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5 Cs Driving Burnout™

Burnout tells you something about your career. Five things can be behind it. Find out which one is doing the most damage, and who can actually change it.

See how it works

Conditions Culture Convictions Choices Capacity
Tara smiling at her desk with a laptop and a microphone, arms crossed

See how it works

Hear it in my own words first.

Listen to it, then come back and try the tool. It makes more sense once you have heard how I talk about burnout with clients.

The Balanced Badass Podcast® · Season 5, Episode 55

Slinging burnout advice without a diagnosis

Listen to the full conversation

The five Cs in a minute

Five places burnout can come from.

1

Conditions

The job itself. Workload, staffing, hours, pay, and what you are asked to do all day.

2

Culture

How the place treats people. What gets rewarded, what gets ignored, and how change gets handled.

3

Convictions

Your values and how you relate to work. Perfectionism, people pleasing, and tying your worth to output.

4

Choices

The habits and the yeses. Saying yes when you mean no, skipping time off, avoiding the hard conversation.

5

Capacity

What you have left after everything else, including caregiving, money stress, and health.

Most burnout has more than one of these in it, and each has a different person who can change it. Some are yours, some belong to your employer, and some you can only influence. The tool below shows how that plays out.

The Balanced Badass Podcast® · Season 6, Episode 57

The 5 burnout patterns I hear most as a coach

The longer version, 16 min

Try it

See how the five fit together.

Pick a situation and watch which Cs light up. Tap any C on the chart to read about it.

Tap a C on the chart

Look at any C

Who can change it

A first move

If it won’t change

Free

The 5 Cs conversation kit.

Knowing your driver is half of it. This is the other half: what to do and what to say, sorted by how much of it’s yours to change. Pick a C and a lane to try one.

Pick a C

Pick a lane

The full kit

The assessment plus the kit.

The assessment finds your top two Cs. The kit picks up from there with every script, your early warning signs, and a one-page plan you can keep.

What to do with this

Next, pick the move that fits.

Knowing which C is loudest tells you where the problem sits. The four kinds of pivots tell you what to do about it.

See the four kinds of pivots

The full version

Take the free 5 Cs Driving Burnout™ assessment

The chart shows how the five work together. The assessment is where you answer for yourself, and the kit picks up from your results.