By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
Workplace stress and burnout is rising among American employees, according to a report from Aflac. Nearly three in five Americans struggled with burnout last year. Joining me now is Amanda Altai, who is the executive coach and the Ambition Trap author. Congratulations on the book.
00:18 Amanda Altai
Thank you so much.
00:19 Speaker A
Let’s just start with the basics. What causes burnout?
00:24 Amanda Altai
So, burnout is multi-factorial. But I really think that it’s a systemic and economic problem and there are some things that we can own on our side of the street, too. So for example, invisible labor is on the rise. So invisible labor is the work that we do that’s unseen and unpaid for, and we can absolutely rein that in. And in my new book, The Ambition Trap, I also talk about us really sourcing our ambition from a place of wholeness versus a place of pain because when we’re deriving our ambition from that pain, that can burn us out, too.
01:01 Speaker A
So according to a new study from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, burnout can cost employers up to $5 million per year in lost productivity. So what can employers do to minimize the business impact as well?
01:19 Amanda Altai
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really important that we check in on our employees, that we redefine success with them because we all have different versions of success. And I also think it’s really interesting that we think that, you know, working harder is going to get us to the goal, but burnout actually, you know, performance really suffers and so does the bottom line. So if we’re healthier, we’re supporting our employees to be healthier, there’s an impact on the bottom line as well.
01:52 Speaker A
You mentioned some steps that employees can take to mitigate burnout on an individual level. The first is identifying that invisible, invisible labor here. So once you’ve identified it, how can you then kind of course correct on the other side, too?
02:10 Amanda Altai
Setting some boundaries around it. So identifying where you’re over indexing with that invisible labor, setting some boundaries with your employers if you can at home as well, because we do invisible labor there too. And I also talk about how we want to adjust our tolerations. So the tolerations are the things in our lives that we’re tolerating that we need to raise the standard on. So where do you need to raise the standard for yourself so that you can take better care of yourself?
02:37 Speaker A
How do you communicate that with your, your boss or your team to say, hey, you know what? Actually, I’m not taking this this week.
02:46 Amanda Altai
Yeah, one of my favorite formats to use is the SBIIS model. It stands for situation, behavior, impact, solution. And so, sharing that with your manager. What’s the situation? What’s the behavior? The behavior is I’m overworking. The impact of that, actually the work product is suffering. So my suggestion or request moving forward is maybe we can manage our trade-offs a little bit better here.
03:10 Speaker A
You also say that some employees should examine their ambition. What does that entail in practice?
03:21 Amanda Altai
Yeah, so sort of the essence of the book. I believe that ambition is neutral and natural and it simply is a desire for growth or a desire for more life. We have a tendency to make it right for some people and wrong for others. But also a lot of us are coming from a place of pain with our ambition. We’re coming from a core wound, right? When our desire for success is coming from pressure, pain or external validation. And so we want to look at those core wounds and instead pivot into more purposeful ambition.
03:54 Speaker A
How can employers also make sure that they’re identifying ambition, building success tracks correctly, or correctly and ensuring that they’re also helping some of their employees, their teammates and colleagues, kind of reach some of those goals that they’re collectively setting?
04:12 Amanda Altai
I think we need to level the playing field a little bit because a lot of people experience an ambition penalty. So for example, ambitious women are often seen as aggressive or too much, that’s the data. And though we enter the workforce with the same levels of ambition, ambitious men are often rewarded for theirs, ambitious women see it as a detractor. And so I think we need to level the playing field around it.
04:39 Speaker A
How has virtual and remote work changed all of this?
04:44 Amanda Altai
I think it’s changed it significantly, right? So many people really value and benefit from face time. Certain communication, I think, is read differently over, uh, through our screens versus in person. So we have to adjust for all of that. Plus we have five different generations in the workforce all at once, and we all communicate differently. And so we have to adjust for that, too.
05:05 Speaker A
Yeah, some with punctuation and some with, you know, all lowercase and emojis. Yes. Amanda, great to have you here with us.
05:17 Amanda Altai
Exactly. Thank you so much for having me.
05:20 Speaker A
Appreciate it.