Upcoming Webinar—Beyond Stress: Why Burnout Is a Systems Issue
Burnout is still widely misunderstood.
Most of the advice people receive frames burnout as a personal problem:
+ Try harder.
+ Set better boundaries.
+ Practice more self-care.
While individual support matters, this framing misses something essential.
Burnout doesn’t begin with individuals.
It begins with systems.
When capable, committed professionals are consistently exhausted, detached, or losing their sense of purpose, the issue is rarely a lack of resilience. More often, it’s the result of sustained pressure created by workload expectations, role ambiguity, moral distress, and workplace cultures that quietly normalize overextension.
This is especially true in healthcare, education, and other service-oriented professions—fields where people are deeply motivated by responsibility, ethics, and care for others.
Stress and burnout are not the same thing
One of the most persistent problems in burnout conversations is the tendency to collapse burnout into “stress.” Stress is typically episodic and recoverable. Burnout is cumulative and structural. It develops when recovery is no longer possible within the system itself.
When burnout is treated as stress, the solutions offered are often mismatched. Telling burned-out professionals to “take better care of themselves” can unintentionally increase shame, reinforce isolation, and make burnout harder to name and address.
A different conversation about burnout
On Wednesday, January 28, I’m hosting a live Webinar titled Beyond Stress: Why Burnout Is a Systems Issue. This is a teaching-focused session designed to offer clarity, shared language, and a more accurate framework for understanding burnout.
During the session, we’ll explore:
How burnout differs from stress
How organizational expectations, workload, and culture contribute to burnout risk
Why individual-focused solutions often fall short
What leaders and organizations can change without new budgets or sweeping reforms
This session is designed for healthcare professionals, educators, leaders, and anyone supporting others in high-pressure environments. Attendance and Q&A are anonymous, and continuing education credit is available.
If burnout has felt personal—heavy, confusing, or hard to articulate—this conversation is meant to help reframe it. Not to excuse harm, but to name it accurately. And to begin shifting the responsibility for change back where it belongs.
