Everyone has experienced burn outs. We reach a point when it becomes too much. We go beyond our ability to handle anything. The slightest mishap can bring us to tears, or one extra inconvenience makes us go nuts. The funny thing is that people rarely burn out on bad things. It’s amazing what most people can handle. I was looking at the lives of various people I know, mostly mothers, who went through periods of extreme hardship without faltering. The people I looked at dealt with career mishaps, family tragedies, relationship issues, and despite grieving, stayed steady. Human beings have an amazing talent for rising to the occasion. We rarely burn out when times are tough. We often burn out when things get too good.

Brian Tracy, the motivational speaker and sales trainer, says that people have a “self-concept” for everything. The self concept is what we expect of and for ourselves in a given field. We have a self-concept to how well we do at work, we have a self-concept for how well we drive, a self-concept on how well we speak in public, etc. If we go too far above or below our self-concept, we do anything we can to get back to normal levels. If things get to bad, we rise up to the challenge, if things get too good, we tend to self-sabotage.

That’s what burning out is usually. It’s when we good things happen beyond our expectations. Brian Tracy mentions various experiences where he saw salespeople achieve their normal target way earlier in the month than expected, and saw that they couldn’t sell anymore till the next month. It’s not that they were lazy, it was that they couldn’t let themselves earn more than they felt they were worth. This is also why lottery winners often get depressed or even commit suicide. Their wealth has shot up way beyond their self-concept for how much they deserve.

You don’t have to stay with your current self-concept forever. You can always have more. In the next post I’ll talk about how to increase your self-concept so you don’t burn yourself out!