A previous client asks for help navigating their own burn out while dealing with a demanding boss.

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Here’s my advice on managing stress, dealing with demanding bosses, and finding sustainable ways to recharge. I look at the importance of questioning assumptions, setting boundaries, and experimenting with new approaches to reclaim control over one’s work-life balance.

Considerations

  • You can’t keep pumping air into the metaphorical balloon; it will eventually pop
  • Does constant pressure need to be “managed?”
  • Stop comparing your limits to others; everyone has different constraints
  • Saying no is a powerful tool for reducing stress and workload
  • Team agreements can clarify communication norms and reduce ambiguity
  • Test small changes like turning off your phone for short periods to gauge the impact
  • Meditation isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution; explore other recharging methods
  • Write down all of the assumptions you have about your situation and question their validity
  • Experiment with scenarios that challenge your fears (e.g., being unavailable and seeing what happens)
  • Ask yourself what your current situation is doing to your body, soul, and relationships
  • Consider whether your job aligns with what you want in life long-term
  • Challenge the belief that you must always be available or risk losing your job
  • Agreements are better than expectations—collaborate with others on clear terms
  • Test turning off Slack or disabling presence indicators to reduce pressure
  • Sustainable productivity requires intentional boundaries, not cheat codes
  • Physical symptoms of stress often signal deeper issues; don’t ignore them
  • If nothing changes in your current situation, consider the long-term consequences on your health and happiness
  • Reach out for help or coaching if you’re stuck—there’s always something new to try

Credits

All songs licensed under Creative Commons

Transcript

This transcript was created automatically and may contain small errors.

The context of today’s topic is brought to us by a former client. By the way, I love hearing from former clients. It never happens too much, ever. So if you are one of those former clients, coachees, whatever you want to call yourself, and you’re kind of Kind of itching to send me an update or ask me a question or whatever. There’s no way that you can impose or inconvenience me if that’s your story.

It’s impossible. So feel free to reach out. If you have my email address, email me. If you don’t have my email address, message me on LinkedIn. I prefer email to LinkedIn, but whatever you got, use it.

I would love to hear from you. I love hearing from people because they are often in situations that I also find myself in, which is I think that I have 2 bad choices.

And what I continue to see over and over and over and over again, the people that I coach and being coached myself, is when I think there’s only 2 bad choices, I usually have like a 3rd and a 4th choice. And so that’s kind of what we’re playing with here today. So this person reached out to share some great news in a text message, and we went back and forth a little bit and I think they had mentioned my podcast or something. And as I often do with people, I said, hey, do you have anything that would be useful to talk about on my podcast? Is there a question you would like me to answer?

And I didn’t hear from them for a while. And I thought, oh, I guess they don’t have any questions. Okay. And then I got this wonderful email. And so we went back and forth on email in a little more detail.

And I’m going to read some of their questions here. And then give my thoughts on them.

So the context for this person is it’s the holidays. They’re expecting to get a break after a brutal year. They’re looking forward to a number of days off in a row where they can just recharge, relax, regroup, whatever the case might be. And instead of that happening, they had a number of unforeseen interruptions. They had someone that resigned from their position, and so they needed to get on the phone with their boss to sort that out, and any number of other things that popped up that they felt compelled to respond to.

Background or context here too is this person’s boss is, sounds like very high energy, works at a very high level, works a number of hours, doesn’t take very much time off. And there is either an implicit or explicit expectation that this person work at the same level. So he has a feeling that he has to be as available and as on and as working as hard as his boss. And he’s starting to feel like maybe that’s not sustainable. So he sent me roughly some questions and then I went back to him and said, okay, Can you distill this down into exactly what your questions are?

And if you had any conversations, coaching conversations with me, you know that I often will say, okay, so you’ve shared a lot of things here. What is the question? And so they wrote me back with 5 specific questions that I will answer to the best of my ability here. Now, before I answer the questions, a very important disclaimer. I coach people in these environments a lot.

I have been in similar, but maybe not to the same degree, high-intensity environments as this. I was earlier in my career, and I have consciously opted out of these environments and no longer work in them by my own choice.

And I feel like that’s important to say so that if you hear my answers here as lacking compassion or real-world possibility, I believe it is. And I respect the fact that everyone’s circumstances are different and we each make our own choices. And prioritize things differently. So the first question here is, with modern technology meaning we are contactable far outside the 8 to 5 every day, including weekends and vacations, combined with an instant lifestyle that society has developed into, how on earth can we manage this constant pressure?

What comes to me here is the image of a balloon. Or a steel cylinder, some type of closed system that you could pump air into. And it seems to me that at a certain point, you can only put so much— well, we’ll just use the example of a balloon. You can only put so much air into a balloon before it pops. So in some ways, I read this question as How do we keep putting air in a balloon and the balloon not pop?

And my response to this is, well, there’s an assumption that we must continue to put air into the balloon.

And I would question that. I would also question the viability or the possibility of a balloon that can take an infinite amount of air without popping. I don’t think it’s possible. So the first thing around this question that I would be questioning is, do you have to manage the constant pressure? Can it even be managed? Or are you trying to manage something that can’t be managed?

Second question. When we feel stressed, we feel overwhelmed with the volume of issues that need to be addressed in addition to prioritizing What other effective techniques can be employed to deal with getting through it? Is there anything that can start to close the tap rather than just deal with an ever-increasing set of demanding tasks?

And I would say, again, sitting on the outside, there’s probably an opportunity to say no to certain things that maybe is not being exercised. Maybe. Because as the last part of this sentence says, is there anything that can start to close the tap rather than just deal with an ever-increasing set of demands and tasks? I’m potentially reading into this, but the assumption that you can just deal with an ever-increasing set of demands and tasks infinitely, I’ve never seen that work. There are constraints.

We all have limitations. Now, I’ve worked with people in investment banking that work hours and travel to a degree that I cannot fathom. That would not work for me. I just don’t get it. And yet they do it.

I think each person’s constraints and limits are different. Perhaps the first false step here is comparing our own constraints to someone else’s and using that as the measure. That might be one place to look. But when I think about this question, I just say, if we’re thinking of a balloon that can only hold so much air, yes, at a certain point, you have to stop putting air in the balloon. The third question here is dealing with a frenzied boss without being career limiting or simply leaving the role.

How can we manage up When someone expects the same level of activity from their team that they show themselves. I would come at this one a couple of different ways. One, I would come at it from the question of, how do we know this is true? Has this person sat down with their boss and said, hey, I noticed you never take any vacations. I noticed that you work 12 to 14 hours a day.

Do you have the same level of expectation from all the people that work for you? Now, I’ve also worked in situations and for people where having this conversation would be a major career-limiting move. I’m imagining— I was never in investment banking. I was in public accounting. Banking and those environments could be somewhat intense, but not to the same level of investment banking.

Yes. Could you sit down with your boss in an investment banking situation and say, these 80- to 100-hour work weeks, I noticed that you’re working that much. Do I have to? Yeah, that would probably be the end of that situation. I get that.

And I think it’s important to be asking yourself, what is this doing to me? How long can I sustain working 80 to 100 hours a week and it not adversely affect my life in a way that doesn’t work for me?

And I’m holding open the possibility, because I have worked with some of these people, that somehow it works for them. I don’t understand that. They have families, they do different things, and I don’t have any judgment towards them. And I’ve also known some people that have been in those spaces that have gotten out of them as well. But I would— the questions I would be asking are, is this getting me more or less of what I want in my life?

And if it’s getting you closer to the things that you want in your life, then, well, it seems like it’s working for you. In the context of the person that shared this question with me, I haven’t talked to them in depth about this yet, but my sense is that they have some type of a relationship with their boss that they could potentially have this conversation. And so that’s the first place I would start is how do we know it would be a career-limiting move to sit down and have a conversation with the boss and say something like, It’s been a brutal year. You know, we’ve all been burning the candle at both ends. I need, I need a full week off to hit the ground running again in 2025.

Is there any way we could design or come up with some agreements or a setup here so that I know that I don’t have to be looking at my phone or accessible or whatever from this date to this date. Could we create something or work out something in a way that would work that way? And could we also agree in advance what the exceptions to that would be? So that’s how I would come at question number 3 here. What is true?

What is absolutely true? Now, I have worked for people Where I also believe that behavior is a language. I’m stealing that from John Delony. He’s a therapist that has a radio show, and I find him kind of interesting and intriguing. Anyway, he has this whole thing of like behavior is a language.

So while I don’t believe that we can ever know 100% what someone is thinking or feeling, I think if we observe and experience enough of their behavior over time, that can become a language. I’m thinking of one very specific person that I worked for in my career that my experience of them was that they were very low in integrity. They told me a lot of things in confidence that seemed to be breaking confidences with other people. And so I determined that trusting this person with my career and other things was just not a wise idea. So would I have had this particular conversation with that person?

No, I would not have. And eventually I moved out of the role that I was in into a much better role. And some of those experiences were motivations and pointed me kind of in the direction of, you got to do something different. Because as this person shared separately in a different part of their email, it’s starting to have physical— Implications on their body. And I definitely went through some kind of mysterious— they were real illnesses and pain.

Like, I was feeling it in my body, but we could never quite figure out what was going on or where it was coming from. Number 4, can we turn the phone off? Oh, I’m sure there’s an answer to this one, but a fascinating discussion for a podcast. I feel like the answer is very different between companies, even within companies. It all depends on the people and what they are used to.

So while I agree that it varies between companies and within companies and teams, I do know that there are teams, and I’ve talked to people that are on them, where the teams sit down and they create team agreements, which is essentially, how are we going to be with each other on this team? How will we use Slack? How will we use text messages? What are the channels that we’re going to use? How are we going to use them?

When are we going to use them? When do they not apply? What are the exceptions?

Can you turn your phone off? Yes. I mean, as far as I know, every phone has an off button.

How high are the consequences if your phone is in that off position? And I’ve played with this with people. I had a current client actually that was visiting different sites and they left their phone in the car on purpose. I think it was like a 30 or 45-minute meeting that they were having. And the person that they were with was like, is this okay?

They were kind of in shock that this person was leaving their phone behind. And they just said, well, We’re going into this meeting. We need to be fully present. So yeah, my coach challenged me to do this. And so like, let’s just leave our phones here and see what happens.

He’s had nothing but positive things happen as a result of doing that. The other thing to play with, or the thing to play with on this one, as far as I’m concerned, is testing it out, experimenting. Maybe you want to start really small. Maybe you want to start with 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour. Same thing with Slack.

I’ve had, oh, I had a recent conversation with someone here. We were lovingly calling it the green dot, that stinking presence indicator. The last role that I was in, it was a contract role a couple, 2 or 3 years ago. The first thing I did was I disabled that thing. I just thought, I’m available.

I’m available when I’m available. And I’ll answer your question when I answer your question. And I had kind of an internal policy of, I will always reply within 24 hours. So some of this, I believe, is training. Did I respond on the spot all the time?

No, I didn’t. Did I respond pretty quickly? Yeah. But it wasn’t based on my presence indicator. So I think some of this, the last part of the question here, it all depends on the people and what they are used to.

Some of this is training people to get used to certain things, which is, oh yeah, I don’t respond all the time. I don’t respond in an instant, but I always respond. I always respond within a certain time. And again, if you have a team where you can figure some of this stuff out, oh my goodness. It erases so much ambiguity and so much expectations that you just instead have agreements.

This is how we’re going to do this. This is how this can work. This is how we’re agreeing to work together versus the cringy. And if you’ve ever listened to Steve Chandler’s Expectations Versus Agreements, you can never hear again in the same way when someone says, you know, well, I set expectations with my team. I expect this, I expect that.

There’s, there’s a completely better way, and it’s creating agreements. This again, this one, testing things out, finding out what’s true, coming up with agreements on— or, you know, in the case, in this person’s situation, it could be maybe a conversation with the boss that just says, hey, by the way, I’m turning my phone off. It won’t be on. If this happens, this happens, or this happens, You can call my wife. Sure.

Or I was gonna say call the home phone, but does anyone have a home phone anymore? I don’t know. And then the last question, are there any cheats that can help with recharging our batteries? Meditation can be useful, but I feel its beneficial impact doesn’t last long enough. In the context of the person that sent me this question, who is highly educated, Yeah.

With one of the, with, I think the highest degree you can get from a university. And my guess is most people listening to this, there aren’t any cheats. Like, you know them all already. You’ve, you’re, you’ve deployed them all. You’re managing a bazillion things.

You know how to prioritize, you know how to get stuff done. You know how to focus on what’s important. And when I hear cheats, I think of a game. I think of a video game or something, you know, are there cheat codes? You know, ultimately, if you want to get good at a game, you have to develop some new skills.

Yeah. I don’t think there are cheat codes for any of these things. I, if there’s, I just don’t. I think it comes down to carving out some space to really sit back and think what’s important to me. Where is all this headed?

If nothing changes for the next year, 3 years, 5 years, what will this have done to my body, to my soul, to my spirit, to my family, to the things that are important to me?

After this person sent me these 5 questions, I wrote back and said, you know, these are great questions and I will answer them, which is what I’m doing right now. And To really get somewhere and go somewhere with your situation, the best way for me to help you with that is to have a conversation. So we’re going to have a conversation and I have no idea what we’re going to discover. My hunch is what we’re going to discover is there are some untested assumptions about this situation that once tested, Might yield a better outcome. So that would be my encouragement to you if you find yourself in a similar situation is, and I would ask the same question to the person that sent me this question is, what haven’t you tried yet?

There’s always something that you haven’t tried yet. It’s usually living in the land of, oh, I haven’t tried that because, you know, that would be the nuclear option or that would result in catastrophic damage or career-limiting moves. And yet, if you step back and really, really, really, really, really be open and question, you might find— you will probably find that there’s more there. Even— I think it was in one of these questions.

Somewhere in this question, I can’t remember, or maybe it was in the other background they provided me, that was a statement that, quote, I have to have a job. To which I would say, is that true? Or said a different way, how long could you not have a job and things be okay?

This question always surprises me. I do my best to not make up money stories for people. And I remember asking this question to a prospective client several years ago.

I don’t think their partner liked the answer to their question or the fact that I asked it. And so I’d never heard from them. I think I heard from them once again, but we didn’t end up working together. But we were going around about different things and I said, well, So you’re trying to find a new job. How bad do you need money?

They’re like, well, not really at all. And I said, well, then why are you looking for a job? They’re like, well, you know, because my partner wants me to have a job, but I really like this other stuff I’m doing and they make a really good living, so I don’t really need to work.

And I have seen this play out a number of times and I have asked people, they’re like, yeah, but I have to have a job. Okay, totally fair. And without disclosing any number, you don’t have to tell me the numbers, but how many months could you, based on how much money you have in the bank or resources available to you, how many months could you go without working? It surprised me the number of times people have said in excess of a year. Or someone that’s maybe presented as kind of in a dire situation, like, well, I could probably go a year, year and a half, probably 2 years at the most.

But then, like, I wouldn’t have any money left. So that’s a very specific example. But my overall encouragement with all these things is, how do I know what’s true?

Is it true? Maybe you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, yeah, but my situation is totally different. My encouragement to you would be, there’s something about physical pen and paper, pencil and paper. Get out a piece of paper. And write down all of the things that you believe are true about your situation.

Unfiltered, no judgment. You’re probably going to write down some stuff that’s just— you think to yourself is kind of ridiculous. Just write it down anyway. So, I must work or we will have no money. I must be available or I will lose my job.

I must work as hard as my boss or I’ll get a bad review. I must, I must, I should, I have to, like write all those things down and then go back through the list very, very slowly and just say, how do I know this is 100% true? How do I know this is 100% true? And if, as you go through, you’re like, eh, I guess that one, I’m like, I’m about 75% sure that’s true. Next question to ask would be like, how could I get 5% more truth or clarity on whether this is true?

What would I have to do? What kind of experiment would I have to run? What kind of questions would I have to ask? What kind of agreements would I need to make with certain people? And see what that shows you.

And if you get to the end of this whole exercise and you’re like, yeah, my situation’s special, John. None of your questions worked. I don’t think any of this stuff really works. That’s perfect. That’s great.

Email me. We’ll have a conversation. Or if you went through this exercise and you’re like, yeah, I’m starting to see some glimmers of things that maybe I’m assuming are true that I’m not quite sure are true, but I’m still stuck. Email me. We’ll have a conversation.

Or if you did this exercise and you had an incredible breakthrough, email me as well. Yeah. Email is REDACTED. That’s johnpoelstra.com, and I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for listening to The John Poelstra Show. Notes, links, and all that other good stuff for this episode are at johnpoelstra.com. Send your questions, ideas, or a simple hello to REDACTED.

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