How do you cope with stress and burnout as a people development professional?

> Set clear work-life boundaries, prioritize activities that recharge you (e.g., exercise, hobbies), and delegate tasks when possible. > Recognize you can't absorb everyone's stress. > Practice empathy but maintain an emotional distance to avoid compassion fatigue. > Talk to a therapist or counselor for stress management tools. > Look for training in resilience building or mindfulness to enhance your own well-being.

As a people development professional, managing stress and burnout involves prioritizing self-care and setting boundaries. Regularly engage in activities that promote relaxation and rejuvenation, such as exercise, meditation, or hobbies. Establish clear work-life boundaries to prevent overextension. Seek support from colleagues or mentors to share experiences and gain perspective. Delegate tasks when possible and focus on the most impactful initiatives. Embrace a growth mindset, viewing challenges as opportunities for learning and development. Regularly reassess and adjust goals to maintain a sustainable workload. Prioritize self-awareness to recognize signs of burnout early and proactively address them through targeted interventions.

Identify carefully the sources of stress. Usually there more then one reason for stress. Impact factors might be unclear goals, undefined processes, uneffective structures, lack of know how, missing digitization, lack of staff...etc. But as well interpersonal problems, misunderstandings between colleagues, disputes, competition, work against instead of with each other. Toxical behaviours, inbetween colleagues, teams or toxical bosses, missmanagement, bullying etc., lack of respect etc. Consequently it is very important to face an analisis by a 360º analisis, working climate analisis, one-to-one's with colleagues, superiors, subordinates. But as well to pay attention on regular conversations during meetings, coffee breaks, gangway talks etc.

Identifying little steps that can be firm boundaries can really help here. "Do not schedule" blocks for breaks each day (or blocking the first hour of your day so you don't start with meetings), no meeting Fridays, and other "time protectors" are small steps that can massively help both burnout and mental health.

Obviously you need to have a balance to be able to be of help. Your experiences are the best to recommend because you are able talk about you own experience. However there is no universal recipe. From my experience it is about a combination of socialization with "givers" instead of "takers". People that inspire you and make you feel after a conversation better. Journaling is a strong alliade to undertanding your thoughts and acts better. Reading is very helpful inspiring lecture, for example studying stoic philosophy might change your perspective, will expand your horizon and the way how to understand it is not happened, it is how we react.

Lean on and rely on others Those you trust There is value in simply sharing challenges or difficulties as the act of articulating them helps you process them yourself Insight or perspective from others also gives you another vantage point you may have not considered Feeling connected and part of a team is also extremely important. For those working remote, more needs to be done by leaders to facilitate that emotional support

We need to be humble enough to ask for help. You have to create a working enviroment of trust. A working enviroment of communication and the possibility to make any type of questions. There are no stupid questions. We have to make sure that this basic trust to ask questions or ask for help is given. Staff should not be afraid to make mistakes or to overload themselves. But the clou is trust and communication and obviously a positive feedback answer, feedback or support. If you have the chance to help, do it in the right way, that people feel they can ask the next time again. Humble behaviour giving support is very important to make feel people good asking for support.

Celebrate the wins! Big and small... The small one's tend to be forgotten, rushed past or not focused on But helping your team to celebrate success and highlight their achievements boosts morale, self esteem and resilience! There are some tools (highfive, even slack) that help people share accomplishments, but try to do this for real (in person, on video) to ensure it is authentic and not just another 'process' people have to follow

Stress/Burnout is a fact of life Even if your work environment isn't stressful, there will be times when your team are stressed about things outside of work! You need to be aware of this Appreciate everything happens in cycles If you want to retain and support people long term, take the peaks with valleys (but don't be an an enabler)

Corporate behaviour and culture is organic and depends on many different circunstances. It is a must to have a regular diagnostic. The pulse of this diagnostic will not only give you an insight about possible bug's in processes, structures, effective managing, but as well status quo of your work climate. Both aspects may lead to stress factors and burnout effects. As we take care of accurate data, rigor accounting, optimal revenue management, we have to take care as well about our company´s culture and behaviour to avoid stresss, burnouts and to assure our sustanaible and long term success.