Page 8 - Healthcare News Nov/Dec 2022

Cooling Agent
Local Executive Coach Writes the Book on Defeating Burnout
By GEORGE O’BRIEN
“Ihad a major problem, and I needed a solution. Fast. So I decided to use the
best strategy I had: outworking the problem on my own until either it was resolved or I collapsed. It was an easy choice, really. Up until this point, I had a 100 percent success rate in winning those battles. Besides, failure wasn’t an option. I’m a man. We don’t fail, and we don’t need help.
This time I was different. I knew that because of the carpeting.
Until that point in my life, I had never spent
time inspecting the nuances of the flooring of my tiny, two-bedroom condo. But there I was, planted face down in the middle of my living room floor, drenched in sweat, tears streaking down my face, anguished groans occasionally escaping my writhing body. The abrasiveness of the matted Berber carpet felt harsh on my nose, forehead, and cheeks. Its aroma, stale and slightly chemical in nature, reeked of atrophy. It was not a pretty scene.
As I lay there uncontrollably sobbing, shaking from waves of stress pulsing through my depleted body, it was clear that I wasn’t OK.”
That’s a very powerful, and poignant, passage from the introduction to Jim Young’s recently re- leased book, titled Expansive Intimacy: How “Tough
Guys” Defeat Burnout.
Young, a Northampton-based coach who calls
himself the “Centered Coach,” and before that an
IT executive, has become an expert on the subject at hand — burnout — and defeating it. He’s been there and done that, as we can discern from his introduc- tion, in which he talks about an assignment to revive a major client’s IT system, one that, coupled with other factors ranging from his grandmother lying on her deathbed to being six months into divorce, sent him nosediving into that aforementioned Berber carpet.
He’s also helped others defeat burnout, but only after they managed to find the strength to do what most men strenuously resist doing — first admitting that they need help, and then getting that help.
“I often describe myself as a men’s and organiza- tional burnout coach,” he told HCN. “Because that’s who keeps finding me; that’s the work I’m most compelled to do, to help men deal with this condi- tion we call burnout.”
In a wide-ranging conversation about his book and the broad subject of burnout, Young said this term gets thrown out almost daily in the workplace, usually with little regard for its true meaning and symptoms.
Jim Young says the first steps in defeating burnout are admitting there’s a problem and seeking help.
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