185. Burnout Isn’t Your Fault (But Here’s How You Fix It), with Cait Donovan
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My name is Kate Donovan. I'm a burnout expert. I feel like my job is to end burnout culture. The Gallup polls, the Harvard Business Reviews, the Wellbeing at Work reviews, the McKinsey reports, all of them are like, burnout is worse and we're not sure why. Companies are unwilling to have burnout professionals come in often because they don't want to be told that they're at fault. If you are...

In a workplace or in a building that only uses fluorescent light and you never see dawn or dusk because of your working hours, you're going to be more vulnerable. Is it a case of saying, well, some people are just weak? Some people can't hack it? I can't work a nine to five job. I can't do it. Does that make me a bad person? No. People are increasingly overwhelmed. And what I'm hearing is an overwhelming sense of sadness. Yeah. Of loss. Say you started in, you're a nurse. Yeah.

And you were like, all I want to do is help people. And you find out that most of your work is paperwork. Does that suck? Sure. Can you put up with it in a short term? Absolutely. Can you put up with it long term? Absolutely not. I messaged you immediately. I was like, Kate, we need to talk about this at length. How do I start to diagnose my own state at the minute? You don't...

are someone who grew up in an insecure family. You had no one to support you. You created people-pleasing perfectionism and a lack of boundaries. So far, what I've found in the past 10 years, six buckets of things. One of the things that they found was there's only one actual action that increases your resilience automatically. One. And it's asking for help.

Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioral science meets workplace culture. We are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I'm a chartered occupational psychologist.

And my name is Al and I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you create amazing workplace cultures. Today, we are joined by the brilliant Kate Donovan, who's been on the podcast almost three years ago, I think it was, I can't believe it. Kate is a burnout expert with a unique background in both Chinese medicine and Western medicine. She's the host of the top 1% globally ranked podcast, Fried, and author of The Bounce Backability Factor.

What's cool about Kate's approach is that she challenges our entire understanding of burnout because she argues it's not companies or individuals who are solely to blame. It's actually far more complex than that. According to Kate, burnout isn't just about workplace stress that's gone unmanaged.

It involves six different buckets that make us vulnerable, from workplace factors to family history, personality traits, health, environment, and broader cultural influences. And this conversation feels like it's perfectly timed because recent research shows that burnout rates are higher than ever, worse than during the peak of the pandemic.

Kate explains why this is happening and offers practical insights into what both organizations and individuals can do about it. So after this very short break, we're going to join Leanne as she explores a fresh perspective of burnout that could transform how we approach workplace well-being.

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Welcome back. Let's join Leanne as she gets to the heart of the burnout issue with the incredible Kate Donovan. Kate, welcome back to Truth, Lies and Work. I say back, it feels like so long though. I think it was 2022.

When we first spoke to you, which is wild, for our listeners who maybe missed the episode, can you just start by introducing yourself, who you are, what you do, and what you're famous for? I don't know that I'm famous, but my name is Kate Donovan. I'm a burnout expert. My history is in Chinese medicine crossed with Western medicine. So I have a degree in biobehavioral health and a master's degree in Chinese medicine, which gives me a conversation.

kind of a different view than most people on most things, if we're honest. My work is in podcasting, keynote speaking, authoring books, etc. And I really have a very deep goal, mission and purpose for being and I feel like my job is to end a burnout culture and which puts me out of a job, which is totally fine. I want to ask you about burnout specifically in the current

times and climate. I'd imagine most of our listeners would be aware of burnout, heard of burnout. How has burnout changed in the last six to 12 months and what does it look like as we're moving into 2025? So the last six to 12 months, what we're seeing is higher levels of burnout, lower levels of engagement, higher levels of disengagement in the workplace. Every single person that studies this, the Gallup polls, the Harvard Business Reviews, the

well-being at work reviews, the McKinsey reports, all of them are like, burnout is worse and we're not sure why. What I think is happening, what I see happening outside of all the political shifts and outside of all the changes in the workplace that we're not sure what to do with yet, outside of that, I think we are still reacting to the pandemic.

And it has been just long enough now that people feel like we should be in the new normal that we all kept talking about way back then. And, like, we're not. It seems like we're just going backwards and doing the same stuff that we used to do. So now you want me to go back to work? And now...

It's like we didn't learn anything from the lesson, but people's values shifted and the world's values didn't shift with them. How have we seen burnout levels change over the course of, say, 2020 to 2025? Has there been any peaks and troughs or has it just steadily got higher? It has steadily gotten higher. And we have...

I think the end of 2024, the measures for disengagement specifically, which is part of burnout, the measures for disengagement were worse than at the peak of the pandemic. When it comes to burnout, I think the biggest missed opportunity is this constant focus on burnout prevention. Instead of looking at the fact that

Depending on what study you read, anywhere from 37 to 88% of us are experiencing burnout, which means we are too late for prevention. Burnout prevention measures are stress management measures. They're the same thing. There's no difference. But burnout recovery requires something different. And we keep talking about burnout prevention like it already happened.

That's like saying if you don't want to get food poisoning, don't eat bad food, but you ate the bad food three days ago. That's not helpful right now. And I do believe, as a general rule, as someone who has studied health promotion and sort of like public health measures, I do believe that we at some point need to go way back and start fixing things much further upstream.

But right now we are in a crisis of people who are already burnt out and we need to help them recover. This conversation sparked from an exchange we had over LinkedIn when I was looking for some hot spicy takes for our Tuesday episodes. And it really did stop my message immediately. And I was like, Kate, we need to talk about this at length. You said burnout is not the fault of companies, not individuals. So burnout.

The reason that I say this and the reason I spend so much time on it is that people that work in burnout, in the burnout space, are often telling people, individuals, like, listen, burnout is not your fault. Like, and I agree with that. Cool. But then they're going about pointing fingers at companies and saying, your leaders are the problem. You are the problem. And so companies are unwilling to have burnout professionals come in often because they don't want to be told that they're at fault.

And when you look at a wider causation of burnout, your workplace is just one small part of it. This is why. So the World Health Organization of Burnout is focused on the workplace. It says this is workplace stress that has gone unmanaged and doesn't apply to life outside the workplace, which is like, you guys, it's 2025. We know better than to think that the different silos of our life don't affect each other.

there is no one to blame. How do we...

know where it comes from? How do we know how to deal with it? Is it just something that we accept? And does that actually get organizations off the hook and go, well, if we're not to blame, we're not accountable for employee well-being? No. See, and this is where I think that the biggest mishaps are happening. Like, that's what we think. Like, if we can blame something, then we can fix it. But how often have you been attacked in a way of blame that made you really sit down and say, well, I'll change my behavior?

Like, is blame an effective way of getting a shift made commonly in your experience? If we look at workplace health and safety, there's an element there potentially of change happening or behavior modification happening because of significant consequences that people were held accountable for. Held accountable and blaming different energy. But think about your world personally. If someone comes in your life and starts blaming you for something,

is your initial reaction to say, well, let me change that for you.

Or is your initial reaction to become defensive, to dig your heels in and protect yourself? So applying this human lens to an organization, how do we approach burnout or how are you approaching burnout in a way that empowers, we're talking positive language, empowers an organization to take accountability rather than accept blame? We all need to start understanding as a community that burnout is a bigger thing and that has many benefits.

different areas. So there's an epidemiological term from the 1960s called a web of causation. And it was originally thought to, they were describing how diabetes type 2 arises. So initially, when diabetes type 2 was a thing, they were saying, well, it's people that eat too much sugar.

And what they ended up finding was that it's people that live in poverty or socioeconomic issues, have socioeconomic issues, are more prone to it because they have less access to good food, not because they're aiming to eat sugar on purpose. And sugar isn't the culprit, except for the fact that sugar was the solution to their food problems because they didn't have access to good food. And the lack of movement

was a big part of it. But then we have in the States, especially this country was designed for cars. So we don't have people walking to and from their local store or taking a bike like this is in Amsterdam. We're not riding along canals and getting places with our kids on the back like we are driving everywhere. So they started to see that the full web of causation for diabetes was all these different bits and pieces. Burnout is much the same. A person becomes vulnerable to burnout.

Not that burnout is caused by, but a person becomes vulnerable to burnout when there are a multitude of factors in play. And those multitude of factors come from so far what I've found in the past 10 years, six buckets of things. The workplace is simply one of them. If you don't have anything in the other five buckets, your workplace could be pretty terrible and you'd still be okay. Your workplace could also be a utopia and

But if your other five buckets are full of burnout risk factors, you're going to burn out anyway. So I don't think we can fully blame any single one of the buckets because that doesn't make any sense. So talk us through these six buckets, Kate, the six areas that can impact our vulnerability towards burnout. So the first one is the workplace.

So how we're treated at work, if our value system matches the value system of the company, if the company's value system matches what it actually does in action, like that's a big one in the workplace. If a company has all these like really great values on their website that are like color coded and have fun animations, but in reality they don't live according to those values, like that's a huge issue.

Lack of psychological safety in the workplace is an issue. So the workplace has its own bucket of issues that it is responsible for. Not blaming, but it is responsible for these things. Cool. The next bucket is family. This is intergenerational trauma. This is whether or not you were able to form a secure attachment with a caregiver as a child. Just this one thing could end up being a root cause, a root cause, one of the many root causes of burnout later in your life.

If you had family that was someone in your family who was chronically ill, if you had an addict in your family, if you had a family member who was in prison or jail for any extended period of time, if there was any neglect or abuse in your world, all of those things are going to affect whether later in life you are susceptible to burnout. So any of those things will increase your vulnerability to burnout.

The next bucket is personality slash traits and states. Now, when we say burnout is not an individual's fault, when I say that, I really truly mean it. And we know that possibly because of some family stuff earlier in your life or some cultural stuff earlier in your life, you created coping mechanisms that probably worked for you for a very long time. People pleasing and perfectionism are successful mechanisms.

They get us where we want to go often. They get us jobs. They get us friends. They get us success. So we keep them. Sometimes we keep them a little too long and we own them as so much pressure that they start to break down our stress response system because we don't have healthy coping mechanisms. We have fix other people's stuff coping mechanisms. So personality traits and states is another bucket. That's three. So workplace, family, self.

The next bucket is health separate from personality traits and states. So if you have a chronic illness, if you have a tendency toward anxiety or depression, there's genetics and epigenetics here. So we're back to some of the buckets they'll crisscross ideas sometimes. So intergenerational trauma might lead to an epigenetic change, which changes your ability to manage stress that you don't even know about.

There are markers on our genes, especially the stress genes, that can actually change how much your stress response responds. So if your mother, while she was pregnant with a daughter especially, so the line through the female side is stronger, if your mother had an extreme stressful situation during her pregnancy that you don't know about, she could have had an epigenetic shift in her DNA around stress.

which would change your DNA around stress. Sometimes this shift is to lower the volume on your stress response so that you can survive when things are really mental.

But what that does, if you take that through your whole life, is that your stress response never really gets high enough for you to, like, finish it. So you just stay at this chronic stress level, whether the stress is coming from your work, your home, your environment, your culture, your politics, or anything else. So this is just a body-based, biological, physiological thing. If you have a traumatic brain injury, you're more likely.

to have burnout. If you have poor diet, sleep habits, exercise habits, etc., you're more likely to burn out. The next bucket is environment. Environment includes everything outside of your body that adds or distracts from your ability to enjoy beauty and connection. So if you live in a city that has absolutely zero green space, you're going to be more vulnerable to burnout, no matter how good or bad your workplace is. If you are

in a workplace or in a building that only uses fluorescent light and you never see dawn or dusk because of your working hours, you're going to be more vulnerable to burnout. If you have no community of people that you can meet out and about, that you see, like I have a coffee shop down the street that my dog takes me to every day. I know now every single person in the coffee shop because my dog goes in and gets a treat every single day.

That's part of my community. That's part of what helps my nervous system feel safe in the world. But if you don't have that, you are more vulnerable to burnout. If you, and this sounds wild, but matters, if you don't like the design of your home, if there's too much clutter, if the color is wrong, if you hate the art on your walls, if you have too many drawers that always stick or, you know, any of those things,

If your household environment does not allow your nervous system to feel safe, you are at a higher risk for burnout. Sometimes I have clients literally change the art on their walls or paint a wall a different color. And they're like, am I seriously doing this? And I'm like, yes, and it matters.

On a neurological basis, on a biological basis, this matters. So, so far we have five buckets. Work, family, traits and states, health, environment. The last one is culture. This one is the underlying belief systems and ideas that we carry with us that own our behaviors sometimes, even though we don't know about it. In the U.S. specifically, in our top 10 cultural values,

Two of them are hard work and individualism. Work hard, do it alone. That's terrible.

But we all have it in us because it's built into our culture. If on top of that, you are in the U.S. and you are a first generation immigrant whose parents gave up everything so that you would have the opportunity to live in the United States, you then have hard work, individualism and family pressure. Then you go into a workplace that tries like overworks you a little bit, but you agree to the overwork because you think it's the right thing. So

So we're always interplaying these ideas together, right? The rest of the culture bucket, well, you know, we could go into for days and hours and lifetimes. But if you are a person who falls into any of the categories that has an ism, ageism, sexism, homophobism, transphobism, etc.,

you are going to be more vulnerable to burnout because actually getting these microaggressions thrown at you all day every day changes your body's inflammation levels, which makes you more susceptible then to burnout. If we think of all of these six buckets,

What are we supposed to blame? I guess an element of just that shift it back to more of an individual accountability to know where I'm sitting with my six buckets and how well I'm doing in terms of balancing my six buckets. When I work with companies, the thing we talk about is where do these lines overlap? So what can the workplace do to take care of the workplace bucket as best as possible so that people can work on their individual buckets

And then we can meet in the middle and create something that actually works. Instead of pointing figures and everybody saying, well, it's because you're not strong enough. It's because you overwork me. It's because why don't we just figure out? And I think the other before I go into that, the other thing that I think is problematic right now is I work with leaders every day. Most of them have a desire to lead well, but they are not therapists.

They are not well-being specialists. And frankly, that's not their job. But they are being expected to take on a role that matches that of therapist or psychological well-being. And so their job is to create psychological safety, which is different than being a therapist.

But they feel so much pressure to not only manage everybody's work stuff, but also be the empathetic ear when somebody has a problem and respond appropriately when someone has something going on at home. This is a lot to ask of people that are not trans.

After this very short break, Kate reveals whether all six burnout buckets carry equal weight and which factors have the most powerful impact on our vulnerability. Plus, Leanne quizzes Kate on the surprising truth about values, mismanagement in organizations, and how they affect our lives.

why some personality types struggle more in certain workplaces, and what leaders can actually do to protect their teams without becoming therapists. See you in 90 seconds.

Leah, do you know who I think is awesome? Me. Well, yeah, of course. Yes, of course. But also my long-term hero and former guest, Joe Thea, who's the host of Hustle & Flowchart podcast, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Of course. I remember when you booked Joe as a guest last year and you were so excited. Yeah, he's just an awesome guy. I've been listening to his podcast since about episode 100, long before we joined the network. And I tell you what, if you like systems...

mindset tweaks, reframes and strategies to actually enjoy the process of being in business. And this podcast is right up your street. Now it's true. Joe does love talking about building business systems, which isn't entirely my bag. But when you bear in mind that he loves talking about these systems so he can work less and live more, I'm there for it.

He also has loads of guests I know our listeners are going to love too. Yeah, like episode 644 with a guy called Robert Glazer, who's an author and an employment expert. He's advocating for a new way to manage the resignation process. He's got a book called Two Week Notice and explains why two weeks notice is the wrong way of doing things. And well, obviously, I'm not going to spoil the surprise. You need to go listen for yourself. Episode 644 with Robert Glazer. Listen to Hustle and Flowchart wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, let's rejoin Leanne and Kate as they explore the secret to understanding burnout. I have some follow-up questions on these buckets before we dig into them. In terms of their impact on potential burnout, are they all equal? Or does one have more power than the other to cause burnout? My belief is that our individual nervous system's ability to see things

feel and respond to stress appropriately?

is our biggest factor, but that's built of three or four different buckets. Playing like devil's avocado, if there are some maybe like not very nice leaders out there who wanted to still use this model to point blame, is it a case of saying, well, some people are just weak? Some people can't hack it? No, absolutely not. Because it's not a question of weakness. So when it comes to the nervous system, weak and strong is not the correct vocabulary.

that nervous systems aren't weak or strong. They have a smaller window of tolerance or a wider window of tolerance. And some people do have a smaller window of tolerance, but that's not their fault that they have a smaller window of tolerance. I get it. But to that lady with that mindset, does that not kind of mean the same thing? It might to them, which is why I like going in and doing this work with people, because it's not your job to fix their window of tolerance. It's your job to recognize where they are

and try to work within it with them as best you can. Or, honestly, a lot of times, you know, people often are a little bit afraid to, you know, take in someone who talks about burnout in the workplace because they're afraid for the blame game, and they're also afraid that everyone's going to quit and, like, go try and find a new job, which never happens. That's not actually how it happens. But sometimes what we do find is that it's not a good fit, right?

My window of tolerance and this position don't really match each other. That's okay. I think the individual side of things and this individualistic view that we have of people in the West leads individuals to believe that they should be able to put up with anything. And that's just not true. If your window of tolerance is smaller than other people's, if you cannot manage as much stress as somebody else, then you shouldn't take on a job that is...

But you might not know that. So sometimes you have to get to burnout to realize that that thing that you thought was okay for you actually isn't. And there's nothing, there's no morality attached to it. There's nothing wrong with it. But we all think that we're all supposed to be able to do the same things. And we can't. I can't work a nine-to-five job. I can't do it.

Does that make me a bad person? No, it means that I have to work a little differently. But if I can't work a 9-to-5 job...

My nervous system goes wild when somebody tells me what to do. There's a part of being on the spectrum that, you know, somebody tells you what to do and you have this like extreme reaction. I have that. So I'm never going to be able to be in a workplace where somebody from the top is saying you need to get X, Y and Z done. Like that's never going to work for me.

But I know that about myself, so I choose work that I can work within. Like I said before, there's no morality attached to how you interact with the world and how much your nervous system can manage. And because your nervous system is affected by all of these things, and you can expand capacity and there's, you know, etc. But if you don't know that and you are someone who grew up in an insecure family,

that had really unhealthy boundaries with a chronically ill family member. You had no one to support you. You created people-pleasing perfectionism and a lack of boundaries. And then you end up in a workplace that has fluorescent lighting and a bully for a boss and someone who expects 10 out of 10, but you're giving 12 out of 10 anyway because you're a perfectionist people-pleaser. As leaders, we need to see when people aren't fit for their role. And as people, we need to accept that we're not supposed to be in every role. And it's not because we're not good enough.

It's not because we're broken. It's not because it's just because this thing doesn't fit the life that I have lived up until this point. So if we connect the two aspects we've kind of dived into so far, Kate, in terms of the state of burnout, what's happened over the last five years, and then through the lens of this really cool model, by the way, I like how it is.

It's intuitive whilst also like, ha-ha moment. If we fit those two things together, what buckets have been really under strain the last five years? The family bucket has been under massive strain because family members had to take on additional roles, especially mothers, right? All of a sudden mothers were teachers and they were keeping their jobs and they were mothering. And that was a lot.

So the stress family within the stress levels within families rose incredibly. The culture bucket is a mess because we got to this place where we were like, oh, my God, we can reexamine our values and change things for the better. Look, we don't all need to be in the office. We can get things done. And now there's pushback against that pendulum swing and we don't know where we land anymore.

So there's a lot of the finger pointing and the blaming and the what's right and what's wrong instead of the expansion of

Some jobs do really well. Some jobs have to be done in person, but jobs that have the ability to be remote or not, some companies can do it the way they want and other companies can do it the way they want. And you should work at a company that works with your values. Like if we let it expand instead of let it be like there's a correct way, there's not a correct way.

There's no correct way. And I think the fact that there's no correct way is why the workplace stuff is not to blame fully, right? Because if you created...

a workplace that had a perfect balanced workload that was super well-resourced. You had always had everything you needed to do your job. You had at least one friend at work. You were psychologically safe. You were getting regular praise and recognition. Everything felt fair. There was a value alignment and everything was like ideal. The way that it's ideal isn't ideal for every individual, no matter how good it is. We have to stop thinking that there's an answer. An answer. There's 5,000 answers.

That makes it tricky for business owners, leaders. Infinite number of options, infinite number of ways of doing things. You mentioned before that you go into organizations, you help them figure out the main things that they can focus on to have the most impact. Do they typically tend to be the same three things? One of the things that almost every place needs...

is the praise and recognition piece. Most people are not doing this well, but giving regular and specific pointed, not just like praise and recognition all day every day because like everybody gets a blue ribbon. No, ma'am. Those moments of praise and recognition are really important. That being said, if we are going to work on praise and recognition, then the individual team member

needs to work on being able to accept praise and recognition. Because how many times has somebody said, oh, that's a super cute dress. And you say, oh, it's old. Oh, I got it at TK Maxx. Oh, I, right? Like, oh, this old thing. Oh, it was $24.99. If we're going to work on that, even that needs to come from both sides. When somebody praises you, you need to say thank you. The other piece that is absolutely necessary, no matter who we're talking to, no matter what,

is it's like the values mismatch is one of the top six factors for burnout in the workplace, according to research for the past 40 years. But values alignment and or misalignment can happen on a couple different levels. And I think people only think about it on one level. But the first level of values misalignment can happen on is between the company and itself that we talked about before, right? Like we have these values. They are

you know, painted on a wall when you walk in and they are well designed and they sound beautiful, but we don't actually live according to them. We do not act them out. Our values in writing are not our values in action. When that's true in a company, you immediately break down trust and immediately break down psychological safety. You can't work on any of the workplace things if the trust and psychological safety is broken. You can't do them.

So the values misalignment on that level has to be adjusted. The next place that a values misalignment can happen is between the manager and their team member. How many times has someone quit a job because their manager did not suit them? And they say that their manager is a jerk, and maybe they were, or maybe they just weren't a good match. If there's different work ethics between a manager and an employee, that's going to be a problem.

So we need to know a little bit more about our leaders and what's important to them so that when they create their teams, they're creating them with people that not just agree with them, because that's not quite right, but share some values so that when they're having a discussion, there's an underlying understanding.

The third place a values misalignment can happen is between the company and the person working there. Say you started in your nurse and you were like, all I want to do is help people. And then you start in this big, big, big hospital system and you find out that most of your work is paperwork. This is not going to work out long term, no matter what, because the thing that you want to do and the value that you're there to use is not really applicable.

in the way that they want you to work. This is one of the most common issues in burnout that I see worldwide. We wanted to do a job because we assumed that the job would help us feel a certain way, and the job in reality is not that. I think the third one really depends, is more individual to the company. Because sometimes it's about creating community better, and sometimes it's about creating enough autonomy. It really depends on what the complaints are

on the engagement surveys. My thing is that sprung to mind when you talk about that was Meta, Mark Zuckerberg. Meta, how used to be, you know, pretty, pretty firm in terms of diversity and inclusion. This is a core value of ours. And now it's swinging to, oh, we need more masculinity in our culture. It's like overnight, I've gone from being an employee who is in an organization where I felt my values were aligned to now they're really very much not.

Not. How do I deal with that as an employee when it's, you say that it's the culture, it's the environment that's completely shifting out of my control overnight? Well, then you look at what the thing is that you can control, which is creating a graceful exit strategy and finding another job. The issue really happens when you decide that you should be able to, for some unknown super person reason, put up with this shift.

When you assume that if you just like do enough meditation and breathe enough, like you should be able to manage it, you're not going to be able to manage it. It's going to overtake you at some point. This is bigger than you. You have to create an exit strategy. Does that suck? Sure. Can you put up with it in a short term? Absolutely. Can you put up with it long term? Absolutely not. The good thing about the major swings that are happening now is that both both, um,

Maybe not. There's not only two, but different value systems are becoming really obvious in a lot of places. So the chances that you'll find something that is aligned with your values still are really high because people are being real loud about what they think right now, which is really helpful when you're searching for a job where you want to be in a place where you're safe. There's lots of leaders that don't seem to give a shit, excuse my language right now, about creating that environment. JP Morgan's CEO is one that springs to mind as a recent example.

Are you putting that in the same thing that actually there's going to be leaders that will make it very clear where they stand and that'll make it easier for people to distance themselves from that? That's the hope, yeah. Honestly, I'd rather have people be that loud and obnoxious about it so that we know what we're up against. If you can't maintain, and the thing is, even within a company like that with a CEO saying those things, if the CEO is saying things that don't actually match what's going on internally...

then you can kind of let the CEO like run his mouth and say whatever he's going to say. And people still have managers that care about them and see them and hear them and are OK. And maybe, maybe not. I don't know what the truth is. I don't know what's going on internally at J.P. Morgan. The point is we have to look at what the reality is on a day-to-day basis for individual people within their teams and their direct management.

This is the most important space because this is a space that we have influence over. So if the CEO is going wild, but the manager is like, don't worry, dude, I got you. You can stay home and is willing to be that buffer for you. You're OK. But if the CEO says that and then all of the leadership right away says we're on board, get your tushes back to work. That's it. Well, then you have a decision to make. But I think we have this idea that we're not supposed to have to

shift things to suit us. Things are supposed to shift to suit us. And that's just not real life as an adult. I've spoken to a few people recently who

I mean, thinking with these buckets in mind, it's tough, you know, because work, they're going through shifts in terms of whether it be return to office or transitions of leadership. In terms of family, they've had very different voting preferences over the last six months that is causing stress and strain. In terms of...

of the environment and as you say that the culture I mean it's it's very changeable it's it's really quite frightening from you know the extreme weather events we're seeing to as you say these very fundamental cultural norms shifting in terms of democracy or equality the list really goes on people are increasingly overwhelmed and what I'm hearing is an overwhelming sense of sadness

of loss. And that is something that I haven't really felt to that magnitude at scale. I'm not sure I've ever felt that in my kind of regular day-to-day life rather than my more specialised practice. How is all of this going to impact burnout if everybody's buckets are getting

getting all a bit uneven, all a bit unmanageable. But we have to look at the buckets of what the good parts of the buckets are, right? Because everything that could go wrong in a bucket could also go right. So we call, I call these, we, me, myself and I, I call these BPFs, like SPF, but for burnout, right? Each bucket has plenty of things that you can control and

That can improve your ability to be in your life. So the first is when you can, of course, I understand that not everybody can like quit their job tomorrow and wait for a better offer. You have to create a structure for yourself to feel safe financially, etc. I get it. But if the workplace does not align with you at all, it is your responsibility to start looking for a new thing.

If your family of origin did not give you the secure attachment that you needed in order to have a settled enough nervous system to interact with the world on an even keel, it's time to get some therapy. You can work through these things. Like, these things can be worked on. Our genes and our brains, they're not stuck. They are changeable and malleable.

And the worse things get, the more we need to up our own internal abilities to function so that things don't pull us totally off center every time they happen. We need to be able to, the title of my book is The Bounce Back Ability Factor, right? We need to be able to come back into ourselves. We need to be able to bounce back. We can only do that if we are resourced enough to do that. We can only be resourced enough to do that if we know where we get our resources from and we use those things on purpose.

So you might need therapy or a coach. You might need to work on your boundary system. You might need to work through how to ask for help and get support. You might need to work on receivership so that when somebody pays you a compliment, you're able to say thank you. You might need to work on your sleep schedule or your food intake or your walking, whatever it is. Every bucket has a positive side.

So the buckets are not we do the negative, the quote unquote negative side first, because that's the thing that everybody wants to know. But the fact of the matter is you can fill every single bucket with resources. That's possible. And if you have to start by filling those buckets within your small communities or between you and one other person, because this is not just about individuals, this is about community.

If you need to do that within a small community, then cool. Focus on two or three people in your world that you can fill buckets together because that will give you the strength and the centering that you need to handle the chaos that's going on around us. I love that. And I think collective resilience is getting so much more talked about and more understood and more valued. It really is finding your tribe. It's as simple as that. Well, there's nothing... I want to go there for a second.

Because there's no such thing as resilience that's not collective. When you look at resilience research, one of the things that they found was there's only one actual action that increases your resilience automatically. One. And it's asking for help. Because when you ask for help, what you do automatically is gain access to that person's resources, which are different than yours or multiply yours. And when that person taps into their network, they are increasing your resources even more. There's no such thing as

about filling your buckets that you do alone. All of this happens in community. But you have to be in charge of what kind of community you're building and what kind of holes in your bucket you're accepting. I think it brings us really nicely back to...

to where this started in terms of, you know, blame. An individual isn't to blame, a company isn't to blame, or is at fault for burnout. But from everything you've said, it feels like as an individual, we can empower ourselves to take accountability to nurture our buckets. And as a workplace, as leadership, we can take accountability for the bucket of work, but we cannot take responsibility for the bucket of someone else's perfectionism.

If you tell an employee that they really can go home at five o'clock, they don't need to stay until six, but they insist on staying until six, you can't fix that. So I think that, yes, an individual has so much power. You can look at your burnout protection factors. You can fill your buckets. You get with a community that fills your buckets naturally. You create systems that keep pouring things into your buckets. All of that is doable.

The only control you have over the workplace bucket is how you interact with that workplace and whether or not you stay in a place that values you. That's it. But you have to be able to do your part there. For someone listening who is now thinking, how do I start to diagnose my own

state at the minute, my own self, my own understanding of my buckets. Is there any exercises they can do, Kate, to help them understand? Yeah, they can grab this exercise, actually. If they go to katedonovan.com forward slash freebie dash web, W-E-B, they can download this worksheet and do this worksheet on their own, the one that we've been talking about this whole time. So that's available to people who

whenever they want it. What words of wisdom, reassurance, guidance, advice would you give anyone listening right now who is struggling? You know how Michelle Obama said, when they go low, we go high, right?

In this scenario, I think when things get too big, we go small. And that means to me that we refocus our energy on our core base needs, start meeting our core base needs, eliminate some of the... It used to be that only one side had a ton of fake news. Now there's fake news all over the place. So you're getting riled up about things that are not even true, no matter which side you're on. It's like...

pulling back from some of the allowance and space and time that you're giving to things that may or may not even be true. I am paying attention to everything, but I have a very limited period of time in my day where I sit down, I look at as neutral news as I can find, I know what's going on in that day, and then I move on. Go back to the very core.

basics of nourishing your human body. Remember that you are human, that you have a body to live in. Go back to those basic things. You do them, it affects a certain area of your brain that allows you better management of the big stuff. Kate, where can our listeners find you to learn more about you, your work, absorb more of your wisdom?

Everything can be found through Fried the Burnout podcast. It's friedtheburnoutpodcast.com or friedtheburnoutpodcast anywhere you listen to podcasts. Well, that was the amazing Kate Donovan, burnout expert and host of Fried the Burnout podcast. If the six buckets approach resonates with you, definitely go and check out our website at katedonovan.com. That's Kate with a C, C-A-I-T, donovan.com. I wonder if she knows Jason Donovan or Terrence Donovan from Neighbors. Anyway, different conversation, different day. And download that free worksheet she mentioned.

The link is in the show notes. Oh, and one last thing. The major lesson I think we need to take from this is it's not just about powering through on your own. Asking for help is actually the number one action that increases resilience. Talking of asking for help, if you enjoyed this episode, would you consider clicking that subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts? Or if you're on YouTube, then the button should be somewhere down there.

Or you could share it maybe with a colleague who might be showing signs of burnout if you feel comfortable doing that. Or the other thing is if you just, you could just write a quick post on LinkedIn saying how much you enjoyed it. You don't have to disclose anything about burnout. If you tag both us, Truth, Lies, Work and Kate Donovan in, then I'm sure we'll share your posts with our lovely listeners. I mean,

We will and we will see you on Tuesday for our regular episode with our weekly news roundup, our spicy hot take and our world famous workplace surgery where I'll put your questions to me. Have a fabulous weekend and we'll see you soon. Bye. Bye.