If life weren't tough enough anyway,
the miserable fact is that
job burnout is increasingly common in the contemporary, stress
filled workplace. As teachers of English, I feel we're prone to
this more than just about any other group of professionals.
While some job stress can, naturally, be regarded as a normal
occurrence, how can we really know when we've lost the ability
to control the root causes of that stress, or when they're
leading to a more serious condition, job burnout?
Job burnout, though a serious problem, is a natural response to
stress in the workplace, leaving us feeling powerless,
frustrated, fatigued, drained and even without hope. Never the
less, it's important to realise that, in teaching English as in
any profession, job burnout doesn't happen overnight; it's
important to recognise the early signs and act before the
problem becomes serious. Here are a few questions you really
might like to ask yourself:
• Do you often find yourself dreading going to work in the
morning? • Do you regularly feel fatigued and lacking in
energy at work? • Are you easily bored at work? • Do
work activities you once found enjoyable now feel like drudgery?
• Do you feel depressed on a Sunday (assuming that your
job affords you some form of weekend), thinking about Monday and
the coming week? • Have you become more cynical or bitter
about your job / boss / place of work? • Do you find
yourself easily annoyed or irritated by your co-workers? •
Are non-work relationships (marital, family, friendships)
affected by your feelings about work? • Do you find
yourself envious of individuals who are happy in their work?
Think about this: Do you now care less than you used to about
doing a good job? If you answered yes to half or more of the
above, the chances are you're suffering from some degree of job
burnout. Unfortunately, for many who reach the burnout stage,
the steps out of it can be really difficult, especially as
burned out individuals often feel as though there's no hope.
The fatigue and despair we associate with burnout can make it
hard to actively seek solutions. Also, it often leads to
feelings of isolation, leaving people feeling alone in their
predicament. The difficulties in dealing with full-scale job
burnout are why it's important to recognize the early signs and
take action, a good starting point being to recognize the
factors that could be leading to burnout.
Theories about job burnout say tedious and boring jobs appear to
be one source. Another is facing a job that's beyond your
ability to do it well. Lack of recognition for the work you do
can be another serious source of job stress. As teachers of
English, it's easy to see how these symptoms manifest themselves
in our everyday lives.
Although it can be difficult for those faced with burnout, it's
not impossible to recover from. If someone is experiencing
burnout, the first step is to address the causes of work
dissatisfaction, in other words the what, when and why of
burnout:
What?
Have you been able to face changes in the organization, the
demands of the job, your boss, or the industry? These changes
happen often, did you realize the effect that they had on you?
When?
Was there some pivotal event that changed the way you view your
job; a new boss, other teachers, or responsibilities? Again,
these things happen regularly. Did they have a major effect on
you?
Why?
Have you yourself changed? Are your interests or values
pertaining to work now different than they were before? Has the
school's mission changed? Are your abilities and skills not
being utilized?
Identifying the what, when and why of burnout can help to start
you on the road to exploring options to manage the sources of
your stress. Sometimes simple things, such as talking to a boss
about making changes to your job responsibilities, can make a
difference.
Sometimes more serious measures may, however, be necessary, such
as changing jobs or even changing your career field, as daunting
as that may sound. Most importantly, job burnout is a reaction
to work stress. Methods of handling stress can be identified and
encouraged. While career counselors specialize in helping people
with such issues, they are extremely hard to find when you're in
a foreign country, if they exist at all. Job burnout is
therefore a common problem among TEFL teachers, but one from
which we can recover and, in the end, learn more about our needs
in relation to work.
There are practical methods we can employ to combat the
condition, regardless of our situation. Here are some things we
can do:
Take care of our bodies
Eating right, sleeping well, doing exercise and seeing a doctor
if we feel burned out. If we can take care of our physical
health, it will reduce our burnout.
Do our favorite things
Make a schedule for spoiling ourselves over the course of a day,
week or month. Reading favorite books or doing our hobbies is
the same as recharging the batteries after going through a
difficult period.
Set yourself realistic targets
Making targets for our lives will give us a genuine sense of
purpose. We should make personal targets over the short and long
term and set up a plan to achieve the targets. Learning and
reaching new targets will ease our burnout.
Talk with friends and colleagues
Communicate with others who will listen and understand us, but
not judge. Talking with others like that will ease our emotions
and we are practicing healthy communication. We must be sure to
let our emotions out in healthy and productive ways.
Understand our strengths and weaknesses
Knowing our strengths and weaknesses can help us to learn better
ways to deal with day-to-day stress. We can avoid stress once we
recognize the cause.
Enhance our relationships
Getting closer to our partners, children, friends and other
people we can count on will really help restore our energy. It
can ease our burnout, as we will not feel underappreciated.
By David Vincent
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