, and wondering why work still doesn't feel right.

[00:12:32] Okay, so we know the solution is getting very, very specific, and again, you're more than welcome to go to that 8-day course. It's gonna get you started on this work, but it's not gonna happen overnight. But I do want to skip ahead a little bit and help you understand, you know, what happens when you do this type of work at a very high degree of specificity.

[00:12:51] Well, Lisa did this work, mentioned her at the beginning of this episode, and after seven years of going numb, she sat down with one of our team members and built what we call an ideal career profile. This isn't a list of job titles or industries, but it's actually a very specific picture of the conditions she actually needed.

[00:13:09] It's things that matter much more than the job title or the industry. At least one other person who understood her role well enough to collaborate with her. Ideally three. A manager who checked in regularly, who was invested in her growth and would advocate for her. Variety and flexibility built into the work itself, not just a remote work policy.

[00:13:29] She even went a different degree further to describe what those might look like. These specifics allowed her to know whether a role actually met her needs before she ever said yes. And when she found a project manager role at the same organization she was already at, a role in a completely different department she would never have looked at under the old approach, she had real conversations to verify if the role actually fit before she accepted.

[00:13:54] She got the position. She negotiated a higher salary that was much more in alignment with her ideal career profile. She was working for a leader that she gets to learn from every single week on a very collaborative team that met what she was looking for in terms of how she liked to collaborate, doing work that required her whole brain, as she put it.

[00:14:12] Same city, same organization, completely different experience. It's one of the funny things that I think really gotten to see since we started this many years ago that it's amazing how close work can be that actually fits if you really truly understand what it is. The real difference for most people is not that they don't know how to get there, it's actually they really misunderstand or have not gotten specific enough before they've moved.

[00:14:38] Now, here's a funny thing that I've seen too, is that, like we get to work with really talented people that are, you know, senior professionals, leaders all over the world, really kind, caring, smart, talented human beings. Many of them come to us, they feel like they have gotten specific enough. 100% of them have not. 100%.

[00:14:59] Now, just let that settle for a minute here. What that means is you don't necessarily need a new career in this circumstances. You need better conditions, but more so than that, you need the clarity to find them on purpose. But what if those better conditions don't fix the problem? And what if it's our opposite type of burnout, functional burnout?

[00:15:15] And what if it's the work itself that needs to change? Well, this requires a slightly different approach. Functional burnout feels harder to face because sometimes people feel like the solution is harder. A new environment won't fix it, only spending your time executing different actual work will. I think one of the most common mistakes that many people make when they get to this point is they try to search their way out of a functional burnout.

[00:15:41] You know, scrolling job boards, applying to roles that seem slightly different or slightly more interesting, hoping that somewhere in the listings is a version of what they want to do, and it somehow miraculously finally feels right. The only problem is that version doesn't exist because the job board can't tell you how you actually want to spend your time, what type of tasks and activities actually match up with you and who you are and how you're built.

[00:16:05] Only you can figure that out, and figuring that out actually takes a kinda work that has nothing to do with updating your resume or, you know, repositioning things. What we've seen across thousands of career changes is that people who find work that fits, they don't start with those job titles, and they don't start with the job postings.

[00:16:22] They start with... One of the things that we've seen across thousands of career changes that seems to be very aligned with the research is that the people who are finding work that fits, they're not really starting with job titles. You know, I know we've mentioned that on various podcast episodes.

[00:16:38] But often instead, [00:16:40] they're starting with what we would call signature strengths. Not the skills that they're good at, not the skills that are transferable, but instead think about it as starting with who you are. Signature strengths are, in many ways, the essence of who you are, how you're wired, you know, what your talents are.

[00:16:59] That said, think about some clues to that as work that actually energizes you when you get to spend time doing. Think about that as activities that actually energize you when you get to spend time doing them. What are the problems that not just you'd solve, but that in many ways drive you, even if nobody was watching?

[00:17:16] You know, those things that make time disappear. We can find our clues there, but I just wanna point out for a moment that skills and strengths are not the same thing. You can spend a decade building world-class skills in work that slowly empties you. Very possible. Many of us have done it. That's exactly how career burnout happens.

[00:17:35] That's exactly how functional burnout happens. The longer you optimize for what you're good at instead of what fills you up, the wider the gap grows between your career and the work that would actually fit. Now, closing that gap starts with getting very honest about where the energy has actually been in your career, in your work, paying attention to those clues, even if they're in brief, small moments.

[00:17:56] We can then go a step further. We can say, "Well, what were you doing in these moments? Was it the context of the moments itself? Was it the kind of problem that you were solving? Was it the people that you were with? What did the environment feel like?" That pattern is a more reliable compass to start to piece together those clues than any job title, any salary range, or any industry trend.

[00:18:17] It doesn't mean it's easy, but functional burnout is real, and it's solvable. It's not solved, though, by finding a better version of what you already do. It's solved by understanding what actually energizes you, understanding what is a far better fit, and then building toward that on purpose, sometimes over time.

[00:18:37] Okay, we packed a lot in here. We talked about the three forces that drive burnout. We talked about a couple of different kinds of burnout. We talked about the difference between burnout and bore-out. I think what's important to recognize is that all this shows up in very different ways. The main driver might not even be workload anymore.

[00:18:53] It might be cognitive fragmentation. It could be disappearing recognition. It could be an exit that's harder to use than it's been. It could be that you're continuing to push through. But the interesting thing is pushing through is not gonna work because the forces producing the burnout haven't changed.

[00:19:09] Nobody we've ever worked with has found the right path by accident, and nobody found it by searching harder. They found it by getting clear first. The quiet version of burnout survives by staying unnamed, and as soon as you name it, once you know which kind you're dealing with, you finally know what to do about it.

[00:19:26] Once you name it, and once you know what kind of burnout you're dealing with, well, then you can finally start doing something real about it.

[00:19:33] If you wanna go deeper on signature strengths, the ideal career profile, understanding what to build towards instead of what you're running from, well, I wrote a book about this exact set of things, this exact process.

[00:19:45] The same process, by the way, that helped Lisa and thousands of other people make the change. It's called Happen To Your Career: An Unconventional Approach to Career Change and Meaningful Work. So you can actually get it any place where books are sold. However, we have, for a limited time, the audiobook available for free.

[00:20:01] You can go and grab it at happentoyourcareer.com/audiobook, and that link is in the description in the show notes. And again, you can just, like, click in there. It will ask you for your name and email address, and then it'll direct you to where you can get that audio for free.

[00:20:17] I just want you to know that the work you're probably looking for actually exists. The question isn't whether or not it's out there. The question is whether you know what you're actually looking for.