Burnout and revitalising your passion.

2021 has unquestionably been a challenging year for everybody with so many obstacles cropping up around every corner from redundancies or job insecurities to families separated by borders to home-schooling our children for weeks on end.

Burnout and fatigue have started to appear in many areas of our lives as we battle the stresses that have come with this year and ever so slowly the spark and passion could start, or already be, dwindling.

In light of a New Year just around the corner, and hopefully leaving the angst of this one behind, here are some ways to help revitalise your passion heading into 2022:

Drill down to the root cause of your burnout:
It’s easy to have the thoughts of being “I’m so stressed” or “I’m so burnt out” without taking the time to reflect on the WHY behind you being burnout.

You can start by identifying what it is within your environment that is stressing you out – is it the office environment, is it the commute to work, is it the pressure of juggling children’s after school activities?

Once you can identify the cause of the stress you can start to investigate HOW to resolve the stress and reignite your passion!

Find and develop what you are passionate about:
What do you love to do? What do you dream of doing? Do you have a favourite hobby that you could turn into a career? Have you had to give that up to settle into a 9–5 job to make ends meet? If you’re unsure of what you want or have varied interests in several areas, consider taking a career or aptitude test.

Once you’ve identified your passion, spend time working on how you are going to pursue it. If art is your passion, practice! Join an art club or visit your local galleries for inspiration. If it’s photography you love, then go take some photos! Experiment with all times of genre – landscape, wildlife, portraits – find what it is that excites you!

Whatever your passion is, set a plan to get there!

Set yourself specific goals:
The process of goal setting is essentially identifying something you want to accomplish and establishing specific criteria, objectives, and timelines in which you want to achieve your goal. Goal setting allows you to lay out your roadmap and then measure your progress, keeping you accountable along the way!

When setting goals, the recommended framework is by making them SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.
SMART goals have a much greater chance of being accomplished than a general goal it is easier to communicate to others what your goals are and how you are going to meet them, the less specific your goals are the easier it is to drift off track and not have any accountability or motivation to achieve it.

Evaluate your progress:
Regular check-ins against your goals will allow you to get an early glimpse into whether the goals you’ve set are reasonable and driving you to achieve your passion, or, if they need to be altered and tweaked!

Tracking your progress will help you stay focused on what’s important in reaching your goals – by not reviewing your progress regularly you may find that your motivation starts to dwindle, you may not reach your goals and you won’t get the chance to evaluate what is working for you.

Take care of yourself:
It’s hard for anyone to keep up with what they enjoy doing if they are in poor health or experiencing prolonged periods of stress or fatigue. Stress is known to deplete the resources in your body, weakens your immune system and eventually manifests itself in physical illnesses and mental breakdowns – finding an outlet outside of work to practice self-care is an integral step to revitalising your passion.

Self-care presents in many forms and can be as something as small as decluttering your workspace to as large as heading to the gym on your lunch breaks to clear your head. Whatever your method ensure you schedule it into your day, so it doesn’t get missed!

Click the above image to open my booking page in a new window.

Copyright © 2021 Steve Hockley Business Coach, All rights reserved.