Beating Burnout, Finding Balance

CHAPTER 1ON SELF-AWARENESS

The first step in preventing burnout and implementing any sustainable change in your life is developing your self-awareness. As you become increasingly self-aware, you will notice if you are working stressfully or feeling fatigued and you can take action to self-regulate depending on how you are feeling (you will read about self-regulation in chapter 4).

For this book, I interviewed close to 200 people who had experienced some sort of burnout and, alarmingly, 90 per cent of them said they were not aware they were burning out until it was too late. It wasn't until they had a panic attack or reached crisis point that they realised they were burnt out.

Put simply, you can't change what you don't notice. Developing self-awareness gives you the ability to practise self-control, to manage stress, to look at different perspectives, to have better decision-making skills and to create solutions. In this chapter we will explore the concept of self-awareness and how you can begin to cultivate a deeper understanding of your inner self, which will benefit many areas of your life. Let's start with a personal story on self-awareness and how it helped me to self-regulate in a very challenging situation.

Rural South Australia

One fine afternoon, five good friends and I sat around a coffee table and spawned the crazy idea of cycling around the world on our mountain bikes for a couple of years. As plans progressed, we looked at maps of Africa, India, Asia, Europe ...