The cure for your exhaustion isn't rest

The Great Resignation: that's what they're calling this time, when 30-40% of the workforce is expected to leave their current positions.

After my last essay about burning out from my nonprofit position, I heard from so many of you that the story resonated. 

And right now, so many of my clients are asking themselves: Should I stay or should I go? (And if I do go, how do I face those unknowns?) 

These conversations are bringing me back to a book that I read around the time I was thinking of leaving—David Whyte's Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity.

There was this one idea from one chapter that felt like it was written just for me. 

I felt called out and called forward at the same time. 

I think that it might do the same for you:

——

There was a time, many years ago, working at a nonprofit organization, trying to fix the world and finding the world didn't want to be fixed as quickly as I'd like, that I found myself exhausted, stressed and finally, after one particularly hard day, at the end of my tether, I went home and saw a bottle of fine red wine I had left out on the table that morning before I left. No, I did not drink it immediately, though I was tempted, but it reminded me that I was to have a very special guest that evening.

That guest was an Austrian friend, a Benedictine monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast, the nearest thing I had to a really wise person in my life at that time or at any time since. We would read German poetry together—he would translate the original text, I read the translations, all the while drinking the red wine. But I had my day on my mind, and the mind-numbing tiredness I was experiencing at work.

I said suddenly, out of nowhere, almost beseechingly, "Brother David, tell me about exhaustion."

And then he said a life-changing thing.

"You know," he said, "the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest."

"What is it then?"

"The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. You are so tired through and through because a good half of what you do here in this organization has nothing to do with your true powers, or the place you have reached in your life. You are half here, and half here will kill you after a while. You need something to which you can give your full powers. You know what that is; I don't have to tell you.

"It's all right, you know, to support yourself with something secondary until your work has ripened, but once it has ripened to a transparent fullness, it has to be gathered in. You have ripened already, and you are waiting to be brought in. Your exhaustion is a form of inner fermentation. You are beginning, ever so slowly"—he hesitated—"to rot on the vine."

It was just the beginning of a long road that was to take my real work out into the world, but it was a beginning.

——

When I first read this, the feeling of exhaustion had become a fact of life—this is just how life is, I thought, and I need to toughen up.

But reading about his experience made me realize that I was swimming upstream everyday, all day. If I just got honest with myself about my "true powers" and "the place I had reached in my life," I could change direction and experience more alignment and ease.

It was scary. It took time for me to acknowledge this realization, and then even more time for me to answer it.

But it was a move towards wholeheartedness, which, I now know, is always the right move for me.

Questions to ask yourself:

- How are the feelings of exhaustion or inner fermentation showing up for you?
- If you’re “half here,” where is the rest of you?
- What does it mean to you to be wholehearted in your work?

Want to think through these questions and your next steps together? Book a Career Mapping Coaching Session. I have three open spots in July.