Plastic straws, turtles, and burnout recovery

There’s no quick fix for a hole it took years to dig

On a call with a client the other day, she dropped a line that I haven’t stopped thinking about.

She’s a physical therapist—I’ll call her Chrissy. She’s been in practice for 20 years. And she’s tired. Exhausted.

She told me she wanted out, but also she had no idea what to do next. Did she want to stay in corporate PT? Start her own practice? Leave the bedside?

I started describing how I work with clients to get them out of burnout. It takes eight weeks, I told her. In that time, we tackle some very big questions:

• Are the values that drive her today the same ones she had when she was 26? Are they ones she believes in, or did she adopt them due to societal expectation?
• How does she want to orient herself for the next decade?
• How does she navigate difficult conversations with family that considering a change will require?
• What does she do with the shame that sometimes comes when considering decreasing patient contact?
• Are there effective decision-making frameworks can she use to make a big, uncertainty-fraught, identity-changing decision?

(Side note, the longer I do this, the crazier I think it is that those of us in healthcare are entrusted to make life-altering decisions for our patients, but nobody has ever taught us…