How to Manage your Personal Expectations at Work and Avoid Burn-out

Can your current work environment realistically provide you with the essentials you need to thrive?

Many people have an idea of their dream job and the day they realise their dream job and their actual job are not one and the same, fatigue can set in which can be depleting and lead to burnout unless changes are made quickly.

Burnout is a prolonged response to long term emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job with the key dimensions of this response being:

* Overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of energy depletion.

* Feelings of negativism or cynicism and detachment from the job.

* A sense of ineffectiveness and a lack of accomplishment – leading to a reduced sense of how well you’re doing our job.

So, what can you do about it? Here are our top tips to help you reflect and manage your personal expectations and see if they can align with your work:

1. Make a note of the aspects of the job you enjoy; those that nourish you and those work situations which make you feel stressed, anxious or helpless; those which are depleting. Does the bad outweigh the good? Rank the situations is hierarchical order and think of ways to modify the top stressors.
2. Check if your work expectations are age appropriate. Remember you may have decided to follow your current career at 16 or 17 years old when you were at school with few responsibilities and could work uninterrupted? Now in your 20s, 30s, 40s 50s and beyond, maybe with a partner, family, thinking of having kids, desperate to spend more time with your kids, desire to travel, does this career now work for you? Can you balance your career needs, personal needs and family needs?
3. Is your job more mundane or more demanding or emotionally demanding than you ever imagined it would be? If your job just does not suit you then, consider reducing your hours, find a career specialist get a personality profile done, retrain in your spare time, convert a degree.
4.  Can you align your morals and values with those of the organisation? Maybe at one time you and your organisation were a good fit, but how about now? If you cannot rectify a person-environment ‘mis-fit’ between yourself and your organisation, then consider creating an exit plan as this may give you a sense of freedom and choice.

Making changes can be hard and tricky but in the end, they can put you back into the driving seat of your own life and help you gain a sense of autonomy and control and help avoid burnout.