PhotoCredit: gaggle
The saying "your goose is cooked" refers to being in a degree of trouble as a result of one's actions. Evidently originating from the martyrdom of a person whose name sounded like 'goose' in German. Or so the internet says.
Don't ask me how my brain works. I don't always know. But this is the saying that leapt in my head as I thought about today's topic. Burnout.
It sneaks up on you and is very insidious. Gradual, subtle and with very harmful effects. Well, it's subtle in the beginning. Once it takes hold, it's anything but subtle. It's debilitating.
It's also extremely confronting. Not only are you faced with not being able to do things the way you used to, but you also need to acknowledge it's the result of your own most excellent work. All your striving and caring and perfection and being relied upon. Your reward for being a good person who does great work is to be thoroughly exhausted and on the verge of collapse.
The best part is...wait for it...nope - there is nothing good about this. It's a massive alarm bell that you need to make some changes and make those changes reasonably quickly. Failure, please hear me on this, is not a pretty picture. You are literally damaging your adrenals, minimum, and creating damage to your health that could take a lifetime to repair.
The worst part is confronting the fact that you are doing it to yourself. You are the one taking on too much work. You are the one not getting enough help at home to compensate. You are the one saying yes to too many things. You are the one who the team keeps relying on rather than doing the hard yards themself.
You are the one.
You matter.
You owe it to yourself to take control. You owe it to yourself to stop making everyone and everything else matter more than you.
If this is you, or might one day be you, please stop. Just for a moment. Take a deep breath through your nose. In and out. Feel what it's like to have a second of calm. Just one second. Take another, deeper breath if you didn't feel it the first time. You need to recognize what that feels like. Step One of moving beyond burnout is understanding that you are in constant fight or flight mode, and you need to teach your body what the rest-state feels like.
That is your task this week. More to come next week but for now I want you to find as many moments as possible in your day for one-deep-breath. Just one. One second. One breath.
You owe it to no one else but yourself.