Experiencing Professional Burnout or Professional Complacency?

Each New Year brings with it a plethora of blog posts and articles. These pieces encourage you to set bold goals, crush quotas, and move forward with resilience and vigor!!

Realistically, you just may not have the mental (and physical) energy to fulfill everything you are told to do in those articles. Equally realistically, consider how your professional priorities changed over the past 12 months due to pandemic experiences.

Are you really going to just keep kicking yourself forward? I don’t think so, and neither do you. Instead, take control of your day with this 5-minute hack. Evaluate whether you are experiencing professional burnout which is motivating you to become professionally complacent. Then, choose to move one millimeter beyond anything that tempts you to become complacent. Complacency should never be your legacy to clients. Let’s explore together, shall we?

Are you experiencing professional burnout or professional complacency?

There is a big difference between burnout and complacency. And professional burnout should never provide an excuse to justify professional complacency. Your awareness of the difference moves you one millimeter towards what is really going to work for you, moving forward.

If you are experiencing professional burnout that consumes your workday, admit it to yourself. And admit it to others, too, rather than continuing to ignore it. Then, commit to avoiding falling into the trap of professional complacency: together. Because you all are better than that.

Professional complacency results from doing the least you can do to fulfill the stuff listed on your To Do list or KPI. Except the result is that you short sell yourself and your clients and potentially family members, too.

• First, by justifying professional complacency, you settle for what is easy, rather than what is required and needed to better serve others.
• Next, when you choose complacency, you obligate others on your team to do more, to pick up the slack. Consider that they, too, may be experiencing some degree of professional burnout, as well.
• Then, be open about your mental and physical energy to team members. Recalibrate for delivering in shorter sprints. Take frequent breaks. Look for more innovative and timely solutions, together. Rewrite your professional playbook for 2022.

Evaluate the role professional burnout is playing in your workday. Just because it is a new year does not mean last year’s burnout “automagically” disappears. You have two goals. First, avoid being complacent and potentially mediocre. Next, devote both established and newly-identified resources to delivering enduring client-focused outcomes by leveraging a less is more daily professional strategy. Your thoughts?

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• It is time to stop spinning your wheels professionally. Start doing the smallest things with the biggest professional impact on what is new and next. Engage me to present a One Millimeter Mindset ™ program! Delivered virtually or in-person.
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My keynotes, breakouts, workshops and coaching programs catalyze people, teams and organizations to ask the right questions, the right way, so they define and solve the right problems. Better serve each other first so you can better serve your clients, together. One millimeter at a time. Contact me here. My playbook of cross-functional collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Image source: Adobe Stock.