How are you handling uncertainty in life?
Are you excited and optimistic, or drained and depleted?
Do you know why you do what you do?
What drives you to stick with hard things to get desired results?

This is Episode 30: Dealing with Motivation Ruts and Burnout

Hello and welcome to The Incrementalist, a productivity podcast on making big changes in small steps. I’m Dyan Williams, your productivity coach and host for this show.

2020 was an especially challenging year. And this year continues to require some extra effort to start and finish things that matter. Even if you’ve built a business for yourself, like I did, you can still have creative exhaustion and feel trapped by your work. To get unstuck and build momentum, I do several key things.

One is to take action, even if it’s small, regardless of whether I feel motivated or inspired. Action doesn’t always require or follow motivation or inspiration. Instead of having a linear relationship, they are together in a loop. They fuel each other. The more you let stuff build up, the harder it will be to gain traction.

Take small, consistent actions like making your bed, taking a short walk, or opening the document to begin writing the memo.

Celebrate the small wins and increase the load incrementally. Instead of moving from 0 to 60, go from 0 to 5, 5 to 10, and 10 to 20.

Be gentle with the primal part of your brain that craves the quick fixes and mental boosts. The logical, executive functioning part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, doesn’t work well if you neglect basic needs. Your brain is 2% of your body weight, but burns 20% of your energy. When your brain is depleted, your executive functions suffer. You’re more distracted and more impulsive. You’re less focused and you make unwise decisions.

Cut back on information consumption, especially around negative, sensationalist news. Read a good book instead. Weekly check ins on what’s going on in the world is often more than enough. If there is a true emergency that requires immediate action, you will hear about it somehow.

Indulge in necessary breaks. Set yourself up so you don’t have to do heavy work when you’re on a vacation, sabbatical or long weekend. Create margin for incubating and processing ideas. Make time for highlights in your day, whether this in your morning routine, afternoon break outdoors, or evening rituals.

Let go of perfectionist tendencies; not every single piece of thing you create or work you has to meet your highest standards. Sometimes you will reach your full potential and others will not.

Manage expectations. When you set high expectations, high goals, and high demands on yourself and others, in every aspect of life and work, you become more prone to burnout. Have systems and processes that allow some things to run on autopilot.

Be willing to say no, reduce your commitments and lower your standards when it makes sense to do so.

Reduce friction to building good, healthy habits. Nurture positive relationships that give you a different perspective on obstacles, opportunities and even yourself.

Being in a motivation rut is not the same as having depression or some other mental health issue.
If you’re suffering from burnout, be patient with yourself. Instead of worrying or panicking, get the rest and support you need.

There is often a tendency to blame it all on work. Consider other areas of life too, like social connections, spiritual health, physical fitness, and creative hobbies.

How do you know what you value? Look at your past experiences and action. Think of a moment, experience or activity in which you felt a high sense of engagement or satisfaction. It doesn’t even have to involve a process you enjoy. The work could have been hard and challenging, but in the end, you felt great about what you did.

Also consider who you admire. The qualities, behaviors, characteristics, and habits they have. How do they respond to crisis, lead their teams and deal with challenges?

Your values may change through reflection and experience, new priorities, and growth and development.
To build momentum and move toward your goals, you need to take deliberate action. Take a step and then another. If I want to become a skilled pianist, I have to play piano, preferably daily. If I want to keep building my writing skills, I need to keep writing, consistently. How often you take each step is just as important as the distance between each step that you take.

Without action, you get no feedback on the impact and the results. Is this working or not working? You will not reach a state of flow unless you’re willing to move through frustration and boredom, build the focus muscle, and remove distractions, whether it’s other people, other activities, or digital devices.

Focus on high leverage, meaningful work that challenges you just enough and triggers flow. When you’re focused and intentional about what you do, you will feel more engaged and more energized. The results of your work will be affected by how much time you put in and how productive you are, but you also need to go at a sustainable pace.

Maintaining discipline is more critical than having motivation. Pace yourself and synch with your natural rhythm. If you don’t work at a consistent and manageable pace, you will burn yourself out. If you’re easily distracted, it makes no sense to force yourself to work in 2 hour blocks. Test your limits – start with 15 minute time blocks of focused work, and then build up to 20 minutes in the following week, for example. If that goes well, keep building up to 30 minutes and then to an hour. Track how you feel. If you feel exhausted at the 30 minute mark, cut back.

Preserve your energy and leave some fuel in the tank. Steady, daily progress through discipline allows you to cultivate long-term motivation. There is a maximum number of hours that you can work without feeling depleted.

When you work too long, you get diminishing returns – where the rate of increase in work leads to a decrease in marginal gains of output. At some point, you get negative returns, where you make things worse by putting more energy into an activity.

Presenteeism – which involves putting more time into a task despite feeling drained – is not a good metric of productivity. You’re showing up, you’re sitting at your computer, but you’re not really doing much or doing great work.

Ask yourself, are you working on the right project? Do you find meaning in your job or your work? Are you heading in the right direction? Is there a trusted colleague that you can ask for feedback? Are you in a supportive work environment or is toxic?

The deeper the motivation rut, the more vulnerable you are to burnout.

Fire is a chemical process that involves the oxidation of a fuel source at a high temperature. It produces energy. Burnout occurs when a fire runs out of fuel and gets extinguished.
When it comes to burnout at work, there is no clear definition. It is usually discussed in terms of its common symptoms, like high stress, fatigue, anxiety and depression.

In the 1970’s, psychologist Herbert J. Freudenberger coined the term burnout. He referred to it as “a state of mental and physical exhaustion caused by one’s professional life.” He observed that doctors, nurses and social workers were less motivated even though they cared very much about their work.

Christina Maslach, psychologist and creator of the leading burnout measure, the Maslach Burnout Inventory™ (MBI), describes burnout as a syndrome emerging as a prolonged response to chronic, job-related stress. She defines burnout as “a state of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion marked by physical depletion and chronic fatigue, feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, and by development of a negative self-concept and negative attitudes towards work, life and other people.”

In the International Classification of Diseases, burnout is included as an occupational phenomenon. It is referred to as a state of vital exhaustion. Burnout is not recognized as a medical diagnosis in part because its symptoms overlap with those of more widely studied conditions, such as depression and anxiety disorder, as well as physical illnesses.

While there are questionnaires to self-assess burnout, there are no official methods to diagnose burnout or whether the symptoms are caused by something else.

Dr. Maslach and her research partner, Dr. Michael Leiter, define people’s relationships to their jobs as a “continuum between the negative experience of burnout and the positive experience of engagement.”

They note there are three interrelated dimensions of the burnout-engagement continuum: exhaustion-energy, cynicism-involvement and inefficacy-efficacy. Burnout and engagement are opposites. Engagement is an energetic state of active involvement and increased efficacy.

Burnout has three key dimensions:

The first is Emotional exhaustion. This includes low energy, depletion and fatigue. You feel emotionally drained by interpersonal contact and overextended and exhausted by your work.

The second is Depersonalization. This refers to cynicism and detachment, a negative and excessively impersonal response toward clients and various aspects of the job. You’re irritable more cynical, and withdrawn.

The third is Reduced personal accomplishment is a sense of inefficacy and a feeling of ineffectiveness in producing the desired results. There is negative self-evaluation of professional competence. You might have depression, low self-esteem, low morale, and an inability to cope.

How well you match with your job is also important. Your work environment and workplace factors matter.

In their book, The Truth About Burnout, Dr. Maslach and Dr. Leiter identify six factors in the workplace that trigger burnout. They are:

1. Work overload. Organizational restructuring, downsizing and budget cuts force individuals to work more with fewer resources.

Burnout involves a mismatch between demands and resources. When job demands exceed your resources and depletes your capacity, you are more prone to burnout.

2. Lack of control over your work. Having autonomy — such as the freedom to determine your own priorities, set limits, and solve problems creatively — is critical for workplace motivation and engagement. When you have little or no control over which tactics and strategies you use, and when you execute them, it’s much harder to influence the outcome and derive satisfaction from the work you do.

3. Insufficient reward. Meaningful rewards come in a variety of forms. They include high pay, good benefits, recognition from peers and supervisors, and the feeling that you make a difference for your organization and your clients or customers. In the high stakes legal industry, lawyers are harshly reprimanded and called out for mistakes and failures, while their diligence and successes are often taken for granted. If your work is not met with appropriate reward, burnout is more likely.

4. Lack of community. When there is minimal support from colleagues and supervisors, unresolved conflicts, extreme competitiveness, and intense isolation within your workplace, there is a higher propensity for burnout.

5. Absence of fairness. Trust, openness and respect are necessary for a workplace to be perceived as fair. Inequities in the workload or pay structures, favoritism in promotions, biased evaluations, and failure to appropriately resolve disputes can lead to burnout.

6. Conflicting values. A mismatch between your organization’s values and your personal values makes it hard to align priorities and goals. You stay engaged and motivated when your work brings a high sense of satisfaction.

Resting, recharging and refueling between particularly stressful events – such as meeting a deadline or arguing at trial – helps you avoid burnout and better engage with your work.

But work overload is not the only factor. When you have autonomy, discretion, rewards that you value, social support, fair policies, and meaningful work, you feel more engaged and less burnt out.

Maslach recommends that workplaces provide ideal social and psychological environments, not just ergonomically ideal physical spaces. This can be harder to accomplish in remote work and in remote teams. But to prevent high turnover, disengagement, and burnout, organizations will need to cultivate a sense of purpose, belonging, connection and optimism in the workplace.

If you’re a solo business owner or an independent consultant, figure out what motivates you. If you’re a leader of a team, determine what motivates each person. Rewards, compensation, flexibility and perks are external factors that do not always work. And the reason is they don’t necessarily tap into internal drivers of each person.

In the book, Motivation Code, author Todd Henry recommends that you identify your achievement story. First, name an accomplishment that gave you deep satisfaction. Second, describe what you did. Third, explain what part of the achievement you especially enjoyed. A good story is specific and in the past, is meaningful to you, and is memorable and withstands the test of time.

The Motivation Code (MCODE) was developed by Rod Penner and his team. It’s a framework for understanding what motivates you and why. It captures the way each person is driven to achieve a specific goal. Each person has a unique blend of motivations that drive behavior and engagement. Your motivation themes are what drives you and what leads you to find your work satisfying or engaging.

Todd writes, when you use a one-size fits all approach to sparking motivation, it’s like you’re using a sledgehammer or blowtorch to open a series of lockers. The motivation code gives you combinations to open each padlock on each locker.

If you complete the MCODE assessment, your Motivation Code will include your top three motivations. Within the framework, there are 27 distinct motivational themes.

Each motivational theme has unique attributes, but share common characteristics to create motivational families. The motivational themes are grouped into six motivational families. Here they are:

Number 1, the Visionary Family. In the Visionary Family, the top themes are achieve potential, make an impact, experience the ideal. The Achiever Family. The top themes are meet the challenge, overcome, bring to completion, and advance. In the Team Player family, the top themes are collaborate, make the grade, serve, and influence behavior. In the Learner family, the top themes are comprehend and express, master, demonstrate new learning, and explore. In the Optimizer family, the top themes are organize, make it right, improve, make it work, develop, and establish. And in the Key contributor family, the top themes are evoke recognition, bring control, be unique, be central, gain ownership, and excel.

The free version of the assessment is found at motivationcode.com/free. You start by listing your five to seven achievement stories. After you complete the assessment, you will get a report showing your top three motivational themes, which drive your actions, behavior and decisions.

Discuss your report with a trusted peer, at least one other person who can tell you how your Motivation Code plays out in daily life. Next, craft your job to the fullest extent possible to synch with your top motivation themes. Talk to you manager about your motivations, including how it fuels you to do your best work, or how misalignment leads to burnout.

Employers, managers and leaders gain by taking on a partnership approach and talking with team members about what truly motivates them. Don’t be the overprotective parent who takes away responsibilities to fix things. Less work doesn’t always lead to more satisfaction or engagement. Rather, the work might simply not align with the intrinsic drivers.

Todd Henry writes, “What truly motivates you does not equate to doing what you love. Rather it’s about understanding which outcome matters so much to you that you’re willing to endure undesirable tasks to accomplish them.”

He suggests we use clean fuel to motivate our work. When your work matches with your top motivations, you can make positive contributions while you feel more alive and engaged. Create possibilities instead of try to right personal wrongs or prove others wrong.

When you operate consistently with your Motivation Code, you get a deeper sense of engagement and satisfaction. I suppose this is why I continue to practice law even when there is sometimes work overload, high stress, and incredible overwhelm.

In dealing with motivation ruts and burnout, the nature of your work and the manner in which you deal with it often matter more than the volume of work. Strive for connection, meaning, significance and autonomy to feel alive and engaged, instead of depleted and drained.

If you liked this episode, please share it with others. I also invite you to send me topic ideas and comments through my website at dyanwilliams.com. And if you enjoy the show, give it a five-star rating and review to encourage others to check it out too. Thank you for being with me and stay tuned for the next episode.