Celebrate!

I have a fair number of friends in the nonprofit world, and while they believe deeply in the work they do, it can also lead to a lot of burnout. Work is long, hard, many hours and sometimes seemingly insurmountable in the face of so much difficulty and poverty worldwide. How do you go about keeping your teams motivated and engaged to do this work?

You know, and it's a two part response. I would start with. Well, yes, burnout is very real. Right. So don't get weary of doing good. I mean, that's one of the things is how do you pace yourself so you don't get burnt out. And I think as a leader, it's very important for any leader in any organized effort to watch out for his people in the group that he's with to make sure we don't get burnt out. And how do you do that? Well, you pause for breaks. You pause for celebrations, right. You pause for quick wins even in the middle of fears, if you will, battles if you are, take time for each other.

Because it can be easy to forget what you did accomplish because you're only looking at how much more needs to be done. So you're right. I absolutely agree. And stopping saying, you know what I think we did yesterday, I was pretty I was pretty exhausted.

Well, I'll tell you a story... This was a very extreme situation. We were in the middle of a massive refugee camp, you know, about a couple hundred thousand people in Darfur, in Sudan at the time that that crisis was at its peak. And it was a terrible place to be. It was a terrible place. You were seeing the impact of man on man. How much damage and how much hurt we can cause? And mostly it is on the littlest and the weakest people. Right. So you are seeing that. And we would come back in the evening to our little campsite where our staff was and we were gathered. And I still remember every evening. Every evening. There was a couple of the ladies who would come in and cook for us and we would then sit there and we'd be singing and we'd be dancing and we'd be eating. And you would think these guys were in the middle of, you know, Manhattan or Silicon Valley having the time of their lives. Well, we knew next morning when we were going to get up and go out back into the camp what we were going to be faced with was blood and tears. Right. Broken lives. Who we are trying to put together. But we'd come back and every evening and I remember I was still learning the ropes of my work. One of our team leaders, an absolute requirement, was when you come into our campsite, you leave the world behind.