RECLAIMING THE FIRE How Successful People Overcome Burnout DR. STEVEN BERGLAS

RECLAIMING THE FIRE How Successful People Overcome Burnout DR. STEVEN BERGLAS

A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams. —BERTRAND RUSSELL

The first irony lies in the fact that no successful person I can think of became successful without conquering some form of crisis. Career success signifies an ability to overcome obstacles, to persevere in the face of competitive threats, to adapt to change, and to endure grueling periods of deprivation. Someone who succeeds must have experienced the travails of (1) acquiring a new or specialized skill, (2) perfecting skills in order to display talents and abilities in a stellar fashion, or (3) deconstructing the status quo (as an entrepreneur, artist, inventor) and creating a new paradigm or prototype of excellence. Successful people are conquerors,

Chinese symbol for crisis, which consists of two intertwined characters: the symbol for “danger” and the symbol for “opportunity.”

Crisis need not connote impending catastrophe; it can be understood as a turning point, a choice point, an opportunity for change.

I define Supernova Burnout as a psychological disorder that results when a competent person who is, or could be, successful in a professional arena experiences a state of chronic trepidation, distress, despondency, or depression attributable to the belief that he is trapped in a job, or on a career path, from which he can neither escape nor derive psychological gratification.

When you strive for success, you feel energized, alert, and activated because you can see yourself adding value to an entity or enterprise that has yet to realize its full potential. In contrast, when you sustain a successful endeavor or enterprise, you are likely to experience ennui or depression because you are forced to wonder, “What is the purpose of this work or my life if all I am doing is amassing money like a mercenary?” This is one of the major reasons success can make a person feel trapped when, to all external appearances, he is sitting on top of the world.

Psychologists have demonstrated that when a person is deprived of eustress, the “good stress” derived from stimulating circumstances or challenges, he or she will either find alternative routes for generating eustress or suffer intense psychological pain.

Recall that the mind needs to be stimulated with inputs from the external world or it will create stimulation of its own.

According to M. Scott Peck, author of the bestselling Road Less Traveled, “Success eliminates as many options as does failure.”

humans are psychologically hardwired to use what is called a social comparison process that imposes a naturally escalating standard of acceptability on achievement.

"My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation" - —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “THE SIGN OF FOUR”.

The poet Robert Browning maintained, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?”

Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void - William James.

Sigmund Freud asserted, “A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.”

Abraham Maslow.12 His core conviction was that we all have an innate propensity to strive to reach the highest levels of our capabilities; he was a true believer in the ascendancy of human potential.

Maslow’s model of self-actualization describes two sets of needs thought to motivate all people. This hierarchy includes four levels of D or deficiency needs, and one B needs, to achieve a self-actualized sense of being. Levels 1 through 4 are physiological needs (oxygen, food, water, and so on); safety needs (protection from harm); belongingness needs (love, affection, oneness with others); and esteem needs (self-respect and self-confidence from authentic achievement). Once the deficiency needs are met, the theory goes, people can proceed to level 5, the attainment of self-actualization: an ongoing process of realizing inherent potentials, capacities, and talents.

Doing something for the sheer joy of doing it, without regard to reward, audience approval, or obligation—in a manner akin to a child mindlessly playing with a new object of interest—will make self-actualization immediate. Likewise, according to Maslow, a musician makes music because it is his calling; a writer writes for the same reason; people who find parenting a calling need no incentive to love and engage in raising children.

According to Maslow, “The great cause of much psychological illness is the fear of knowledge of oneself—one’s emotions, impulses, memories, capacities, potentialities, of one’s destiny.” He went on to note, “This kind of fear is defensive . . . protection of our self-esteem, of our love and respect for ourselves. We tend to be afraid of any knowledge that could cause us to despise ourselves or to make us feel inferior.”

Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied. —NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson pointed out, that male identity is forged in relationship to mastery of the world at large, and female identity is awakened in a relationship of intimacy with another person. The hallmark of high-achieving males seems to be anticonnectedness. Women, by contrast, work in networks, form webs of inclusion, and readily acknowledge problematic feelings.

Publilius Syrus, a former Roman slave who composed hundreds of maxims between 42 and 1 B.C.E., was the first, according to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, to note, “It is a consolation to the wretched to have companions in misery.” Never one to skimp on words, he also observed, “Society in shipwreck is a comfort to all.” 

Chris Argyris, of the Harvard graduate schools of business and education, has devoted much of his career to analyzing smart people’s resistances to being reeducated when they are in positions of authority and leadership. He believes that the root of this resistance is a general human tendency to act in accordance with four basic values: (1) to remain in control; (2) to maximize “winning” and minimize “losing”; (3) to suppress negative feelings; and (4) to behave in what appears to be a rational way to the greatest extent possible.

Because women are trained to process the negative feelings that arise from failure or simple disappointment, they are familiar with two facts of life not well known to successful men: (1) that you rarely die from committing simple mistakes; and (2) that the company you have in misery can be a valuable resource.

In his classic sociological treatise The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber examined how Protestant religious orthodoxy was transformed into capitalist philosophy. According to Weber, it appears that rather than remaining true to the end of getting closer to God through habits of industry, self-discipline, moderation, and contempt for self-indulgence, our capitalist society became obsessed with the means of securing wealth or profit.

In his classic The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch maintained that the self-made man, archetypal embodiment of the American dream, originally thrived because the Protestant work ethic paved the way for social mobility predicated solely on individual initiative. The psychological traits the Puritans reinforced—individuality, autonomy, independence, and achievement motivation—propelled people toward finding their identity in self-contained or self-directed careers (Mather’s concept of a personal calling).  

Underlying Lasch’s analysis is the recognition that as Puritanism became more of a secular philosophy than a religious ideology, the church lost its power to help people find meaning. As Lasch points out, when we lionize the pioneers who conquered the western wilderness or venerate entrepreneurs for revolutionizing the business world, we should remember that these modern heroes turned away from society (and, more specifically, organized religion) toward individual career development as the one arena in which they could derive spiritual satisfaction. Because people came to believe that their sense of personal achievement was all they could rely upon for psychological well-being—the self-made man turned into the self-contained man—doing things for the good of the community slowly but steadily went the way of the horse-drawn carriage.

According to what has come to be known as the Yerkes-Dodson law, increasing the extrinsic motivation to succeed—through incentives, pressure, demands, and the like—will improve performance up to a point commonly called an optimum level of arousal. Beyond that point, however, increasing the motivation or incentive to perform will interfere with skilled task execution and result in deteriorating levels of accomplishment. Research has shown that a person will be highly motivated to perform in contexts that possess three characteristics: (1) they allow him to feel responsible for a successful outcome; (2) they provide him with feedback from the performance; and (3) the performance settings include some risk of either not succeeding or actually failing.2 As T. E. Lawrence observed, “There could be no honor in a sure success.”

TECHNIQUES FOR INTRODUCING INNOVATION AND CHANGE WITHOUT THREAT 

1. Know What You Are Afraid Of

2. Forget About Breaking Set. Try Expanding Set Instead

3. Employ Psychological Diversity Training

Sigmund Freud remarked, “It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement—that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and they underestimate what is of true value in life.”

Erich Fromm noted in The Art of Loving: Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be loveable. In pursuit of this aim they follow several paths. One, which is especially used by men, is to be successful, to be as powerful and rich as the social margin of one’s position permits. Another, used especially by women, is to make oneself attractive, by cultivating one’s body, dress, etc. . . . People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love—or be loved by—is difficult

Eleanor Roosevelt noted, You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” . . . You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Churchill claimed, “Every night I try myself by Court Martial to see if I have done anything effective during the day. I don’t mean just paying the ground, anyone can go through the motions, but something really effective.” Unfortunately, most of us are more dependent on the status quo than this and use it as a reference in many ways, ranging from social status to physical competence. This dependence leads to a herd mentality that, in large measure, is responsible for what is judged successful. The influence of normative standards extends well beyond trend-setting and status symbols.

Friedrich Nietzsche: “Once one is clear about the ‘why?’ of one’s life, one can let its ‘how?’ take care of itself.”15 Nietzsche refers, of course, to finding pure intrinsic motivation, or what I have been referring to as passion. This is the motivation that underlies all forms of self-actualization and it is the motivation that enables a person to naturally reclaim the fire.

In Greek legend, Prometheus wanted to ensure that man would be superior to all the animals. That is why he challenged Zeus’s edict, stole the sacred fire from Mount Olympus, and presented it as a gift that would guarantee man’s survival and superiority. I see Prometheus’s fire as the energy that fuels psychological development and self-reliance. Prometheus’s gift of fire made man efficacious, and anyone who has achieved success began his or her career with an overabundance of fire.