Hey GenXer. You’re slogging away in a job that’s depleting your soul, but you tell yourself you have nothing to complain about. The paycheck is steady. Benefits are reliable. Sure, there is always a looming threat of a layoff, you feel lousy, and your friends are worried about you. But you’re not in a crisis. And a crisis would be the only valid cause for leaving corporate burnout behind.
Is this true?
Our culture normalizes the idea that hitting rock bottom is the appropriate catalyst for a life change. But it’s possible to improve your life without a dramatic crash.
So let’s talk about the idea of pre-traumatic growth: building the resilience you’ll need to step away from an unfulfilling corporate career before a crisis strikes.
The Myth of the Breaking Point
Getting to a breaking point is awful. A health scare, the loss of a relationship, a global pandemic. We all know what it feels like to go through it and then slowly crawl back out of the hole.
Emerging can also be clarifying: you look at your life with acute vision and an intense need to align with your values. When you take an action in response to that crisis, like quitting a job or moving to another city, you don’t have to prove your decision to anyone. You just went through a crisis! Of course you had to make a big change.
Besides, we GenXers love “starting over” stories; hearing about people who reinvented themselves after getting through something awful. Shawshank Redemption, Jerry Maguire, VH1’s Behind the Music series.
But you might have inadvertently gotten the memo that you also had to go through a catastrophe to “earn the right” to make a big move.
You worry that making a change absent a crisis will seem reckless and selfish, so you stay. Your crushed spirit doesn’t get more than a few Google searches and a half-hearted vision board.
We can do better than that.
Soul Rot vs. Trauma
Your desire to improve your life is all the reason you need.
Burnout can feel like a million cumulative paper cuts – you have to dull your senses to cope. Your curiosity and energy both take a hit when you’re just trying to get through the day. It all feels harder if you then judge yourself for your lack of motivation to investigate new ideas.
Your unhappiness can come out in other ways, too. Some of my clients get sick a lot. Others start having weird and uncomfortable social interactions. You might take small actions just to reclaim a sense of agency over your life, like buying clothing that feels like armor. Or making everyone in the house to listen to hair metal.
You’re not in a crisis, but one is brewing. So let’s head it off.
Pre-traumatic Growth
To grow before that crisis happens, you’ll need to build resilience, gather your resources, and take some tiny experimental steps.
This process is slow and intentional. Because you’ll have a sense of ownership over your circumstances, you’ll be less inclined to make impulsive decisions. You’ll start to nurture your curiosity and follow your interests.
Maybe your ultimate goal is to leave the job, even if it’s stable. It’s easy to focus on the stability and ignore the fact that you’ve been miserable, and maybe making everyone else miserable, too. A lot of people stay in their jobs because they worry they’ll regret leaving for something unknown. The unknown can be scary. But more often than not, we regret the moves we didn’t make, not the ones we did.
And this is the point of pre-traumatic growth: to create a stable base and a secure harness before you leap.
Gather Ye Resources
Your resources are the qualities and people that will support your future decision to leave and pursue something that feels more like you. Like Legend of Zelda, the more resources you gather, the more resilience you’ll have available to handle the difficulties of change.
And before you say you hate change or are afraid of it, let’s place that fear where it belongs. You’ve been through lots of changes before, and you got through each one. So it might not be the change itself that’s scary, but the feelings that change creates. I promise you can handle feelings. Besides, they don’t stick around for long.
Your body
The first and most important resources is your body: your home for all time. If you aren’t already eating well and exercising, start. Get outside regularly and drink enough water. Go to bed on time. You’re in training now, and your ability to initiate change will increase when you feel better. Even a daily 10-minute walk will get you started.
And if there’s a health issue that you’ve been putting off and you have health insurance, address it now.
Your emotions
Your emotional state will also need some attention, and self-compassion is a good start. When you tune into the part of you that feels stuck, you may discover a younger version of yourself who sat in their room feeling lonely and unwanted. Or a student who thought they had to earn the approval of everyone around them.
Please don’t punish that scared part of you. They are trying to protect you from the very feelings that you are building the capacity to handle.
Your people
Friends and family are a big part of this resilience-building process. Even if you’ve kept your unhappiness to yourself, it will likely not be a surprise to the people closest to you. Tell them how you’re feeling. And then conduct a couple of experiments.
Here’s one from Adam Grant: find someone in a similar situation to yours—burned out and dying to leave. Ask if they are open to some ideas for how to handle it and how to get out. Then listen to what you tell them. That’s for you, too.
And another: ask a close friend what they would think if you quit your job. You may be surprised to hear the cheers that come back at you, and you may soften the fear that you’ll be perceived as a failure if you leave.
Don’t Fret, Just Start
Pre-traumatic growth builds resilience, confidence, and bravery. Tending to your body and heart improves the stamina you’ll need to leave that company and reconnect with what you love.
For more ideas on what to do once you feel more supported, go back and listen to episode 6 and episode 9.
Many of us operate under mistaken assumptions about the reactions we’ll hear if we announce, “I don’t like this anymore,” and then leave. But get this: the people whose judgments you fear are probably also yearning to get out of their jobs. You’re part of a big club of non-identifying members.
Imagine that you’re 85 years old, looking back at this very day. What would you say to the present-day you?
I’d wager that you would not tell yourself to suck it up and stay put. That wise, older you might express compassion, remembering how it feels to be afraid and sad. But you also know that there are more chapters ahead, and time is getting shorter.
Pre-traumatic growth is deliberate, steady, and will pay dividends for decades. It will help you weather the storms of upcoming planned and surprise changes, of which there will be many. Knowing you can rely on yourself and the support of others can save you years of slow soul rot.
You don’t need a breakdown to start. Just start.
Burn the map. Build what fits.
