Last year, Huong wrote a LinkedIn article about her experience with burnout. Since that article was published, people have been reaching out to share that they are either experiencing burnout themselves or they’re witnessing the devastating effects of burnout on their team, their friends, or their family.
One thing seems clear: we are experiencing and witnessing a high level of stress and burnout. It’s impacting our health and well-being as individuals. It’s also threatening the stability and growth of many teams and organizations. How did we get here? More importantly, what can we do about it?

To get at the root causes of burnout, we need to look at the three key players in the game: individuals, organizations, and society. That’s where we will find the solutions.
In this article, we’ll focus on the individuals because this is the essential building block for the next two levels, organizations and society, which we’ll focus on in subsequent articles.
We all contribute to our own burnout in some ways. That may be hard to hear, but it’s important.
For Huong, her beliefs about success, ambition, and accomplishment drove a lot of the behaviours that led to her burnout. She used to believe that the only path to success was through a lot of hard work, and there’s no other way around it. This meant that overworking, obsessively thinking about work after hours, and being so busy that she rarely had a break between meetings weren’t really bad things. They were actually signs that she was on the right path: the path to a successful and fulfilling career. Once in a while, she even let herself believe that those were signs that she’d made it.
Huong also believed that rest must be earned through “hard work”. Rest should only be granted once we’ve done enough. The trouble was, it rarely feels like we’ve done enough. There is always more that we could do and should do. So any rest that Huong took was filled with guilt and worry. She felt guilty for being lazy while there was still so much to be done and worried that she’d let others down. Even on vacation, she had such a hard time detaching from work that it usually took her a week into the vacation to finally stop checking work emails and stop thinking about work. By then, it was almost time to start thinking about what was awaiting her upon her return.
As a hyper-achiever, Huong only felt good about herself when she was getting recognition and validation from others that she was doing well and achieving the desired results. On the outside, she was holding up an image of someone who was confident, competent, and accomplished. But on the inside, she never felt good enough for long. She was constantly criticizing herself, mostly in the name of self-improvement. She believed that she needed that self-critical voice to improve, to push harder, to work smarter, so that she could achieve more.
As a giver and a helper, Huong believed her role was to make sure others were well-supported. As a leader, it meant thinking about what would be best for her team and twisting herself and her family’s schedule to meet those needs. She couldn’t see a way to meet others’ needs without sacrificing herself. To be honest, it even felt good at times to give up her needs to take care of others. It affirmed her sense of purpose.
In our work with clients on their burnout recovery, we uncover a similar pattern in their beliefs and behaviours. And this has nothing to do with how smart or logical someone is. We all get it, logically. We all know it. But the gap between knowing and doing can feel impossible to bridge at times.
We share all of this not to blame the victim. There are larger forces at play that contribute to one’s burnout, as we will explore and explain in our next articles. But at the end of the day, if you carry the same bricks, you will end up building the same house, no matter how many times or how far you move.
This is why we’re so passionate about working with individuals to help them address their current burnout episode and identify the patterns to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s something we wish someone had helped us with after our own burnout experiences.