Dealing with Burnout Part 2 — Joel Yoder — Ep. 080

Lesson Transcript

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. We're here with Joel Yoder again, and we're in New York City at the Training Center, where you teach a bunch of different classes on ministry and church and being involved in reaching out to people. In the last episode we did, we were discussing what burnout is, what causes it, the ways we can help. This time, let's kind of follow up on that conversation.

What are ways that we as individuals specifically, people that are in ministry, people involved in church, what are things we can do to avoid burnout to begin with? I wish I had a perfect answer to that, and I want to give a couple of disclaimers here. One, I don't know that there is a roadmap that works for everyone. There is no perfect "if you follow these steps, you will avoid burnout," but I do think that there are some steps that we can take that will certainly reduce it and hopefully avoid burnout.

I have a list of about 15 different things that we can do that are not original with me. They're a result of reading good books on the subject, and hopefully we can have a list of resources that the viewers could follow up on—good books, good articles. So the points that I'm going to give are not original with me. The first one I mentioned in our last episode, and I think it's vital. I'm re-saying it because I think it's so important, and that is link your work to serving your Heavenly Father.

In other words, the ministry that you're involved in, I'm doing this ministry, or you're doing this ministry because of your love for God, and you're following His call on your life to serve these people. And when that is our number one focus, then even if people don't respond the way that we want, it's disappointing, but we're not failures because ultimately our work is for God. So link your work with serving your Heavenly Father. The second thing, spend lots of time in the Word of God and in prayer.

The more time you spend in prayer, I think, will have a direct correlation to reduction in burnout. The more you spend in prayer, the more time you spend with our Father, the more direction we get in saying, "This is where you're supposed to go. This is when you can say no. This is when you can stop for the night," or, "This is a request you should take." Spend lots of time with the Word of God in prayer. Another one that's similar and yet is different is practice stillness. Just spend some time.

This is not a Buddhist meditation, but just practice stillness. Anna Werner says it's a conscious reminder that we can stop and the world won't. Hmm. Unpack that a little more. When you say stillness, are you saying removing yourself from where you're at or just getting away from people, or is it different? It's a little different. Just taking time to just pause and reflect and rest. Getting quiet in your head? Just quiet in your mind. Again, it's usually we think, "Well, I can't just be quiet.

I have to be praying, or I have to read my Bible, or I have to be doing something." Part of our society has driven us to that. We keep going and going and going. And if we sit down for five minutes or ten minutes, it's like, "Oh my goodness, I feel guilty. I should be doing something. I'm lazy." And sometimes just practice sitting down, just stop. It's a reminder that I can stop and the world won't. Another thing that you can do that I think is really important is develop some margin in your life.

We all have the limits of what we can sustain long term, and we're going to have times where we're working above that limit. We know it's not sustainable long term because there's always going to have—we're always going to have crises that are going to come up. We're going to have unexpected events. So if you have margin in your life between your maximum of what you can sustain and where you actually are, that gap is your margin.

And if you can develop margin in your life, so then unexpected events come and you're like, "Yeah, I can do that." You have some cushion, basically. Right. You have a cushion there. And part of the problem that I have that led me closer to burnout, as I said in our last episode, was not having margin in my life. I maxed out my schedule.

I was like, "Well, I can squeeze this in yet." And then you kind of get used to that pace of life, and then you're just like, "Well, maybe I could do something else or unexpected things come." So develop margin in your life, I think that's really important. One way to do that, and this is another point to avoid—how to avoid burnout is learn how to say no. I don't like saying no. Me neither. I'm afraid people won't like me, or the ironic thing is, is when you learn to say no, then your yes becomes more valuable.

And stop and think about this for a minute. So if you're involved in ministry and people know that they can come and they can dump anything on you and you always say yes, you will be taken for granted. And if you're not careful, you're going to start—you'll say yes, but you'll resent the people for asking. Ooh. That happens. Yeah. That happens in ministry. I've done it. I've said yes, but inside I'm like, "Can't you see I'm overworked?" We need to learn how to say no.

And that's one way to learn how to avoid burnout, or how to avoid burnout is by learning how to say no. Peter Brain in his book, Going the Distance, says, "Pastors burn out because they're lazy." And you're like, "What do you mean, Mr. Peter? What do you mean?" He's like, "Actually, they're too lazy to develop a schedule and articulate their priorities and say, 'This is what I'm going to do,' and then everyone else's priorities become their priorities, so they burn out." Oh, wow.

So articulate your priorities, say, "This is important. This is what I'm going to do. This is a priority for me," and you schedule those in. And then sometimes you do have to say no to other requests. Another thing that you can do to help avoid burnout is take time to take care of yourself. Intentional self-care is not intended to be self-pampering.

It's not a self-indulgence, but rather it's trying to manage the resources that God has given us, and our body is one of those resources to be able to sustain ourself to go the distance. Some of those things could include having hobbies, something that you do just because you enjoy doing it. We sometimes can feel guilty because we're like, "Oh, I'm involved in ministry, and I know people are supporting me, and I'm supposed to be working." Well, stop and think for a moment.

If you work for a carpenter and you're doing your carpenter job, when you're on the clock, you're working 45 hours a week or however many hours a week. You want to give everything you can because you're being paid for that. And ministry is no different. But just the fact that people are supporting us in ministry doesn't mean that they expect us to work 90 hours a week. We do need to have time to recharge and do something that we enjoy. So have hobbies.

And hopefully it was something that you enjoyed before you went overseas or before you got involved in ministry, something you did before. Maybe it's painting or drawing or reading, but have hobbies that you can do. Another thing that is really important is get physical exercise. It's different than having hobbies. So they can be kind of similar, but getting physical exercise, getting out and getting your heart stirring.

Not the study done by Oxford University, but a separate study found that if you get physical exercise three to four times a week, that is just as effective for dealing with depression as taking a medium to mild dose of antidepressants. Many studies, almost every book that I have read on burnout or relating to that subject emphasizes that point, that you need to get physical exercise. Another thing that you can do to help avoid burnout is to continue learning.

I think I said it in the last episode, in ministry, we're often giving out, and I think it's important that we take in. Get good books to read. So maybe you could set a goal of, "I'm going to read one good book for input," not just for the fun of it. You can read as a hobby, but reading, intentional reading for input, maybe one good book a month or one book a quarter, something like that. Set it a reasonable goal that you can take in and continue getting more input.

Another thing that I think is important in how to avoid burnout is have friendships outside of your team. Often in ministry, we're living overseas. We're sharing a house. Maybe you're sharing a room, depending on if you're single like a school teacher or you're working in a setting. You're sharing a room with your fellow worker. You're sharing a vehicle. You eat your meals together. You go to the same church. And if your only friends are in that circle, it can start rubbing on you after a while.

So have a friend off the team. The only reason you're friends is because you enjoy being together. That's a good thing to have in order to avoid or to help avoid burnout. Kind of along with that too, you could have a mentor. I think it's really important. Every one of us needs a mentor, someone that can speak into our life that when we're not sure where to go or what to do with the situation, we can say, "Hey, I'm not sure. You've walked a road like this before me.

How can I handle this?" That was the biggest one for me, honestly, having good mentors in my life. Another thing you can do is just pay attention to your body. This is not so much something to do, but more like a warning sign, something to be alert for if you realize that you're always tired. Your body's trying to tell you something. It's saying, "Slow down. Either you need to get more sleep. You need to spend less time on social media or something." But you need to get more sleep and slow down a bit.

So maybe it's a loss of appetite. Maybe it's a sudden weight gain or weight loss. Your body's trying to tell you something. So listen to your body if you see abnormal or changes that are no longer normal. Listen to your team members. I talked about that earlier, that maybe your team members are saying, "Hey, Regan, you need to slow down a bit. Don't take on so much." Someone just told me that today, actually. That's interesting. Don't resent them for it. I did. I did.

I'm like, "Why are you telling me?" That's what I enjoy doing. Yeah. Yeah. Even if it's something you enjoy doing, you can only do so much. So if your team members are saying, "Hey, you're approaching this limit. You're going to go over the edge," listen to them. Not saying you can't do anything without their permission, but listen to them. They do care about you. That's why they are taking the time to share that with you.

And finally, I think I'll just say, pay attention if the things that you used to enjoy have lost their appeal. You no longer enjoy them. And I talked about that in a previous episode. When I used to enjoy a particular ministry and I no longer enjoyed it, that was a warning sign, and I knew it. At the time, I wasn't quite sure what to do, but I needed to slow down.

So there's just a few things there that you can pay attention to, steps you can take, things you can be listening for, being alert to that hopefully can help you avoid burnout. I don't want to see our workers burned out. It takes far more time and far more energy to recover from burnout than it does to avoid it in the first place.

And I really want anyone who's involved in ministry to stay back from that edge so they don't have to go through the struggle and the time and the pain of trying to rebuild after burning out. Yeah. That's a big one for people to understand. Maybe they don't quite realize how detrimental this is to what they're actually trying to do and how less effort it would take just to sustain themselves instead of just pushing themselves all the way until something breaks. Yeah.

Well, we want people to take this seriously, learn from it, and as a result, be so much more effective in what they're trying to do. So thank you for taking the time, doing all the research, putting all this together. Yeah. That's really good stuff. And maybe people will watch this and want to come take some of your classes up here in New York City someday. I'd be glad if they would. That would be awesome. We'll put a link to it. Maybe we can get some people to come over here, but. Sure. Yeah.

I really appreciate your time.