By chance, are you feeling a mite bit burnt out? I’m just guessing because I’ve been feeling that way too. During the past few months, I’ve been tossing out hundreds of hours of work to re-work projects to keep pace with the changes due to COVID. Work is increasing while deadlines are getting shorter. For some reason, vacation days have been scarce.
How about you?
Have you had to ditch most of the work you did on upcoming in-person events to turn on a virtual conference immediately? Are you learning how to manage the sudden increase in traffic in your online community? Are you scrambling for revenue-replacing ideas, all while spinning five more plates at home?
Not only is everyone busy right now, but there’s a fog of worry about the future. Will we be working at the same time as homeschooling this Fall? Will my parents get sick? What’s going to happen to our savings? Burn out is not just about what is happening now. Burn out can be future-focused as we worry about the struggles to come.
Of course, we are not alone. Members are feeling burned out in many professions, industries, and fields. There are a lot of ways to soothe burn out. Vacation, slowing down, and getting help, to name a few. But we can’t force our members to go on vacation or to stop worrying.
We might, however, be able to show them a few possible lights at the end of the tunnel. We can uncover and spread the new ideas that are helping their peers to survive. We can raise up the ideas of our innovators. We can show them the experiments that their colleagues tried that didn’t work.
Your association might be the balm for your members’ burn out.
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