When someone experiences burnout, our first reaction is often the same.
What happened to this person?
It is a natural question.
After all, it is the person who can no longer sleep. The person who bursts into tears without understanding why. The person who struggles to get out of bed, to concentrate, or simply to face another working day. Because the symptoms appear in the individual, we naturally look for an explanation in the individual.
Perhaps another question deserves our attention: What has become impossible in the way this work is being carried out?
Burnout is often explained through the characteristics of the individual. We hear that people who experience burnout are highly committed, perfectionistic, unable to set boundaries, or too invested in their work. These factors may play a role, but perhaps they are not the whole picture.
What gradually becomes exhausting can also be the constant need to reconcile demands that no longer fit together: delivering quality with insufficient time and resources, being asked to care while constantly accelerating, meeting performance targets without compromising professional judgement, making compromises that slowly move us away from the work we believe should be done.
What becomes difficult is not simply that these tensions exist, but that they are increasingly carried by individual alone. Protective space, where these tensions can be recognized, discussed and worked through collectively, rather than being silently carried by one person are difficult to find nowadays in the workplace. When such spaces disappear, individuals often end up carrying tensions that never belonged to them alone.
These tensions are rarely visible. They are carried silently, day after day, while the body keeps compensating until it no longer can. What the body eventually expresses is not only exhaustion. It is the accumulated effort of constantly compensating for contradictions that remained unresolved.
Perhaps this is why burnout cannot always be understood by looking at the individual alone. It emerges in one person, but it often reflects something larger than that person.
The greatest danger may not only be the collapse itself. It is also the story that follows :
- “I wasn’t strong enough.”
- “I’m not made for this job.”
- “I couldn’t cope.”
These conclusions hide a more complex reality: sometimes, burnout is not simply telling us something about a person’s limits, it is also telling us something about the conditions under which we ask human beings to work.
If we only try to repair the individual, we may miss an opportunity to question how work is organized, experienced and lived. And without questioning work itself, it becomes difficult to create the conditions in which people can continue to work, contribute and remain fully human.
Understanding work is not an end in itself. It is the starting point for imagining, discussing and creating ways of working that allow people not only to perform, but also to remain connected to what makes them deeply human.
The question is not only how people can continue to work, it is also how work can remain a place where people continue to build, express and preserve their humanity.
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If you would like to experience this way of looking at work in your own daily activity, you may be interested in the 7-Day Guided Practice.
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