Pushing Your Limits and Flirting with Burnout

It's Friday, and, given my life currently, it's a great time to talk about pushing to, and beyond, your limits, and managing as best you can the associated risk of burnout.

For a while now, and likely for a while into the future, my professional career has been largely focused on two amazing, potentially once-in-a-lifetime opportunities: one in the strategic research space, and one in the global impact tech translation space. 

So if it appears I've been slacking off and not doing much, I haven't! It's just that the majority of what I've been focusing on for a while now hasn't been in the public domain much, if at all. 

In my new Hacking Academia video, I talk about:

✨ those periods in your life when you deliberately and consciously choose to go all in on an amazing opportunity, that has a statistically very low likelihood of coming off - and all the pschological, time and energy burden that entails, both for you and your collaborators / team members. This is a different situation to the ad-hoc challenges that life and careers periodically throw up.

✨ the conditions under which this is even feasible, professionally and personally: a relatively stable situation in both, supportive and understanding professional peers and family and friends, ability to delegate and offload to some extent. And the need to be aware that if any of that changes you may need to stop.

✨ that some risk mitigation and burnout risk management can and should be done, but ultimately, growth is pushing beyond your boundaries and with that comes risk, highs and lows, and unpredictability.

✨ unless you're all in, the tension and compromise involved in maintaining some of your core activities and having some sort of fallback position

✨ the exhilaration of chasing something really amazing, and the joy of getting "into the zone" and becoming incredibly prolific 

✨ the analogy to peaking in sporting endeavours: as a planned, deliberate activity, it's possible to peak for a sustained, but not indefinite, period of time

✨ the downsides: hyperfocus can make context-switching difficult, especially for those more "mundane" everyday activities; switching from grand ambitions and visions to nuanced and delicate personal interactions (e.g. in any leadership role) can be challenging; and the increased risk of missing things or bad decision making, which can be remedied by sanity checks with peers

✨ the recommendation to watch out for these opportunities - they're incredibly exciting, exhausting, and amazing learning and growth experiences. 

#HackingAcademia #ProfessionalGrowth #Burnout
#CareerJourney #InnovationLeadership #TechTranslation #StrategicResearch #PeakPerformance #RiskManagement #WorkLifeBalance #GrowthMindset #LeadershipChallenges #CareerOpportunities #ProfessionalDevelopment #Resilience #Ambition #Focus #LifeBalance #Risk #CareerSuccess #PersonalGrowth #CareerAdvice #Academia #Research #Technology #University #Startup #Leadership #Teams