Posts tagged as:

burnout

Mark Hawthorne on Coping with Burnout

January 29, 2010

I think this will be the last post about avoiding burnout for the next little while, not because we’re done, but because I want to think about other things for a bit, so I’m going to pass the torch, so to speak, to Mark Hawthorne, who literally wrote the book on animal activism (you can see our review here.)

Consider this a homework assignment: check out Mark’s talk on burnout. The video’s an hour and a half long, but Mark’s portion of it is in the first 20 minutes. The middle chunk (Robert Roop on Coping with Compassion Fatigue) is interesting, but I’ll admit I didn’t watch all of it due to time constraints. The last 20 minutes are Q&A with both Mark and Robert, and you might get something out of that too.

And yeah, I know that even after I’ve picked out the highlights from 90 minutes of video for you, some of you don’t learn that way, so I’m going to give a quick summary of Mark’s “ACTIVE approach” to avoiding burnout.

As you might have guessed from the all-caps presentation, ACTIVE is an acronym that stands for these tips:

A: Allow yourself to be human. Give yourself permission to have a good time without feeling guilty.
C: Create something tangible to remind you of your victories. A notebook, a binder, a website, a scrapbook with clippings of your successes. Something to turn to to remind you you’re fighting the good fight.
T: Talk to someone you trust. Have someone with whom you can dare to be yourself. It’s critical to be able to unburden yourself. Use a therapist if you don’t have someone else you can turn to in your personal life.
I: Ignore upsetting images. Give yourself some space if at all possible.
V: Visit an active sanctuary (or volunteer at one.) Get some face time with the faces you’re working to protect.
E: Exercise. Walk, hike, bike, go to the gym, yoga, pilates, whatever you can do.

I could write a whole essay about how each of these tips have made positive changes in my life by both helping to avoid burnout and making me more effective, and if you can’t, then there might be something missing in your burnout prevention kit, so I highly recommend giving them a try.

If you’d like to follow more of Mark’s work, you can check out his blog, where he does incredibly in depth reports on activism opportunities, his Twitter feed for shorter updates, and of course his book, which I think is a great one to have handy whenever someone around you says they’re thinking about getting into volunteering or activism.

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The matrix of activist burnout

January 21, 2010

I’ve been thinking about activism a lot lately, and you know what? A lot of the “rock stars” that were first in everyone’s minds, say, ten years ago (locally and globally) aren’t around so much anymore. They’re just gone. I’m assuming they burnt out, for the most part.

This sucks. It sucks for the activist community, because we’ve lost some great people. It sucks for the cause we’re representing, because duh, we’ve lost some great people. Possibly most importantly, it sucks for the people who’ve gone through burnout in all its various forms. That’s not somewhere I want anyone to be, so I’m putting some of my energy towards helping to reduce the risk of this kind of thing happening to more people.

Now, burnout can take a lot of forms, and the sneaky part of it is that it’s gradual. When you hear the name burnout you think more of the “out” part of the word, because people who burn out are gone, finished, done, etc., but I’m thinking more about the “burn” part, which eats at you over time. In other words, you’ve probably got a bit of the burn in you right now, and if it rages into a huge fire, you’ll burn out for sure, but even in the meantime those flames can be doing some serious damage to your work.

This hits you in two main areas: your productivity and your happiness. Both can vary for different kinds of burnouts, but the ranges are pretty easy to figure out: Productivity can be either high, low, or none. Happiness can pretty much be in three categories too, with either really happy, so-so happy, or completely unhappy and possibly deeply depressed.

If my years of attending boring business meetings back in the days where we didn’t have BlackBerries to play with and had to actually watch the bad PowerPoint taught me anything, it’s that when you’ve got two factors with an equal number of categories, you can make a spiffy matrix.

Here’s the matrix of activist burnout:

matrix of activist burnout

(If anyone wants to draw up something prettier, I’d be more than happy to swap this image out! Just sayin’!)

…and after all that, I’m not going to go into what any of it means. OK, I’ll go so far as to explain that red 1s are bad, yellow 2s are so-so, and you want to get yourself in the green checkbox zone: really happy and highly productive.

Because the matrix of activist burnout is also the matrix of activist effectiveness!

I was going to do something cool like design the grid so I could flip it upside down or something, but I didn’t pay that much attention in the meetings. The point is that if you’re in the so-so zone, you’re not as effective an activist as you could be, and if you’re in the red zone, you’re probably either on the verge of being counter-productive or possibly you’re out of the game, maybe forever.

The cool thing about the matrix is that the two axes are interrelated. Happy people are generally more productive, and productive people often are happier, since they’re getting things done. That works both ways though, so be aware that if you’re unhappy, even if it’s about stuff that has nothing to do with activism, your productivity might be dropping as well, and the same for the other way: low productivity makes people cranky.

Please, please, please pay attention to these two factors and your position on the grid. A lot of the time, you can course correct before things get bad, and if you keep a close eye on things with regular reflection you can get a lot more done for the animals, the environment, and for yourself.

If you don’t pay attention, you might let things go until it’s too late, and we’d hate to lose you! The other possibility is that you catch yourself in time, but it takes drastic measures to recover (remember how I took that year or so off from 2007-2008? Yeah, that wasn’t a lot of fun.)

“But Jason, I don’t do any activism for veganism!”

If you’re vegan, that’s not entirely true. Just being who you are is going to have an influence on other people, and burning out from simply being vegan happens all the time – it’s one of the reasons people go back to eating meat.

I’ll be honest, this isn’t the post I planned on writing about burnout today, but I need some feedback on this post before I go further, so please let me know your thoughts via a comment (preferred) or the contact form. I’ll probably post the followup in next week’s newsletter, because in my head it’s something that’ll work better on our YouTube channel, but I’ll post a link here later on so nonsubscribers can learn more.

Where are you on the matrix? How many of those squares have you been in before? How’d that feel? Give it some thought, and again, I really need some feedback on this, so thanks in advance!

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