Unless you are an entrepreneur without partners or outside funding, you can count on suffering psychological burnout at some point during your career. Actually, you may suffer it often if you embrace the most common self-help wisdom available - Confucius’ counsel to, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” This “wisdom” actually exacerbates on-the-job malaise because just as marriages succumb to The 7-Year Itch, people grow bored with the rewards inherent in virtually every job there is: pay-for-performance. Salaries become blah in no time, and most people fall in-and-out-of-love with jobs more often than teenagers tire of their crushes.
The second most commonly self-administered nostrum used by those suffering burnout—promising yourself, “If I could only get X promotion, Y bonus, or Z bundle of cash, I’ll be happy”—is the most damaging delusion of all. Any and all successes you aim at fail to fundamentally change how you feel about yourself and your career, because (a) you always want more (it’s only human), and, (b) success is an ending leaving you bored witless wondering what to do.
Dr. Steven Berglas has been studying burnout—what causes it, how to cure it, and most recently, how to prevent it—and will share his views on these issues in his talk. Specifically, after presenting a brief explanation of what burnout is, how it develops, and why it’s so debilitating, Berglas will explain how some people become naturally inoculated against burnout and will give examples of this process.
Register Online
Date: Thursday, November 1, 2018
Time: 6:00pm to 8:00pm
Location: Palo Alto Four Seasons,
2050 University Ave, East Palo Alto, CA 94303
Cost: WCNC members $15.00, Non-Members $30. Registration closes Wednesday, October 31st at 4:00pm.
About our Speaker:
Dr. Steven Berglas
Dr. Steven Berglas has worn a number of professional hats during various phases of a career devoted to understanding and ameliorating the negative psychological consequences of work success, including research scientist, psychotherapist, Consiglierie, and author.
Dr. Berglas has authored five books that examine how the changes brought about by career success cause vocational, interpersonal, and psychological problems, two devoted to burnout: Reclaiming the Fire: How Successful People Overcome Burnout (Random House, 2001), named by Fortune Magazine to its list of the 75 Smartest Business Books ever written, and, Stay Hungry & Kick Burnout In The Butt (Center Street, 2018).
Berglas holds a BA, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with high honors in psychology from Clark University, a Ph.D. from Duke University, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in social psychiatry from Harvard Medical School.
