How to Career Transition After Burnout
03.16.2021
“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.”
— Joseph Campbell
If you’re suffering from burnout, it’s likely you’ve invested a lot of time, care and attention into your career. You may have once had every intention of making it work.
And if you’ve identified a career transition as your solution, you must still believe that it’s possible to do work you care about.
The trouble is usually, but what?
What do you do when you can’t go home, but you can’t stay here, so to speak?
Set boundaries. Joseph Campbell spoke of the need for “sacred space.”
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.
You need to create space from your current work so that you can remember who you are when you feel well. If you’ve truly burned out, your body is sending and receiving stress signals constantly.
That takes an enormous a toll on your executive function, your memory and your neuroendocrine system.
Over time, your body will actually stop producing excessive cortisol and swing into abnormally low cortisol levels, quite literally burning out your nervous system.
You can’t plan for the future from this headspace.
Speak to someone at work about what you’re experiencing. If possible, take a proper break. Some countries grant sick leave for burnout.
If you’re not willing or able to take time off, set standard working hours and stick to them, no matter how difficult it is to shut down. It’s within your right to do so; labor laws exist to protect your health.
Reflect on what you love, what you want and what you can offer. Career transitioning is not easy. Progress may come slower than you think. But if you target the right thing, you’ll be much less apt to notice.
Use these four points as your compass:
Follow your excitement. Think about where you really love to invest your time and energy. What activities light you up? What can you get lost in for hours? What do you Google obsessively? These are things you want to dial up.
Work backwards from the life you want to live. Will you work for someone else, start a business or go remote? How closely do you want to work with other people, and on what terms? What kind of income do you need to earn?
Leverage what that you’re good at. Lean into what comes easily and don’t worry about the things that don’t. Your innate skills will take you farther, faster—particularly when paired with passion. Anything else can be outsourced.
Anchor that in the experience you’ve had. This is the context where you’ll most naturally find traction. For example, many of my early coaching clients worked in tech, because I had. I speak their language, and it made sense.
If you need more clarity, try the career compass I developed after my own career transition below.
Experiment before you exit. You want to validate that you’ll enjoy whatever it is you’re transitioning into, and there’s no product or service that can’t first be designed as an MVP. Can you take on a first client for free? Build a prototype? Pitch your writing to an editor? You get the idea.
The point is that you do some element of your future work, rather than simply research it.
Looking for guidance?
My career compass worksheet offers 30+ questions to point you in the direction of a career that you won’t burn out from.
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