That's not a joke, I'd properly thought it through. Outside, working with my hands, seeing something finished at the end of the day.
This was before I found clinical Pilates, and I was struggling. Really struggling.
The thing that was killing me was the passive treatment. Person comes in sore, I do something to them, they feel better for a bit, they come back. Over and over. I didn't feel like I was actually helping anyone, and I couldn't see how the next thirty years of that was going to work.
I thought I'd chosen the wrong career. That's what it felt like from the inside.
What I got wrong
I was reading it as a me problem. Wrong job, wrong personality, not cut out for it.
It wasn't that. I just didn't have the skills to do the part of the job that would have made it worth doing.
Uni had taught me how not to hurt anyone. Genuinely useful, and it's a real skill. But nobody had taught me how to make someone better, so I was doing the only thing I knew how to do, which was put my hands on people and hope.
Once I learned how to actually get someone moving, most of the dread went. Not all of it. But most.
That's why I bang on about burnout being about skills. If you can't move the needle for the person in front of you, of course you're going to dread the diary. Anyone would.
But I need to be careful here
There's a version of that message that's rubbish, and I don't want to write it.
"Your burnout is a skills problem" can very easily land as "your burnout is your fault", and that's not what I mean at all. Plenty of people burn out in workplaces that would break anyone, with caseloads nobody could carry, and no amount of clinical reasoning fixes that.
So here's the honest version, including the part that might annoy you.
Clinicians do need to take some ownership of knowing what they actually want. If you're working somewhere where the values are completely at odds with yours, that's a guaranteed way to end up burnt out, and no course will save you from it.
What does frustrate me a bit is when someone says they're burnt out but has never sat down and worked out what they want or what they value. "I'm just burnt out from the job" is too general to do anything with.
That's not a criticism of the feeling. It's just that vague problems can't be solved, and specific ones usually can.
Get specific instead
The useful version is drilling right down. Two lists:
- What in this job fills your cup
- What empties it
Be really specific. Not "admin", but which bit of admin. Not "clients", but which type of client, on which day, in which room.
You'll notice pretty quickly that it isn't about hard things. Hard things are often the ones that fill you up. It's usually about the things that feel pointless, or the ones where you can't tell whether you helped.
Once you can name them, two useful things happen:
- You get tells. You start noticing when you're sliding, before you're gone
- You can actually change something, because you know what you're changing
That's the part that gives you back a bit of control. Not the whole job, but a bit.
One important warning
Do this before you're burnt out.
If you're in it right now, properly in it, this kind of values work will probably make things worse rather than better. It takes energy you haven't got and it tends to turn into another stick to hit yourself with.
If that's where you are, this isn't the article for you today, and I'm sorry. Go and talk to your GP, and talk to someone who isn't in the profession. The reflective stuff can wait until you've got a bit more in the tank.
I mean that genuinely, not as a disclaimer.
If you're somewhere in the middle
Which is most people. Not in crisis, not thriving, just a bit flat and quietly wondering whether this is it.
Have a think about which bit is actually the problem. If it's the workplace, that's a different conversation and probably a different job. If it's that you can't get people better and you don't know why, that one is fixable, and it's a skills thing, and I've been exactly there.
It's not your fault. Uni stopped one step short for pretty much all of us.
You do have to put in to fix it though. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
Have a crack at the two lists this week, even roughly, even on your phone between clients. It's a strange thing how much clearer it gets once it's written down.
If it's useful, we've got a free guide on the burnout side of this that goes deeper into the values work.
Let me know how you go with it, genuinely curious what ends up on people's lists.