“You are the fuel for the fire that is your life.”

Oprah Winfrey

Recently, I was fortunate enough to hear these words spoken by Oprah Winfrey, live, in-person at the Massachusetts Conference for Women. Despite the fact that there were 11,000 other people in the room, the words hit home, as if she were speaking directly to me. Maybe everyone felt that way. She has a gift.

The statement resonated so deeply with me because of what I have learned about burnout recovery and prevention in recent years. When I was deep in job burnout, I was so depleted that it was all I could do to get through the day. My head was down—my focus went only as far as the next task that needed doing.

Repeating frustrations and workarounds stayed as they were because I didn’t have the bandwidth to go upstream and change anything. Like the candy factory episode of I Love Lucy, I could not keep up and couldn’t see any alternatives.

What I have learned from working with hundreds of physicians with burnout over the past six years, is the power of recovering one’s sense of agency. Especially when the system around you is big, complicated, and inexplicably broken in many ways.

When physicians begin to see the places where they have some power to make changes, even if tiny, they begin the journey back to themselves. Through small experiments, they add one change to the next until their work lives are manageable again.

I wish I had known this 20-plus years ago, but sometimes our most important lessons come after the fact.

A past client that I spoke with recently, summed it up as, “Now I can see where the problems are when they come up.” She explained that wanting more time completely away from work, she decided to shift from a lighter schedule on Mondays to a lighter schedule on Fridays. She still works full-time, but this change allows her to avoid checking weekend lab results on her day off. Before coaching, she told me, problem-solving felt overwhelming and solutions were unapparent.

With the strategies that she’s learned and the changes she’s made, she has returned to being the fuel for the fire that is her life. How great is that?

If frustrations and inefficiencies at work seem too daunting to shift, try starting with a very small experiment of change. And if you’d like help along the way, please get in touch. Don’t suffer in silence when a better life is possible.