DISCOVER  THE

Hey, does this sound like you?

Do you find yourself dreading going to work to what used to be your dream job?

Do you have serious feelings of self-hatred and frustration when you can’t kick those feelings of overwhelm?

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night feeling like an elephant of anxiety and stress? It’s just like sitting on your chest.

If so, I want you to know that I have been there myself, and I know to ask those questions because I experienced those things.

What I want you to know is that you’re not alone.

Today, I want to talk about how to combat cynicism.

As we learned last week, cynicism is one of the main components of burnout that can absolutely choke out your power.

It can choke out your air, and it can make you want to distance yourself from others.

It can even make you want to distance yourself from the things that you used to be passionate about, like working with patients or working with your coworkers, or even cynicism that shows up in your home because, as you know and I know, burnout affects all the areas of your life.

Now I don't know if you know this or not but the average person will spend over 90,000 hours at work and the reason why I want to share this with you is because there is a form of air the people and places that you put yourself around that is unavoidable.

Air at work is not something you can always get away from, and some of you are thinking right now, yeah, Aaron, exactly.

That's my problem.

She is so cynical or that person over there…They just make my life miserable and I can't get away from it and I can't quit my job.

So what do I do?

And when cynicism begins to seep into you pretty soon, all you can see is the negative aspects of those other people, and it adds to your exhaustion, and it makes you want to distance yourself even more.

I remember the day after I quit the job that I had for 11 years, like it was yesterday.

For months, I'd been buried in exhaustion and cynicism, and it felt like my world was just pressing in on me from all sides.

I was hardly sleeping, and I often felt like an elephant of stress was sitting on my chest in the middle of the night.

I would wake up in a cold sweat, desperate to find a way out, and no one had told me that I could burn out while doing good things.

I had just helped complete a capital campaign raising over $800,000 for a youth center, and I was overseeing teams and leaders that were serving hundreds of kids in our city, and yet in the middle of all of that, I hit the third wave of burnout, and I had no idea it was coming.

You see the third wave of burnout after exhaustion, the physical, mental, and emotional toll your body takes, and then cynicism, the moments when you start to distance yourself from the people and the passions that once drove you and motivated you is this word called inefficacy.

And it's the moment when you begin to doubt and question even your most basic and foundational skills as a leader.