When Leaders Burn Out: The Real Story with Dr. Brian Crewe

Sponsored by Enelra Talent Solutions, LLC - Your Go-To Coaching Partner.

In this episode, Arlene Pace Green sits down with her dear friend Dr. Brian Crewe for a personal conversation about their own experiences with burnout. Both are executive coaches who help leaders navigate burnout every day. Both are industrial-organizational psychologists who know the research inside and out. And both, at different points in their careers, missed it completely in themselves. If you're a high performer, a leader, or someone who keeps saying yes because you care and you deliver, this conversation is for you.

Dr. Brian Crewe is a certified leadership and life coach with a PhD in industrial and organizational psychology. For more than 20 years, he has been helping organizations, leaders, teams, and individuals improve themselves and their performance. He's a coach with Enelra Talent Solutions and also owns his own firm, Change in Process. Brian and Arlene have known each other since middle school, and this conversation carries the honesty that comes with that kind of long friendship.

Join us as we explore:

The World Health Organization's definition of burnout as a syndrome from chronic workplace stress that shows up in three ways: exhaustion, mental distance and cynicism, and a drop in how effective you feel in your work.

Why the first time Brian burned out, he didn't recognize it at all. He just thought he was getting lazy, procrastinating, and losing his usual excitement about new client work.

The feelings that showed up before either of them realized what was happening: resentment toward work they'd signed up for, guilt over not being productive enough, and a strange lack of energy for the people and activities they loved most.

Why burnout often gets misdiagnosed as depression, and the single question Brian's counselor asked that helped him name what was actually happening.

Arlene's honest story about being burned out for over a year in her corporate role without knowing it, and the moment in Mexico that should have been a warning sign.

Why both Arlene and Brian only recognized their burnout after they were coming out of it, and what that means for how high performers should be watching for the signs.

Why recovery from real burnout takes 3 to 6 months, not a long weekend or a vacation, and what a counselor told Brian to do to actually start recovering.

Why energy is the resource most of us underestimate, more than time, and how that plays into overcommitting to things we can't sustain.