Burnout: Coaching can help prevent it

The Burnout Syndrome is a particular form of work-related stress, predominantly associated with activities characterised by strong relational exposure in difficult situations. Examples often mentioned include: healthcare workers, social workers, law enforcement, teachers. Stress in these cases is related to the strong emotional involvement characteristic of this kind of activity. It is therefore not pressure or workload that produces this type of discomfort, but the emotional wear and tear resulting from a strong disillusionment with professional roles often initially undertaken with a strong idealistic charge.

The particular situation we are currently experiencing, such that Collins dictionary elected the neologism “Permacrisis” (permanent crisis) as the word of the year, seems to have extended this profound state of malaise to a much broader spectrum of work activities. Covid is a little less of a concern today, but it has been affecting our lives in some way for three years now; the health emergency has been compounded by the drama of war, the economic crisis and the climate crisis. We have to go back many years to find a scenario marked by such a deep crisis.

All of this inevitably affects people’s lives, creates upset and insecurity. Improving our emotional agility therefore becomes a fundamental resource in order to cope with such profound changes and the resulting stress. Emotions, if not managed properly, can become a real obstacle; if treated correctly, however, they are a great resource for our growth, because they contribute to our balance by expanding our awareness. By listening to our emotions, we learn to know ourselves better, not to deceive ourselves with false illusions, and to be able to find increasingly valid answers over time.

The ability to handle stressful situations is therefore intimately linked to the ability to produce effective response strategies. Such strategies, defined as ‘Coping‘, comprise the set of actions, both cognitive and behavioural, intentionally implemented by the subject with the aim of ‘coping’ with the negative impact of the stressful event. This is a very important consideration when we are called upon to address this issue within a coaching relationship.

Some research has highlighted how failures and setbacks can be explained through so-called “derailing factors“: individual blocks and personal limits that almost always arise from a lack of awareness of one’s own emotional dynamics and their consequences. These limiting factors manifest themselves in the difficulty of having positive relationships, in a lack of ability to manage emotions such as anger, fear or contempt for what is perceived as different or distant from oneself. Or in the discomforts linked to the tiring and difficult relationship with power both acted upon and suffered. Situations in which appropriate coaching can be the effective solution.

With regard to stress management, coaching can provide valuable help in understanding the nature of the problem with greater clarity, increase the level of awareness with regard to the specific emotional involvement, and in other cases succeed in identifying a set of activities aimed at reducing the tension generated by negative stress. It may be useful in this regard to briefly describe the main coping strategies:

Problem-focused coping: these are strategies that aim to solve or modify the situation perceived as threatening. Within these solutions, cognitive input is decisive, within a succession of phases that we can summarise as follows: careful analysis of the situation; identification of triggers; evaluation of alternatives or possible solutions; application of identified solutions.

Emotion-focused coping:determining in these solutions is the contribution of emotional intelligence aimed at achieving a new balance. The first step is to identify and describe the behaviours we use to defend ourselves. Next, it is important to understand the level of our emotional involvement and develop awareness of the nature of our emotional reactions, which can be effective or dysfunctional.

Coping centred on problem restructuring: Since stress depends not so much on what happens but on how we interpret it, problem restructuring consists of becoming able to attribute a different meaning to the situation that causes us discomfort. Restructuring is a very refined and effective technique, which requires awareness and a high degree of mental flexibility, and is obviously easier to achieve with external help.

Activity-focused coping: In some cases, solutions aimed at reducing the tension generated by negative stress through the practice of certain sports activities, specific exercises, or relaxation techniques may prove effective. For some years now, ‘Mindfulness’, an Eastern-derived meditative practice adapted by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a professor of medicine at the School of Medicine of the University of Massachusetts, who in the early 1980s developed a protocol: (MBSR) Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, to introduce the practice of meditation in clinical settings.

Finally, it is useful to remember that there is no such thing as one coping strategy that is better than another; experience gained in coaching teaches us that it is the interaction between several strategies that can provide the best results. The decisive aspect is therefore flexibility, the dynamic ability to change when necessary and to learn from new experiences, and above all: a positive attitude and confidence in one’s own possibilities that leads to action, to feel like a protagonist and not a passive subject at the mercy of events.

Diego Ingrassia, Mondo Formazione, Harvard Business Review. November 2022