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KEYNOTE
Why talking about burnout matters to all of us
AT A GLANCE
Role
CTO & Chief Software Architect
Organisation
AdeAnima
Category
Community
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Martin Westphal is a Nerd by heart, loves challenges of any kind and is a firm believer that most people are capable of way more than they believe, if you give them the chance and encourage them. As the co-founder & CTO of the yamuntu GmbH, leader & co-founder of the byteAdventures Community, founder of the Hamburg Dart, Firebase and byteAdventures MeetUps, he is trying to help people achieve more and believe in themselves, to create great things with technology.
TALK
Why talking about burnout matters to all of us
People who burn out go on to have higher rates of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, and among younger workers, higher rates of early death. That burnout is real and has real health consequences is not an opinion, even if how we measure it still is. You might think it does not matter to you. But even if you love working so much that not being productive feels like wasting your time, and even if you think you are stress resilient, it creeps up on you without you noticing. As it deepens you start to feel empty or drained, maybe like everyone around you is incompetent, maybe quietly sure you are no longer any good at the work itself. It builds slowly until one day it does not, and by the time you can no longer ignore it a lot of the damage is already done. And it does not stay with you. When someone burns out it reaches the people around them too, their team, their company, those closest to them. And often it is the most committed who burn out, the ones running on empty, and they are the likeliest to leave, so the team absorbs the gap. That is why this is a conversation we should have, and especially if you lead a team or company.
This session is the starting point of a much larger conversation we need to have in our teams and companies, but also with the people who will be there if we break. I will share my experience with burnout. The morning I couldn’t get out of bed. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. And the months afterward when I felt almost nothing at all. Parts of it never fully came back. I still miss memories, I sometimes can’t focus, and honestly I still feel like my brain is only running at 50% a lot of times. I am just not at the end yet. I have to really take care not to stress myself too much, and I keep getting better. We will go through my experience and try to clear up some of the most common misconceptions about burnout, to understand why it reaches further than the person going through it, and to talk about how we can at least be prepared and there for each other if it happens to someone who matters to us personally or professionally.
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