Balancing Ambition with Unrelenting Standards
I learnt a huge amount about myself and my capabilities during my 23-year corporate career, but probably none more so than when I experienced burnout at the end of 2020.
I’ve always been very ambitious and driven, from my earliest days at school and throughout my education, and I took this wholeheartedly into my career. I had a continuous desire to prove myself to my managers and peers, my family, my friends, when really I was probably the one driving myself for most of it.
For many years I worked to my own ‘unrelenting standards’ and the place where they were most apparent was at work. Constantly climbing, pushing, proving, trying to achieve perfection, which of course resulted in ever increasing hours and pressure, and ultimately burnout.
I don’t however regret any of the years I spent in my corporate career, in fact I am hugely grateful for them. As well as a burnout, my career brought me a huge amount of personal satisfaction, monetary gain, friends for life, travel to many beautiful places I wouldn’t have otherwise been to, and learnings and experiences that I wouldn’t change for the world.
So how do you balance ambition, a love for your career and a desire to achieve, with an unhealthy perfectionism and unrelenting standards?
By getting to know yourself, your working habits, your negative patterns, setting boundaries and sticking to them, and embedding smarter ways of working into your daily routine.
Here are my 10 tips from personal experience.
I know that some of these are really difficult to implement and I don’t say them lightly, but I say them as someone who has gone through the pain of doing them and come out the other side as a calmer, more productive, optimised version of myself!:
10 Tips for Working Smarter to Avoid Burnout
Accept that your best is good enough
Get to know your unhealthy habits and do something to change them
Set work-life boundaries and stick to them
Say no
Own your own time and get organised
Finish meetings on time
Get to know your manager’s ways of working
Focus on one task at a time
Get strict with your digital devices
Let go of control
Accept that your best is good enough:
This is a key one for someone like me who by design feels the need to prove myself.
Somehow you’ve got to work out how to not need to prove yourself all the time.
This could be via therapy, coaching, finding a mentor at work and working with them on this, finding someone who seems to not need to prove themselves (though of course what we see on the surface is not always the reality underneath) and ask them what their secret is. Work through your desire to please and prove yourself, and change it.
I make it sound easy I know, and I also know from personal experience that it’s not.
But if you have this tendency to always want to do more as what you do is not enough, you’ve got to deal with it otherwise you’re going to be continuously needing to do more and prove more, as I did for many years.
Trust me, it will get you in the end so you might as well face it head on and stamp it out!
Get to know your unhealthy habits and do something to change them:
Getting to know yourself is the first stage of personal change.
Self-awareness is critical in understanding your strengths and weaknesses, what you can build on, and what you need to change.
Take the time to stop and observe your behaviours, habits and patterns. An easy way to do this is to take a piece of paper, split it into two sections with positive on the left and negative on the right, and write a list in each. At least then you know what you’re dealing with.
Some of my unhealthy habits which I’ve now addressed, and which all contributed to my burnout: working long hours, starting work really early, multitasking, procrastinating, trying to control all situations, beating myself up for what I did ‘wrong’ and not acknowledging my positive work, getting to dinners and personal arrangements late because I couldn’t get myself out of the office as I just needed to finish whatever it is I was working on. I could go on!
Knowing your unhealthy habits means that you can one by one work on changing them, and also catch yourself early on when you’re falling back into them.
Set work-life boundaries and stick to them:
Of course I understand, corporate life sometimes means long hours and pressure projects, but the key is not to do this all the time. Know when the high pressure weeks are going to happen and plan around them. Literally plan those long days in your calendar as a one off and don’t try to cram in a busy social life and multiple long gym sessions as well in that week. Just be kind to yourself and focus on work.
And take the time back in other weeks.
Book in work finish times and stick to them. It will be hard and painful to start with, and if you’re like me you’ll probably have anxiety that everyone is looking at you as you leave or log off on time, but trust me from experience, the people that matter aren’t. And probably no one is as everyone is too focused on themselves to worry too much about other people.
For me, planning ahead is key in avoiding stress and burnout. I plan my calendar the week before and know when I need to work longer days and when I can take them time back, including when I’m going out socially, when I’m going to go to yoga and the gym, when I’m going to take time out.
Say no:
Another tricky one to start with, but once you do start you realise that people care so much less than you think they do about the extra work you think is so essential to do.
My final senior level role was based in Singapore with a London Head Office and once I decided I was not going to work evenings any more, I had to say no to and reject a lot of meetings. And do you know what? No one cared! In fact they fell over themselves to apologise and re-arrange the meeting at a more convenient time as they actually hadn’t thought about what time it was for me, they were too busy getting through their own day.
I honestly believe from experience that people respect you more for saying no in a sensible way, that is my experience over and over again. And as a people pleaser, if I can do it, you can do it!
Own your own time:
Sounds obvious but sometimes work is so fast paced that you don’t have time to draw breath in between meetings.
I’ve gone to many meetings without knowing who is hosting it or what it’s about; no agenda, no actions, and what a waste of time. My calendar was so full that I barely had time to eat at lunchtime and I was attending meetings that I didn’t even know if I needed to or not.
So one meeting makes the difference, even if it’s just 30 minutes.
Don’t let other people hijack your time, own it!
Make 30 minute meetings your default, and if someone books a 60 minute meeting, know that they and their topic is worth it.
If you have a meeting in your agenda and you don’t know what it’s about, nicely ask the organiser for an agenda.
Take the time before your week / day begins to get organised, know how your time is going to be spent, remove anything unnecessary, make sure you have enough time to do what you need to do, and plan in time for breathing and proper breaks.
Finish meetings on time:
This is a pretty simple one and closely related to owning your own time, but from my personal experience I think it deserves it’s own point.
When your diary is packed and you are going from meeting to meeting, any one of them running over can cause great stress.
Either it means you are late for your next meeting, or you don’t have time to take a breath in between meetings, or you lose lunchtime / planned break time / time to do that really important thing that you need to do, all of which are stressful.
So don’t let it happen. Kindly and professionally just say you need to end the meeting on time, and do that.
This one made a huge difference for me and my stress levels. And also my level of respect for myself.
Get to know your manager’s ways of working
This can help a lot in terms of smarter working and stress management.
Get to know your manager, their stressors and triggers, what they like and don’t like and do your best to deliver what they need before they need it, most of the time.
If your manager has control freak tendencies, work out a way to keep them informed via a weekly report or something similar so they don’t constantly ask you questions, or if your manager is distrustful of work being delivered on time then over communicate coming up to deadlines.
Over delivering on what you can do to reduce your manager’s stress will reduce yours on an ongoing basis.
Focus on one task at a time:
Multi tasking is one of the myths of the modern world.
It’s often hailed as something to be proud of, but research shows that it’s impossible for us humans to do two things at once.
In my experience, it’s an excuse for procrastination and not working on the difficult thing I don’t want to / is giving me a headache.
My life changed when I stopped trying to multitask and got really strict with my time and focus.
And when I find myself hopping around from task to task and trying to do multiple things at once, I know it’s a sign of being out of control, stressed and anxious and I need to stop and take a break.
These days I try to chunk my time out focusing on key tasks one at a time.
And another game changer for me: starting my day by being real about the one task I don’t want to do and getting that done first.
Gets it out of my head and off my plate and it feels amazing!
Get strict with your digital devices:
This is a tricky but necessary one if you’re going to hold your work-life boundaries firm.
Again this comes back to knowing and accepting yourself and the way you operate. If you know that you can’t resist constantly checking your emails if they’re on your phone, then take them off.
If you know that you’re going to reach for your phone at dinner every time a Teams notification comes up, turn off the notifications when you’re outside work hours and turn them back on again in the morning. It takes seconds to do.
Having all your notifications on and your phone by your side 24-7 could be a journey to burnout at some point, so think about how you want to live and embed habits that are in line with that.
And if you decide you want to reduce your screen time and find it hard to do (as most of us will do), How to Break up with Your Phone by Catherine Price is a great read with actionable ways to break your addiction and habits.
Let go of control:
As a recovering control freak, this is one from my heart.
You can’t control everything and everyone, so give up trying.
Focus on you, what you need to do, what you want to do, and what you can control, and let everything else go.
So easy for me to say, so hard for me to do, but when I had my burnout I had to let go of total control, and I’ve happily never got it back since.
People in your team and around you are so much happier when you let them do what they want, the way they want to do it. People are also so much happier when you admit you don’t know everything and ask their opinion instead. People are also so much happier when you’re a more relaxed manager / colleague / friend and you go with the flow a bit more.
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