“Find a group of people who challenge you and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life’

- Amy Poehler

A common problem we see in our clients is a BIG over-indexation into their career. They constantly live in a battle of WORK vs LIFE.

I often look back to the time in my life a few years ago when I experienced career burnout and a hell of a lot of disharmony in other areas of my life.

“How soon ‘not now’ becomes ‘never’.

- Martin Luther King Jr

“The true currency of life is time, not money, and we’ve all got a limited stock of that”

- Robert Harris

It’s that time of year when I always seemed to fall out of the year desperate for a break and promising myself, I would use the time to make the next year feel different, look different and be different.  The first few days of holidays were often spent recovering, the next part I began with setting good intentions and making plans for positive change. I often used the time to reconnect with my family that I hadn’t seen enough, catch up with friends that I missed, I walked slower, spoke less, and exercised in daylight for a change. I wondered why life couldn’t feel like this more often? I would always read books about the change I wanted to see in my life, and I made promises, promises for more balance, greater patience with loved ones, fewer hours at work and be more present when I wasn’t at work. A New Year packed with Resolutions is our opportunity to make amends and set intentions for change and ensure the next year was different to the one that just passed…. Or is it?

I’ve written before how burnout has become normalised, almost a rite of passage. A passage that is incorrectly assumed unavoidable if you are giving all you have to your career in Allied Healthcare. It starts with and continues from the commencement of our academic journey; we must give our all always! We get swept up in the demands of our industry and become enmeshed in our career and before we know it, we have lost control! We are powering on, unsure why with the perceived end point potentially terrifying!

How having it all can feel like you have nothing…

You have probably heard of the saying ‘the secret to living is giving’.  The joy of giving is not only highlighted in countless movies that showcase the happy generous giver, and the miserly uptight and greedy taker.   In fact, the benefits of giving have been widely researched and documented, most notably by Stephen Post PHD and his book The Hidden Gifts of Helping.  Post talks about how humans are wired to get into a state of wellbeing and inner peace when they even ‘think’ about giving let alone do it. 

No matter who you are, there is probably something you really really want or something you really want to do. Some experience, achievement, or monumental outcome that fuel moments of joy as the thoughts of reaching this milestone run through your mind. These things or events will inspire you, as you commit to harnessing your energy and focus to ensure these become a possibility.

How perfectionism, over commitment and high achieving is squeezing the life out of your career…

I loved being near the ocean growing up. The freedom, creativity and challenge it brought me moulded into my DNA, it felt like a spiritual part of my being came alive whenever the ocean was close, it was a big part of my childhood in the country. I went to local school and was quite good at it, I was a young athlete competing in many sports, life was simple and fun! I went through school supported by an adoring, nurturing family and by the time I left high school I joined my brother on the Gold Coast. It was time to get serious about my future. I was taught as a kid that hard work was the only way to get ahead. That it needed to feel challenging and not always in a good way, I was led to believe that was normal. I was unsure of what to do but I was kind of smart, good at sport, interested in sport and I got in, so Physio it was!

We would not be alone in feeling like the world has gone mad right now. Waking each day wondering are we in a bad version of a sci-fi thriller. Our broader world is experiencing the most abnormal of times, yet our daily lives are seemingly becoming a long drawn-out string of a new repetitive norm. It’s hard to see past this reoccurring thriller, like the Netflix series that keeps on playing and we keep watching aimlessly. We regularly hear ourselves saying, ‘I just want things to go back to normal’. Somehow this current experience will change us all and poses the question; is our understanding of ‘normal’ forever changed? How can we manage through this?

Why the normalisation of burnout is creating an unhealthy acceptance of an abnormal state of being. My personal journey through languish…

What actually is luck? Is our interpretation of luck different to another? Is luck something that happens to me, not by me? How did I get so lucky? How did they get so lucky?

Too often our self talk get’s in our own way of moving forward or achieving what we want. But there are ways to break through them.

Understanding where your midlife transition sits within the different life stages is a great way to help us navigate the inevitable midlife slump.

Unfortunately were going to have a dip in our happiness during the midlife stages of our lives. An economist and researcher David Blanchflower did a lot of research in the 1990’s around happiness across the lifespan. No matter what outcome he measured he consistently found that when happiness was pitted against age, a U shaped line always formed. As such he coined it “the happiness curve”. (see image 1 below). The lowest levels of happiness always showed in midlife, specifically between 45 – 49 years of age. What’s more amazing is that in 2020 when he did a similar study across 132 different countries globally, these findings were the same for other parts of the world.

5 tips to create a great life vision and make it a reality.