Christina Maslach

Burnout researchers have pointed at this for a long time.

Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, whose work is behind the most widely used burnout measure, describe workload as one of six drivers of burnout.

And right alongside it is control, whether you have a say in how the work gets done.

People can carry heavy loads when they choose them, and the loads mean something to them.

Wow.

Around the same time, Christina Maslach was doing her seminal research, which led to the creation of the Maslach Burnout Inventory or the MBI.

Yes.

The MBI is still considered the gold standard for evaluating this condition.

The physicians complain of feeling entirely drained.

They are increasingly cynical and short-tempered with patients, and they express a belief that their work is pointless.

Based on the Maslach burnout inventory, what are the three distinct mechanisms you are observing?

Okay, you are seeing the complete triad of occupational burnout.

And if you want to work with me, if you want me to coach you, Hello at AnnaMarcoline.com. Email me and let's get on a discovery call together, okay, to see if I'd be a good fit for you, all right? And then if you're in Illinois and you want therapy, you can reach me there at the same place, same email, and Blake, my assistant, will get you on the calendar or I will get you on the calendar, okay? So if therapy is in Illinois only, coaching is wherever you are in the world, okay? All right, so which part of the job is wearing you down? Like, let's break it down a little bit.

There's Christina Maslach and Michael Leder.

They describe six areas where a mismatch between a person and their work can contribute to burnout.

We talked about this briefly earlier.

I come every two years for the last 16 years because there's a wonderful program created by a Scottish woman, Cara Flanagan, and they bring 4,000 high school kids from all over the UK, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, within London, around London, And each, for one day, to hear teachers talk about the exams and term papers, and typically a British speaker talks in the morning.

And then in the afternoon, me and my wife, Christina Maslach, we talk about our research, the prison study, research I've done on shyness, new research on time perspective.

And now what I'm doing is on...

It's called Man Interrupted, how boys are living in a virtual reality.

My wife is the queen of burnout, so she tells them about how she went from being the heroine of the prison study to beginning to study prison guards and people who work, poverty lawyers, and how many of them use the term being burned out.

giving too much.

So she's the one who studied the mismatch between people and jobs and then has come up with great solutions.

So what am I going to do? In a split second, I become something I couldn't imagine is in me.

Chronic stress takes your best thinking offline.

You'll also remember Dr. Christina Maslach's research.

One of the six organizational drivers of burnout is community, the sense of positive connection at work.

When community goes, burnout risk rises.

It was born in a man who looked at his own reflection and didn't quite recognize it.

Around the same time, the social psychologist Christina Maslach at the University of California, Berkeley, was studying emotional strain in human service workers, nurses, social workers, teachers.

She developed what became the Maslach Burnout Inventory, still the most widely used measure of burnout today.

And her work gave us the three-part definition that the World Health Organization essentially adopted when it included burnout in the ICD-11, its international classification, which came into effect in 2022.

Burnout is often treated as a personal weakness, as if the burned-out person simply didn't meditate enough, sleep enough, or drink enough green smoothies.

But the research points somewhere else.

Christina Maslach and her colleague Michael Leiter identified six areas where a mismatch between a person and their job tends to drive burnout.

Let me walk through them, and as I do, notice which ones you recognize.