Reclaiming the Fire: How Successful People Overcome Burnout by Steven Berglas

Author:Steven Berglas [Berglas, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Business & Economics, Self-Help, Careers, Workplace Culture
ISBN: 9781588360045
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2001-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

MISERY LOVES COMPANY, SHOULD YOU?

Publilius Syrus, a former Roman slave who composed hundreds of maxims between 42 and 1 B.C.E., was the first, according to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, to note, “It is a consolation to the wretched to have companions in misery.” Never one to skimp on words, he also observed, “Society in shipwreck is a comfort to all.” I have to hand it to him, roughly two thousand years before psychiatry gained respectability, this Roman was handing out psychotherapeutic advice that Beverly Hills shrinks now charge three hundred dollars an hour to dispense. Unfortunately, most successful men won’t pay attention to Publilius Syrus’s wisdom regardless of the price.

Chris Argyris, of the Harvard graduate schools of business and education, has devoted much of his career to analyzing smart people’s resistances to being reeducated when they are in positions of authority and leadership. Among other things, Argyris’s findings confirm that smart old dogs are adamantly opposed to learning new tricks.23 He believes that the root of this resistance is a general human tendency to act in accordance with four basic values: (1) to remain in control; (2) to maximize “winning” and minimize “losing”; (3) to suppress negative feelings; and (4) to behave in what appears to be a rational way to the greatest extent possible.

According to Argyris, “The purpose of all these values is to avoid embarrassment or threat, feeling vulnerable or incompetent. In this respect . . . most people [behave in a] profoundly defensive [manner]. Defensive reasoning encourages individuals to keep private the premises, inferences, and conclusions that shape their behavior and to avoid testing them in a truly independent, objective fashion.”24 In other words, Argyris has unearthed the value system that accounts for escalation of commitment and the machismo on which most failed executives hang themselves.

While Argyris didn’t discuss gender differences in relation to his four basic values, I have consistently found that men adhere to them more than women do. As a rule the person who experiences Supernova Burnout has a history of success that renders him wholly unfamiliar with the consequences of failure. So his implicit personality theories about “failed” people become caricatures with traits such as unhappy, weak, and stupid.

Because women are trained to process the negative feelings that arise from failure or simple disappointment, they are familiar with two facts of life not well known to successful men: (1) that you rarely die from committing simple mistakes; and (2) that the company you have in misery can be a valuable resource. Even women with histories of success know, at a deep psychological level, that not only the loser suffers from hurt feelings. This empathy, as the reinterpretations of Horner’s data demonstrate, does not make women more likely to fail or more likely to self-sabotage, it just gives them a broader base for understanding the complex consequences of being successful and having to confront negative outcomes.

A number of studies prove that social support promotes mental health. One study done to assess the relative benefits of

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