Have you ever experienced burnout? How did you feel during that time? Overwhelmed? Frustrated? Hopeless?
The feeling of burnout is becoming more common in our society according to a report by Indeed. In this report, 52% of all the surveyed workers in the US are feeling burned out, which shows that employee burnout is on the rise. That shouldn’t come as a surprise with how the last couple of years have been for workers dealing with the deadly coronavirus pandemic, which led to an overnight change in the workplace.
There are many reasons behind this burnout, from adjusting to the work-from-home culture to balancing one’s professional and personal life, but is there more to it? Is the COVID crisis the only reason people have burnout, or does the issue run much deeper than that?
Our guest today is Jonathan Fields, and he thinks that the latter is true. Jonathan is an award-winning author, host of the acclaimed podcast The Good Life Project, and the founder and CEO of Spark Endeavours. He believes that the root of this burnout crisis is that most people don’t feel fulfilled with the work that they are doing. Each of us has something that fulfills us and makes us come alive when we do that work, but sadly, most of us don’t recognize this.
“Until you cultivate the ability to say no to the things that fill your life but not your soul, you’ll never have the space to bring into it the things you desperately want to say, ‘yes’ to.” – Jonathan Fields
It’s so good to have Jonathan Fields back on The School of Greatness after almost eight years. In all my years of hosting this podcast, I have come across numerous people who have neglected the work they were meant to do for the work that they are doing. Today, Jonathan will help us understand why burnout is becoming more and more common in today’s society and how to shift the narrative for ourselves and find joy in the work that we do.
Who Is Jonathan Fields?
Jonathan Fields is a man on a mission to spark purpose that creates possibilities and unleashes potential. He is the host of one of the top-ranked podcasts of the world — The Good Life Project — which has been featured everywhere from O Magazine to The Wall Street Journal and even at Apple’s annual product event.
Jonathan has founded multiple companies focused on maximizing the potential of humans, his latest being Spark Endeavours, where he is the chief architect behind the “sparketype.” The “sparketype” is an online assessment system to help individuals and organizations identify, embrace, and cultivate work that makes people come alive. Jonathan is also an author of best-selling books like How to Live a Good Life and Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel For Brilliance.
Jonathan has been featured widely in the media, including The New York Times, Entrepreneur, Forbes, The Guardian, and more. He finds his ultimate purpose is giving insights and solutions that inspire people to do more with their lives and find their spark.
This episode is for everyone, from individuals to teams, because the threat of burnout affects all of us. Hopefully, this will give you a chance to understand how burnout happens and how you can deal with it by finding your spark.
Understanding Why Burnout Happens
The last two years have been hard on the global workforce. With the shift in work from the office to the home, the delicate boundary between the place of work and the place of rest has diminished. This imbalance is definitely one reason for the most recent rise in burnouts, but is it the only reason? Jonathan says that’s not all.
“I think that’s not the whole story. What I think we are missing is the fact that it is not a new problem. Burnout has been on the rise for the last 10-15 years. … [COVID] has just brought it to the surface, but there is an underlying issue. The average person tends to wake up in the morning to do something that is not necessarily well aligned with a fundamental impulse for work that would nourish them in a deeper way. Over time, that level of misalignment turns into an outright conflict, but we never really deal with it.” – Jonathan Fields
Many of us have experienced a lack of boundaries in the workplace where there is no balance between work life and home life. This has caused a sort of existential crisis where people are working way more hours than they should and they are doing things that really don’t nourish them. Jonathan shares his experience with burnout:
“I was working as a lawyer in a very past life, and I was working insane hours, sometimes never going home for a couple of days at a time. There was a huge amount of stress because I was a securities lawyer at a big firm, and the stakes were massively high. You had to be perfect — that’s what we got paid for — and I ended up doing that until basically, my immune system fell apart. A large infection kind of exploded in the center of my body, eating a hole through my intestine from the outside and sending me into emergency surgery. … It was beyond burnout. It was sort of like I had nothing left inside of me, and that was a huge wake-up call.” – Jonathan Fields
As a serial entrepreneur and somebody who just works really hard, Jonathan has trained his mind to a point where his brain can actually take a lot. Even when the world around him is spinning, his mind still remains functional. Still, if his physical body manifests an illness or pain and he doesn’t listen, eventually it brings him to his knees. So working on aligning different aspects of his life helps him overcome his mental obstructions and his physical limitations.
