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How to Avoid Burnout When You're Saving the World
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Burnout of a Nonprofit employee
The burden is slightly different for a nonprofit employee. In addition to an intimidating pile of work on your desk, you face a steady stream of people whose lives often depend on you and your organization’s assistance.
You'll need a new strategy to fight that feeling of professional fatigue.
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Burnout Cause #1: The Grind Never Stops
There is no regular downtime when it comes to serving the needy and fundraising to keep a nonprofit organisation running—this never-ending demand means constant deadlines and a steady stream of emergencies.
How to Deal with it.
- Schedule Time Off. Plan breaks around deadlines, even if it is only part of a day.
- Prioritise. Focus on what's really important.
- Take Some Time to Think. Diarise time to do deadline-free work.
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Burnout Cause #2: Other People’s Lives Are on the Line
Falling into the trap of feeling guilty about prioritising yourself when so many people depend on you.
How to Deal with it.
- Find a Community. Try scheduling dinner or a happy hour with your colleagues or finding an outside group of nonprofit workers.
- Create Redundancy So You Can Really Disconnect. Start keeping your colleagues in the loop about all your projects—even training them to take over for you in a pinch.
- Leverage Funding. Consider talking to your donors. Plenty of understanding foundations may be willing to schedule funding for employee wellness.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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The Relationship Between Goals And Burning Out
Effective goal-setting underlies the fundamental aspect of your motivation and keeps stressful situations at bay.
If you don’t set goals in positive, attainable ways, you may fall i...
Reorganizing Your Goal Hierarchy
As losing resources is more likely to cause burnout than gaining resources is to mitigate it, dealing with the negative aspects is more beneficial than using positive “band-aid” fixes. You want to drive down uncertainty and inefficiency to ensure that you aren’t doing unnecessary tasks and minimize your emotional exhaustion. To do that:
- Create a chart and place your major goal at its top, followed by layers of very specific subgoals needed to attain the major goal.
- Find and fix the inefficiencies in your goal hierarchy.
- Determine the attainability of each goal.
Burnout Symptoms And Signs Of Exhaustion
- Chronic fatigue
- Insomnia
- Impaired concentration/ forgetfulness
- Loss of appetite
- Anxiety
- Increased illness
- Physical symptoms
- Chest pain
- Shortness of breath
- Dizziness
- Gastrointestinal pain
- Depression
- Interpersonal problems.
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Recognize the signs
- You're tired all the time.
- Cooperating with colleagues takes an enormous effort.
- You keep your office door shut and interact with your computer.
- ...
Take a mental health break
It's hard when you can't function as well as you're used to, but slogging on doesn't work when you're in a downward spiral.
When you're at a crossroads in terms of your mental health, you need to really say, 'OK, I'm going to ask for five days off. That might mean the difference between me not having a mental health breakdown, or needing to take additional time off.
Find treatment
"To stay with it and maintain an independent and productive life -- it's important to identify it, get the appropriate treatment and then stick with that treatment."
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Understand your limitations
Burnout occurs when job demands consistently outweigh the resources available. The first thing you need to do is to set proper limits.
When you limit your time spent on specific tasks,...
Learn to say no
... especially to projects and clients that suck the creativity out of you.
When your mental resources are limited, you need to make sure they’re going to the right tasks. Burnout decimates your motivation, making working on projects you’re uninterested in an agonizing process.
Finding a creative outlet
Find a completely unrelated creative outlet: look for a creative task with lower stakes to help ease you back into things and re-ignite your creativity and motivation.
What are the things in your own life that you enjoy but aren’t necessarily “productive”?