Restore Yourself: The Antidote for Professional Exhaustion

The Antidote for Professional Exhaustion

Edy Greenblatt

• Publisher: Execu-Care
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780981929903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: General Health

#1 Global Resilience coach and resilience pioneer Dr. Edy Greenblatt provides an easy to read, research-based approach to identifying what is draining your energy and resilience, and what to do about it without quitting your job, moving to Costa Rica, or getting a divorce. Especially now, when work from home is making clear how important it is to understand our resilience challenges so we can do something about it.

Originally published in 2009, some of the references may seem a bit dated (yes, your Blackberry is mentioned) but the approach, the tool and results have proven evergreen. This approach is being captured in a mobile application soon to be launched by the author which will directly address current challenges including Covid-19 induced lifestyle changes. If you would like to be part of the Beta testing of the app, please reach out to the author directly at [email protected]

CHAPTER ONE

Vitameatavegamin

“Are you tired, rundown, listless? Do you poop out at parties? Are you unpopular?³” In the 1950s, I Love Lucy featured Lucille Ball inviting us to join the “thousands of happy peppy people” who had successfully rejuvenated themselves by drinking Vitameatavegamin.⁴ On her husband’s mythical television special, Lucy hawked this equally mythical elixir – the 23% alcohol solution to cumulative urban fatigue.

To me, the Vitameatavegamin episode provided telling social commentary. Even 50 years ago, the man in the grey flannel suit was already often chronically exhausted, burned out, pooped, fuzzy, dull, or depressed.

Life surely hasn’t gotten any easier and the real-life Vitameatavegamin has yet to appear. Though not clinically in physical, psychological, emotional or spiritual crisis, many of us are among the scores of walking wounded or nearly so.

I wrote this book to help you heal from and prevent future burnout. Through it, I will teach you to view, choreograph and manage your life in ways that will help you energize yourself and those around you. The research, tools and best practices shared in this book will allow you to take steps, right now, to improve the quality of your existence without quitting your job, moving to Costa Rica, or getting a divorce. If you or those you manage are professionally exhausted or on the verge, you’ll want to implement at least some of these restorative strategies. My intention is to give you the basic tools you’ll need to prevent or recover from professional exhaustion.

Unlike many work/life balance strategies, my approach does not pit work against home nor does it force you to choose between yourself, your family or your career. Au contraire, with Personal Resource Management™ (PRM), my approach to lasting resilience, your net gains in energy, attitude and capability will benefit you, your family, AND your organization. A more resilient YOU will have more to bring to all aspects of your life. In this chapter, I present the book’s main ideas and then briefly summarize each chapter so you can quickly locate what you need.

THE MAIN POINT

The useful and proven assumption underpinning Restore Yourself is:

If you know how to successfully increase your personal resources and then do so, you will have more available energy to mobilize in the service of those things most important to you.

Your personal resources are your founts of physical, social, cognitive and psychological energies. Notice that I am not talking about reallocating financial resources, downshifting, multi-tasking or managing time better. Restore Yourself is about learning to create and then mobilize more personal fuel in the service of the things that matter to you without costing you additional time, money or favors. Moreover, the skills required to restore yourself can be learned and practiced while you work, not in lieu of it.

On this journey, you will learn to see life in terms of restorative or depleting events instead of as a war between work and life. I’ll provide research and case studies reminding you that in many instances, both your grandmother and your instincts were correct all along. A satisfying, successful balance of work and life is possible if you have the right tools, skills and mindsets. Personal Resource Management™ (PRM), the antidote for professional exhaustion, will provide them.

In many ways, you already know and understand the basics of PRM. To prove it, try this little quiz. How would your grandmother have answered this question, “What do children need when they get home from school?” Jot your answer down here.

Great. Did your list include things like run around, play, tell someone about their day, take a nap, go outside, get a hug, sit quietly, or have milk and cookies? Would the answers have varied for different kids or under different circumstances? Of course they would have.

These answers support a core understanding that people’s personal resources are part of a dynamic and individual cycle that ebbs and flows with who we are and what we do. Grammy could predict when and why energies would be up or down, and knew how to enable her loved ones to self-manage. She was using her instinctive version of PRM.

You face daunting demands as a manager, worker, leader, team player and family member. You are a corporate athlete who needs adequate breaks, proper nutrition and coaching. Basic maintenance is necessary but not sufficient for life’s performance. To be your best, you also need the skills to repair the damage done by work, and more importantly, the ability to diagnose the conditions and behaviors that depleted you in the first place. With these tools, you can recover from and prevent future burnout.

Grammy did not need a book describing a systematic approach to increasing her organization’s productivity. She was pretty good at predicting what people needed because she personally (a) knew all the players well, (b) was a skilled and mindful observer of human behavior, (c) knew the working conditions, and (d) recognized and understood the daily energy demands on members of her staff. She also had social values on her side. The values of Grammy’s world did not thwart her efforts; they actually guided her.

Grandma’s job was in many ways easier than yours is. She did not have to contend with television and the web wide cacophony of contradictory experts. Nor did she confront external stakeholders’ value conflicts driven by organizational mission statements. Experience and instinct, aided by ethics and religious values, informed her. And, Grammy’s risks of making a mistake were lower. If Grammy miscalculated and her team started running on fumes, the Sabbath acted as a safety net that insured the extra rest, socializing, engagement or detachment that was needed.

In Grammy’s era, human needs were basically the same, but, values were clearer and external influences were more limited. Life was neither global nor 24/7. Knowing how we were ‘feeling’ was part of her job description and a valued use of her time. Society understood that people were, well... human, and needed attention, care and maintenance. That was Grammy’s job and she got little guff for doing it.

Times have changed. More than half of what we know we’ve learned in the last fifteen years. The need to remain resilient in our complex world is great and growing ever greater. And the costs of failing to do so are dear and growing dearer. Professional exhaustion is expensive by every standard of measure because it disrupts our lives, companies, families and communities.

Restore Yourself teaches you Personal Resource Management™ (PRM), a research- and practice-based system to diagnose and treat the causes of your professional exhaustion. And Grammy would have approved of it. PRM has already helped thousands of professionals world-wide. As a manager, this approach will help you increase your own productivity, satisfaction and energy. It will also help you understand how to create conditions that will do the same for those around you without noticeably increasing your costs in time or money. In learning and mastering Personal Resource Management™, my proven method for increasing your energy and satisfaction with your entire work/life), you will become expert at diagnosing what most impacts your personal energies. This will help you make small but powerful changes that increase your personal and professional resilience.

Whether out of necessity, obligation or enjoyment, using PRM will make it natural for you to effectively restore yourself. This works whether you are currently running a company, raising a family, or managing a personal setback.

WHAT’S IN THE BOOK

In order to reliably and successfully restore yourself, you will need to (a) get clear on the problem, (b) understand what a solution would look like, (c) determine exactly what you will want to change, (d) learn techniques and tools to implement the solutions you come up with and then (e) implement. This book provides you with the tools, techniques and knowledge to get you started down the path to restoration.

First, you will need a clear vision of what the problem really is and what kind of results you want. Since one barrier to achieving a more resilient life is the myth of the work/life balance, we will approach professional exhaustion in ways that make solutions both tractable and attainable.

Chapter Two reveals the commonly held assumptions about work/life balance that have led most of us astray. Here, I explode the debilitating and pervasive myth that work is essentially depleting and non-work is restorative. Adopting a more accurate perspective of the situation will get you off the work/life balance merry-go-round and onto a mount headed down the road to resilience.

If the demands of your work and life have you feeling caught between a rock and a hard place, Chapter Three will help you understand how you got there and how to relocate. There I reveal how Personal Resource Management™ is the antidote for professional exhaustion. PRM was developed to help those employed in various 24/7 service industries and has made a difference for thousands of people living hectic professional lives. It will help you.

In Chapter Three you’ll also learn about the two agreements of PRM: Learn to identify your depleters and restorers and commit to managing them on a regular basis.

In Chapter Four you will be introduced to three counterintuitive secrets that will help you master what depletes and restores your personal resources. These three musketeers of resilience will help you in your battle against professional exhaustion.

In Chapter Five, you will learn about the four kinds of energy – physical, social, psychological and cognitive that constitute your vital personal resources. You’ll learn how they interact with each other and how to manage your Average Personal Resource Levels (APRLs).

With a basic understanding of Personal Resource Management, you’ll be ready for some surprising findings in Chapters Six and Seven: Reliable Restorers and Sneaky Depleters. In these chapters you’ll discover why fidgeting in your desk chair can increase your productivity and how even extroverts can become exhausted being around people. You will also learn how overdose effects can turn your favorite hobby into a draining experience.

In Chapter Eight you will diagnose your own energizing needs. You will complete an enlightening exercise; my proven Personal Resource Management Assessment^TM (PRMA). Regardless of how traditional or untraditional your occupation or lifestyle, completing this exercise will immediately reveal to you specific, simple actions you can take today that will improve the quality of your life tomorrow. You will find this exercise helpful right now. It will also show you how to effectively prioritize your future actions as you progress towards a richer, more resilient future. You’ll finish Chapter Eight with a first draft of a Personal Energy Profile (PEP) and action plan that will start you down your path to resilience.

Chapter Nine is about time and timing. Here I teach you about what I call strategic sequencing. This approach helps make even the most debilitating and inflexible schedule less daunting and exhausting. Strategic sequencing will help you hone your PEP to use timing to your advantage in ending professional exhaustion. Ever wonder if it’s better to take lots of short breaks or push through and then take a longer break? You’ll get the answer here. Even master time jugglers and calendar queens have honed their skills using my strategic sequencing protocols. You’ll hone your action plan here.

Finally, Chapter Ten is your review and the launch of your more resilient life. That’s the best part!

ARE YOU READY TO RESTORE YOURSELF?

Many people feel like unwilling participants trapped in a lose-lose game of overwork and fatigue. Some feel they’ve traded financial security and social comfort for chronic exhaustion. Others feel that they have unknowingly signed up to be a responsible, albeit slightly miserable drone. There are also those who do what I used to do; pretend that it is okay to exhaust yourself in the name of caring for others while ignoring the reality that if you collapse, everyone loses.

If you’re okay with clinging to weekends like a rescue buoy and enduring each weekday by minimizing the time and energy you spend on work, then don’t read the rest of this book. BUT, if your current existence simply is no longer good enough for you, or, if you want to coach your kids, employees, parents, teammates, mentees, clients and spouses towards a better way, then read on. I will equip you with the necessary tools to bust the myth of work/life balance and start to working on the things that you CAN change to bring positive energy into your work/life. That will put you and your team, company and/or family back on a path to living the lives that you know you are capable of and, dare I say, deserve. Are you ready? ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Vitameatavegamin
• Chapter Two: The Work/Life Balance Myth
• Chapter Three: The Antidote for Professional Exhaustion
• Chapter Four: Three Musketeers of Resilience
• Chapter Five: Four Tigers In Your Tank
• Chapter Six: Reliable Restorers
• Chapter Seven: Sneaky Depleters
• Chapter Eight: Assessing Your Unique Energizing Needs
• Chapter Nine: Strategic Sequencing
• Chapter Ten: Restore Yourself!
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• Endnotes