Reigniting the Flame: How Leaders Find Meaning After Burnout

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Leaders are taught to light the way; but when they burn, who struck the match? Burnout is thought to belong to the overworked and underpaid — those on the front lines — yet leaders burn out too, behind closed doors, wearing a mask of resilience. What if leaders were coached toward renewal, not performance metrics, but more human trajectories of burnout and engagement? Brooks et al. (2023) pose this question: amid ambition and exhaustion, could the secret to burnout be no more than a successful coaching programme? Yet what if the way coaching is used, focused on recovery and performance rather than reflection and humanity, is itself part of the problem?

But what if it’s more than just burnout that needs intervention? When the grip of emotional exhaustion, cynicism and inefficacy softens, what is responsible for the return of deeper and more soulful aspects of engagement?

Coaching works – it does – yet something more haunting is at play. Coaching can be adopted to manage leadership burnout, as an organisational ‘self-defence’ at the least, but used in this way, coaching becomes the treatment to a cause. Perhaps coaching isn’t fixing tired leaders at all, but propping up tired systems, desperate for change, yet afraid of it. Coaching is being used as a tool to teach people to survive in fundamentally unsustainable roles, restoring energy into a structure that continuously drains it and feeding a system instead of restructuring it.

There is one element of the psyche that returns when burnout is managed through coaching: vigour. The energy, drive and ability to get up and keep going. It sounds ideal, in theory, but it cannot be fed without deeper connection through:

• Dedication, a sense of purpose and devotion to something larger than the self

• Absorption, a flow-state immersion in one’s work

Neither of which can be re-written by being coached through burnout. Love and passion for one’s work cannot be restored by tools designed to manage reality. Perhaps leadership culture has been built on momentum instead of meaning, rewarding endurance over depth, presence over authenticity, and the illusion of survival over the experience of joy. That is what’s missing.

This may evoke a distrust in coaching, yet it far from discredits it. It is not necessarily the process of coaching, but the system that informs the structure. Intentional coaching processes DO reduce the felt symptoms of burnout, a hugely transformative tool that matters deeply. Approached in the right way, coaches present a mirror to one’s patterns, allowing agency to be reclaimed. With this in mind, coaching’s potential may not come from performance restoration, but instead presenting existential reflection. It is the first step to viewing the broken system; removing the symptoms of burnout may transform into acknowledgement that the tiredness is, in actuality, the reaction to an unsustainable environment, not within the self. Used consciously, coaching becomes an invitation into dialogue with the shadow and the doubts, fears, and forgotten desires that lie beneath the polished surface of leadership. In this way, coaching helps leaders not escape burnout, but understand what it reveals about their unlived life. Coaching sessions could be utilised to re-write the idea of leadership, instead of reducing burnout, questioning the system and rewriting relationships to work, purpose and presence.

The pattern of burnout lives in all of us; it is not reserved for the corner office. Many people sprint to achieve, maintaining a full calendar, continuing as the quiet metrics (dedication and meaning) start to dwindle. Vigour can be more easily regained through a mindful app, or the eventuality of the weekend. So the question remains: how does one regain devotion and meaning? It demands truth-telling, questioning the self: ‘what has gone flat?’ and ‘what’s missing?’. It is not necessarily a case of restoring engagement, but redefining it; finding a new path.

If leaders are burning out, who is responsible for the fire? What can be done to restore depth as well as vigour and how can leadership be about more than endurance? It may not be the act of taking on too much that creates burnout, but the ignorance of doing too little of what really matters.

Depth psychology sees burnout as more than fatigue, as the psyche’s rebellion against a life unlived. The ‘persona’ of the leader, the mask of control and competence, grows so dominant that the rest of the self is eclipsed. The shadow of the self is ignored and leaks out as exhaustion, cynicism and loss of meaning. Coaching intervenes, highlighting the vulnerability, doubts of the unconscious, guiding an encounter with the parts of the self that the leader exiles in place of the ‘persona’. This may be the reason vigour emerges first; the loosening of repression expels energy. Meaning is not found by polishing the mask, but by meeting what lies beneath it. The soul does not trade in efficiency but in wholeness.

To acknowledge the mask may be the turning point — the moment burnout becomes reflection on the self, the shadow, and, ultimately, one’s humanity.

For the full research article, published in Frontiers of Psychology, 2023, find the link here:

Frontiers | Coaching leaders toward favorable trajectories of burnout and engagement

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