The Nonprofit Burnout Assessment

In Chapter 1, we introduced you to the four steps to nonprofit burnout that identify different phases of burnout in terms of loss of passion for your mission. The following assessment can help you become more aware of your stress symptoms and identify where you fall on the Nonprofit Passion Continuum before burnout takes its toll.

Note: This assessment is not a clinical diagnostic instrument and is provided for informational purposes only. If you have any concerns about your state of physical or mental health, consult with a medical professional.

Your Current Reactions to Stress

Self-care can minimize your stress and act as an antidote to many of the stressors that you may face each day working at a nonprofit. The next assessment comes from the University of Buffalo School of Social Work Self-Care Kit.¹ The source is unknown, but it is used by many nonprofits, including Crisis Text Line.²

The purpose of this exercise is help you assess any negative self-care behaviors that might be increasing your stress levels, leading to burnout. If you answer more “Yeses” in the left column than the right column, then you are choosing to react to your stress in negative ways. Think about ways you can replace your negative stress reactions and behaviors with more positive ones Hint: Self-care activities are a good start. The checklists later in this chapter can help you identify a whole range of self-care practices available to you as alternative ways of dealing with your stress.

Stress Triggers and Self-Care Behaviors Worksheet

Doing a candid assessment of whether you handle your stress in a productive or destructive way can help you identify habits to change for your self-care plan. In the previous assessment, you identified whether you engage in positive or negative self-care behaviors in response to stress. Your next step is to keep a diary of your stress triggers and make a note about how you tend to respond to them. This exercise can help you gain more self-awareness about how to manage your stress, anticipate stressful situations, and identify bad habits you need to change.

Download this worksheet from www.happyhealthynonprofit.org for an easy-to-fill-out version.

Happy, Healthy Nonprofit: Individual Self-Care Assessment and Checklists

Mark the following checklists to assess your self-care practices based on the Five spheres of happy healthy living. The self-care plan that you create for yourself should be customized to fit your own needs and personality. Use the time you spend going through the lists below to highlight actions that resonate with you to include in your self-care plan. Assemble a mix of things you can do in the morning, throughout the day, and at night. In Chapters 4 and 5, we share stories from nonprofit professionals who provide specific self-care practices you can adopt at work and home. This assessment and accompanying checklists were inspired by the Self-Care Starter Kit from the University of Buffalo.

Congratulations! You made it through the assessments, worksheets, and checklists. Self-assessment is like holding a mirror to your life. While sometimes you might not like what you see, it gives you the opportunity to change your habits and improve your attitude and behaviors.

Attitude Changes (Mind-Set)

Take a hard look at the bad habits you need to change, and examine your lack of established good habits. Both are depleting your crucial energy to do your work well. Later in this book, we explore how organizations can support you and others at your nonprofit in making positive changes for more sustainable focus, motivation, and productivity. But let’s start with you.

All the habit-change experts will tell you, changing habits is challenging but possible. First, you need to understand how habit formation works to develop an effective habit-changing process for yourself. In his book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg talks about the three steps of habit formation—also called the “Habit Loop:”³

1. Cue: the trigger of a particular behavior. This could be an alarm clock that initiates your wake-up routine or seeing something like a sign or Post-it note or any other catalyst for action.
2. Routine: the process of acting on the cue—physically, mentally, even emotionally. When the routine becomes automatic, it is a habit.
3. Reward: something that signals to your brain, “Yes, remember this routine,” reinforcing it as a habit.

Duhigg also refers to “chunking,” the process when your brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine—a routine you don’t have to think about because it is now a “behavioral chunk” or habit. Forming a new habit, or getting rid of an old one, requires reminders and repetition and takes time.

Behavior Changes (Actions)

You can’t separate your attitudes toward habits and habit change from your actual habits or behaviors. Understanding your attitude, or even your personality type, can be helpful as you work toward changing your behaviors. We love author Gretchen Rubin’s take on habit change. Rubin examines what she calls “Four Tendencies” in her book Better Than Before and lays out scenarios to help you determine which one of the Four Tendencies or attitudes you have toward outer and inner expectations. Then she lays out ways to change your own habits once you know your Tendency.

The Four Tendencies

1. Upholder. Meets outer (from other people) and inner (from self) expectations.
2. Questioner. Resists outer expectations (often by questioning everything) but meets inner ones. If an expectation makes sense to them, they treat it more like an inner one.
3. Obliger. Meets outer expectations (think: people pleaser) but resists inner ones (doing for others before doing for themselves).
4. Rebel. Resists outer and inner expectations. Bucks the system.⁴

Your Tendency influences the approach you need to take if you want to change a habit. For example, if you are an Upholder, chances are changing or adopting a habit is much easier than if you are a Questioner questioning the reasons for changing or a Rebel not doing what is expected. Knowing your Tendency—the internal aspect of yourself that influences your behavior—is a critical element of habit change. We highly recommend Rubin’s book to get to the bottom of your nature to better handle habit change.

What causes behavioral change? Scientist B.J. Fogg came up with The Fogg Behavior Model⁵ that breaks down how behavior happens: first there is motivation or the desire to act, followed by the ability to carry out the particular behavior, and then some kind of trigger or cue so the behavior takes place, like a call to action or a reminder.

When setting a habit, you may not be successful because the habit is too big or you didn’t identify the right trigger. The key to changing habits, according to Fogg, is to iterate on the habit or trigger until you find the right mix that helps you make a smaller change.

Fogg also talks about “Six Elements of Simplicity” or six things that might block your ability to create a new habit:

1. Time
2. Money
3. Physical effort
4. Brain cycles (mental effort)
5. Social deviance
6. Nonroutine

Without simplicity, habits are hard to adopt. We’ve talked a lot already about the essential nature of self-care for your holistic well-being—for your mind, body, spirit, and emotions. Let’s take a look at acts of self-care through the lens of Fogg’s Six Elements of Simplicity:

1. Time. Self-care takes time, but even small amounts of time devoted to self-care can bring great benefits, such as five minutes of meditation a day instead of one hour.
2. Money. Self-care doesn’t have to cost anything. You can move into a yoga pose several times a day and get benefits without having to pay for an ongoing class. Or you can encourage your organization to incorporate a yoga class into the workweek that is free of charge.
3. Physical effort. You don’t have to push yourself to do strenuous exercise but instead incorporate simple stretches into short breaks throughout your workday.
4. Brain cycles (mental effort). The beauty of self-care is that it doesn’t take a lot of mental effort and, when practiced regularly, actually revitalizes your brain and refreshes your mind.
5. Social deviance. Self-care is not socially deviant—but it isn’t taken as seriously as it should be. Self-care produces scientifically proven benefits and combats a whole host of work-related and technology-related ailments so should qualify as socially acceptable and socially essential.
6. Nonroutine.Things that are not a routine are hard to adopt. Self-care activities must become routine as a practice or a series of repeated rituals to sustain over the long term and for you to experience large and lasting benefits.

Let’s face it: knowing about self-care doesn’t translate into doing self-care. Doing self-care requires habit change. Likewise, having self-care resources available to you in your home and at your workplace isn’t enough to ensure you actually use them. Using them requires habit change, and habit change requires simplicity for it to really take hold.

Habit Changes (Sustaining)

Even if you understand the habits you need to adopt or change, even if you have the right attitude, and even if you know the right steps to take to make a change in your behavior, that change might not last. To have sustained habit change, you need motivation. According to Daniel Pink,⁶ the carrot/stick model of reward and punishment just doesn’t work when it comes to motivation. He says there are three main factors that motivate us to do anything:

1. Autonomy. This is the desire to be self-directed, to have some independence and ownership.
2. Mastery. This is the urge to keep improving at something that is important to us.
3. Purpose. This is the sense that what we do serves a purpose beyond ourselves.

B.J. Fogg identified three things that change behavior long term:⁷

1. Option A. Have an epiphany.
2. Option B. Change your environment (what surrounds you).
3. Option C. Take baby steps.

Fogg jokes that having an epiphany—some kind of mystical experience—is rare, so your real options for long-term behavioral change are to change your environment or to take baby steps or both. For sustainable behavior change, you need the right conditions so the behavior becomes more automatic and less of a chore. To keep it going, you need fundamental environment change and an easy process—the baby steps.

Beth participated in a five-day process that Fogg offers online for free that has helped thousands of people change habits using his Tiny Habits method.⁸ What she learned from Fogg’s method is the habit anyone wants to establish has to be really small and specific. If you find yourself not taking that first step toward changing a habit, you should evaluate the size of your habit and revise it, making it smaller.

Beth wanted to start a new habit of meditation:

When I get up in the morning, I will meditate.

The first day, she didn’t do it.

After reflecting on both the trigger and the goal, she came up with something smaller and more specific:

When I sit down at my computer for work, I will close my eyes for three minutes and breathe deeply while the computer is booting up.

This shift got her started, and now she does a quiet meditation for 10 minutes each day before she starts working.

Gretchen Rubin identifies these three pillars for sustainable positive change:

1. Monitoring: Measure, track, and reflect on your behavior.
2. Scheduling: Put the first step of your new habit or behavior change into your calendar so you actually take that first step.
3. Accountability: Bring someone else into the process with you or build in more public check-ins so others can help keep you on track.⁹

Rubin also identifies the four foundation habits that can help with any attempts at habit change:

1. Getting enough sleep
2. Getting some exercise
3. Creating external order
4. Managing eating and drinking

Do you recognize the Wellness Triad in there? Without fortifying your foundation for habit change, your changes won’t be as sustainable as you’d like. Be constantly vigilant for any internal or external forces that get in the way of keeping up with a good habit that you’re trying to form or sustain.

Creating Your Self-Care Plan

A self-care plan identifies self-care goals or behaviors that you want to sustain and is your strategy for making positive behaviors routine with some form of accountability. Self-care is something that you need to live and practice daily. Schedule your self-care activities. Put them on your calendar. Make a commitment to yourself, and prioritize self-care as mission-critical.

A written self-care plan spells out daily activities that will reduce your stress and revitalize you. Writing down your plan helps you articulate and define your routines and rituals for self-care. The goal is to help prevent and potentially eliminate the destructive impact of chronic stress. Self-care is meant to help you cope better in the face of workplace stress and life challenges. A self-care plan is your road map to happy and healthy.

Your self-care practices are personal and particular to your needs, preferences, personality, and motivation. Some of the basics of self-care are essential, and you should not shirk them, like getting enough rest, eating healthy foods, exercising, and making space for downtime. But the specific practices you integrate into your life around your relationships, spirituality, and any of the other areas is entirely up to you. If you feel that you don’t have a creative bone in your body, then meditative art as a mindfulness activity might not be your cup of tea. Maybe taking a dance or stretching class is a better fit or simply starting a regular walking routine. Don’t judge yourself or let others judge you for the self-care choices you make—as long as they are grounded in happy and healthy principals.

Self-Care Plan Templates

A written self-care plan does not have to be a long document. In fact, the shorter the better to start. You can always add to it as you progress through your self-care practices. Make a list of your practice goals or the specific actions you plan on taking to attend to your self-care. Tie your actions to the Five Spheres of Happy Healthy Living, and identify only a few practices related to each category.

Here is an example of a basic self-care plan:

You might be all fired up and ready to get started, but if this plan feels overwhelming, pare it down to one practice per area or several practices in just one area and stick to them for a month. The following month, add a little more and so on. You might even consider identifying a monthly theme and commit to a year of establishing self-care habits as a framework for your plan.

Your plan could look like this:

Or it could look like this:

Roll your self-care plan out slowly and deliberately.

Another format for a self-care plan is based around your Self-Care Bill of Rights. List your “rights” to self-care, and then add some concrete action steps to implement them. For example, taking a cue from Aisha Moore’s Self-Care Bill of Rights, here is what your plan might look like:

Get even more compact using B.J. Fogg’s Tiny Habits method and do only this one thing starting today:

Get seven to nine hours of sleep every night.

Once you have established a better sleep routine and are feeling the benefits from it, then do this:

Eat more fruits and vegetables every day.

You get the picture. Put your one tiny habit into your daily calendar and create reminders—triggers or cues such as an alarm on your iPhone, a Post-it note on your bathroom mirror or refrigerator door. or a friend checking in with you.

Even when you write down and schedule your self-care goals and practices, they may need to be tweaked as you learn more about yourself. Changing habits and incorporating self-care into your work and life are iterative processes. Identify what isn’t working and get rid of it. Find what works for you and stick with it.

Tips for Self-Care

Doing what is good for you doesn’t have to be hard. If you use the approach of starting with small steps and adding on incrementally, you can build a solid, steady practice. To better adopt your self-care practices, don’t just write out your plan but also track your progress and revisit your plan and outcomes on a regular basis.

Additional tips for carrying out your self-care plan include:

• Keep your written self-care plan in a place where you can see it every day. Keeping it visible will help you to think about and commit to the strategies in your plan.
• Make a laminated abbreviated version of your Self-Care Bill of Rights and carry it with you in your wallet, purse, or bag.
• Share your self-care plan with a trusted colleague, friend, or family member so he or she can support you in your actions—your accountability buddy.
• Stick to your plan and practice the activities regularly. Just like an athlete doesn’t become fit by merely thinking about fitness, you can’t expect to perform effectively without putting into practice a holistic plan for your well-being.
• Reassess how you are doing at the end of one month and then three months. Behaviors can take over a month to become habits, so check in and be realistic. After a while, come back and complete the self-care assessments in this chapter again to see how well you are doing with your new, improved habits.
• Be gentle with yourself. If you fail to carry out a new self-care routine, try to assess why. You may need to make the thing you’re trying to change smaller and more manageable. Don’t beat yourself up about not meeting your goals. But don’t stop trying to meet at least one goal at a time.

The next two chapters are filled with self-care tips and techniques you can apply directly to your Five Spheres of Happy Healthy Living.