Welcome to Burnout Part II: Role Conflict. In Burnout Part I we talked about chronic stress caused by social media as one source of burnout. I wrote about stepping away from the cycle of trying, adjusting, and trying again, to get centered and find your poise.
A lot of that was about dealing with standards that we’ve subconsciously set for ourselves and measure ourselves against. Today’s post is about trying to live up to two different sets of standards simultaneously. Sometimes you see this when you try to meet conflicting demands within one role. Other times it happens when you have multiple roles that conflict with one another. Today’s post is about the latter.
Role Conflict
Most women will at some point in their lives have to fill multiple roles or statuses simultaneously. This isn’t limited to the classic working mother scenario. Women are students, daughters, aunts, sisters, workers, executives, wives, partners, and community members, too. And most important of all, they are their selves.
The self is the role that each and every one of us should strive to fulfill the most, first above any other. Our self is our foundation, and if that isn’t thriving, then everything else will be weaker because of it.
Of course we all have to divert our energy to multiple places. We can’t just sit around focusing 100% of our energy on self-development all the time. So ideally, anything else you divert your energy to would support or complement the effort you put into your self.
Think of them like multiple oars on a boat, all rowing in the same direction. Each oar represents something different that you’re devoting energy to, but they’re all rowing in the same direction and build upon each other’s force to gain momentum. This creates success and progress on all fronts.
Role conflict occurs when your oars are rowing in different directions. It requires the same amount of energy as the previous example, but ultimately you aren’t making any progress. All of your endeavors are out of alignment, possibly even counteracting each other and spinning you in circles. It’s a frustrating and disheartening place to find yourself and leaves you feeling chronically stressed and burned out.
Getting Aligned
How do we find ourselves pursuing multiple endeavors at once that are in direct conflict with one another?
People like to say that it’s just an inevitable fact of life. No one likes their job; everyone has marital issues; everyone is frustrated by something or everything. But I don’t think it has to be that way.
No one teaches us about aligning our careers and personal lives with our desires. There aren’t any college 101 courses that cover it. And many of us find ourselves in careers, with partners, surrounded by friends, or engaged in activities that are completely out of alignment with our true selves. By the time we realize it, we may already be in burnout and it seems impossible to change course.
Step 1: Figure out where the conflict is
You have to listen to your body to identify where your role conflict is. When role conflict is triggered, it might manifest itself in something powerful and obvious like a panic attack, or it might be something more subtle, like a general feeling of shrinking in on yourself, being rendered temporarily mute, or pulling away physically from whatever it is that triggered you.
When you learn to tune into your body’s messages, and you realize that something has triggered you, you can start to examine what was going on around you when it happened to find the cause. Did you leave a meeting and feel like your heart was beating too fast? Did you break into a sweat when you opened your e-mail? What about your breathing? When does it speed up or slow down? What’s going on around you when any of these things happen?
Step 2: Which oar needs redirected?
Once you pinpoint which roles are conflicting for you, you have to decide which role, or “oar” to use our previous analogy, is rowing in the wrong direction. Remember, we said that ideally all oars are rowing together. But that presupposes that you’ve picked the direction you want to row in. So when you experience role conflict, you have to be able to say which role is the cause of the conflict; that is, which role is counter to the way you want to live your life.
This might bring things to your attention that you’ve never thought of before or that you’ve ignored for a long time. And yes, it can be scary and take time to work through. This shouldn’t be approached impulsively. If you find role conflict between your self and your career path, that doesn’t mean you should quit your job tomorrow. Which brings me to the third step.
Step 3: Work with what you’ve got, first
In most situations, there’s a lot of renovation that can be done before you have to level the building. The same is true of the life you’ve built.
If there is role conflict between your self and any other role that you fulfill, try to find ways to bring the conflicting role into alignment without eliminating it entirely. For example, if your career feels out of alignment, figure out why. Is it the company you work for? The department that you’re in? The hours you work? Would changing any one of those things help your role there support your roles elsewhere?
Likewise in your social circles. If you feel like any of your relationships, romantic and otherwise, are not supporting your path, why? Do you need your partner to do more at home? Do you need more mutual support from friends? Are you always agreeing to activities that don’t light you up the way they used to? Find ways to work with the people in your life to bring these things around.
Trust Your Intuition
You’ll get clearer and clearer about what is in alignment for you and what is not. And your most powerful tool for this is your intuition. If there are things that you just cannot bring into alignment, you’ll know, and you’ll have more confidence taking steps to remove them from your path.
Go back to what I said about listening to your body. As women in particular, we have an amazing gift of intuition that we are able to cultivate. When you are aligned and all of your oars are rowing in the same direction, you can physically feel it. You are relieved from chronic stress.
That doesn’t mean that life will be easy and you’ll never feel stressed out. But that chronic stress, that burnout that comes from role conflict, will be lifted.