We are not immune from burnout, not even here at Mindful. It takes constant communication for our small but mighty team to feel supported, balanced, fair, healthy. We want to create the psychological safety necessary for all of us to show up, make mistakes, and fix them. The goal is to be real together so we can make quality things together.
We use weekly “Too Hot To Handle” check-ins to take each others’ temperature. This allows us to see who’s “on fire,” and discuss how we can spread the work around to make sure we’re hot enough to keep us warm, not burn us out. Sometimes our systems fail us. Sometimes we take on too much. It takes all of us working together to maintain compassionate systems that support our thriving at work.
In 2022, rather than offering you a “New Year, New You” issue, we wanted to to explore how mindfulness can help with one of the most complex problems of our time: burnout at work. Because burnout isn’t an individual problem, it’s a collective challenge partially fueled by our disconnection from each other. Burnout at work happens to people who have been pushing themselves to perform for an extended period of time. It’s a byproduct of passion and drive embedded in unkind systems. But those systems were created by people, which means they can be updated.
