 Hey everybody, first I wanted to say thanks for making it almost to the end of your first day of WordCamp. Give yourselves a round of applause, well done. So you're here to hear a talk called Care and Feeding of Your Passion. It is largely about burnout and so if you think that you were talking about something else in here, you still have time to de-plane. But before we get there, I wanted to just buy a show of hands, ask a few questions about who we have in the audience, just so that I know what I'm working with personally. So by show of hands, how many of you are agency owners or directors? Wow, for those at home it's like 25% out there. I'm bad at estimating, don't confirm. Who out there is a community builder of any variety? Okay, online community, keep your hands up. Okay, in-person community, keep your hands up. Okay, that's a little under half I'd say, community building folks. Do any of you contribute to a team of any type? Cool. So that's almost 100% and it should be. We all contribute to teams of some variety and I will be talking to all of you as contributing team members today. So now that you have taken the time to introduce yourselves to me, thank you very much for that. I will introduce myself to you. I'm Joseph Hayden and I'm a digital literacy advocate who really loves to build communities. I'm also a WordPress enthusiast who happens to work at Automatic and I consider myself a wordsmith which mostly means I make up words sometimes. So if I say something in here and it's made up, I apologize in advance. But importantly, I am also a non-profit junkie. I have been working in non-profits for about 15 years, mostly as outreach to underrepresented groups in those non-profits and then also there was a period of time in there where I was working with victims of various kinds of assaults. So really, really high stress non-profits are what I have been spending most of my life on at this point. Just so that we have kind of a tiny road map because I'm a road map sort of person, what we're going to be talking about today are the basics of workplace burnout and some generally held concepts of how you can combat that with your own work and with teams if you work with any teams at all. Then we're going to discuss something called compassion fatigue. Has anyone heard of that? We've got a few hands, okay? How that relates to non-profit work and especially to community building work. And we'll look at a few strategies, a few really big, big broad strategies for how to take some proactive work to prevent that sort of burnout. So first off, it should be said that burnout is a really popular topic right now and it should be. It's extremely important to not only be aware of it but to know how to identify it and know how to come back from it. The two kinds of burnout that we're going to be talking about today are very different in that one kind of talks about the tedium of everyday work and the other one talks about kind of mental and philosophical fatigue for something that you have a passion for. One of them is considered treatable but there's not like a good consensus on the treatment and we'll chat about that a bit and one is considered not treatable and so we're going to talk about how to keep it from happening in the first place. I feel like that's a good idea. So first off, burnout as a whole is widely studied and has been since about the middle of the 70s. It's not a DSM recognized disorder even though there is so much that we talk about related to it and as a result there is no consensus on the treatment. Burnout as a set of symptoms is largely indistinguishable from depression and so a lot of people go to get treatment for depression when they're burnt out and alternately some people are getting feelings like they're burnt out and what they actually are dealing with is depression which I'm sure you all know is a DSM recognized disorder. Those who are most at risk for burning out are the ones who are so extremely passionate that we have out there. The people that we love to count on the most in non-profit work especially if you're working with volunteers and just to stay in keeping with our terminology here then the ones that we see who burn the brightest are the most likely to burn out. The double bad part about that is that they don't realize it and so you have to realize it for them and help them to find those footholds to come back to kind of a more level mental space. So what we're going to talk about first I know I said burnout but we're going to talk about workplace satisfaction and I'm doing that specifically because there are lots of factors that go into burnout not only what contributes to it but then also kind of when those erode what that looks like and so I wanted to take a moment to talk about the balances and workplace satisfaction simply because you have to have an understanding of that before you can start to look for burnout. These are three very broad subjects that I'm about to give to you. There are lots of factors they're basically grouped into these. So the first one that we have is involvement somebody who really takes a lot of care to interact with the people in there that they're working with regardless of whether it is a co-worker or people that they're involved in a community with. In our case a community is going to mean any group of people. This is our community WordPress is our community and so a lot I will relate this to us but it can apply to any of them. When you see involvement start to erode that looks like exhaustion and feels like exhaustion. It's general fatigue whether physical mental or emotional and there are a lot of things that can cause it. It can be because of 24-7 work cycles where you feel like you always have to be available for people but also largely it's because people feel like there's too much to do with too little time to do it in. The second part of workplace satisfaction that you have to keep in balance with the first one there involvement is motivation and that's easy to identify it's people who really want to do the work that they're doing. Not only are they really engaging with the people that they're working with but they are engaging because they feel it's important and they are choosing to do that work. When that erodes that can look like reduced engagement, depersonalization and often it looks like cynicism. You will have workers who are dealing with a problem and make light of it. It's not necessarily because they don't understand it's a problem but the first time that you hear that the Wi-Fi is incredibly slow then it's a big problem for you too because it's the first time you heard it but the 18th time you're like, I know, it's slow, right? That's kind of what we're talking about. You make light of it, you're like, I know, it's terrible, man, the Wi-Fi is just... It's that sort of thing making light of a situation that you know is important for the person who's telling you and that you know is important for your community as a whole. The third part of workplace satisfaction is enjoyment and this is something that is really hard to identify. The way that people express enjoyment often is very different. However, this is just how much you love what you're doing. Not only are you active in it and not only are you wanting to do it but for heaven's sake don't you think it's cool and you just love the people you're doing it for and it's just the funnest thing you've ever thought about doing in your life. Funnest is that wordsmith moment, I apologize. When that starts to erode, that feels like and sounds like from the people that you're talking to, incompetence. They feel like they are incompetent. They feel like their skills are lacking regardless of whether that's true or not. Most of the time, if you're in a leadership position or you just experience their work and you know it's not true and they say that to you, your first reaction is to just say, well, your work is fine but that's not going to help them feel any better about that. There is a separate and side related term for that and it's called rust out as in a rusted car and you feel like you're not using those skills and so they're deteriorating rusting away. We might touch on it a bit later if I don't run out of time. So now that we have these three things that we really know that we have to kind of keep track of, oh, I forgot one. So the final part about enjoyment, that can erode because of lack of support, lack of feedback, lack of expectations, kind of a lack of context in general. And when you work with communities that are primarily online and so you don't see the people that you have to work with and that you're working for, there's always that moment where it's out of sight, out of mind and you accidentally forget to give people context. We'll touch on that again a bit later but that's one of those things that can cause enjoyment to erode for the people around you. All right, so the types of burnout. I'm going to explain these and kind of give a few rough notes as we go along. This information is all readily available if you Google burnout like this is the first thing that comes up and so I'm not going to spend too much time on it but frenetic is the first one. It looks an awful lot like a workaholic. It's somebody who is working a lot and is engaged a lot and doing a lot of things and seems to enjoy it but probably doesn't for what it's worth. And for my friends working on diversity and inclusion because I know there are a lot of us in the WordPress community, the first stage of burnout stems from a desire to prove that you belong and to prove that the work that you're doing is good enough for you to be here. There are 12 stages of burnout and so I'm not going to talk about them but they're very interesting. The important part about that first stage is that it means that the people that we bring into the technology sphere that are underrepresented and we want them here feel like they have to prove to us that they belong here and so they are at high risk for burning out because they will choose to overwork in a lot of cases. The next kind is under challenged. I'm not going to ask for a show of hands but you can mentally show your hand if you're working for somebody and this feels like you. When you have this type of burnout, you have people who feel like they have this large set of skills and no one is taking advantage of them. I can word that better. They have this large set of skills and no one is letting them put them to use. It is related to that rust out thing that we were talking about earlier and it can be because there's no place for that kind of skill set in the work that they're doing but often it's because there are other things that are more pressing that have to be dealt with and so they just are not able to put those skills to use because other things are more urgent. And then the final kind which we see a lot of and this is the one that we most closely identify with burnout is just the worn out sort of variety. This happens when people have worked too hard for too long with too few resources and it does just look like not wanting to do it anymore. Again, I'm not gonna ask anyone to raise hands but if you know anyone or consider yourself in this group of people that maybe are starting to feel worn out in that burnout area, it's definitely something to keep an eye on and in general for burnout if any of this sounds like you or anyone on a team that you're working with, absolutely, this is something that needs to be addressed and you should talk to other people about and encourage them to get help for. And since we're there anyway, let's talk about some burnout busters. So these are all things that like I said, not roundly considered as the consensus for how you deal with burnout but they are the things that people recommend the most often and certainly things that I recommend to people the most often as well. So the first one up here is relax like you mean it. All of this is going to be in very casual language all of a sudden just so you're aware. Relax like you mean it. When you're taking time off, take your time off. We recommend always that people take enough time off, take adequate time but we don't actually have a concept of what that is. A week at a time can get you a fair distance but if you have at least two weeks that gives you enough time to really disconnect from things and then enough time to mentally reset, recharge and just completely not think about the work that you're doing. The second one is doing awesome stuff outside of work. I don't know what your awesome stuff might be, it might be learning how to row dragon boats or making chocolate and it really doesn't matter what that awesome stuff is that you do outside of work as long as you do it and you get out there and interesting fact, if you are taking a two week break or a three month sabbatical if you are so lucky to have that as an option, the most successful way to recharge and get yourself ready to get back to work is to learn a new skill and it doesn't have to be a big skill. You could learn cross stitching, do it. I just got a lot of shaking heads from that side of the room. Never in a million years. This one is really important as well and it's something that, again, is talked about a lot in media at the moment but breaking the 24 seven work cycle is really important. Setting a schedule for when you will answer emails, setting a schedule for when you will read people's proposals to you, not necessarily always being on call 24 seven. Oh, and this one, eat, sleep and think. I realize that that means you're alive. But truly, when you get stressed out, which is a thing that happens when you're becoming burnt out, let's be honest, one of the first things that goes is your ability to sleep because that's what stress does to you. It causes you to not sleep well and then you don't take care of yourself by not eating the proper things because you only have 15 minutes because you're on call 24 seven and you're not gonna think about how to process things and put them all together because for heaven's sake, just deal with whatever's coming in the inbox next. Just saying it all together like that makes me feel stressed out. So it's important to take care of yourself. Self care is important. Planning ahead, really important and I didn't mention it in here but getting up and moving your body is important. Taking a 30 minute walk. This is a point in my presentation when I originally had a picture of my dog and said, get a dog. I'm not going to encourage you to get a second living creature in your world to manage your stress. But you know, if it works for you, you can do that. Avoid the sunken cost fallacy. This is really tough for human beings. So that's all of you. 100% of the room. This is the idea that because you've already put so much time and effort into that thing, you have to continue putting time and effort into it until you're done. And an important thing that we always forget while we're toiling with this one problem that we've already spent 50 hours working on is that if it's not a problem that we personally are going to be able to solve and we put another 50 hours into it, what we have done is definitely wasted 100 hours and also definitely got really stressed out and burnt out about it. So avoid the idea that just because you've already put so much work into it means you have to be the one to finish it. There's always a place to delegate work to people. And this one is really important. Know when it's in your control. There will always be things that you wish you could change that you just can't. And that doesn't make it better in your mind when you're stressed out about it. Changing the way that you have a relationship with that can make a big difference. But it's not one of those situations where it's not in my control so I'm just gonna fight it forever because then you will just be fighting a thing that is completely insurmountable and you will absolutely not win and you will absolutely end up feeling burnt out about it. So this brings us to compassion fatigue. First off, I'm gonna say this. When you're working in an arcane field, such as web development, it can end up feeling like you're a professional counselor. Compassion fatigue is a DSM recognized disorder. It is generally associated with caregivers, not necessarily associated with people whose work focuses on production. If you are not measured by how many websites you build, by how many plugins you review, this is largely related to people who counsel others, people who respond in crisis situations, people who work in really high stress environments, helping other people, serving other people. It's largely going to be folks like nurses and doctors and case workers for various kinds of assault. But it is tangentially related to what we're talking about. So all of that to say, this is an actual disorder and be careful to not self-diagnose this one. This is the one that if it happens to you is not treatable. And so now that I've brought us all down into this terrifying secondary traumatic stress disorder area, I will tell you this. There is not a silver bullet cure for something like this. But there are a lot of ways to be proactive about keeping it from happening to you and keeping it from happening to other people who are around you. If you're a leader, yeah, I'm gonna ask you all to raise your hands again. How many of you consider yourselves leaders? Not necessarily because you have a title-like manager, but because you have people who look up to you, who follow you, who care about your opinion. Yeah, yeah, for our live stream folks, this is like 80% of the room. Everybody has someone in their lives who cares about your perspective on something. And so to an extent, we are all leaders if you get right down to a definition like that. So compassion fatigue, this is a related topic, but we're not actually saying that becoming web developer causes you to have compassion fatigue because compassion fatigue is a gradual erosion of your compassion due to repeated exposure to someone else's trauma. Slow Wi-Fi is not trauma. I understand it can feel that way, but it's really, really not. So if you're in a situation where you are having to deal with that kind of erosion of your compassion, you feel less and less ready to be concerned about other people's personal issues, personal problems, problems that are affecting them. There is one really big thing that I know that I talk to people about it automatic on a fairly regular basis. Remember that if you work with this a lot, there's nothing new for you. You've seen it all. You've seen all the Wi-Fi's not work. You've seen all the coffee run out. You've seen all of the shirts not fit or whatever. And so it doesn't seem like a big problem to you because you've done it a thousand times this year alone. But when people are brave enough to tell you that there's a problem, it means that it's a real problem for them. And so that problem is important to take seriously. Now, to prevent yourself from anything that is remotely related to this compassion fatigue, I have a few things that you can do proactively. Again, not like a huge list of things that definitely will save you from fatigue of any variety. But certainly things that'll keep you at a pretty level playing field. So the first thing is create an area of psychological safety. This is something that is largely given to leadership as a thing that they have to do for their team. But it is a two-way street. There is a thing in the WordPress community in case you've not read anything about open source, you're about to get a little knowledge. It's about how we fail in public and embrace that. That's a terrifying idea. I know that I never like anyone to know that I'm wrong about anything. Spoiler alert, I am. But if you get into a situation where you are failing and you're just failing alone constantly, not only do you not have the opportunity to have other people help you figure out how it could have gone better, but you also feel alone in failing all the time. When all of us fail, every single day there's something that didn't go quite right. And every single day, we can surmount that. We can get past it. The second thing that you can do is know the difference between news and good news. I know, it's a funny thing. But here's the deal. We get a lot of information. And this is largely that signal to noise ratio thing that sounds very clinical. And so I'm gonna bring it to a non-clinical area. If I come into the room and I say, hey, your daughter's safe, that's neat. She probably has always been safe. She's been safe for a long time, safe for 18 years. But if I come into the room and I say, hey, a tree fell down in your front yard and your daughter's okay, that is suddenly good news. That's relevant to you. It's important to know when things are just pieces of information that would be nice to know and pieces of information that are relevant to you in that moment. If you are in a leadership position, again with our very broad definition, or part of a team, it's good to know that you have someone around who's able to say that is information, that is not news that we need to handle today. Learn the larger concepts that drive small decisions. This is my favorite. So I mentioned earlier that context, lack of context is a way that burnout comes to get ya sometimes. And this is one of those things. Sometimes when you are seeing a lot of small decisions, without any understanding of what's driving those decisions, it seems arbitrary. And as though things are just happening without a reason. But so often there is a reason. For instance, in WordPress, we democratize publishing. And so we make a lot of decisions that are based on democratized publishing. Or for word camps and meetups, we care a whole, whole lot about building an inclusive space that people can all interact in together. And so small decisions often are driven by is that an inclusive choice? Will that benefit the most people that we have in our community? And if it's benefiting the most people, there will always be some people that feel like it's not a benefit to them. As a side note, in case you were not aware of the makeup of kind of this WordPress open source project, we are basically a collection of minorities. All of us have these tiny little intersections of stuff that we love, that not necessarily everybody loves. And so there's always that moment where you're like, I have to make a lot of decisions for a lot of small intersections of people. And that is a tough thing to do. This will also come up if you ever build websites. Just saying. I hope most of you do because you're at a WordPress conference. Another thing that you need to do is find your other tribes. So three or four years ago there was that whole conversation constantly about how you have to find your tribe. Mostly that's finding the people who have shared interests with you and have shared sentiments of some variety. It's easy to find that in work, especially with WordPress, especially with our community. So many of us have other things in common, even if it's just like, you use WordPress, I use WordPress. Look at all these plugins we both use. We're friends, this is our own personal two person tribe. That's a thing that happens. And so it can be really hard for us to get out of this little ecosystem that we have and say, all right, easy for me to find my many, many tribes here in the WordPress community. I should find people who love jeeps or want to kayak or want to go snorkeling, which is never gonna be me. So if you're part of that tribe, just don't come find me. And this thing called hit stickers. It's called a real thing, and I don't know the name of it, but I call them hit stickers and so I'm just gonna explain what I mean. So I have a visual calendar and in it I keep track of my basic emotional mindset for the day and my mental mindset for the day. If at any point I find that I have too many sad stickers or too many angry stickers in a row, I sit down and think to myself, there is something that needs to be changed here. I've done something that is not working this week that was totally working last week or whatever it is. It doesn't have to be a pen and paper system. Anything that gives you a chance to sit down and just kind of check in with yourself and make sure you're still happy and make sure you're still motivated to do things will work just fine. The important part is that you've done it so that you can see your trends and that you can know where you are on kind of a baseline level. And this last one, shed light, not heat. So this is our final philosophical moment because I like to have a final philosophical moment. It's a really kind of wordy way to say if you as somebody who is leading anybody or mentoring anybody or is an inspiration to someone, you have a responsibility to them when you can to shed light on situations that are clouded in mystery. You can't always tell people why things are happening just because sometimes that's not information they're allowed to have. It's not information they're prepared to have. But when you have a lot of tiny decisions being made, shrouded in mystery and covered in clouds and stuff you don't know and don't worry, I have all the answers. Let me shed my warmth of knowing on you. It's not the same thing as saying, I know this is a stressful situation for you. This is why we had to make those choices. Let's all find a way to move forward with a collective decision about what to do next and the next steps that we have to do in order to just kind of get to the next spot. Everyone who burns out started by loving the work that they did just across the board. Use these steps to enjoy yourself and avoid burning out. I have some additional resources. They're all scientific papers and so if you wanna take a picture and check them out later, you're welcome to. But also, they're like 120 pages, so enjoy that. And I am ready for questions if you have them. Yes. Yeah, so the question here is about rust out. That is kind of a buzz feed term for lack of a better way to call that. So the concept of rust out is generally the idea that you have a set of skills that you know that you can use and they're not allowed to be used for whatever reasons. A lot of how that works out is you have been assigned some particular type of work and so for instance, let me just give it a real, a real for instance, say you're working customer support and you are essentially a developer but all anybody wants to ask you questions about is how to handle their DNS, like that's it or how to register a domain all day long. At some point, you will start to feel like you as a developer don't have any way to access those other skills that you have and at some point you will start to feel like you're losing the ability to use those skills. It's wrapped up in that third area, the enjoyment and inefficacy part. It's not necessarily true that you are losing those skills but in a lot of cases it will end up being true if that remains a thing that happens to you. We have a lot of word campers across the whole program who have said I came to a word camp and discovered that that is the work I want to do and I have not been doing it for long enough that I need to get out of that and start working on WordPress or I need to start working on themes or plugins. Rust out is something that you have, if you are on a team, if you're a contributor to a team you have to talk to the people who can help you change your skill set or move to a different job. I really wished I wasn't gonna have to say that. Sometimes the answer to your burnout is moving to a different job. And so, yeah, rust out. Terribly complicated but easy fix. Do we have other questions? If you're in the sunlight, I can't see you. Yes. Hello. Can you go back to the sticker calendar? Is that like a real thing? Yes. So, all right, so. I have a visual calendar and it has like a full seven days on one page. It's like just big boxes. And I write down all the things that I'm going to do. Once a week I sit down and look at everything that I have to do for the week and plan out when it can be done, et cetera, et cetera. There is a section that I have dedicated to, things that happened just like basically journaling through the day. 20 minutes a day of blogging is considered a cathartic practice. This is essentially that but on paper. And so like at the end of the day I'll sit down and be like, how much did I love my work today? For what it's worth, I almost always do love my work. But every once in a while you get those days where you're just like everything was hard and you put a big frowny face on it. It's literally just a calendar and I printed stickers that are smiley or not smiley. I have it with me in the hotel but I'm not going to bring it to show you because then it would be really embarrassing. Yeah. So the question is, well, it was a statement and then a question. So the statement was, a lot of times burnout can be avoided by having a decent system to manage all of your input output stuff. And then the question was, do I have a favorite task manager? Yeah. One. Yes? For one, I love organization in all its ways. Excessive organization so that you can churn out more and more stuff is a little bit dangerous in the burnout way, speaking from experience. I have done that in the past. I've spent a lot of time just like, I'm going to plan every 30 minutes and make everything work. It doesn't work for the long term. So there's that. I don't have a favorite task management system that is automated anymore for a reason. I found that the notifications that were constantly coming in started to blind me. I had no concern over the notifications at some point, but also because I had at some point in the past put in all of my tasks and then got notifications about it. I would have forgotten about it. I didn't plan for it and I was blindsided by everything every single day. And so it seemed far more stressful than it was even when I had stopped trying to fit 10,000 things into a 5,000 thing day, you know? I do sort of use a little bit of a task manager, but it doesn't give me any notifications. It's called Habitica, used to be Habit RPG. It's an open source project and I love it. I can't contribute anything to them so I can contribute money. Cause if you don't have time, I guess I give my money to it. That was a really bad analogy. But yes, Habitica is what I use, but not in any sort of push notification way. Is this a question? Yeah. Yes, getting back to your little smiley stickers and your frowny stickers. What am I supposed to do when I have a day that it wasn't my fault? I mean, my iMac wasn't working right. Then my Mac book was having a problem. And then one of my clients called and he couldn't manage something on his convert kit slash cat. It's just like, what do I do about them? I mean, it's like that's putting those negative stickers or it's just gonna remind me how bad that day was. Don't put a sticker for everything that was negative. I did that once, it was a terrible plan. Yeah. Number one. But I think this gets us back to where are we kids? That one. No one it's in your control. There are negative things that will happen to you that you just can't help. If an earthquake happens, there's nothing that you could have done to prevent that. And counting those things that make you feel negatively as negative things that you could have prevented and so you feel bad about that is not gonna be productive. I didn't repeat the question. The question was what if you have a bunch of things that are causing you to feel negatively and they are not in your control? Know that they're not in your control. And be roughly prepared to give yourself the permission to not beat yourself up about it. A lot of this is mental permission stuff. Like you have to be prepared to say that was real bad. But someone else's computer not working wasn't something that I could have helped in any way. The wifi going out is not something that I could have helped immediately in any way. I think we have time for one more question if there's a brave person. Oh, we have a brave person, yes. Question is why can you not come back from compassion fatigue? So compassion fatigue is, it is a rewiring of the brain, essentially. Is, okay, so a current example is news media. We are seeing a lot of context free, excessively negative stuff right now. And a lot of people are getting so desensitized to it that it just doesn't matter anymore. Their brains are getting rewired to just not be so upset about a war-torn country, not be upset about somebody getting shot unnecessarily yet again for reasons that are beyond their control. It is that. And yeah, a rewiring of the brain, not possible to necessarily rewire it back. Yeah, cool. You all have been lovely today. Thank you very much for having me.