Rico Sharp tells caregivers and mental health professionals that passion without boundaries leads to burnout. He's seen colleagues lose their families or quit because they couldn't separate work from home. His answer: take multiple vacations yearly, draw clear lines, and be fully present when you're off the clock.
Chapters
Amen. Be passionate and compassionate without clashing and crashing. It's good to be compassionate toward the people that you serve. In fact, you have to be. You have to be compassionate because you can't be effective if you're not compassionate. Right? You can't be genuine if you're not compassionate, because compassion allows you to look beyond people's fault and see their needs, and to understand that there's somebody worth saving behind the circumstances that they're challenged with today, the problems that they have. Be passionate. Put your whole heart, your whole soul into Saving people, but don't allow for it to become overburdening. Let me share with you what I mean by that. You have to navigate with precision in what you do. You got to know how to get in, do what you do, and get out. You got to know how to draw the line. You got to know how to not be an empath. And allow for everybody's burden and grief and sorrow and pain and problems and weight to be carried home with you. You don't bring your professional stress back to your personal home. So many people are walking away from this particular industry, this particular career of helping people and serving people Because they didn't know how, they didn't learn how to draw the line and set a difference between what they do at home so that it doesn't affect who they are at work, and then set a difference between what they do at work so that it doesn't affect what they do at home. And I'm counseling people, and I'm mentoring people, and I'm coaching people who have given up on either family or given up on their careers. Because they didn't know how to set a distinction between the two, and the two started clashing. The home life started clashing with the work life. Some of you sitting here right now knows exactly what I'm talking about, because you could be so engaged in who you serve on the job that when you go home, you're carrying that weight with you. And now your husbands and your wives Your children, they're looking at you like, okay, you're home now. We need you to be 100% present. We need you to focus on us. We need you to give us you, your time. Not, not your residual or your residue, not the particles and the fragments that's left from you. We need you to come home as a whole mom, right? As a whole dad, as a whole husband, as a whole father. And when that happens and you're not able to separate the two, then you start crashing. You start falling apart. You start losing you. You start losing interest. You start feeling like quitting. You start carrying the weight around. And when you carry the weight, you know what happens? Not only do you get burnt out, but you burn out. You quit, you get out, you run off, you leave the job quickly for the sake of trying to save home life. So it's important that you're not allowing for the two to cross over. It's important that you're not giving so much to the people you serve on the job that you're neglecting to give all that you have to the people you serve That's why I take like 5 or 6 vacations a year with my family, because I got to make sure that I'm not that guy that's saving the world and then losing my family at the expense of it. How many of you understand what I'm saying? How many of you have had to deal with some situations and circumstances and dilemmas that kind of remind you a little bit of that? Like, some of you have had to deal with exactly that. But I'm just trying not to put you on the spot. Here's how you keep from clashing and crashing. This is very
