Burnout: The Tale of a Not-For-Profit Leader

I’ve just come back from two days in the forest spent making art, feeling the soil under my fingers, hearing ravens overhead, trying to get the Barred Owl to come and peer down at me from the canopy. I dug my feet into moss and balanced on rocks at Rocky Mossy Place. I wandered around Rocky Red, searching for tinder to build a small fire for pine tea. I played on the land with colleagues and dialogued about self-agency, decolonizing therapy, polyvagal theory, and supporting children and caregivers in their grief and healing.

This is the same site where I previously launched the Ottawa Forest and Nature School and Forest School Canada, where I led an amalgamation and capacity-building process with the Child and Nature Alliance. It’s where I worked with a team of amazing people who were deeply committed to relationships, building trust with children, sharing power with others, a broader aim for a socially just world, and supporting play as a way of being and an artistic practice. 

I have come back to this site, four years later, with a story to share about burnout, the lessons I’ve learned, and how I’m taking these lessons to build something beautiful, again…a new charitable organization called Playful Mindset. I offer these lessons to anyone who has struggled to get underneath their burnout, to move beyond shame and the idea that burnout is simply a byproduct of overwork and the professional drive of an individual leader. I also offer these lessons with an equity and systems lens, so that organizations, foundations, funders and the not-for-profit system as a whole can help the people in their organizations thrive.

The end of my time with the Child and Nature Alliance brought a burnout experience that built slowly, then came to a head very suddenly. The timing couldn’t have been worse; but isn’t that always the case? We were about to launch a summit, an outdoor gathering, that was already under-resourced–and rather than being there, helping to prepare, I was on a stage in Toronto, giving a keynote speech about outdoor play to a very large group of early childhood educators. 

I normally loved this kind of thing, especially sharing stories about our work, and the magic that unfolds for children and educators alike when we embrace play, but on this night and this stage, I was at a loss for words and couldn’t tap into the magic at all. I found myself suddenly disconnected from my purpose, my WHY, and had nothing left to give. I returned to Ottawa afterwards filled with tears and panic, spoke to the Chair of my Board, and decided to take a leave of absence. 

In the months that followed, I could manage to get my children to school and feed them, cry a great deal, and trudge through the fog that descended on me most days. Professionally, this was burnout, but personally, it was a mental health crisis that affected my life in deep ways, not the least of which was my financial stability. 

How had I gotten to utter depletion when I truly loved what I did and those I did it with? I had somehow managed to create a beast that I no longer felt aligned with. While I couldn’t pinpoint the precise misalignment, I knew I couldn’t continue on my current path. I wasn’t thriving, and I needed to pause and figure out what came next.

I received nothing but support during this period from the Board of Directors, and over the course of three or four months, the Chair, on behalf of the Board, offered me a two-year paid Child and Nature Fellowship, which would allow me to continue contributing to and collaborating with the organization without the burden of overseeing day-to-day operations or fundraising. 

Accepting that Fellowship had many unforeseen implications, the biggest of which was that it didn’t allow me to work within the organization to address the conditions that had driven the burnout. Instead, the Fellowship severed my contact with the organization in a way that felt very much like a dismissal, and resulted in a long period of confusion, loss and grief that compounded my crisis. 

Today, I write from a place of having worked through this experience. I’ve forgiven myself for my flaws and take pride in the work I did, the relationships I formed, the impact we had, and all the ways I managed to step up as a leader. Today, I see that my burnout wasn’t a result of what I was doing, but how–particularly how I was showing up, and how the culture and systems surrounding me as a leader were not helping me to thrive. 

Here are some of the most important lessons from this burnout. Happily, these insights are now fueling my continued work in outdoor play in a whole new way. 

Lesson #1: Positionality & Childhood Trauma: We Cannot Extract the Personal from the Professional

Our personal position in society and our childhood experiences shape us and form the basis of our values, worldview, habits, and ways of being. To situate myself, I am a settler who was born, raised, and roamed on the island of Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), the unceded traditional territory of the Beothuk and the Mi'kmaq. I am a cisgendered queer woman and mother of two children whom I raised in a single-parent household. I am currently a middle-class, educated adult who writes, plays and lives with privilege, who was once a child who lived in poverty and experienced abuse. This positionality and the adverse childhood experiences I endured reside in me always. 

Being mindful of our past, including our traumas and adversities and how they’ve impacted us, is a big part of our job as adults. Importantly, leaders from equity-deserving groups (groups who have been historically disadvantaged and underrepresented) often have more adversity to unpack, heal from, and learn from. In leaders, past experience with oppression, inequality, and internalized trauma can show up in different ways. We can simultaneously be confronting feelings of worthlessness and shame, alongside great accomplishments and unbelievable feats. 

Personally, my unconscious childhood wounds resulted in a hustle, fearlessness, a drive to make the world a better place–and in constantly biting off more than I could chew, tendencies to want to please everyone, and an avoidance of conflict at all costs. I had been hardwired with hypervigilance, perceiving threats everywhere, my nervous system activated and often in a reactive state. A Board member asking a question about the budget: a threat. A collaborator seeking a last-minute meeting: a threat. A funder questioning our capacity to pull off our “ambitious” strategic plan: a threat. The hustle and overcommitments, which outweighed the actual capacity of our organization, only fueled this reactivity. As a leader caught in this cycle, I was operating in survival mode with little time for reflection or intentionality, although at the time I would have insisted that these were my core values. 

What Could Have Helped:

At an organizational level many things can help us to understand our positionality, unlearn this hustle, normalize how adverse childhood experiences impact our lives, and learn how to better match our workloads to our capacity:

• Offering additional health and wellness benefits to cover therapy for equity-deserving groups acknowledges how difficult it can be to swim upstream, and that this is an equity-based, preventative mental health measure. 
• Discussing in staff or Board meetings how your organization is counteracting the long-term consequences of hustle culture and how this culture perpetuates systems of oppression. 
• In strategic planning sessions, having real conversations about what organizational capacities and resources can meet high-level and aspirational goals. Asking team members, “what is your current capacity, and what do you think you can take on this upcoming year?” 
• Leaving time in staff and Board meetings to explore, “What is enough? What does enough look like? How do we know we’re doing enough?” It’s one thing to be aspirational, but it’s equally important to balance these aspirations with the concept of ‘enough’--especially for those for whom worthiness is an issue.

 

Lesson #2: Defining for Yourself What a Leader Should Look Like 

I remember the excitement that came with being the young, new leader of something I felt was very important. A beloved colleague referred to us as ‘pirates on a pirate ship,’ and I found his description very apt. We were out at sea on a collaborative mission, and we weren’t afraid to be different, mischievous or even rebellious in our efforts. 

As time passed and we were invited into bigger rooms and started to have more reach across Canada, the pressure was building to become something else. With more funding and a larger Board, subtle changes in my notion of what it meant to be a leader crept in. Where I had started this organization largely for the benefit of my own children, I now found myself away from them five to eight weeks of the year, traveling to conferences and engagements. Where I had initially felt close to my personal values and principles of social justice, I was now being told we needed to narrow our scope. Rather than approaching play from an anti-oppressive lens, we were to adopt our funders’ priorities around play from a physical activity and health perspective. Where I had once shown up as the ‘pirate ship’ leader with muddy boots and scraped knees, I now felt compelled to present a more polished version of myself. And where I had embraced a feminist notion of leadership that made room for social and emotional aspects of self, I found myself in many rooms that wouldn’t take these aspects seriously, so I tried to block those parts of myself that had a past, felt deeply, and missed my children. In the end, a big part of my burnout was  being disenfranchised from my true self. 

What Could Have Helped:

Yes, maturity and confidence are factors–but we can actively decide to uphold cultural and systemic norms, or we can challenge them. I now see how I was enacting patriarchal, white, settler, colonized, and privileged notions of what a leader should be. Today, I say challenge this at all costs. Ask questions like, “What does it mean to fully show up in this organization? What does this mean to us and how might this differ to how others want us to show up?” or “What kind of leader do I want to be? And what supports or structures can be put in place to uphold this?” 

In my previous leadership experience, I had the opportunity to take advantage of paid mentorship and professional learning–but it had to be pre-approved by our funder. I found a coach who truly reflected my values, but our funder declined my selection, suggesting in their place coaches who had extensive corporate and public-sector experience. The coach I had found reflected the kind of leader I wanted to be, and that should have been enough. 

 

Lesson #3: Creating Your Own Organizational Metaphor: A Cultivated Landscape or A Wild Forest? 

A few months into my burnout, I had a very important phone call with a mentor. She told me, “You wanted to work in the wild forest, but instead you ended up in a very cultivated landscape, a field perhaps.” It hit hard. I had been living the wrong metaphor. I had to choose mine intentionally. 

I look back on our earliest funders with so much gratitude for their investment and for their belief in me as a leader. By its nature, though, funding comes with structure. We went from operating on a ‘wing and a prayer’ to a funded capacity-building process with six month, then three year projections, to bi-annual reporting, capacity-building plans, evaluation plans, strategic plans, scaling plans, key performance indicators, performance management plans, monthly reports the the board, performance management reports, cohort models, and eventually the priority to ‘mainstream’ our work.

Where we had begun life in the wild, uncultivated forest, the formalization and planning that went with growth didn’t evolve in alignment with our organizational values, such as emergence, play, trust, relationships, and risk. We lost our ability to play with our work, to sit in the unknown, to have a sense of noticing, awe and wonder at what was emerging in any given moment, and to adapt in the same ways we would with children at play in the forest. 

While the good work continued, it became almost a backdrop or lower priority to the new priorities and lines of accountability that came with funding.  As I navigated this new terrain, and quickly tried to find my footing, I lost my metaphor and dream to work with my team in the wild (biodiverse) forest. 

What Could Have Helped:

Let me be clear: I believe in lines of accountability, especially for leaders. But it’s essential to have clear and transparent conversations with funders around expectations, accountability, and impact. At the earliest stages as an organization, particularly if your work has quickly gained traction or a critical mass of impact, it’s very important to remain nimble in your priorities and what these lines of accountability look like. It’s also important to acknowledge that new or young leaders from equity-deserving groups need time to adjust, opportunities that span time to gain new skills, and the ability to set the language and metaphors for their work. It’s important to make space for new and unanticipated/unimagined priorities to emerge, and to be responsive to these, rather than pre-set goals that are prematurely set at that stage of organizational growth. 

It’s important to note that both proposals and reporting to funders from these leaders will often take on a different shape or depth, initially, and having diverse ways to engage with this process is key. You may need to draw on this openness, for instance, in a funding call, or when comparing and evaluating submissions by renowned researchers and experts in the field next to those of a new or young leader from an equity-deserving group. Instead, consider separating these proposals and applying different evaluation criteria to allow for diverse approaches and  experiences that go beyond simply how they appear ‘on paper.’  

Currently, as I enter into new funding relationships, I create plans and lines of accountability but also leave room for the unimagined. Within my new organization and in new funding relationships, or even with our Board of Directors, we develop plans and establish aspirations, but we also allow priorities to emerge slowly, to be uncovered over time, and leave room in our schedules to turn these ideas over, to be curious about them–to walk in the wild woods and ponder.

Lesson #4: Whose Playground? What Friends? Lessons From a Cohort Approach to Funding 

According to Miller Research, Evaluation and Consulting, a Cohort Approach is intended to  generate “wider-ranging and more meaningful impact over and above more traditional funding and project management arrangements. It is used by funders to encourage collaboration, exchange of ideas and peer support across a group of grantee projects, driving a sense of common purpose.” The Alliance was part of a cohort model for funding, and with this model came additional expectations around participation in face-to-face gatherings, engaging with partners online, supporting knowledge sharing and knowledge mobilization more broadly, supporting the learning of our funders around the funding theme, and brainstorming on how to scale and drive impact nationally. It was exciting to be a part of something big, and for a funder to invest this comprehensively and holistically. However, there were unintended impacts of this cohort approach that I can now see had an impact on my burnout and our direction as an organization. 

Initially, our organization had focused on building a network of practitioners across the country in Forest and Nature School. We also started our journey as an organization viewing Forest and Nature School, not just from the lens of outdoor play, or purely from a developmental or health perspective, but from a social justice and anti-oppressive lens. We were equally interested in the intersection of the environment, social justice and child development. As the cohort model got off the ground, our own language and priorities began to shift to reflect those of the funders and the cohort itself. The context and language of our work, our colleagues and the people we played with on a daily or weekly basis became that of the cohort, rather than the practitioners that we were aiming to serve. 

What Could Have Helped:

The cohort model was valuable in many ways, and brought a legitimacy to our work that we benefited from greatly; however, we would have benefited from focusing on building our own communities of practice, and establishing our own partnerships and collaborations that reflected not just the focus of our work (play) but also our values, emerging priorities, the language we used, and our own processes. At the time we would have greatly benefited from more gatherings with the communities we were building across the country. In other words, to have more time to play in our playground with the friends were were aiming to serve.  

 

Lesson #5: Class: Whose Rules Do We Play By? 

The exchange (granting) of money is inextricably linked to an exchange of power and the expression of class. 

As leader of the Alliance, I often found myself in rooms negotiating large exchanges of money and the sets of expectations and social rules that came with this practice. But as someone who grew up in poverty and was a part of a lower-class social structure, I simply did not know the rules of this game, nor did I feel empowered to challenge how power was wielded in these circumstances. Messages of class and power are often subtle, and my job as Executive Director in this context was to quickly up my game, pose as someone who knew more than I did (was middle class), and to play by rules that I had yet to learn. 

I was also a single mom, still struggling financially, and earning a low income. There were times during these early leadership days where I didn’t have money to put gas in my car to get to work. I share this only to contrast my private reality with the public role I was learning to play in the rooms I now found myself in. I was often referred to as “authentic,” but what that meant was that I spoke out of turn, or revealed certain parts of myself, or played by different rules, unbeknownst to me. 

I found myself unable to set boundaries, manage expectations, or negotiate effectively because the funding meant my own livelihood (survival), and that of my staff. It was a terrible place to be in, and it meant sweeping certain expectations or dynamics under the rug rather than addressing them in the open. It also meant that I was trying to follow a set of rules that were unknown to me, and I therefore perceived my fumbles as personal failures. For instance, a funder tried to reach me by email when I was delivering a course in a remote forest location and my assumption was that I could respond once I returned and settled back into my office. But it was made clear to me that the expectation was that I respond immediately to a funder’s request. My way of dealing with these issues at the time – given how overextended I was – was to try to rotate who I was pissing off, rather than to deal with the root issue at hand: a mismatch in vision and capacity, and a mismatch in our understanding of expectations and class rules. 

What Could Have Helped:

Many philanthropists and foundations today are increasingly committed to uncovering how power and privilege shows up in their granting processes, and to level the playing field for equity-deserving groups. Acknowledging in the granting process that there is inherently a power dynamic between grantor and grantee, can go a long way towards a more balanced process. Open conversations and mindfulness about how power, privilege and class plays out is key.