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Welcome to episode 165 of the Non Existence Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. Today's episode is another Friedman's fable. This one is called Burnout and it is a different take on how burnout happens and how to deal with it. So without further Ado, here is episode 165.

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Please obtain a copy of Friedman's Fables and read "Burnout."

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The scavenger fish in this fable is an overfunctioner. She cleans up everybody's messes so they don't have to, and this is the equilibrium or the homeostasis in the fish tank. Presumably, if she were to keep over functioning, she would eventually burn out.

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That's the moral of the story. Keep your nose to the grindstone and you will eventually flatten your face. You will burn out. The analogy here is that the scavenger fish decided to stop taking everybody else's crap and started to selfdifferentiated, and when you do that, it upsets the homeostasis of the system. People unwittingly start to dysfunction because they are used to not having to deal with their own crap. In Generation to Generation, Friedman describes this as a drain trap in a house. The drain trap has an upside down you and the right side of you, and that keeps the gasses from the sewer from rising up back into the system. It traps the gasses. In any system, there are one or more persons who will function as an anxiety trap for the system. They do this by either over functioning and or adapting to the behavior of others. This prevents anxiety or noxious gases from permeating through the system. But what happens when they self differentiate? It's as if the drain trap straightens out and all of the noxious gases go flowing through the system and everybody gets upset. What Friedman writes in Generation to Generation is that the people in the system will unwittingly try to bend the anxiety trap back into its original shape so that they don't have to deal with the noxious gasses.

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That is, so they don't have to take responsibility for self. This fable is as much about the resistance of the system to change as it is about burnout. It is as much about what Friedman calls sabotage, which is the most times unwitting behavior of people in the system to try to push it back to its former state. Friedman illustrates this point in the fable by showing that the behavior of the other species of fish in the tank is really unwitting. They are just dysfunctioning because they don't know how to deal with the fact that the scavenger fish is taking care of their crap. The last question in the study guide for this fable asks, in what way is burnout of any member in a system attributable to a failure of leadership? To me, this gets to the crux of change, leadership, and self differentiation. My answer to this question is that when there is a lack of self differentiated leadership that encourages both over functioning and under functioning, that is adaptive behavior, and this will lead to somebody in the system becoming an anxiety trap or one or more people in the system becoming an anxiety trap, and this can lead to their burnout.

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However, unlike the fable, usually when an anxiety trap in a system burns out, they themselves start to dysfunction because they are tired of taking the crap and they will either get into conflict, they'll get reactive, or they will withdraw. They will be tired of being adapted, so they will disconnect emotionally. But either way, it's not good for the anxiety trap, the person who is the anxiety trap, and it's not good for the system. On the other hand, when you lead through self differentiation, you not only take responsibility for yourself and yourself, only you encourage others to do the same. You know where you end and another begins and you don't over function for the sake of trying to get things done. I think this is the difficulty of being a leader is you want to get things done, but when other people are not functioning well, we tend to want to get involved and fix them. And of course we know that this does not work. It will only make things worse. And this really is what leads to the whole point of burnout in the leader. If you over function as a leader, you will be more likely to burn out.

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This is especially true for pastoral leaders because the Church seems to be a place where people don't take responsibility for self. They complain about others, they triangle, the pastor, they resist change. And this makes it even more difficult for a leader who over functions because the leader is always trying to get people to get along with each other, which takes an enormous amount of energy and will actually have the opposite intent. Friedman describes it this way that if you as a leader are trying to convince others to agree with you. In other words, if you engage in a conflict of Wills, whether that's to agree with some kind of change you're proposing, or to get involved with triangles to help people get along, you will not only expend an enormous amount of emotional energy, but you will actually cause the system to remain even more stuck because it will be constantly pushing back at your efforts. This is a recipe for burnout. On the other hand, if you selfdifferentiated, if you take responsibility for yourself only if you communicate your goals and values and where you believe God is leading in healthy ways, then you will expend less energy and you actually flip the system.

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Instead of you spending all the energy to try to convince others to agree with you and get along with each other, they will be expending energy to try to get you to go back to your old over functioning self. It's analogous to the fish tank going haywire. But in the case of leadership through self differentiation, if you can remain a nonanxious presence through that sabotage, you will not get plucked out of the tank and thrown into the garbage. You will actually be able to lead positive change because over time the people in the middle, those who are maybe not completely dysfunctioning, but the people in the middle will be encouraged by yourself differentiation and they will start to define self in healthy ways as well. The anxious ones will get even more anxious and more disruptive. But if you can maintain connection with them, if you can show them that you care about them even though you don't agree, you have the chance to change the system for good. And the point Friedman tries to make here is that it takes less energy to do that than to over function, than to try to convince others to agree with you and to try to get others to get along.

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So if you want to avoid burnout, then focus on leading through self differentiation, focus on being that non anxious leader and it's never easy, but it's easier than if you try to take responsibility for others. That's it for episode 165. You can connect with me at nonanxious leader.com and you can find the show notes at nonanxious leader.com. Until next time, thanks and goodbye.