“Making It Work” is a series that follows small business owners trying to persevere through tough times.
When Karen Schiro, a real estate agent in Fairfax Station, Virginia, realized she was suffering from burnout last year, she turned to Erin Schinke, a burnout coach based in Tacoma, Wash. “I knew I was burned out, but I didn't know how to fix it,” Ms. Schiro says.
Over six months of weekly video calls, Shiloh, 45, learned to organize her mounting to-do list. Changes like adding a line to her email signature stating that she wouldn't respond to messages sent after 6 p.m. seemed “silly,” but she says she needed an outsider's perspective to make those adjustments accurately.
“It's hard to think about and do those things when you're exhausted,” Schiro said.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted how people work and where they work, the World Health Organization recognized burnout. In 2019, the organization characterized this type of chronic stress in the workplace as exhaustion, cynicism and feelings of helplessness — all traits that make it hard for people to bounce back on their own, said Michael P. Reiter, a professor emeritus at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, who studies burnout.
“At that point, it's hard to stand up for yourself,” he says. “It really helps to have a second perspective and some emotional support.”
Enter the Burnout Coach.
Operating in a grey area between psychotherapy and career coaching, with no formal certification or oversight, “burnout coach” has become an easy buzzword to promote: Essentially, anyone can put up the sign.
As a result, more people are marketing themselves as burnout coaches these days, says Chris Bittinger, a clinical assistant professor of leadership and project management at Purdue University who studies burnout. “There's no barrier to entry,” he says.
Turning a profit is another matter. When Denver resident Leah Batchelder began her career as a burnout coach in 2021, she initially lived off her savings, supplementing her income with freelance law work and dog walking jobs while honing her sales and marketing skills.
“Coaching in general is a very unregulated industry,” she says. “I've probably spent hundreds of hours researching burnout.”
This lack of oversight makes it impossible to know how many burnout coaches there are, but researchers who study burnout, like Reiter, point to high-pressure corporate cultures, a lack of mental health care resources, and The pandemic has created a flood of burnt-out workers looking for ways to cope.
Atlanta-based burnout coach Kim Hires says when she started her business 10 years ago, few people knew what she was doing. “Now I don't have to explain it,” she says.
But burnout coaches struggle with a lack of certification. Some get certified by organizations like the International Coaching Federation, a large nonprofit coaching association. But unlike life coaches, executive coaches, and wellness coaches, burnout coaches don't have specific certifications.
They say they must somehow cobble together certifications and continuing education on topics like stress management and sleep health, which even advocates acknowledge could make the practice sound like mere sales pitch.
But educational institutions are responding to the growing interest.
Terence E. Maltbia, director of Columbia University's Columbia Coaching Certification Program, said the university plans to add burnout to its continuing education curriculum after a biennial survey of coaching program graduates and executives found a sharp increase in interest in the topic between 2018 and 2022. He called the increase unprecedented.
“The market is driving it because people need to work and work is more stressful,” he said.
The American Psychological Association's most recent annual survey found that 77 percent of workers have experienced work-related stress within the past month. Getting help to manage stress is often difficult, and according to the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, more than half of the U.S. population lives in areas with inadequate access to mental health care.
Brett Linzer, an internist and pediatrician in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, said some people prefer to talk to a burnout coach because there is still a stigma surrounding mental health.
“There's a cultural narrative that physicians need to figure things out for themselves and not rely on others,” Dr. Linzer said. Talking with a burnout coach has helped him become more empathetic and communicative, helping him cope with the deaths of two friends and colleagues, he said.
For many burned-out coaches, their pitch also hinges on personal experience: Ms. Batchelder, the Denver coach, had left a career in corporate litigation feeling unfulfilled and burned out.
“I started researching burnout to help myself,” says Batchelder, 33. Learning stress-management tools like breathing exercises, setting boundaries and establishing a routine gave her insight to help her clients.
These coaches say they don't replace therapists but offer a different kind of support. Some clients said they appreciated their burnout coach empathizing with their workplace challenges.
“She understood what I was going through,” said Tara Howell, a public relations manager for a Baltimore nonprofit who began working with Batchelder while seeing a therapist.
“My sessions with Leah were much more practical,” says Howell, 28. “I considered working with a career coach, but I didn't feel it was aligned with what I wanted.”
While some employers will pay for sessions with a burnout coach as part of professional development, most coaches and clients report paying for coaching out of their own pockets, which can cost more than $250 for a 45- or 60-minute individual session, and thousands of dollars for packaged sessions.
As thinking about workplace wellness changes, interest in burnout coaches is growing. William Fleming, a researcher at the Oxford University Centre for Wellbeing Research, found that many employer-provided wellbeing services, such as sleep apps and mindfulness seminars, hardly live up to their claims of improving health. mental health.
“Many of these interventions are not only ineffective, they're counterproductive,” says Kandi Wiens, co-director of the University of Pennsylvania's Masters of Medical Education program and a burnout researcher.
Fleming said such efforts are ineffective because they focus on individuals, rather than the issues like overwork and lack of resources that lead to burnout. “They try to alleviate the symptoms without getting to the root of the problem,” he said.
Burnout coaches themselves acknowledge they're no panacea: “There are obviously limitations to what coaching can do,” Batchelder says. “There are a lot of organizational stressors.”
