In this column for leaders who coach, Lynn Scott explores the meaning of ‘burnout’ for clients. Delving deep can help them understand their overwhelm
I’ve got too much to do.’ When was the last time someone came to you for coaching support because they don’t have enough to do? That would be a surprise, wouldn’t it?
As a rough estimate, 95% of my leadership and executive clients tell me they’re overloaded, overwhelmed and too busy. Are they heading for burnout? Potentially yes – but not necessarily.
I want to deeply understand what they mean by all those words and the impact of feeling those things – words like stress, burnout and overwhelm mean different things for different people. One person’s ‘a bit busy’ is another’s ‘feeling completely stressed’. So as ever, ‘first seek to understand’ is the starting point, digging deep into their meaning.
In this article, I focus on the people we coach who want to stop spinning so many plates and feel more organised and in control of their working day. They want to step away from the operational and reactive and be on the front foot rather than the back foot. They want to lead more and ‘do the doing’ much less than they currently do. There are often so many metaphors to explore in this area of work.
Commonly, they tell me:
‘I need to be more strategic.’
‘I wish I could spend more time developing my team.’
‘I want to filter out the noise and focus on the big priorities.’
When we’re faced with overwhelmed people to coach, we can often get sucked into their feelings of overwhelm. If we feel overwhelmed with our workload, too, that can create another level of anxiety: ‘How can I help this person when I’m feeling out of control myself?’ It’s a good topic for your next supervision session if that concerns you.
Here’s how we help the people we coach move beyond overwhelm.
The first layer
There’s certainly a time and a place for quick ‘beat overwhelm’ tips. I’m often surprised by how helpful these can be if those we coach haven’t heard them. For example, turn off those email/Teams notifications, remove yourself from those email circulation lists where you’re copied in ‘just because’, block out focus time in your calendar and get good at leading timely meetings with an outcome-focused agenda and clear rules of engagement. These might sound obvious, but many leaders have never learned these skills. Or they know them but don’t do them.
On one level, the person you coach believes that all those external pressures cause the overwhelm, preventing them from being more strategic, organised or in control. Their inbox, the constant interruptions, the back-to-back meetings, the lack of clear priorities. They’re not wrong, are they? Or are they?
I like to think of them as being ‘half right.’ And I mean no judgment.
In my experience, what most contributes to being overwhelmed is not the external circumstances alone – it’s the beliefs that the people we coach hold about their work, about ‘busyness’, about productivity – and more. And often there’s the cultural issues at play. In some organisations, being busy is a badge of honour. But presenteeism does not equal productivity. All leaders need to measure outputs and results, not hours spent at work. This is an area where they can take a firm stand.
I see my role as helping them see possibility, shining a light on their own narrative and stories and helping them make different choices about how they spend their time.
One of my first questions is often ‘What if you didn’t have to be too busy?’ or ‘Imagine you could feel calm and in control throughout your working day.’
We experiment with turning their thinking on its head.
A month ago, a client – ‘Roz’ – told me: ‘This job will always be overwhelming.’
Will it? Really? What if it doesn’t have to be that way? What if it wasn’t overwhelming at all? Those beliefs tend to create self-fulfilling prophecies, so we just keep repeating the patterns, believing that ‘that’s just the way it is’.
Shifting the narrative
As Roz’s coach, I can choose to get sucked into that feeling of helplessness with her, collude with her ‘poor me’ narrative (which might sound empathetic but won’t shift much) or get creative with some other ways of looking at her situation with her – playfully, creatively, analytically or practically.
I noticed how much Roz’s thoughts, rather than external circumstances, created the overwhelming feelings. The people-pleasing thoughts, the ‘I need to be available’ thoughts, the ‘my staff are already overloaded’ thoughts, the ‘my boss is too busy to support me’ thoughts, the ‘I never have time to prepare properly’ thoughts and the ‘everybody feels the same way’ thoughts.
What if she could make the opposite of these thoughts the reality?
Or at least be open to the possibility that this could be true.
Challenge the thinking (with love)
- Imagine a better ‘tomorrow’
One of the exercises my clients love is my future-self exercise. I asked Roz to imagine we were meeting again six months from now for a celebratory glass of fizz because she was no longer overwhelmed. I asked her to imagine it’s that day right now and to share what she would say if that ‘no more overwhelm’ magic wand had been waved.
At first, she couldn’t imagine it (this exercise takes time!). But then she identified several things. And one of her biggest insights as she imagined us celebrating together was this: “I’m prepared for meetings and clear on my desired outcome.”
When we explored this, Roz recognised that her desire to hear everybody’s perspectives had meant that she had lost her own. She’d rush from one meeting to the next without proper preparation and felt disorganised. She rarely got the outcome she was looking for quickly and easily. This was eating into a lot of her time.
This highlighted what she called her ‘please like me’ thoughts which were prevalent in several areas of her work. So we started to explore those and help her move away from her well-used ‘I’m a people pleaser’ label.
- Who do you want to become?
I asked Roz: “Who would you be if you weren’t a people pleaser?” She started to shift her identity from ‘an unprepared and scattered people pleaser’ to ‘a calm, focused and assertive leader.’ This identity shift work was exciting for her. She put a big message on her screen reminding her every day to show up as the ‘calm, focused and assertive’ version of herself.
I love to see the new identities unfold when the people I coach realise they don’t always have to be overwhelmed or ‘too busy’. Most of them have more agency than they think. And the key is, as always, focusing on all the areas they can influence and change.
- Lynn Scott is an ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC), director of Lynn Scott Coaching and founder of The Effortless Leader Revolution. She’s a leadership and team coach, coach supervisor and ICF Coach Mentor.
- www.lynnscottcoaching.co.uk
- You can join her free Facebook group for leaders and managers, The Effortless Leader Revolution, for more leadership tips and resources that work in the real world.
- www.facebook.com/groups/effortlessleaders