You didn’t step into HR to feel like this.
You started because you care. You believe in people. You wanted to make a difference.
Somewhere along the line, things started to shift.
You’re showing up every day. You’re doing your best. And it still feels like you’re barely keeping your head above water.
You feel tired. Disengaged. Emotionally disconnected.
If you’ve experienced HR burnout, my guess is you don’t want to get back to that place any time soon. You want to know how to prevent it. For yourself, and for your whole HR team.
You may have already tried a number of different avenues. Insights training. Mental health awareness training. Stress management training. Resilience training. Maybe you’ve invested in mindfulness or meditation apps, or made a commitment to get back onto your yoga mat a bit more often.
And yet something is still off. Those signs are creeping back in.
If that sounds like your current reality, you’re not alone. And you’re not broken.
This is the first in a four-part series designed to help you prevent HR burnout before it starts.
I’m Sara Maude, founder of The Mind Solution International and a former HR leader. I wish I’d known what I’m about to share with you. I’ve spent the last 13 years holding in the region of 10,000 one-to-one sessions, deep-diving into the human psyche to understand what it takes to create lasting transformation.
I’m sharing it so that together we can create a whole new paradigm in HR.
The root cause of HR burnout: the outside-in misunderstanding
To prevent HR burnout, we need to understand what’s creating your experience moment to moment to moment.
The vast majority of people go about their day under an illusion. That the way they feel is coming from somewhere in their external environment.
When we experience an emotion, especially an intense one, or something that takes us by surprise, the brain looks to the outside world for cause and effect. It concludes that the way you feel is because of that situation.
It isn’t.
Everything you experience is internally generated, based on the perceptual map and model inside your neurophysiology.
Your reactions are based on the totality of all your experiences. The brain is a record of the past. It pattern matches back to another experience or memory you might not even be conscious of, and brings that feeling into the present.
What this looks like in a normal HR day
Take an email.
Most of us have received one and had an intense reaction. Anger. Frustration. Impatience. How dare they say that, when they haven’t even answered my question.
There’s all this drama going on, and it looks like it’s coming from the email.
Now take the opposite. An email with good news. A new job, a promotion. You feel excitement.
The email looks like the source of your emotions in both cases, because your brain has associated your feelings with the email.
It isn’t the source. It never was.
Or take a meeting room. Someone talks over you. Someone looks at you a certain way. Someone is passive-aggressive.
You have an immediate reaction, and it appears to be caused by what’s happening in that room, or by those individuals.
Your reaction stems from the totality of your experiences, and from what you’re making that moment mean. Usually unconsciously.
In HR you never quite know what’s going to come through the door. It’s why so many HR professionals describe themselves as permanently in firefighting mode.
It seems like the feelings are caused by the situation, because the brain creates these faulty pattern matches and associations.
And when we don’t know what’s really creating our experience, we feel powerless. Out of control. Dependent on external factors.
Why HR stress management alone won’t fix HR burnout
You might have tried mental health training. Resilience workshops. Meditation apps. Yoga classes.
If you’re still stuck in HR burnout, there’s a reason. Those solutions treat the symptom, not the root cause.
Until you understand what’s creating your internal experience, the cycle continues.
The more you raise your awareness, and the more you understand the human psyche and true cause and effect, the more you can see through the illusion of why you feel the way you feel.
Understanding what creates your experience, and bringing awareness to activated thought patterns, is a central part of mastery.
This is the first of the four shifts that break the HR burnout cycle.
Watch Part 1: HR Burnout, How to Stop It Before It Starts
It’s just 10 minutes. But it could shift the way you see your entire world.
Coming next: self-awareness and consciousness
In the next post we’ll explore what it means to raise your levels of self-awareness, and why that’s a key aspect of shifting from HR burnout to brilliance.
If this is where you are
This is the exact reason I created The HR Alchemy Circle! A space I wish I’d had access to when I worked in HR. The only membership group of its kind where you get to work on you, so that you can access your next level of HR Leadership and gain support from other HR Leaders on the same journey. See how the HR Alchemy Circle can support you now.
