Doing any work in the diversity and inclusion (D&I) space can be exhausting over time. Your entire job is to regear a workplace that was likely not built for everyone. As workplaces shift in response to societal changes, even the most inclusive spaces need to readjust and readapt. Often, this can be an exciting experience as you get to make real change happen with very human outcomes. But it can also be exhausting - whenever you’re dealing with the emotions and personal experiences of other people, in a professional setting like an office, burnout is a real risk.

Mental Health and burnout as a CDO is tough, but can be avoidable.

While rough days are all but certain when doing D&I work, it does not have to burn you out to the point where you can’t do the work anymore. Keep reading for practical tips on how to handle emotional exhaustion before it turns to burnout.

Be aware of compassion fatigue

When you take on the CDO role, your entire job is to care for the well-being of your organization so everyone can do their best work. But if you’re “on” all the time and care about everything all the time, it’s a surefire way to get to burnout - quickly. And more than just your average, everyday burnout, this can lead to a phenomenon called compassion fatigue.

If you spend all of your time absorbing the emotions and experiences of everyone in your organization, you may reach a point where you fall into compassion fatigue. When that happens, it’s as if a switch goes off inside of you and you become unable to care about anything. You depersonalize everything and may inadvertently shift to a cold demeanor, even when you don’t want to. It’s a psychological response our brains use to protect us from mental trauma, but it can be seriously detrimental to DIB work.

Managing compassion fatigue as a CDO or a leader is paramount and can not only help yourself, but your team’s health as well.

To combat compassion fatigue and push it back before it hits you, set some emotional boundaries. This doesn’t mean you choose which groups or people to care about and ignore the rest. But it means you set up some rules for yourself about engagement. Try these tips to help with emotional boundary setting:

Assess situations and react based on whether you’re able to help, either the situation or the person, or not at all
Look at the severity of a situation and gauge your response accordingly
Build a system that people can follow where the first few steps require them to do some work on their own - only if that fails does it escalate to you
Have resources or outside people on hand to direct people to for when you can’t solve their problems

Fighting to avoid compassion fatigue can feel very selfish at times, especially when you have to tell someone else that you won’t solve their problem immediately. But it’s necessary to ration your emotional energy so you can continue to tackle the challenges that really move the dial.

Get it off your chest

Sometimes emotional exhaustion and burnout is less about what happened and more about you stewing over it. Humans have an unfortunate ability to focus in on something and make it seem far larger and more important than it is. Suddenly one inadvertent comment made by the CEO makes you spiral and feel like D&I isn’t a priority anymore because you thought about it too much. Or an issue brought up by an employee now feels like the end of the world.

If this happens to you, you’re not alone. But you also can’t let it continue too long or it will push you to emotional exhaustion, burnout, or compassion fatigue.

Sharing with others can help you work through and manage any frustrations you may be feeling.

Instead of stewing over something, get it off your chest. Try:

Writing it in a journal
Asking someone to listen while you rant
Do a voice recording
Talk to yourself aloud
Yell into a pillow

Anything other than “thinking quietly” to yourself. When you think alone, you can still stew on things - your mind is wildly capable of inserting random thoughts into your main line of thinking. But when you say it aloud or write it out, you trigger different senses that activate your BS-radar. When you’re thinking things, you can rationalize a lot. When you say it out loud or write it down so you can see it, it’s much easier to realize when something is off base. That opens the rational side of your brain to question what’s going on and check if it really is as bad as you thought. Oftentimes, it’s not.

Pay attention to your physical health

We’ve all been in the back-to-back meeting grind before. In the D&I world, this can become weeks of back-to-back meetings. Or late nights. Or events. Eventually you realize you haven’t done any physical activity in weeks, you’ve drank more than is good for you, and you’re exhausted. When that happens, you risk the physical exhaustion creeping into emotional exhaustion, leading to burnout over time.

Two people taking a walk together outside. There is a pool and a set of stairs on either side of them.

One of the best ways to keep your mind sharp is to give it the best fuel possible, and that means keeping your body healthy through food and exercise. Treat working out and eating well as necessary job inputs. Just as you can’t progress at work without professional development, you won’t be able to perform your job well if your body and mind aren’t working well together.

If you don’t have full control over going to the gym or planning every meal, there are a few tips to make your life much healthier overall:

At events, choose veggies or fruit over bakery items
Turn one-on-ones into walking meetings whenever you can
Walk to events from the office if they aren’t far away
Have a 1-2L bottle of water sitting on your desk at all times
Keep high protein snack bars in your desk drawer so if you get hungry you don’t reach for high-carb or high-fat snacks at the office
If you have control over office events, try making one activity-oriented, for example after-work yoga or a fitness class

Connect with other practitioners

When you’re a CDO, chances are you’re either alone or on a small team within your organization. No matter the size of your organization, it can begin to feel lonely. When the hard times hit, only having a small team can leave you feeling all alone ‘at the top’ with nowhere to turn.

Community helps! In these instances, it’s crucial to reach out to other practitioners. These could be other CDOs, VPs of diversity, or a similar role. It could even be someone who operates in a volunteer capacity in their organization but is still responsible for leading the D&I charge. Ideally, you’re connecting with them regularly to stave off emotional exhaustion and burnout, but when times get rough they should be your first line of defense.

When Ulysses Smith, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB) leader at Blend, spoke about facing emotional exhaustion and burnout, he turns to his community of practitioners.

“I'm an introvert in an extroverted role and it can be very emotionally draining,” said Smith. “I've got a supportive group of friends I can depend on who are doing similar work.”

Having a network isn’t just about getting ideas and solutions, although that’s a huge benefit. It’s about connecting with other people who innately get where you’re at and what you’re going through.

Completely disconnect on occasion

D&I leaders often advocate for better work-life balance. They make impassioned speeches about the need to disconnect, take a vacation, and have a life outside work. But often they are the poorest models of their own advice, frequently working late and checking emails at all hours (especially if the company operates globally).

So: take your own advice and disconnect.

Disconnecting can help you manage your mental health and help you avoid burnout.

Embrace a hobby, read a book, binge some TV, go for a walk… whatever works best for you to completely forget about work for a little bit.

For Blend’s Ulysses Smith, it’s all about video games. “Sometimes I just need to totally disconnect. I used to work at EA and love gaming, so I often escape into the fantasy sci-fi world of a good game,” he said.
The goal of disconnecting is to get your mind completely off work - both the challenges and the good things. If the way you disconnect costs money, for example shopping or going out to dinner, just make sure it’s easy for you to afford. You don’t want to accidentally create financial stress when you’re trying to relieve work stress.

Emotional exhaustion is not a requirement of being a CDO

Feeling tired after a long day at work is common to everyone, but it can feel particularly touchy when your day is filled with other people’s emotions and experiences. It does not, however, need to result in burnout.

Being a CDO means being a champion of inclusion at the office, making sure everyone can do their best work - and that means you, too. If you’re facing emotional exhaustion or burnout, try these steps to get yourself back on the right track. You never know, you may even find a solution to your problems by taking care of yourself.

Coping with emotional burnout and mental health as a Chief Diversity Officer