“Making It Work” is a series about small business owners struggling to overcome tough times.
When Karen Schiro, a real estate agent in Fairfax Station, Virginia, realized last year that she was suffering from burnout, she reached out to a burnout coach, Ellyn Schinke, based in Tacoma, Washington. “I knew I was burned out and I just didn’t know how to fix it,” she said.
Over the course of six months of weekly video calls, Ms. Schiro, 45, learned to whittle down her bloated to-do lists. Making changes, like adding a line to her email signature saying she doesn’t respond to messages sent after 6 p.m., seemed like a “dumb thing,” she said, but it took an outside perspective to highlight those adjustments.
“When you’re exhausted, it’s hard to think about these things and implement them,” Schiro said.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic upended work patterns and workplaces, the World Health Organization had already recognized burnout. In 2019, it defined the characteristics of this type of chronic workplace stress as exhaustion, cynicism and inefficacy — attributes that make it difficult for people to bounce back on their own, said Michael P. Leiter, a professor emeritus at Acadia University in Nova Scotia who studies burnout.
“At that point, it’s hard to get back on your own,” he said. “Having a secondary perspective or emotional support is very helpful.”
Enter the burnout coach.
Operating in a gray area between psychotherapy and career coaching, and without formal accreditation or supervision, “burnout coach” can be a buzzword for advertising. In fact, anyone can put up a banner there.
As a result, in recent years, more people have been calling themselves burnout coaches, said Chris Bittinger, an assistant professor of clinical leadership and project management at Purdue University who studies burnout. “There’s no barrier to entry,” he said.
Making a profit is another matter. When Denver resident Rhia Batchelder began her burnout coaching career in 2021, she initially lived off her savings, supplementing her income with freelance legal work and dog-walking gigs while honing her sales and marketing skills.
“Coaching in general is a very unregulated industry,” she said. “I’ve probably spent hundreds of hours researching burnout.”
That lack of oversight makes it hard to say how many burnout coaches there are, but burnout researchers like Leiter say a pressured corporate culture, a shortage of mental health resources and the disruption of the pandemic have created a critical mass of burned-out workers looking for ways to cope.
Kim Hires, an Atlanta-based burnout coach, said few people knew what she did when she started her business a decade ago. “Now I don’t have to explain it,” she said.
But burnout coaches suffer from a lack of certifications. Some obtain certifications from organizations like the International Coaching Federation, a large nonprofit coaching association. But unlike a life coach, an executive coach, or a wellness coach, a burnout coach does not have a specific certification.
They say they have to cobble together certifications and continuing education on topics like stress management and sleep health — which, even advocates acknowledge, can make the practice seem like a gimmick.
Educational institutions are nevertheless responding to this growing interest.
Terrence E. Maltbia, director of Columbia University’s coaching certification program, said the university is adding the topic of burnout to its continuing education curriculum after its biennial survey of alumni and coaching program leaders found that interest in burnout spiked between 2018 and 2022, an increase he called unprecedented.
“It’s the market that’s pushing people to work because work is more stressful,” he said.
The last annual investigation According to a study by the American Psychological Association, 77% of workers have experienced work-related stress in the past month. It’s often difficult to find help to manage this stress: more than half of the American population lives in an area where access to mental health care is inadequate, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration.
Brett Linzer, an internist and pediatrician in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, said some people prefer to talk to a burnout coach because there is still a stigma around mental health.
“There’s a cultural narrative that physicians have to do it alone and can’t rely on others,” Dr. Linzer said. Talking to a burnout coach made him more empathetic and able to communicate, he said, and helped him cope with the deaths of two friends and colleagues.
Personal experience also plays a role in the discourse of many burnout coaches. Ms. Batchelder, a Denver coach, left a career in corporate litigation that left her disengaged and exhausted.
“I started researching burnout to help myself,” says Batchelder, 33. Learning stress management tools like breathing exercises, setting boundaries and establishing routines has helped her help her clients.
These coaches said they were not replacing therapists, but rather providing a different type of support. Some clients have said they appreciate how a burnout coach can adapt to the challenges they face at work.
“She could understand what I was going through,” said Tara Howell, a communications manager for a Baltimore nonprofit who began working with Ms. Batchelder while seeing a therapist.
“My sessions with Rhia were much more hands-on,” said Ms. Howell, 28. “I had considered working with career coaches, but it didn’t seem like a good fit for what I wanted.”
While some employers may pay for sessions with a burnout coach as part of professional development, most coaches and clients report that people pay out of pocket for coaching—which can cost $250 or more for a 45- or 60-minute one-on-one session, with session packages running into the thousands of dollars.
Interest in burnout coaches comes amid changing views on workplace wellbeing. William Fleming, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, has found that many employer-provided wellbeing services, such as sleep apps and mindfulness seminars, do not live up to the claims to improve mental health.
“These interventions — not only do many of them not work, they backfire,” said Kandi Wiens, co-director of the master’s program in medical education at the University of Pennsylvania and a burnout researcher.
Mr Fleming said these initiatives were ineffective because they focused on the individual rather than on issues such as overwork or lack of resources that lead to burnout. “You’re trying to alleviate the symptoms of the problem without addressing the root causes,” he said.
Even burnout coaches acknowledge that they are not a panacea. “There are clearly limits to what coaching can do,” Batchelder said. “There are so many institutional stressors.”
