Disrupting Burnout
Disrupting Burnout with Dr. Patrice Buckner Jackson is dedicated to overworked, undervalued high-achieving servant leaders who give all to serve others and leave very little for yourself. You are an accomplished woman with many responsibilities and you often find yourself overwhelmed, exhausted, and burned out. I’ve been there. As a matter of fact, burnout almost cost me everything. Compassionate work can carry a high price tag: your mind, body, spirit and relationships may be in distress as you serve the needs of others. I am here to equip your hands and refresh your heart so you can serve in purpose and fulfillment and permanently break cycles of burnout.
Disrupting Burnout
146. Creating Your Burnout Crisis Management Plan: The Response Phase
Imagine if we treated educator burnout with the same urgency as a fire alarm. When flames threaten, no one calls a meeting to discuss whether evacuation is necessary—they act immediately. Yet when burnout ravages our educational communities, we respond with inaction, delay, and empty platitudes.
This powerful episode breaks down how to create an effective burnout crisis management plan using established emergency response frameworks. Dr. Patrice Buckner Jackson (PBJ) walks through the critical response phase that follows prevention and preparedness—what happens when burnout is identified and immediate action is required.
The cornerstone of effective burnout response is understanding that burnout exists on a spectrum with three distinct phases: surviving, overwhelm, and shutdown. Each phase requires different interventions. Someone in the surviving phase might benefit from schedule adjustments or a long weekend, while an educator in overwhelm needs substantial support like peer mentoring or workload reassignment. Those in full burnout require significant time off and comprehensive healing resources.
PBJ outlines four essential response elements every educational leader must implement: activating tiered support based on burnout severity, providing immediate relief measures to reduce workload pressure, connecting affected staff directly with support resources (not just sharing contact information), and managing communication to protect privacy while addressing practical implications of work redistribution.
The small, interconnected nature of educational communities means many educators suffer in silence rather than risk reputation damage. Having pre-established, confidential communication protocols allows you to protect struggling staff members while explaining necessary changes to stakeholders.
Don't wait until another valuable educator reaches their breaking point. Take action today to create your response plan.
Also, download PBJ's STOP Plan for incorporating micro-breaks as a sustainable rhythm of rest. Your educators—and the students who depend on them—deserve nothing less.
Upgrade to Premium Membership to access the Disrupting Burnout audiobook and other bonus content: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1213895/supporters/new
If the alarm goes off, we're not going to call a meeting and everybody go to the conference room to talk about is this a real threat? Can we stay in the room or do we leave? If the fire alarm goes off, our plan is activated and people do what they know they're supposed to do to keep themselves and each other safe, know they're supposed to do to keep themselves and each other safe. So, immediately when there's a fire alarm, people begin to leave the building and they go to designated areas. And I don't know about you all, but in our plan we had not only a designated area for our team, but we had a way to account for where is everybody? You know, do we have everybody here in our safe space, or were they working across campus or are they off? Today we had several things in place to account for each other. We understood that when the alarm sounded it was time for immediate action, not discussion. When it comes to burnout, what I'm finding is not only are we not taking immediate action, but, even worse, sometimes we're taking no action at all. It is the inactivity that is so dangerous to our educators today. Hey friend, I am Dr Patrice Buckner-Jackson, but you can call me, pbj.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to the Disrupting Burnout podcast, where we are giving you the strategies for pouring out purpose without burning out. Friend, I am ready to jump right back into our conversation. If you've been listening lately, you know that we are walking through the steps of crisis management and creating a burnout crisis management plan for you and your team, and we're leaning on the tried and true phases of crisis management, from the National Incident Management System here in America through the Department of Homeland Security. This is the language, this is the plan that is used anytime there's a catastrophic event in any of our cities or areas. These are the phases that we walk through and we are using this framework to build out a burnout crisis plan for your team, for your school, for your workplace. So in the last couple of weeks, we've discussed two of the phases.
Speaker 1:First is prevention, and prevention is what you want to do in order to minimize the likelihood that burnout will actually happen. You want to stop burnout before it happens and you do everything you can to prevent burnout, like training programs, like making sure folks are aware of what burnout looks like and what they can do for themselves to prevent burnout. You want to empower your team, but you also want to create a culture that does not fuel burnout. So you begin to make some changes in the way that you approach your work so that you don't put your folks at higher risk of burnout. So that's prevention right.
Speaker 1:And next we discuss preparedness. So no matter what you do to prevent, it is responsible and wise to prepare or make sure you have the capacity to respond to burnout when it shows up. So we will do everything that we can to prevent burnout and we recognize, as educators especially, that the risk of burnout is very high. So it is our responsibility to prepare ourselves to have the capacity. So we need a plan. We need to have done some tabletop exercises, some drills, to practice that plan. We need to communicate to our folks that we have a plan. We need to communicate to our folks that we have a plan. We need to allocate some resources to support in case burnout shows up. So prevention is we're trying to stop it before it happens Preparedness we are increasing our capacity to deal with it when it comes. And today we are discussing response. What are the immediate actions when burnout shows up? What do we do when our folks have shown, have said that they are struggling with burnout.
Speaker 1:I want to continue with this metaphor of fire safety because I think it helps to clarify what we need concerning our burnout crisis plan. So we're walking through the phases of crisis management concerning a fire. In prevention, we make some rules. You can't have an open flame at work, you know. We put some things in place right. So in prevention, we're giving everybody fire safety education and we want them to understand what kinds of things can cause a fire and to discourage those things that can cause a fire.
Speaker 1:In preparedness, we equip our environment. So we have fire alarms, we have smoke detectors, we have sprinklers, but we also do drills. We do drills so people know how to escape. I've noticed in hotels and other buildings there are placards on the wall that show you this is where you are and this is where the nearest stairwell is if you need to get out of this building in case of emergency. So all of that is preparedness. Right, we are increasing our capacity, but we're also increasing the likelihood that we can be safe even in the midst of the crisis. So we're not pretending that a fire cannot happen.
Speaker 1:Just because you've done the fire safety does not mean you are absolved from having the preparedness measures, right From having the alarms and the sprinklers and the automatic communication to the fire department, and to do the drills so that people know what to do when we are considering fire safety. If the alarm goes off, we're not going to call a meeting and everybody go to the conference room to talk about is this a real threat? Can we stay in the room or do we leave? If the fire alarm goes off, our plan is activated and people do what they know they're supposed to do to keep themselves and each other safe. So, immediately when there's a fire alarm, people begin to leave the building and they go to designated areas. And I don't know about you all, but in our plan we had not only a designated area for our team, but we had a way to account for where is everybody. You know, do we have everybody here in our safe space, or were they working across campus or are they off? Today we had several things in place to account for each other.
Speaker 1:We understood that when the alarm sounded, it was time for immediate action, not discussion. When it comes to burnout, what I'm finding is not only are we not taking immediate action, but, even worse, sometimes we're taking no action at all, it is the inactivity that is so dangerous to our educators today. So I want you to put burnout in the same category that you put fire safety. When the alarm sounds, we're not talking about it, we're not thinking about it, we're not having meetings about it, we're not sending emails, messages about it. We take immediate action to protect ourselves and protect the people around us, and that is the same thing we need to do in the response phase concerning burnout. Response means immediate action, it means activation, it means addressing the issue, and our goal is to minimize, first of all, to halt the threat and minimize the long-term impacts of the crisis of burnout, and there are four steps that we need to take when we get to the response phase.
Speaker 1:So, pbj, I can't stop. I don't have time to stop. If I stop, all of this falls apart. We're short-staffed. I don't have anybody that can take my place at work. I don't have support at home or at work to stop.
Speaker 1:Friends, if any of these thoughts come to mind when you think about taking a break, you are the person who needs to stop the most. I want to offer you our stop plan Simple. I want you to use the same strategies and wisdom and skills that you use at work, and I'm going to guide you to using those strategies to plan micro breaks. I'm not talking about a month's sabbatical, but can you incorporate micro breaks into your life as a regular rhythm of rest so that while you are serving, while you are giving, you can have moments of revival, so that you can live the life you're living sustainably? Friend, you need to grab this stop plan. Make sure to click the link in the show notes or wherever you're watching or listening to this, so that you can get what you need right now. It can't wait. I know you do a wonderful job, but people don't know what it costs you to be you, and you know what the cost has been. It's time to stop. Grab the plan today.
Speaker 1:So, in prevention, you're trying to stop burnout before it happens. In preparedness, you are aware of the high likelihood and you want to be prepared just in case it shows up. And response is here. In response, we are clearly aware that there is burnout in the team and you need to take some immediate actions. So the first action you need to take when burnout shows up is activation of your tiered response.
Speaker 1:Now let me tell you what I mean, if you've ever been in one of my workshops, you know that I talk you through the phases of burning out. Right, because burnout is not an incident, it's a progression. You may have an incident as a result of burnout, but you've probably been burning out for years and one of the biggest challenges is we don't stop and pay attention to the signs and symptoms of the phases, right? So we have three phases of burning out. The first phase is surviving. You know the load is heavy, you know you're exhausted, you know there's a lot going on, but you don't know what to do. So you just keep going. It's fine, I got it, it's fine. It's fine, it's fine, right, you know that the impacts are already happening, but you can handle it. You know things aren't falling apart. Next, necessarily, they may be falling off the plate, but they're not falling apart. So you just keep going.
Speaker 1:And in this phase is when you may notice that somebody's work product is just a little bit different, or you may notice that the way that they present in their personality and their characteristics, in their mood, may be just a little bit different, but they're getting the work done and there are no major disruptions to the flow of work or to the outcome. So we just keep going. That's surviving. If you don't do something different in surviving, then you move to overwhelm. In overwhelm, the water level of your life is rising and you are fighting to keep your head above water. So we're in surviving.
Speaker 1:Folks wear their professional mask very well and overwhelm starts to tell on them. So maybe there's a high level of absenteeism now because they just don't know what else to do. Or maybe there are major deadlines that are missed or major projects that are not executed well because they just no longer have the capacity to work well, to teach well, to show up as well as they normally would, because they're feeling overwhelmed. For the individual in overwhelm, your nervous system is starting to really respond and try to get your attention and let you know you've had enough and it's not working. For the workplace, you notice overwhelm because there's a marked difference in the way the work and the product and the outcomes of this person compared to what they normally, what they normally provide Right. So you've got surviving, which is that first phase of burning out. Then you move to overwhelm and some people can stay in overwhelm for a very long time, but you those the signs and symptoms are more evident and overwhelmed and then, finally, you move to the phase I call burnout, and in burnout it is the involuntary, automatic shutdown. Something breaks. It is the most critical level. I review these levels with you because I need you to understand that your activation should align with the appropriate level.
Speaker 1:As I travel and I share these ideas, these strategies, and I have an opportunity to talk to folks what I'm hearing is there are people in many different phases of burning out. In your workplace. I talk to some people and say, man, I wish I had you 20 years ago. I'm good now, like I'm okay now, but I really wish I had heard this 20 years ago. Or I speak to some people who say, oh, you got me on that surviving. I'm not overwhelmed yet, but I'm on the roller coaster, pbj, I can feel it. I know there's a lot of pressure. I don't know what to do with it, but I'm carrying a lot.
Speaker 1:Other people are clearly in overwhelm, where they feel like they're drowning. They feel like they're drowning and they're recognizing the tales, the symptoms from their nervous system. And then there are others who are in full blown burnout and often all those folks can do is cry. They can't even often articulate to me. They just come and say I'm just glad somebody can see me, I'm glad somebody understands. So I share that with you. To let you know that all of your people are not in the same place. So your activation should be appropriate to what level they are on.
Speaker 1:A person who is in surviving does not need as much intervention as a person who is in full-blown burnout. A person who is in surviving, maybe they can use a little work adjustment or maybe a long weekend or a little more time off or an adjustment in the schedule, and they would be okay. A person who is in overwhelm will need a little bit more intervention. Maybe they need a peer who understands the phases of burning out. Maybe that person has been trained or certified in some way and they can talk to them, support them, meet with them, help them think through maybe a coach not just what their workload is but what their life load is. A person who's in full blown burnout probably needs some significant time off and they need some significant healing. But your people are not in the same phases, so your activation should be aligned with the level of burnout that your folks are experiencing, right. So make sure that we are not using the full fire hose to put out a little candle fire when we have the fire extinguisher right beside us. Ok, so we're going to stick with this fire thing, because I think we can get that when we need to apply it to burnout. So use an appropriate activation according to the level that the person is at.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about some immediate relief measures. Response calls for immediate relief measures, so I've already identified some of those that are appropriate to each level, but the important thing is we need to have these relief measures in place. That's what preparedness is for. In the second phase, called preparedness, we should be implementing, setting aside putting some relief measures in place, so when it's time and we become aware of the level of burnout, we're ready to respond. We need immediate relief measures.
Speaker 1:What can you take off of the plate? What can you adjust, what can you remove so that the person can begin to experience relief? When you think about immediate relief measures, I want you to think about what can you do right now to support Not next semester, not. Please. Get through exams and then we'll help you. But what are the immediate ways that you can reduce the workload? What are the immediate ways that you can do some temporary reassignments. What stress can you remove right away? What can you change right away to support the person who is facing burnout and again, considering what level they're at? But there's always an opportunity to adjust or remove some stress. The next thing you need to do is activate support Now here, friend, I'm not talking about giving somebody a phone number and say please give them a call.
Speaker 1:I know when it comes to my students. I wouldn't just say, friend, I'm not talking about giving somebody a phone number and say please give them a call. I know when it comes to my students I wouldn't just say, hey, you should try counseling. I would say, if you're open to it, I'll walk you over there right now. Can I walk you to counseling right now? As a matter of fact, our counseling center at one institution that I worked at, they had a person, a counselor, that was assigned to walk-ins all day long. So and they rotated who was assigned to walk-ins. So every day there were counselors who had set scheduled meetings and there was at least one that was open to walk-ins all day long. So when we were meeting with that student who was food insecure or struggling with homelessness or whatever the trauma may be. If we could encourage that student to go to counseling, we wouldn't say here's their phone number, make an appointment. We would say come on, let's go, I'll walk you over there, I'll introduce you to the folks and we'll get you started right, because at the moment the person says yes, it's the most impactful time to get them support.
Speaker 1:So when we talk about offering support with response to burnout, don't just hand somebody a phone number, don't just say, hey, we have great resources through HR. You should check them out. But who is going to directly connect them to the community resource? The counselor in the community, or even the person, the peer on your campus that has been trained for burnout response? This is one of the things that I'm developing now and that I'm so excited about. I want to come to your campuses and train folks to be your burnout response team and when someone, when the process is activated, when the alarms are going off and we become aware that someone is identified in the phases of burnout, particularly in overwhelming burnout, we have a response team of folks who have been trained and prepared to connect with that person, to support them, to help them get connected to other resources, to walk them through processes that we have available on our campuses. So immediate support is necessary and not a let's talk about it next week in your one-on-one or let's get through this semester and then we'll address it. But immediate means right now. Response means right now. So what support mechanisms do you have in place that you can directly connect someone to so that they can get the help that they need? And finally, in response, you need communication management.
Speaker 1:Now, friend who listen, the world of education is a small world. Everybody knows everybody and often everybody knows everybody's business and this is one of the primary reasons why people don't raise their hand and say I need help. This is one of the primary reasons why people hesitate to identify themselves as someone who needs support, because they are worried and concerned about the impact of everybody knowing their business. So, ahead of time, we need to have communication protocols in place and preparedness so, in response, we can implement those communication protocols. Because, as we are adjusting workloads, as we are giving folks some time off, as we're doing whatever we need to do to support the person who's burning out or burnt out, it also impacts other people and they will have questions and they want to know why and it might look like somebody is getting favoritism. So get ahead of it. Get ahead of it in our communication. Don't wait until the moment. Get ahead of it in our communication. Don't wait until the moment. Make sure we have some communication protocols in place that says if you or somebody you know is dealing with burnout, here are the steps that we need you to take. Here's who you communicate with, here's what you say to them, and we want you to know that we're going to protect your information. You say to them and we want you to know that we're going to protect your information. People may have some awareness of change because they may have to take on some responsibilities, but we will never share your personal information about what's going on with you, right? So have some templates in place that you use to let people know that the workload is adjusting or that we're bringing in some partners to help us have some things ready to go.
Speaker 1:Response is not the time to sit down and figure out how do we say this. That's what you do in preparedness. Response is the time to activate what you've already put in place. So this is why the preparedness phase is so important to have your full crisis plan written, to have your template email messages written to have your template responses to questions, your frequently asked questions, written and ready to go. So when it's time to for immediate action, when it's time for response, when burnout shows up and it is in your face, you're not guessing what to do. Not only have you a written plan, not only do you have written templates, but you have practiced. You have done the tabletop exercises, you have done the drills. So folks know what to do and how to do it, friend.
Speaker 1:So response means burnout is here and it's time for immediate action and we need to activate, based on the appropriate level of burnout and what people need. We need some immediate relief measures. So what are we going to do to make the load lighter right now? We need our support mechanisms in place. What is your burnout response team? Or your local counselor or coach that will come in and support someone?
Speaker 1:And then you need to implement your communication plan, especially thinking about your students. If you're at college, thinking about parents also, no matter what level of education you are. Well, why did the professor change mid-semester? Or, you know, why is somebody else teaching this class? Why is there a TA here when there was a teacher? So you need to think about the questions that people are going to ask and you need to thoughtfully plan what you're going to say while protecting the privacy of the educator who's walking through burnout. It's one thing to try to go heal. It's another thing to worry about what people are going to think when you get back. So do your very best to support and cover folks so that you can welcome them back when they are ready, when the time is appropriate to come back, without the pressure of worrying about what everybody thinks and that they're aware of what I've been through.
Speaker 1:Yeah, friend, we're going to keep walking through this. We got two more phases right. So we've already discussed prevention and what you need to do. We had a discussion about preparedness and how important it is to prepare, and today we discussed response, immediate action, immediate action. Next week we're going to talk about recovery and what recovery looks like concerning burnout, and then, finally, we'll talk about mitigation right, and how to use the lessons learned to improve our processes and hopefully prevent even further.
Speaker 1:Yeah, listen, friend, we don't have to keep. We don't have to keep struggling concerning what to do about burnout. We don't have to keep struggling concerning what to do about burnout. We don't have to keep guessing, we don't have to keep trying the same things over and over and over that have never worked, but it's time for us to make a comprehensive plan for how we're going to take care of our people, because we know burnout is real and we know that it's among us. We know burnout is real and we know that it's among us and again, it's no time to have a conference call or an email chain. Response means take action right now, and we need to be ready to take that action. All right, as always, you are powerful, you are significant and you are loved. You can do this, you're equipped for this, you do it all the time. We're just applying it to a different context. I got your back, friend. I'll keep sharing with you and you're going to do the work. All right, love always. Ppj Bye, thank you.
