Boiling Frogs and Burning Out

Join IoD Jersey for this informative well-being webinar, where Dr Julie Luscombe tackles the issue of burnout.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, have too much to do and not enough time to do it, you’re not alone. The last few years have placed more demands on us all at work and home. Sometimes it can feel as if we are working harder and harder just to catch up with ourselves.

Stories and anecdotes are a great way to help us make sense of the human experience. The boiling frog analogy goes like this...if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it would immediately give a powerful push with its legs and jump out recognizing that this water is too hot to handle.

However, imagine a pot filled with cold water. A frog is quietly swimming in it. When the heat is turned on under the pot, the water starts warming up which initially feels okay to the frog who keeps swimming and warming up. The water continues to heat and is a little more than the frog finds comfortable. It becomes a bit tired but doesn’t panic. The water continues to warm to the point the frog finds it very unpleasant but it has become weak so it puts up with the heat and does nothing. The temperature continues to rise up to the moment the frog will simply end up being cooked without ever extracting itself from the pot. This is a good analogy for the increasing pressures many of us feel in the workplace.

We can be busy yet still thrive in work and life, as opposed to just surviving. However, sometimes we need to come up for air, reflect and check we are not sacrificing our health and well-being for our work. You shouldn’t have to choose between getting out or burning out. There are ways to manage the water temperature.

So, if you feel like a simmering frog or someone who can start to feel the temperature rising, join Dr Julie Luscombe for this IoD Leadership Session to find out about practical and pragmatic strategies based on neuroscience and drawn from current research designed for busy time-poor professionals and their teams to adjust the water temperature, manage pressure and reclaim control.