In this solo episode, host Beth Cougler Blom explores some of the risks, signs, and symptoms of burnout, particularly for people involved in facilitation or entrepreneurial work. Beth shares some of her personal struggles of 2024, discussing why setting boundaries, creating support systems, and saying the “right yesses” matters. She also offers some practical strategies to help people take care of themselves as well as reconnect with purpose and joy in their work.
Links From the Episode
- Rest Deck from the Nap Ministry
- Should We Do This Work? decision-making matrix from BCB Learning [PDF]
Connect with the Facilitating on Purpose Podcast
- Follow Facilitating on Purpose on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube
- facilitatingonpurpose.com
Connect with Beth Cougler Blom
- Give feedback or suggest upcoming show topics or guests at hello@bcblearning.com
- Visit bcblearning.com to explore Beth’s services as a facilitator and learning designer
- Purchase a copy of Beth’s book, Design to Engage
- Follow Beth on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn
Podcast production services by Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions.
Show Transcript
[Upbeat music playing]
00:00:02
[Show intro] Welcome to Facilitating on Purpose, where we explore ideas together about designing and facilitating learning. Join me to get inspired on your journey to becoming and being a great facilitator, wherever you work. I’m your host, Beth Cougler Blom.
00:00:21
[Episode intro] Hi there. Welcome to the podcast, and welcome to 2025. As I’m recording this, it’s early January 2025. It’s the start of the New Year. And I don’t know why many of us do this, but when the new year begins, we tend to just think about how we want to do things differently in the new year. And that got me thinking about the episode topic for today that I wanted to talk about with you. And that is Keeping Burnout at Bay.
00:00:54
As I look back to my 2024, I realize and I knew it at the time. [laughs] It was a hard year. And I say that as someone who has a lot of privilege, I recognize that, but a lot of things happened both to me personally in my business, and in the country and the world in 2024, that was kind of just like this WTF moment or moments.
00:01:21
I wasn’t the only one feeling this. I wasn’t the only one talking about it. What was up with 2024? A lot. [chuckles]
00:01:30
And we had to deal with so much. And I think there’s something that we can do in 2025 to recover from that. And that’s what I wanted to bring into this episode, to think about burnout and how to keep it at bay, how to prevent that from coming into our life, into our work, and having a much better 2025.
00:01:53
If you had a great year last year, way to go. [laughs] I hope you did!
00:01:57
And if you didn’t, if you feel like you were in a little bit of trouble, like I was, feel like you’re not alone. I’m going to share a few things that happened to me last year, without sharing too, too much. But just to be real about some of the difficulties that we all have in our work, in our business—if we own our own businesses—and other things that can happen to us. There’s a lot going on right now.
00:02:21
Let’s figure out what to do with it and not have so much trouble happen in the future if possible.
00:02:28
So in this episode, I’m going to talk a little bit about burnout, what it is, what I think some of the risks are that are in the fields that I tend to talk about here in the podcast, such as facilitation and learning design, people who teach and facilitate and train and work with groups and so on. Those of us who own our own businesses are kind of a part of that.
00:02:49
Some of us have our businesses, some of us work for organizations, but there are burnout risks in both of these types of environments as well as the work that we do in facilitation.
00:02:58
So what does it look like? I mean, what is the real definition of that and how do we recognize it when it shows up in our life, and kind of watch out for those warning signs so that we can do something about it and keep it away from us if possible.
00:03:13
I have some practices and some resources to share with you that I use, and should use more ,and want to keep using more in the new year as I try to reclaim some of my health and some of my joie de vivre for my work. [chuckles] My joy in my work. And I’m hoping some of these will be useful for you as well.
00:03:34
It was hard for me to think about, did I want to talk about this topic on the podcast?
00:03:40
Because, like you might feel as well if you’re doing something on social media, if you’re talking about things in public. It’s hard to talk about the bad stuff, right?
00:03:51
It’s hard to talk about the hard things that we experience in work or in business. And so part of me wanted to just not talk about it at all and just—not like I’m pretending that everything’s all hunky dory over here—but just it is hard to know how much to share.
00:04:07
And where to stop, I guess, when you start to share the real story of what’s happening behind the scenes.
00:04:14
But I’m going to make myself do this episode because I hope it’s helpful for you, and I know it’s going to be helpful for me as well. I’ll try not to over share, but I’ll try to just alert us all and highlight some things that we all can be looking out for in terms of burnout and capturing and reclaiming and maintaining our health as we go throughout each year.
00:04:35
So stick with me here if you’re at all interested in thinking about your emotional health, your physical health, your work life health and mental health, I suppose as you go throughout your 2025 – or whenever you’re listening to this episode, at some point in the future.
00:04:55
The topic of preventing burnout is relevant to so many people right now, but I think those of us who are in any fields related to designing and facilitating learning, especially on the facilitation side, it’s something that we need to think about. Because we’re in a helping-related profession. We either have clients or participants that we work with day in, day out, sometimes in person, sometimes online.
00:05:19
The people-based nature of our work is great and it also can be very difficult. We hold space for people a lot in the work that we do. I mean, I think about my own work.
00:05:31
I’m often meeting with clients and partners and team members online—or in person, but it tends to be mostly online these days.
00:05:41
I do facilitation work and so I’m holding space for the group. We facilitators are often the first ones to arrive at an event, we’re the last ones to leave, so we end up working long days when we’re actually doing facilitation work because of the prep required. And there’s lots of work to be done.
00:06:01
There is just a ton of need for people who do facilitation work these days, and so there’s never a shortage of work, and sometimes there’s too much work. The amount of times I laugh with my colleagues, I’m sure I’ve spoken about this on the podcast before, that I get requests saying, oh, can you facilitate something in two weeks?
00:06:20
Can you facilitate something in three weeks? No, we’re busy. But it just says to me that there’s a lot of demand out there for those of us who do this work and it’s up to us to protect ourselves and set boundaries so that we don’t take on too much.
00:06:36
So if I use my own experience, there’s a lot of work out there. It’s very easy to say yes, yes, yes to all sorts of things and then find myself in an overly busy situation which could lead to burnout.
00:06:50
In some ways, I refer to it as the shadow side of my business because I have a busy business. I’m lucky to have a lot of clients, a lot of people interested in working with me.
00:07:00
Which I take very seriously, I’m very grateful for. But at the same time, if I don’t set boundaries to figure out the amount of work that I can do, or my team and I can do, then I’m going to be in trouble and I’m going to lead myself down a path to burn out.
00:07:16
And I sometimes don’t even realize that I’m doing that because I’m just trying to do great work and do a lot of great work and have great ideas and implement them. But then too much work is not a good thing either, and could lead to burnout.
00:07:31
There’s so many reasons why this topic is relevant and useful to all of us. It’s why I wanted to talk about it today.
00:07:39
A few of the risks that I experienced in my business last year were things around the team that I had been building and just the stuff that people have been dealing with as people. As mothers, as fathers, as people who are colleagues with each other in businesses. So I was watching things happening with myself, my friends in the field, my colleagues in the field,
00:08:05
my team, my clients. There was some level of burnout I think happening with all of us in various ways because we have too much to do at work, but also at home as well. And particularly I think women fall into this category of being overwhelmed because we not only have wonderful work that we do these days, but we have usually a lot of responsibility on the home front as well, and sometimes more than our partners do.
00:08:33
I realize this in conversation with my women friends. I don’t know the research around this, I didn’t look it up, but I feel like the research does support, it would support me saying that women still have more of the work at home and we’re still dealing with a very busy job as well.
00:08:50
So again, a risk to burnout. So we’re wearing multiple hats in the actual work that we do, in our working with clients in running a business or being an employee types of things, particularly on the entrepreneurial running a business side, there’s lots to do to keep a business going. There’s also things like feeling like we have to produce on social media.
00:09:13
And this is something that we talk about time and time again in our communities of practice and so on. That feeling that is coming from who knows where about keeping up with the Joneses on social media.
00:09:25
Ah, I hate it! [laughs] I can’t stand it. I wish we could all just go away and leave social media and not have it be part of our lives anymore. I mean there are some good things for sure, but mostly I think it is creating this feeling in ourselves, this impetus that we have to keep creating content and showing up there and being part of something or else people are going to forget about us and we’re never going to get work again.
00:09:49
So social media is one of the things I’ve been really trying to reduce over especially the past year. We still have a content calendar and I sometimes update that with kind of the things I’m doing, but I don’t use it to run my life anymore.
00:10:03
I’m really trying to make intentional choices about when and how I show up on social media, and I’ve really backed off a lot of my presence there for the company and for myself over the past year. It has worked, I think for the most part, and probably there’s more backing off [chuckles] that I could do this year in 2025.
00:10:22
So those are some of the multiple hats pieces that are burnout risks for us when we have our own business and when we are in a facilitation profession particularly. One thing that I noticed that I was doing this past fall was saying yes to people who I had worked with before—past clients—when I didn’t really want to say yes to them.
00:10:46
They were great people to work with at the time, they came back with a project I wasn’t very excited about and didn’t have enough budget. And I still said yes to it anyway.
00:10:57
So the trap I made was to be nice to my past clients because I thought, well, I know how to do the thing. I can help them out. But being nice to them wasn’t being nice to myself.
00:11:07
It wasn’t being kind to myself and supporting me in the types of work that I really want to be doing, that feed me and serve me and support me. So there is this impact of saying yes too often or yes to the things that shouldn’t be yesses.
00:11:25
In 2025, I want to say the right yesses. Not so many yesses that I feel like I’m spreading myself too thin, which isn’t going to serve me.
00:11:35
So, I started to say to myself I was going to say a lot of nos this year, meaning that I’m going to say no to some work and yes to others, of course.
00:11:43
But I thought, well, that’s a negative way to say it. I’m going to say the right yesses. So if clients come to me with a wonderful project that is going to inspire me and allow me to flex my creative muscles and do fantastic work for those ultimate learners and so on, I’m going to say a yes, that’s a right yes.
00:12:03
And I don’t want to say a wrong yes that’s not going to serve me. Because actually it doesn’t serve my clients in the end when I say a wrong yes.
00:12:13
So that’s one tip I’m going to give myself is to say right yesses and avoid those kind of burnout risks around doing the wrong work for me, at this particular time. In facilitation and related professions like facilitation, we also have to consider that a burnout risk comes from the emotional labour and the energy that we need to have to do this kind of work.
00:12:38
So if we’re working with participants, whether it’s online or in person, but particularly in person, we’re holding space for others. We’re paying attention. We’re working with groups. We’re navigating group dynamics.
00:12:50
There are all sorts of things there that we need to do that take emotion. They take mental space, they take physical energy to do those things.
00:13:01
So in our particular type of work, if we’re teaching, training, or facilitating with groups, real live people who demand things of us. It can be energizing for us, but it also can be draining as well. So we do have to watch the risks.
00:13:18
I don’t know what that looks like for you. It could be that you back off the amount of facilitation that you do this year, if you feel like you’re not being your best self with your groups.
00:13:28
Or it might mean that you might say yes to some groups and no to other groups, ones that you are really excited to work with are yesses and ones that you feel might be draining you or not serving you this year might be the nos.
00:13:44
So thinking about the risks and just the front of house [chuckles] kind of work that we do as facilitators and of course the back of house, the behind the scenes business stuff, that we do as well. It’s really important for us all to think about.
00:13:59
I do know some of my colleagues out there have an additional risk around sharing their story with their groups. And I know folks who do this and they share past trauma-related stories with groups and we’ve had conversations around how much to do that with groups in general, but also what you need to do to recover from that and rebuild yourself after you do that.
00:14:24
I can’t relate to this personally, but if you are a facilitator out there where you’re working with groups, facilitating learning particularly, but it involves sharing some of your own story, just be careful about the risks around that. I think I wrote about that in my book,
00:14:39
Design to Engage, around just knowing where that line is of what you can share, what you should share, and what you should not share.
00:14:47
Beause it’s not going to serve you, and it actually might be harmful to you to share too much, in the end. We don’t want you to go into burnout because you think you’re serving the group by sharing, and then you’re sharing too much.
00:15:01
Now let’s talk about what burnout looks like because you might be thinking, well, I don’t even know. Maybe I’m in it right now. How do I know?
00:15:09
The World Health Organization has a definition of it. You can look it up if you just literally Google “WHO definition of burnout”. And what you’ll find is that it says if you have feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion,
00:15:24
If you have an increased mental distance from your job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism towards your job and reduced professional efficacy, that’s burnout. If you have any of those things happening, then you could be in burnout already. Or maybe you just have some of those and you are realizing you’re on your way to burnout and there’s enough time to catch yourself to be able to do something about it so that you don’t go into full blown burnout.
00:15:55
For me, it’s hard to see it at the time. I think as I look back on the year, and maybe even the past couple of years, because of busyness, because of overwhelm, there have been times where I’ve been talking negatively about my work, complaining about different types of work that I have, and just generally feeling in some cases that I should be doing more creative, more wonderful, more impactful work and being dissatisfied with some of the things that I’ve been doing.
00:16:31
So some of that is just getting clear on the services that I’m say yes to. And some of it is the sign of burnout. That even though I was working with great clients and we were creating great courses that were going to be wonderful for learners, there was a barrier there that was hard for me to just be fully into and it resulted in a bit of a negative impression around the thing.
00:16:57
So I know I’m in trouble, don’t I?, when I’m in that situation? I mean, I chose to have a business in this field, and I’ve been doing it for many years. I started my business in 2011. I actually like my job. [laughs]
00:17:09
I have a podcast I’m talking about this work all the time. And so when I realize that I’m speaking negatively about something that’s happening in my work then I know I have a problem. There’s something I need to fix so it’s either what services am I offering kind of thing, or it’s something that’s supporting all of that around my exercise, my eating, my sleeping, everything else that’s supporting and being a foundation to me being able to do this work.
00:17:47
Some other red flags that we all could experience include feeling uninspired by our work, being emotionally or physically exhausted, and even things like sleep disturbances. Waking up in the middle of the night, thinking about work, and not being able to get back to sleep.
00:18:07
I even have had this like keyed up sort of buzzing feeling that I’ve noticed in myself here and there. I don’t have it now, I’ve been able to get rid of it. But here and there last year, I’d realize throughout the day that I was just buzzing.
00:18:24
I was working on eight different things at the same time, just going, going, going and not even getting up from my computer. And literally would be feeling this buzzing sort of vibration happening in my body that I knew was problematic.
00:18:38
So we do get physical symptoms around potential burnout or burnout happening, don’t we? And we have to figure out how to slow down and notice and recognize that they’re happening and figure out what to do about it.
00:18:51
The cool thing is that as facilitators, I actually think we have great noticing skills. [smiles] And the trick is that we have to turn those noticing skills to what’s happening with us,
00:19:02
instead of noticing what’s happening with other people, which is what we often do in our role, right? We train ourselves to be very, very aware of what’s going on with our groups, and are we giving ourselves the same kind of noticing to figure out what’s happening in our body.
00:19:19
How exhausted or energized we are? And do we have enough gas in the tank to be able to do the things we need to do either behind the scenes or in front of the group?
00:19:32
So lots of various red flags or things to look out for from the textbook definition from the WHO, but just I think we know some of this stuff from talking about it with our friends and our colleagues and noticing it ourselves in our own bodies.
00:19:50
Some of you might be journallers or write reflection questions for yourself and do some sort of self-awareness practices. That’s a great way to uncover, I think in some cases, that you are experiencing burnout or you’re on the way to burnout. You might see and notice things that you’re writing about in your journals. I don’t journal myself. I used to many years ago, I haven’t done it for a long time.
00:20:14
But I’ll notice it in conversations that I have with my friends, conversations with people who do what I do. And when we get down to it and we talk about real stuff that’s happening in our work, we are realizing that we are all feeling incredibly busy.
00:20:33
And we’ll even ask ourselves questions like, “Um, why are we doing this to ourselves? We own our own businesses. Why are we accepting so much work? Why are we saying yes to too much? Why are we finding ourselves too too busy yet again?” We actually are in control of this.
00:20:52
I don’t know if it’s something that you’ve experienced, but if you do, know that you’re not alone. And so the more you and I and all of us talk about it with each other and just help us recognize what’s happening and support each other in it, I think we’re going to be better served.
00:21:08
We have all had a lot to deal with over the last year particularly. Well, I can’t speak for all of you worldwide, of course. There are a lot of things going on in the world that I know about and don’t know about both.
00:21:22
But here in my country, Canada, we’re very lucky in so many respects. But we have had political strife. We have had economic hardship. We have had social things to deal with. We have had lingering effects of pandemic things happening.
00:21:41
And we have a southern neighbour that concerns us. As what happened in fall 2024 won’t be a surprise to hear, that here in Canada, we’re watching, right? We’re watching things that are happening in other parts of the world. Wars happening in other parts of the world, and so on. And there’s a lot that we see in the news every day that infiltrate our sense of well-being. And it’s just something we all have to deal with.
00:22:11
So what do we do to address this and to try to deal…like we can’t take away what’s happening in the world, we can’t take away what’s happening in our countries or with the ills that are happening around us, but maybe we can set some boundaries around those kinds of things coming and creeping into our mental health and and try to figure out something to do about thatm to preserve our self-care.
00:22:36
I actually, one of the things I did just recently was to talk with Chat GPT – my pal, Sunny, I’ve named it – about a cortisol reducing daily plan. So this is one of the self-care things that I was doing is to think, OK, well I’ve heard of this thing called cortisol that runs throughout our body.
00:22:56
It’s a stress thing and I want to reduce that. I want to reduce stress in my body. So hey, ChatGPT, what are some of the things that I can do to reduce the cortisol in my body, to reduce my stress? What does a daily plan look like for me to do that? And it was actually really astute, what it gave me. I mean, this is a conversation, right, ourselves and AI having a conversation about how we can keep care of ourselves.
00:23:23
But my ChatGPT knows me a little because I’ve talked to it a lot about my work and my life. So it gave me this plan that I’m trying to follow and just keep accountable to some of the things that will be ‘self-care-y’ for me. Daily yoga practice. Getting out for daily walks. Staying away from technology more. Hey, I work online. I’m sitting in front of my computer all day long.
00:23:51
But does that mean I need to plug my phone in and have it charge right beside my bed, my head, at night?
00:23:58
No, I’m going to plug it into my office now and get it away from me. And try not to check it in the evenings and try not to pick it up at 6:00 AM when I wake up in the morning and start checking emails for work right away.
00:24:11
So I’m doing things that are going to preserve my self-care and try to keep me out of that burnout situation that I was going too far down the path towards. Some folks, of course, would be turning to coaching or therapy or maybe your communities of practice, or some sort of peer accountability groups.
00:24:31
I have a couple of different sets of friends that I get together in my work, where we all own our own businesses, and we do talk about these things. And it is a support to me and I think to the other people in the group. And so we take these kinds of individual strategies and group strategies don’t need to be able to combat something like preventing burnout.
00:24:56
There are even little things that we can do to help ourselves remember to take care of ourselves. I have a paper weight that I had put away for a while and I brought it out and put it back on my desk in the fall. It says, “Say no to everything that doesn’t make your heart sing.”
00:25:14
I picked it up years ago. I love it. I love the message. I try to do that. And I know when I don’t do that, I’m going to be in trouble actually. Because when I say yes to things that don’t make my heart then I feel like I’m going to be back down the road to burnout again. Or at least to some unhappiness that I shouldn’t have caused myself.
00:25:37
So notes to yourself on your computer, or on your mirror, or a paperweight like I have, can be really good things. You can also create resources for yourself to help you stay accountable and to maybe set boundaries for yourself in your business or in your work.
00:25:54
I created this matrix document for myself that I use when I’m potentially taking on a new client and the document’s called, “Should we do this work?” And it’s a matrix that has all of these statements along the left side—and it’s a Likert scale.
00:26:14
The scale is definitely not, possibly, probably, definitely. And the items on the list are things like, We’re excited about it (excited about the work). We have time for it.
00:26:27
It affords us an opportunity to be creative. It will allow us to learn something new and interesting. The topic fits within our business values and so on.
00:26:37
I kind of forget about it this “Should we do this work?” matrix from time to time. But this is one of the things I’m going to pull out and put front and centre in my eyes for this year to say, OK, I’ve actually created a resource for myself to help me with decision making around the work that I want to do.
00:26:55
And I hadn’t been using it as much. I’m going to bring it back out and use it. And it can help me set those boundaries that I want to set to be able to preserve myself, to be excited about my work and to prevent burnout for myself and actually for my team as well. None of us want to be working on work that we don’t want to do. No, no, [laughs] we’re not in that point in our careers.
00:27:19
We’re lucky, we’re privileged to be in that situation and there’s all sorts of boundary stuff happening with being able to say yes or no to to work that I’m going to do for myself, and perhaps you could too. I will put that matrix document in the show notes if you want to download that and you can use it to create your own version if you would like.
00:27:39
One last resource that I want to mention that I have found very helpful over the past two or three weeks, even after I got it is the Rest Deck from the Nap Ministry. This is a little deck of cards—I know we facilitators love our facilitator card decks – but this one isn’t about what we can do with groups. And it’s not about what we can do as facilitators.
00:28:01
It’s about how we rest and how we take care of ourselves. So the Rest Deck, the subtitle is 50 Practices to Resist Grind Culture. It’s by Trisha Hersey. I’ll put that in the show notes as well.
00:28:15
I’ve been pulling a card from the Rest Deck every single day and it is helping me really remember to prioritize rest and relaxation and getting out of this grind that I feel I and so many of us have been in over the past year. And getting back to something that is going to feel more spacious, more creative, more wonderful and will allow me—and us—to do the good work in the world that we are meant to do on a timeline that is doable and supports us as well as supports our clients, or our bosses, or our organizations, or whomever it happens to be.
00:29:04
So go forth and keep recognizing what’s happening to you and doing something about it to maintain your own health. You deserve it.
00:29:18
[Episode outro] Hey, if you liked this podcast episode. I think you’re going to really enjoy the next one. I’m interviewing Dr. Myriam Hadnes. A lot of you will know her from her workshops.work podcast, as well as the NeverDoneBefore community. So related to the topic of this episode, Myriam and I are going to be talking in that one about letting go and saying yes. That is saying no to what we don’t want in our work and saying yes to what we do. Sound familiar from this boundaries conversation? [chuckles]
00:29:50
I think so. It’s so related. We’ll see you then.
00:29:55
[Show outro] Thank you for listening to Facilitating on Purpose. If you were inspired by something in this episode, please share it with a friend or a colleague to help them expand their facilitation practice too. To find the show notes, give me feedback, or submit ideas for future episodes, visit facilitatingonpurpose.com. Special thanks to Mary Chan at Organized Sound Productions for producing this episode. Happy facilitating!
