The Sinkhole: How Low Can You Go?
The third symptom of Burnout is called “Loss of Professional Efficacy” which basically means you feel that you can’t do sh$%*! Nothing will amount to anything. . . You’re no good at it anyway. . .Something will always come along to burst your bubble. . . You don’t know why you even try. . . Ouch! Sound too familiar?
Having a sense of self-efficacy is necessary for healthy self-esteem and it protects against that terrible feeling of helplessness that leads to hopelessness and ultimately to real depression. A bad work situation can slowly dry up your soul and leave you vulnerable to these sudden sinkholes where, before you realize it, you’ve tumbled into a dark hole.
Albert Bandura, the psychologist who coined the term self-efficacy, found four key components to gaining and keeping a sense of efficacy. I go into all of them very deeply in my course - The Great Resignation - but here is a simple tool to give you a toehold out of the sinkhole if you need quick fix.
The Portrait Exercise:
Think of someone you know or have heard of or read about who has come out of difficult place and overcome obstacles. This should be someone you can identify with. (So maybe not Alexander the Great, but who knows? If that’s your alter ego then go for it!)
Take five minutes to recall to yourself, or to look up online, the sequence of events that allowed them to meet and overcome the challenges that might have flattened them.
Find a quote from that person and commit it to memory. Try to hold that person respectfully in your imagination and ask yourself a couple of times this week, ‘What would so-and-so do in my shoes?’
Just having a role model as a touchstone is a powerful tool to keep your head above the dark abyss!