147: Prevent And Recover From Burnout With Kristen Knowles

At this moment, we’re more than a year into the pandemic. Many of us have become accustomed to the added stress of living in isolation, not taking real vacations, not having the outlets of fun we used to have. This, combined with our intense workloads and home lives, with the promise of this all being over in just a few more months, is wearing many of us down. Burnout is nothing new, but if people struggled with burnout pre-pandemic, it seems even more prevalent now. 

In this episode, I speak with Kristen Knowles. Kristen is a 13x award-winning leadership expert with over a decade of experience in leading HR and leadership development for top global companies in Tech, Healthcare, and Startups. Her passion is helping organizations create brave cultures and working with leaders to overcome burnout and lead from purpose. She is the CEO of Brave Leaders Group, a full-suite leadership firm that specializes in offering transformational leadership and organizational development services that create brave cultures with practical application that you can immediately start implementing to see results. She offers a unique opportunity to implement strategies that create empowering cultures and breaks apart our previous ideas of leadership to create brave leaders that will mark history and change the narrative for leadership going forward. 

Kristen and I talk about the stages of burnout, how to avoid it and what to do if you find yourself out of alignment and heading into burnout. Kristen also shares tips with how to talk to your team to help them avoid burnout.

 

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Read the related blog article: How To Stop Burnout From Burning You And Your Team

 

KEEP UP WITH KRISTEN

Website: https://www.kristenknowles.co/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristen-pinkston-knowles/

Clubhouse: @kristenknowles

Instagram: @kristenpinkstonknowles

Brave Leadership Course: https://mailchi.mp/98a9ae4346da/brave-leadership-program

 

Key Takeaways:

• Burnout is often a result of being disconnected from your purpose. 
• There are four stages to burnout. (1) You are excited about the new work. Then your energy wanes and you start to feel irritable. (2) You start to be irritated by small things that otherwise wouldn’t bother you. (3) You feel stuck and overwhelmed and might have trouble sleeping. (4) You experience tremendous difficulty coping and getting work done. 
• Purpose isn’t about achieving something. It’s the “why” of your life, your overarching guidepost for living. 
• To help overcome and avoid burnout, identify what feels in and out of alignment in your life. Find time and space in your schedule to do things you care about. Create an action plan for how you want to show up better.
• We need jobs that fit with our working style, strengths, and personality. We can only keep up a working style that doesn’t fit with us for about six months before we experience burnout. 
• To help your team members align themselves with their purpose, give them autonomy to figure out how to complete tasks in the way that works best for them. 
• Have a conversation with your team about their 80/20. What are the 20% of things that they are doing in their role that are best suited to their strengths? Think about how to eliminate, delegate, or manage the other 80% of their tasks. 
• Learn about your team members’ individual purposes and how they can align with the company’s purpose. 

 

Additional Resources:

• The Sparketype Assessment - help find your purpose
• Episode 47: Managing Stress and Avoiding Burnout 

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