My Personal Story of Burnout
How I got clarity on my purpose and the inspiration to spread positivity and energy management
“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.” I think of this quote from Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron whenever I keep enduring repeat episodes of something I want to change but clearly haven’t yet.
This was me and burnout from work in intense tech life.
Then it was me again burning out trying to scale as a leader in this intense tech life.
I don’t think my personal story is unique in this regard. I’ve met many experienced leaders in tech who immediately get what I mean because they’ve burned out multiple times themselves, and recognize that sometimes people don’t even know they’re burning out, especially in their early/mid-careers.
I’ve also repeatedly seen people burning themselves out on many teams that I’ve led. What many of us don’t realize is how much of this is in our control, and that in startups/tech, we have the autonomy and openness to test new structures to create a much better path!
On the upside, all these life smackdowns taught me how to manage my energy smarter on a daily basis and how we could manage our team energy to perform at a higher level and maintain our sanity and have fun along the way!
These lessons inspired me to bring more of my unique contributions to the world through leveraging my personal strengths and sharing the wonders of energy management.
How It Started
Phase 1a: Burning out and not knowing it
I’ve burned out multiple times in my jobs. When I was in my 20s on Wall Street over two decades ago, I worked long hours because that’s the way it was and everyone did it.
I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of the financial markets, economics, and current events, but didn’t understand why we had to have so much grind — but I didn’t question or push back even though it didn’t seem like good use of energy. I thought this was the working world. I was told that “shit runs downhill” and everyone had to take it.
So I thought this was just the way it was: Work hard at work to have a good life. That’s also how I grew up, coming from an Asian immigrant family. Strong work ethic and personal responsibility were prized cultural values. My friends in high school and college were type-A high achievers. Most peers around me were like this.
I was young and had a lot of energy. My schedule was dictated by work, and I fit in exercise and social life around that. Work hard, party hard (no drugs). I didn’t know burnout was a thing, and did not “feel burned out.”
However, I wasn’t healthy and wasn’t living in my best energy, even though I didn’t know it. I certainly see it when I look back at pictures. Being tired was normal. I got my self-worth from external validation from work, but I wasn’t even aware of this concept at the time. I was also not self aware about life priorities, and thus not intentional about it.
I DID know how to manage stress through exercise and physical energy, and enjoyed it. But that was only one tool, a fraction of the pie.
Then I switched to the tech industry because I wanted to build cool stuff that improves the lives of millions of people, and the cultures in tech seemed more progressive and openminded by nature of being new and innovative. They seemed to care much more about human well-being.
In reality of course, tech company cultures range the gamut from horror stories to pressure cookers to inspiring pioneers pushing the envelope on inspiring work cultures and how we create our best work.
For the next time period in my 20s, I didn’t burn out. I worked at a few different tech companies. I still worked hard, sometimes longer hours, but again, I just took it as a given in life. I thought everyone did that. I didn’t know any other way.
Me not burning out was not due to my choices though. It was due to working at places with better cultures than Wall Street.
I still was not aware or intentional about my personal most important priorities in life.
Phase 1b: Burning out big and still not learning the lesson
Then when I was 30, I burned out big time at Zynga and at the social gaming startup I co-founded afterwards. This was the beginning of the last 15 years of my experiences in intense, fast-growing consumer tech startups.
I loved the work — it was so fun and fulfilling! The lifestyle, not so much.
I’d found my favorite type of work: product management for consumer apps and games that brought positivity and fun to people’s lives. It dovetailed well with my personal strengths. The best times were collaborating with teammates in team cultures with growth mindset and openness, which I later learned fuels emotional energy, team energy, and team creativity.
At this point while working at Zynga, I was not aware of the concept of energy management and did not have the tools to manage energy. I still did not think about my life priorities and was not intentional about them. So by default, work continued to drive how I spent my time and energy.
And this time, I couldn’t rely on company culture to keep me from burning out.
The pace was hyper-intense because Zynga and the newly-evolving social gaming space was exploding, and as with many startups, the culture was not set up to intentionally manage employee burnout. It was a thrilling and exciting time, and I let life lead me because I wasn’t purposeful in how I spent my time and energy.
Everyone worked late, ate dinner there, and continued working into the late hours everyday. Every minute was go go go. We were constantly ideating and testing new features to increase customers, virality, revenue, engagement, and social interactions in our games. We released changes all the time, multiple times a day (which is typical at many consumer software startups).
The pace was intense, to say the least. We tracked revenue and engagement metrics on an hourly basis (yes, hourly), we had team members on top of community management and moderation at all hours in the player forums, and we created and released game content updates multiple times a week, sometimes daily.
I remember being there until 4am because our servers were in meltdown, we were struggling with how to fix it, and it was urgent to fix ASAP because our team’s games were among the highest-revenue-generating games for our company at that time. There was not a lot of infrastructure in those days. We were doing our best in that moment, even the non-engineers who couldn’t fix the code.
No one forced people to work a certain number of hours per week. No one questioned this way of working. People just did it. We didn’t want to let the team down and the momentum was exciting.
This was another situation of “everyone just does it,” but not because of old school ways like Wall Street; it was because business was going gangbusters and everyone was chasing more money, more users, and more growth before competitors could snatch it.
Digging deeper into this behavior, perhaps we were driven by limiting beliefs from society or how we grew up, like getting our self-worth from work, or assumptions that this is what it takes to succeed in the startup or corporate world, or scarcity mindset that it’s worth sacrificing health, relationships, and everything else in the hopes of getting rich (which is largely out of our control and comes back to the self-worth belief; there are also healthier high-leverage ways to make money). Many founders work this way too, though they have vastly different incentive structures.
Anyway I majorly burned out, but didn’t know it even though I was tired. I was running on adrenaline. I remember “not having time” to go to the bathroom because it was so hectic. But could I have made time? Yes I could have. Work became my social life. I didn’t have time to answer emails or phone calls from friends, and I lost weight and was too thin (and we had so much healthy free food at Zynga!). But I didn’t even notice.
A close friend told me to look at old photos of myself. My coworker later told me I looked very stressed and tired. It’s definitely NOT a compliment when people tell you that you‘re not looking so good.
I had stopped doing my one go-to tool for stress management (exercise). I had stopped seeing friends — which I didn’t know was a tool for emotional energy. I hadn’t yet learned how to fully tap into my natural strength in positivity, which is also a tool for emotional energy.
The one thing I did have going for me was strong fulfillment from challenging and creative work (which fuels emotional energy), but work was burning me out and killing my health so then it was net negative.
As my mom says, “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.”
Well lucky for us humans, the body is really good at smacking you down if you repeatedly don’t listen. I got sick the week I left Zynga and I slept for a month and don’t remember doing much else. That’s when I realized I was super burned out. I remember one of the Zynga co-founders had previously been on an extended leave for burnout. Now I could see why.
Yet I did it to myself AGAIN when I co-founded a startup. But at an even higher intensity with more emotional stress and worse burnout. I didn’t have healthy free food this time—I was eating pizza and burritos while living off savings, I stopped working out, stopped seeing friends. Work was life.
At the end of that stint, I again was very burned out and got a collapsed lung. I loved the work, but I didn’t feel healthy at all and it wasn’t how I wanted to live life.
Given that I hadn’t done any inner or outer work to change my mindset or behavior through these multiple burnout episodes, this isn’t too surprising.
From an energy management standpoint, I had to get smacked down AGAIN to learn my lesson.
I realized this wasn’t a sustainable way to live. I wasn’t going to make it to old age and still look and feel good if I lived like this. I didn’t know how other startup folks did it either.
“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”
— Pema Chodron
Phase 2: Burning out and doing something about it!
It was 2009 and I was at rock bottom in health and emotional energy. I was super burned out and had flamed out from Zynga, the subsequent startup I co-founded, and a bad relationship. I had tried therapy once in college and thought it was useless, and had resisted it since. But now I was pushed over the edge to try therapy for real.
As they say, you grow the most when you’re pushed to your edges.
The silver lining was that I started seeking and trying different tools for stress management that would later be part of my energy management routines: therapy, yoga, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), and positive psychology.
I was fortunate to have friends who researched and taught in these arenas, and they serendipitously showed up in my life when I needed them. Mindfulness and positive psychology were burgeoning fields that were starting to gain mainstream popularity.
This was the first time I learned that you could be intentional about managing your emotional energy, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.
So for the last 10-15 years I’ve been picking up tools along the way. I got clear on life priorities. I did the work with life coaches, a nutrition coach, therapists, group coaching programs, and classes, books, podcasts, and tools to get clarity on how to be intentional about allocating my energy based on top priorities.
By the way, I’m now a huge champion of therapy! In my mind, it’s a basic need like food, water, and exercise, and helps me be at my best. To this day, there’s still a lot of stigma against therapy in Asian and Asian-American culture, and even in overall American culture.
Now at this point, I had inner awareness, recognized that I needed to change how I was operating, and was practicing some of the tools mentioned above. However, I didn’t yet know the concept of energy management, how to apply it in practical life, and did not have a holistic system.
Phase 3a: Scaling as a leader and bumbling around in managing energy (Highlight)
In this next phase of life, I continued growing as a product leader at various consumer internet/mobile startups.
Around this time, I realized that my life motivation, my purpose on this earth was to spread positivity. I hadn’t fully figured out how this would manifest but it felt obvious as my personal mission.
This realization came from a few key defining moments for me.
First, I was inspired by positive psychology and leadership books like How Full Is Your Bucket? by Tom Rath and How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen.
When I saw that “65% of Americans received no recognition in the workplace last year” in the Tom Rath book, I was appalled. I was shocked and thought that was terrible. That’s no way to live! I decided that I was going to change this forevermore wherever I went.
On the upside, I was motivated by the immense powers of positive psychology. For example:
- “9 out of 10 people say they are more productive when they’re around positive people.”
- “Positive emotions are not trivial luxuries, but instead may be critical necessities for optimal functioning.”
On top of that, I was also motivated to be a better leader by Clayton Christensen’s life insight:
“I concluded, if you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions.
...You have the opportunity to frame each person’s work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators.”
A second set of key defining moments: I had learned about my natural strength in positivity from the Clifton StrengthsFinder test, it was pointed out to me in unexpected feedback from friends and colleagues, and I reflected through introspection. I loved this stuff, it was easy for me, and I doubled down on using it to do good things in the world. I was naturally drawn to all the things coming out of the field of positive psychology. I eagerly used all the tools and learnings in “The Science of Happiness: Positive Psychology,” an online continuing education class from UC Berkeley.
Hence for the last 10+ years, my personal mission has been to build products and teams that bring positivity to people’s everyday lives.
I have been intentional in using positive psychology tools to boost myself, teammates, friends, and family. And it works! I didn’t tell people that I was doing it. But I was happy when I got unsolicited comments and feedback that validated the effects of positive energy in our day-to-day, and I saw how it positively affected our mood and performance at work.
I’m a big believer in strengths-based leadership and greatly enjoy encouraging people in their strengths. I’ve found that it positively influences individual and team energy and performance. Everyone has unique strengths, even if many people might not know it.
Ironically, I found out that my top strength in Clifton StrengthsFinder is exactly this! It’s the Maximizer strength. They define it as:
Maximizer: “You focus on strengths as a way to stimulate personal and group excellence. You seek to transform something strong into something superb.”
It boggles my mind that this is even a thing. By the way, I take all these tests with a grain of salt but the Clifton StrengthFinder results were pretty spot on for me, as well as for others that I know.
I believe this stems from my strong conviction in the power of encouragement, especially for kids and people with lesser advantages in life. Encouragement works wonders for everyone though! We all have ingrained limiting beliefs from society that hold us back from being our best selves. And I want to change that!
I‘m motivated by life moments such as when my high school yearbook teacher told me that I didn’t have any fiber and wouldn’t amount to anything. As a kid, it was crushing. I knew it was not true and was mad at the injustice. Hence I am adamant about the importance of positive encouragement and not letting anyone’s limiting beliefs hold you back (including your own). These were good teaching moments to learn how to manage energy more wisely in the future. We don’t have to let anyone drain our energy! Ain’t nobody got time for that!
There will always be naysayers or doubters. This includes all the times when people try to hold you back from pursuing your best life or letting your unique gifts flourish, even if they were only doing the best they knew how in that moment. Hence, I’m very very passionate about encouraging people in their unique gifts — everyone has unique strengths.
Let’s talk about what we CAN do, not what we can’t do!
This relates to energy management! Working in your strengths is another tool to manage burnout and energy efficiently because it puts you in the flow. You inherently perform at your best when you love every moment of it and it’s easy for you. Instead of draining your energy, it boosts your energy, you produce great work, and things feel easy.
Keep in mind — I did not know about the concept of energy management at this point. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was cultivating powerful tools in the energy management framework that I now use, in both leveraging positive energy and leveraging your strengths to boost emotional energy to perform at your best.
The learning above was a positive highlight in managing burnout and scaling as a leader.
Now let’s talk about a lowlight and the biggest (and most non-obvious) challenge in scaling as a leader.
Phase 3b: Scaling as a leader and bumbling around in managing energy (Lowlight)
I loved my job function and the work. Maybe too much [back to that external validation from work thing]. The product work was fun and exciting — we were innovating on new types of social/mobile games and ecommerce experiences. On the people management front, I really enjoy mentoring and coaching, and it stretches you to grow on the emotional energy front.
Out of all the challenges to scaling well as a leader, my biggest challenge was not people skills or domain knowledge or technical skills. This might resonate with others who have been through this as well.
My BIGGEST challenge was in managing my energy smartly. And it held me back as a leader.
However, I didn’t know the concept of energy management yet, even if I was already doing some of it.
I was vigilant about stress management but it didn’t fully address my problems.
So I bumbled my way through managing burnout for several years. My tools in yoga, exercise, and mindfulness helped a ton. But I was more reactive than proactive. I would be more proactive when I was forced to be — once I was already burning out. When you feel like you’re treading water trying to hold it all together, you’ve waited too long.
I knew various tools, but didn’t always use them consistently. There were long periods where I didn’t go to therapy. I didn’t know how to use positivity to manage energy and burnout yet, even though I was all about spreading positivity as a parallel goal. If I was burning out, I’d try to catch up on sleep, do three hours of restorative yoga, get a massage, maybe take time off. Sometimes I’d pep myself up with inspirational quotes and my gratitude journal. But I’d still feel like I was burning out and stretched too thin.
The bottomline is I wasn’t addressing the root cause.
When something isn’t operating effectively over and over, you need to examine the mindset and structure. If your approach hasn’t been working, maybe time to test different approaches or reframing the mindset. A good structure helps you operate smarter. A good structure for energy management helps you make the best decisions aligned with your top priorities and automates habits you want to keep.
And the structure is driven by both the mindset and strategy. A right mindset drives your choices and habits. The strategy drives the priorities. (I say “a right mindset” instead of “the right mindset” because I personally believe there is no singular right mindset or one way to do anything.)
Phase 4: Discovering energy management
I finally learned about the concept of energy management when I was a product leader at Tophatter. Even then it wasn’t a straight path to finding a useful system.
Our CEO Ashvin Kumar encouraged us as product managers to bring energy to the team as leaders and motivators, and encourage everyone to follow what energized them. I had never heard of this mindset before, but I loved this concept centered around how you use your energy. This was a monumental mindset shift for me, and I was eager to learn more and figure out how to apply it in a bigger way to improve my day-to-day life.
I was working with executive/leadership coach Lucy Georgiades (one of our perks at Tophatter!), and asked her about it. She told me about a model for energy management that broke it down into 4 pillars: physical energy, emotional energy, mental energy, and spiritual energy.
I then asked my Tophatter-assigned mentor from the executive team, Leo Redmond, how I could find out more about energy management to incorporate it into my life. Leo awesomely and very thoughtfully gave me a book about it: The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. This book was a game changer for me. It went into depth on each of the 4 pillars of energy management, and now this model is a core part of the framework that I use today for myself and in my coaching.
I am incredibly grateful and blessed for all the key people and experiences that provided such pinnacle life openings and helped me move forward in big ways.
I still had to figure out how to apply it in real life.
The book gave me a great starting foundation by explaining the concept of energy management in a tangible way, and backed it with research, reasoning, and case studies. However, the book focuses more on the components of energy management. I was looking for the whole view and how to integrate all the pieces together in my life. Most of the case studies focus on a specific energy management pillar, such as mental energy, for example.
What I really wanted to know was: “Hey here is how a person uses all 4 energy management pillars on a daily basis.” Especially in intense tech/startup life.
How It’s Going
Phase 5: Using energy management and being at our best
So I experimented and iterated my way to applying energy management in real life.
And I saw the results, for both myself and the teams that I led. I was like wow I now understand a bit more what it takes to be high-performing athletes or artists, and how they purposely design their lives to best cultivate their talents and creativity.
This made me realize that we as PMs and engineers are the same — we ARE tech athletes and artists/creators! We don’t think of ourselves this way, but why not?? Great innovation and pioneering creations require a highly demanding level of energy from the brain, body, and soul.
On top of that, when you cultivate a team culture and structure where the team proactively manages team energy together on an ongoing basis, the team performs at much higher levels.
Here are some testimonials from former colleagues, to give a sense of the power of energy management in action on teams that I’ve led.
We were living in intense tech life, and I was operating with positivity and emotional zen daily, which are traits that I admire in the best leaders. In the down times, people want to be around people who are positive and calm.
As a team leader, I was able to handle setbacks and emotional triggers in a more grounded way, no matter the situation—thanks to energy management!
Trust me, I was very, verrry far from this point when I started this journey.
Creating my own system and framework
I had finally figured out a useful system! From the last 15+ years of testing and tweaking while working in intense tech life, I created my own energy management system and framework.
This framework was what I needed to address the root cause of my burnout and bumbling around trying to manage my energy while scaling as a leader. It helped me figure out a right mindset and a good structure!
I wrote a separate article here explaining my framework for energy management.
My framework synthesizes learnings from a wide array of inspiration: positive psychology, strengths-based leadership, tech product management and engineering, fast iterative software product development best practices, life/leadership coaching, business coaching, mindfulness, yoga, personal development, money mindset, high-performing athletes and creative artists, cognitive behavioral therapy, interpersonal communication, nutrition, and of course, The Power of Full Engagement model (4 pillars of physical energy, emotional energy, mental energy, and spiritual energy).
The main reasons why I even created a framework in the first place:
- I didn’t know how critical it was to have a right mindset to combat the limiting beliefs that we grew up with that contribute to burnout.
- I didn’t know to use different levers for different situations. I didn’t have a holistic system or rubric to help me decide how to spend my energy wisely in any given situation.
This is important because without this understanding, I wasn’t managing burnout well and not using my brainpower and energy to be the best I could be.
When you don’t look at the system in total, you are likely not allocating your energy in the best places for you at that given time.
For example: Some people get energy from marathons. Others get energy from playing video games with friends. Some people get energy from both! Others get drained just thinking about either.
Your energy level will differ depending on the week (e.g. if you’re injured or on your menstrual cycle) or external factors like family issues or world crises or market downturns. It all depends on the person, what other priorities are going on in life for them at that time, what energizes them, and their personal strengths.
Another example: It’s like driving a car that looks shiny and clean but the side door is damaged. Inside, the leather seats still look new but the back seat is full of crap. You can’t even look at it. You change the oil, but you didn’t rotate the tires and one tire has a nail in it.
The end result is the whole system is not functioning at its best. You are partially addressing some things, and ignoring or don’t even see the problem areas. You’re not deciding from a holistic view to be your best self.
Without approaching it as a system, it’s hard to be proactive.
If you don’t have a holistic overview, how are you going to know which levers or knobs to turn? It’s like driving blind without a dashboard. And we all know how much PMs and engineers love dashboards!
Hence you end up being more reactive than proactive.
That was me. You end up waiting until you’re burned out (again) before you do something about it.
So that is the story of how I got here.
This is why I’m passionate about spreading positivity and the life-changing wonders of energy management.
I’ve seen too many people in tech burn out when we could be managing our energy way better!
Life’s too short to waste energy on draining ratholes or piddly things that don’t move the needle. If it’s not additive to your life, time to question why you’re spending energy on it. That includes my content or work—if it’s not additive to your life, definitely unsubscribe. I’d be proud of you for managing your energy!
I leave you with this question:
Why wouldn’t you want to spend your energy on THE highest-value use of your precious energy, and live in your best happiness and bring out your best potential?
For the sequel story on why I’m doing coaching, see this article: Why I Do This: Executive Coaching (Energy Management & Mindset)
Thank you so much for reading! I welcome comments and feedback. Interested in learning more?
- Founders, executives, and leaders: If you’re interested in executive coaching, or leadership coaching/consulting for your team, direct message me on Instagram. You can read more here on My Framework for Energy Management and Mindset.
- Find me on Instagram at christinawpan for the latest.
- For testimonials, all my relevant links, or to join my community for weekly inspiration & latest offerings: https://linktr.ee/christinawpan
