1. Busting Burnout: Advisors Learning to Flourish
Hi Everyone. I’m Maggie Gilchrest, and this is Courtney Bray, and we’re going to talk to you about Burnout. If you came to this presentation thinking, ok, I’m going to learn how to flourish from a super duper happy person – and that will make me happy and fulfilled, etc … think again. Hi, I’m Maggie. I don’t do yoga. I don’t stare at myself in the mirror and repeat positive affirmations. I’m not a super extrovert. As a matter of fact, the older I get, the more introverted I am … which directly correlates to how often I wear sweatpants … surprisingly. I’m a cynic. I make Jeanine Garafalo look like Rainbow Brite on a unicorn, befriending carebears. I was, and occasionally fall victim to it again, but not as often, a super Negative Nancy. I felt like everyone around me was a moron – faculty, staff, students, the administration. And sometimes they were. But you can’t let a moron or a gaggle of morons ruin your day, your week, and when we’re talking about burnout, your purpose, your mission, your vision, your practice. So sometime in late 2014, early 2015, my husband said to me: “I want you to quit. I want you to quit being an advisor.” And I said, “No, no, I’m sorry, I’m like this. I just need to get through this week and then through late registration, and then it’ll be ok.” And he said to me, “Maggie, you say that every. Single. Week.” And I was just dumbfounded, you know? Like, Welcome to Reality, MJ. So I did some personal research. I pulled my social media posts over the last year, this is right before annual conference last year … and here’s a sample of what I saw:
Maggie J. Gilchrest & Courtney M. Bray
Texas Tech University

2. Background
“When I meet with my students I often fear for the world. It’s the same when I grade papers. These are the leaders of tomorrow?”
I had a slew of posts like the first there. Now I’m an avid social media person. I average a post a day … and after counting it up and doing some math … I post 60% of the time about my child and my puppies. 15% of the time, I posted about being sick – headaches, migraines, exhaustion, staying home, and the rest of the time I posted about my job. 25%. A quarter of my facebook posts were the ones I showed you. It’s all the proof I needed. It was time to make a change. But before I was ready to change fields all together, before I was ready to give up advising completely, I needed to see if I was really done with it. Side note: if you're into social media, I highly encourage you to run through your media and see if you’re the Negative Nancy that I am. Even though it’s not a majority, a quarter of my posts is a lot. We’re going to talk about how I got back on track and how important that is not just for your personal well being, but for your students, your advisees.

3. Here’s the Rundown Discuss Burnout causes/predictors
Discuss Burnout as it relates to student engagement & success
Discuss Positive Psychology
Strategies to Combat Burnout
Begin creating a ‘well-being’ Professional Development plan

4. What Is Burnout? Herbert Freudenberger coined “Burnout” in 1974
Originally he discussed burnout as the effects of severe stresses experienced by people working in health professions.
First ask the audience. Let them discuss what they think it is, and when they think it came about. Burnout was not well regarded when the term was coined. It wasn’t being measured empirically at the time, so it was focused on health practiononers and not regarded by scholars. It was considered pop psychology. Oh, The academy and their empiricism, right?

5. What is Burnout? (cont).
Christina Maslach (1995) examines burnout in counselors.
Creates the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) – which is widely accepted as a reliable measurement tool for stress and burnout.
22 items broken into three themes: Emotional Exhaustion, Depersonalization, and Accomplishment.
Christina Maslach, a social psychologist out at UC Berkley is one of the world’s leading experts on burnout. Her focus is occupational burnout. She started first, by examining counselors, but her work is widely accepted in corporate settings and education as well. She creates the MBI, which is widely accepted and used, and has been adapted and made digital. We can visit a site that uses it. You can test any time. You can download a PDF. A super abbreviated version she used for an article is in your hand out to help you see if you have that issue.

6. Multidimensional Model for Burnout
Emotional Exhaustion
Depersonalization
Accomplishment
(Maslach & Jackson, 1981)

7. “Burnout is always more likely when there is a mismatch between the nature of the job and the nature of the person who does the job” (Maslach).
What kinds of mismatches would these be? (Let audience answer) yeah, we feel overloaded, we feel like don’t have control … we feel undervalued, or we feel like the university states their values but then doesn’t act according to those values. We feel like advisors have thankless positions. This affects our faculty advisors, too – the university sometimes doesn’t know how to treat faculty advisors. We’re not going to get into nature vs nurture and all that – but when we’re talking about this mismatch in this environment, we have to consider that some people might be pre-disposed to burnout. Talk about winning the advising lottery. Who do you think is pre-disposed to burnout? (ask audience).

8. People who need Control
Pessimists
Perfectionist
People who need Control
People who are perfectionists – who need everything to be better and nothing is good enough. Pessimists who have negative world views or negative views of themselves. People who have to be in control and have trouble delegating. “I’ll get it all done, don’t help me …” but you know, at what expense? And then severe type A people, super high achieving.
Type A personalities

9. Burnout Causes? Work-related: Lack of recognition for your work
Unclear or overly demanding expectations
Unchallenging work
Highly chaotic environment
Feeling like you have no locus of control on what happens in your practice

10. Burnout Causes…continued
Lifestyle Causes
Not enough time for socializing and relaxing
Lack of supportive relationships
Taking on too many responsibilities
Not asking for help
Not sleeping
Walk me through an appointment with a student who is struggling in all of his coursework. (Audience response) What open-ended, intrusive questions would you ask this student to discern his/her issues with his coursework? Sure you’d ask all the academic questions, and then what? You’d move on personal life questions. We know that our personal lives inform our work, just as personal life issues inform student success.

11. What Does Burnout LOOK Like?
Can’t sleep
Agitated
Drained look/body language
Frequent headaches
Body aches
Withdrawn
Inarticulate
No appetite
Sick

12. What Does Burnout FEEL Like?
Sense of failure
Helpless
Trapped
Detached/alone
Zero motivation
Cynical
Negative
Lack of feeling of accomplishment
Self doubt
Defeated

13. Burnout vs. Stress Stress Burnout Characterized by overengagement
Stress vs. Burnout
Stress
Burnout
Characterized by overengagement
Characterized by disengagement
Emotions are overreactive
Emotions are blunted
Produces urgency and hyperactivity
Produces helplessness and hopelessness
Loss of energy
Loss of motivation, ideals, and hope
Leads to anxiety disorders
Leads to detachment and depression
Primary damage is physical
Primary damage is emotional
May kill you prematurely
May make life seem not worth living
Source: Stress and Burnout in Ministry
I want to pause and take some time to tell you that Stress and Burnout are not the same. Someone tell me what they feel the difference is between the two. (Pause for audience).

14. Advisor Burnout Negatively Affects Student Persistence and Retention
Ok Maggie, you and Courtney have showed us what burnout is and what it looks and feels like … but why does that matter for my advising practice? Because when you’’re experiencing burnout and you’re disengaged, you are disengaging the student. Your body language, your personality, your reactions – you are disengaging the student. When you don’t care – they don’t care. It becomes harder to treat every student as an individual, with an individual set of problems, with individual needs. They become the same student over and over again.

15. So What Do We Do? Positive Psychology
Martin Seligman – “Father of Positive Psychology”
Ok, so now that I know all about burnout, I realize that I’m completely burned out, and your presentation has severely depressed me, what do I do? Tell me you can fix it, So when I hit that stage where my husband said you’re going to have to quit because you’re miserable. I did all I could to research this topic. And I found that there wasn’t much specifically on advising. If you were in yesterday’s stress session from App state – I mean people were sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, because these are things we want to know about. These are things we need to focus on. I actually pulled out my Academicc Advising comprehensive handbook. Burnout – page 453 and 454. In the comprehensive handbook. Advising approaches – the green one from a few years ago … nothing. I pulled from the NACADA clearing house and found some good stuff by Huebner from about Definitely look into it. But overall, not a lot. So I had to look elsewhere and what the literature kept bringing me to is Positive Psychology.

16. Positive Psychology…continued
Strengths, NOT weaknesses
Positive Psychology uses theory and research to better understand the positive, adaptive, creative, and fulfilling aspects of the human existence. The emphasis isn’t on weakness as a pathology – as the case with most psychotherapies. It focuses on contentment, well-being, human strengths, and positive emotions. It’s the StrengthsQuest of advising theories. 

17. Well-Being Plans! Do some research: Positive Psychology literature
Past NACADA presentations
TED Talks

18. TED Talks to Watch “The Happy Secret to Better Work” – Shawn Achor
“Warning – Being Positive is not for the Faint-hearted” – Lea Waters
“Flow the Secret to Happiness” -- Mihely Csikszentinsky
“How to Stop Screwing Yourself Over” – Mel Robbins
“Your Elusive Creative Genius” – Elizabeth Gilbert
“Want to be Happy? Be Grateful.” – David Steindal-Ras
“The Opportunity of Adversity” – Aimee Mullins
“We Can Be Buddhas” – Robert Thurman
“How to Manage for Collective Creativity” – Linda Hill
“Got a Wicked Problem, First Tell Me How You Make Toast” – Tom Wujec
Shawn Achor is really one of the big names in positive psychology right now. Several books. I like this one by this guy whose name I can’t pronounce. He’s a psychologist and one of the things he said that jumped out at me is “lack of material resources increases unhappiness, but the increae of material resources does not increase happiness.” Which basically hit me between the eyes as, yeah, if we had money we could add two more advisors to our adjust our caseloads and ease the burden, but woldn’t we still be answering the same dumb questions? Wouldn’t we still feel burdened by orientation? It goes deeper. I really like Mel Robbins – she’s a syndicated talk show host and she talks about how when you say you’re fine, even when you’re not fine, even when you’re burned out, you’re basically allowing yourself not to do anything about it. You’re busy waiting to feel like changing, instead of changing – and you’re never going to feel like it. You’ve got to be active. Its on us to bust burnout! So let’s work on it!

19. Post-Its
Three things for which you are thankful in your life right now!
Three reasons you LOVE academic advising
Three goals to accomplish for today (today at NACADA)
Ask the audience about a couple

20. SMART Goals Create two SMART Goals One for the conference
One for your well-being

21. Unscheduled/last minute tasks Planning/Goals
Relaxation
Personal growth/professional development
Deadline-driven projects s
Busy Work
Some meetings
Phone calls

22. Burnout Busting – Flourish Frenzy IDEAS

23. Advisor Retreats & Team Building Days

24. Volunteer Together
Time Yourself on Tasks You Hate
Walking 1:1’s
Read the Advisor Burnbook (click me!)
Write Yourself A Love Letter/Semester
Potlucks for Fun
Potlucks for Ease
Create a Vision Board
Journal
Find a Mentor
Post-It Board/Take What You Need
Coloring
Write Thank You Notes
Legos
Schedule Breaks!
Eliminate Negativity – Positive Rhetoric Only!

25. Friday Morning Dance Parties
Visit Campus Resources (MindSpa)
Ice Meetings
Schedule holidays!
Create Ambassador Programs
Get involved in organizations
Find a Mentor
Flip Meetings
Leave Your Work!!
Pin Inspiration
Keep a Kudos File
Onboarding
Intentionality
Make SMART goals
Download meditation apps
Re-read Your Mission, Vision statements. Create Your Advising Philosophy
Blog
Find Your Professional Identity – Erin Justyna’s Session!

26. Meditation Apps Calm Daily Calm Headspace The Mindfulness App
One Minute Meditations
Take A Break
There are so many!!

28. Avey, J. B,. Luthans, F. , Smith, R. , & Palmer, N. F. (2010)
Avey, J. B,. Luthans, F., Smith, R., & Palmer, N. F. (2010). Impact of positive psychological capital on employee well-being over time. Journal of Occupational Health, 15, Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions . American Psychologist, 56(3), Jackson, S. E., & Shuler, R. S. (1985) A meta-analysis and conceptual critique of research on role ambiguity and role conflict in work settings. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process, 36, Huebner, C. (2011). Caring for the Caregivers: Strategies to overcome the effects of job burnout. Retrieved from NACADA Clearinghouse of Academic Advising Resources Web site. MacBride, A. (1983). Burnout: Possible? Probable? Preventable?, Canada's Mental Health, 31, Maslach, C., & Goldberg, J. (1998). Prevention of burnout: New perspectives. Applied & Preventive Psychology, 7, Maslach, C. & Leiter, M. P. (2008). Early predictors of job burnout and engagement. Journal of Applied Psychology, 3, Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., & Leiter, M. P. (2001) Job burnout. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, Pines, A., M. (2004). Adult attachment styles and their relationship to burnout: A preliminary, cross-cultural investigation. Work and Stress, 18, Rego, A., Machado, F., Leal, S., Cuhna, M.P. (2009) Are hopeful employees more creative. Creativity Research Journal, 21, Ronen, S., Mikulincer, M. (2009). Attachment orientations and job burnout: The mediating role of team cohesion and organizational fairness. The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 26(4), Schaufeli, W. B., Bakker, A. B., & Van Rhenen, W. (2009) How changes in job demands and resources predict burnout, work, engagement, and sickness absenteeism. Journal of Organizational Behavior,30(7), Southwick, S. M., & Charney, D. S. (2012). Resilience: the Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges. New York: Cambridge University Press.