Burnout Coaching

What Is Coaching? Burnout Coaching?
Coaching is the process of working through opportunities and challenges with a “thinking partner,” the coach, whose role is to ask good questions that allow you to think through your situation, goals, and strategies for moving forward. The coach is an expert in a process, but you are the expert in your life, hopes, and needs. The coach helps you tap into yourself to better live your values, meet your goals, and overcome obstacles in your path.

Coaching is not therapy, though they might overlap occasionally. Therapists often work with clients who might be experiencing mental illness or distress by excavating the past to understand how it is impacting the present. Coaches, instead, focus on the now and the future, assuming the client has everything they need to succeed.

This distinction narrows when we are talking about burnout. The World Health Organization defines burnout as a syndrome rather than a mental illness. A coach or a therapist can work with you on moving through a burnout experience, depending on what you need – someone to focus on the mental health factors (therapist) or someone to help you develop strategies for work addressing burnout that align with your values, your work, and your goals (a coach like me who has done significant research on burnout).

Is Burnout Coaching For You?
Coaching is an intensive process of self-discovery and self-work that leads you closer to your best self. Coaching is right for you if you want to work closely with someone to explore your values, goals, needs, and challenges and you are comfortable developing those answers yourself – a good coach will never tell you what to do but help you figure out what you think your next best move is.

If you are experiencing burnout and considering working with a coach like me who has a personal experience and a research background in this area, consider these questions:

• Are you experiencing the symptoms of burnout: exhaustion, depersonalization or cynicism toward the job, and (perceived) reduced professional effectiveness?
• Are these symptoms interfering with your ability to do your job or enjoy your life?
• Are you ready to make some changes in your thinking and situation to deal with the burnout?

If you answered yes, burnout coaching with me may be right for you.

What Is RPR’s Approach?
I practice values-based coaching infused with Appreciative Inquiry and have been developing materials and a system for working with higher education faculty and leaders experiencing burnout for the last six years. My research with women faculty and leaders in higher education experiencing burnout deeply informs my approach to my coaching. For many higher ed professionals, burnout can feel like a shameful secret, but surfacing and understanding those emotions helps us work through them productively to address the core issues around burnout.

A typical coaching session starts with agenda-setting where we work together to determine the topic and goal for our 60-minute session. During the coaching, I will ask powerful questions and use various coaching activities and tools to help you explore the topic to better understand your thinking, feelings, and behaviors. At the end of the session, we’ll check in to make sure we met our session goal, identify any action items you will pursue between sessions, and decide on an accountability plan.

A burnout coaching session is similar, including more direct focus on issues and coaching tools relevant to the burnout experience. I bring specific tools to the session, but we always follow the path most valuable for the coachee so you can achieve your goals. I also draw on my experience in leadership development, writing productivity, project management, and career development to support clients.

Is RPR Credentialed?
Yes. I trained with higher ed administrator and coach training leader Dr. Katie Linder and earned her Associate Certified Coach (ACC) credential from the International Coaching Federation in 2022. Including additional training with the College of Executive Coaching, I have 165 hours of training education and 240+ hours of coaching practice. I do in-house coaching for the faculty of Georgia Tech in my role as director of the Office of Faculty Professional Development.

Additionally, I am well-qualified to work with higher education professionals. I earned my Ph.D. in rhetoric and professional communication from Iowa State University in 2007. I served on the faculty as a tenured-track and then tenured professor at Elon University for 12 years. Prior to my current role as the director of faculty professional development at Gerogia Tech, I served in Center for Teaching and Learning as a faculty teaching and learning specialist. During this time, I did extensive interviews with women faculty on their burnout experience which resulted in my book, Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal (Johns Hopkins, 2022). I am frequently called upon by the Chronicle and Inside Higher Education as well as ACE to talk about burnout in higher education. This summer I conducted over 50 interviews with higher education leaders at all levels to better understand their burnout experiences and impact on institutional mission, which I am working to turn into a book for leaders, also with Johns Hopkins. I bring all of this knowledge to bear in my work with coaching clients to support their development and well-being.

What Packages Does RPR Offer?
I offer six- and ten-session burnout coaching packages for higher education professionals.Each session is 60 minutes. In the first session, we explore where you are in your burnout experience and the role your values may play in your career development and burnout recovery. In sessions that follow, we follow your needs and specific areas of concern, while also bringing in research-based tools exploring purpose, compassion, trust, connection, and balance.

I recommend a six-session package if you are in the early stages of burnout or actively working to stay out of burnout. A ten-session package works well if you are feeling significant impacts of burnout to your work and life and want more dedicated time to work on changing behaviors and making career-related changes.

The cost for a six-session package is $1500. The cost for a ten-session package is $2500. I am happy to partner with your institution if you would like to use available professional development funds.

Sessions will be scheduled every 2-3 weeks to allow time to implement learning and tasks. Sessions are available 8-9am, 12-1pm, and 5-7pm ET during the week and 9am-2pm on weekends.

How Do You Get Started?
Look at my new website focusing on burnout coaching – www.higheredburnout.com – and complete the contact form below to schedule a 30-minute free session to discuss your interest and needs.