“I’m only one athletic trainer, I can’t get to you all.” – Feelings of frustration
“Another parent calling me about their son trying to play on Friday when he’s not ready to play?” – Feelings of anger
“When is the season over? I am so worn down.” – Feelings of being tired
“I hate my job, this is too much.” – Feeling of being overwhelmed
“I worked so freaking hard and they bust me on the stupidest crap, this tedious stuff.” – Feeling of being overlooked
“Brett?” “What!?!” – Being on edge
If you consistently experience some of these emotions in your job, you’re likely fighting burnout.
Earlier this year, Spooner Sports Medicine held a virtual seminar dedicated to speaking about the daily challenges that athletic trainers are asked to overcome; and more importantly, how to stay mentally healthy and best avoid experiencing burnout.
One of the keynote speakers at this event was Brett Fischer, PT, ATC, CSCS. Brett, founder of the Fischer Institute, is a licensed physical therapist, a certified athletic trainer, and a certified strength and conditioning specialist. He has worked with and treated athletes in the high school, collegiate and professional setting; including working with the Chicago Cubs, the PGA, and currently is the PT consultant for the Arizona Cardinals. Brett’s expertise has led to national and international speaking engagements. In 2020, Brett and his team joined the Spooner family!
Regardless of whether or not you’re an athletic trainer, Brett shares some insights and strategies that are beneficial for anyone battling the mental fatigue that comes with your job, especially those who work in the medical field.
Some of the advice, experiences, and take-aways from Brett’s discussion earlier this year are highlighted below in an easy-to-read format. Additionally, you can listen to the full audio, accompanied by slides, from Brett’s presentation by clicking the video link below. We highly recommend that you check it out!
Please enjoy, and we hope that you discover some new strategies for taking care of yourself both mentally and physically, so you can continue to enjoy life and serve those that need you the most!
Let’s Talk About Burnout
I’m Brett Fischer. I am an athletic trainer. I’ve worked in all kinds of settings and have been very fortunate to do that in the professional, collegiate and high school ranks. No way am I an expert on this. I’m not a mental health specialist, but I am a soldier. I’ve been fighting burnout for 38 years doing what we do; and as athletic trainers, no one knows better about the stresses of this profession.
So, my goal here is what? Let’s talk about burnout. What is it? What are some of the symptoms? What are some of the causes? We know a lot of these things already, but what the heck can we do about it?
Causes of Burnout for Athletic Trainers
The first thing I want to talk about is some of the causes of mental fatigue and feelings of burn out:
- Long Hours: If you’re in the health care profession now, it’s long hours. As athletic trainers [for the Arizona Cardinals], we got back at 4:00 a.m. last week after a game, and we were back at it at 7 o’clock the next morning.
- Poor Salaries: As health care professionals, unfortunately, the salaries haven’t caught up yet. In fact, it’s kind of scary – if you take the number of hours that an athletic trainer works and divide it by the pay, it comes close to minimum wage for these expert people. There’s a lot of stress that comes with that, financially.
- Tough Working Conditions: You could be outside in the rain, snow or cold. You could be in a situation where you have very little equipment. You’re dealing with super big people like we do at the Arizona Cardinals. Those are tough conditions, and when you do it day in and day out, it takes a toll.
- Giving Profession: Obviously, we’re in a giving profession. We’re always giving out energy. We’re always treating other people’s problems. Which is what we like to do, but it’s also a cause of why we may have a lot more stress in our lives.
- Politics at the Job: We all have them, right? However, an athletic trainer has a unique job. You might have an athletic director (AD), coaches, parents; you have multiple people you must deal with and answer to in sports medicine.
- Poor Family/Friend Social Time: As athletic trainers, we have poor social lives. Because our time is so short, we seem to get less and less time with our family and friends.
- Insufficient Staffing: A very big problem for athletic trainers and medical professionals. People are being stressed out because they have too many patients and not enough support.
What is Burnout?
It is described psychologically as emotional exhaustion. Basically, you’re on empty, you got nothing to give. It’s as if the athletic trainer becomes calloused toward life. You came into this profession wanting to help everybody; and suddenly, you’re saying to yourself, “Wow, I just don’t feel anything anymore.” It’s a scary thing.
People experiencing burnout have a decreased perception of their accomplishments. They lose confidence in themselves. Because they’re so busy, they can’t get to everybody and do all the things they want to do, and their outcomes are not where they want them to be. Before you know it, they’re going, “This isn’t going to work.” There’s this feeling of hopelessness that occurs for a lot of athletic trainers.
All This Leads to What?
- Decrease in work quality
- Increase in substance abuse
- Increase in depression symptoms
- Increased chance of physical ailments
It’s not just that you feel sad or have negative emotions, burnout results in changes to your daily routine: changes in sleep, eating, and much more. You start to lose interest in the things that traditionally have brought you enjoyment in life.
You may even experience changes in the pleasure you receive from your daily work as an athletic trainer. The job we used to love doing has now become a burden. That’s the worst feeling, getting up early in the morning and having to go somewhere and think, “I don’t want to be here.”
Identify and Modify
First, you’ve got to sit down, back up, and really take a good look at your life. Identify and modify these stresses we just talked about. Really sit down in your own time and say, “Okay, what is going on?” Take inventory and have a good understanding of your situation.
A great quote I want to introduce to you is, “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% of how you react to it.” I think once you get that perspective, you start to understand that things aren’t as out-of-control as you originally thought. When we’re in the midst of it, it doesn’t feel like 10 percent, right? It feels like the whole world is coming down.
Are You in the Right Profession?
One of the first things we need to determine is whether or not you’re in the right profession. Regardless of where you work, it’s important to identify what is required of you so you can decide if it truly is the right setting for you. So, let’s look at what’s required of an athletic trainer?
- You have to deal with so many types of personalities. You have your athletes, ADs, assistant ADs, travel secretaries, you have coaches and parents. If you’re someone that doesn’t like dealing with multiple personalities, you’re going to struggle.
- Being organized. There are a million things going on at once for an athletic trainer, and if you’re not an organized person, it’s straight chaos, and chaos creates stress.
- You got to be able to laugh. You need to have moments on the sidelines and in the training room where you have fun. If you don’t have fun with what you’re doing, you hate life.
- You’ve got to love sports. There’re times you’ll be sitting out it the rain and cold going, “What the hell am I doing?” Well, you’re out there because you love what you’re doing. You’ve got to love sports and healthcare.
- You have to be able to communicate and set expectations. You’re going to have parents and coaches who pressure you to clear their players before they’re ready. You have to have confidence in yourself to not succumb to pressure and the ability to sit down and communicate your rationale.
Be Deliberate
Bottom line is this: if you want to fight burnout, it’s a fight! You have to have strategies each and every day to fight. I like this word here – you have to be deliberate. Deliberately attack those areas in your life that you need to modify so you can start enjoying what you’re doing. If you don’t, guess what happens? You can’t give what you don’t have. If you have nothing in the tank, you can’t give it.
Find Time for Yourself
Like Pablo Picasso said, “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” You have to get quality personal time. I don’t care how you get it, you got to figure it out somehow, someway. Whether it’s journaling, reading, mediating, etc., find what works best for you and take the time to do things that are going uplift and encourage you. It will make you feel better and take your mind away from the day-to-day stresses in life.
Spend Quality Time with Friends and Family
I hate to say it, but it’s hard as athletic trainers to have a lot of friends because we don’t have a lot of time. True friends are going stick by and understand that you can’t be there all the time. Every now and then though, you’ve got to kick it with your people. You have to be yourself, let loose and have fun. You’ll enjoy life more.
Connect with Your Mentor
It’s so important to establish certain people on your cell phone that you can dial up and say, “Hey, you got five minutes to talk to me? This is what’s going on, can you give me some perspective?” That’s been a huge deal for me. We can’t know it all, but we know people in our lives who have done things and who’ve been successful. Utilize them and start building your mentors, your people in your speed dials, keep building those up.
Improve Your Physical Health
Take care of yourself. I know it sounds so simple, but sleep, diet, exercise; whenever you get a chance, take it! It is critically important. How you feel has a lot to do with how you think and do things. If you want to survive in this business, you’ve got to take care of yourself. You’ve got to have quality sleep, a heathy diet, and consistent exercise. If you don’t, it’s going to catch up to you.
Time Management
We’ve mentioned this before, but when it comes to time management, you got to be deliberate. It’s not just our work week, it’s also our social calendar, our personal calendar, our meal plans, everything.
Plan ahead, because things could happen last-minute, and you’ll be glad you gave yourself that extra leeway. As an ATC, we have a special job, so it takes special preparation to get us to last a long time in our career.
Establish Your Priorities
Who and what are the most important things in your life?
A great book for me was a book called, Essentialism by Grey McKeown. He had a quote which sums the book up in a lot of ways. He said, “Distinguish the vital few from the trivial many.” When you start figuring out what’s really important and what’s not important, you start getting these priorities in your life set.
Picture a clear pond, and you throw a rock into the pond and it causes a ripple effect. Everything on the surface is now choppy and unsettled, and that effect can travel on for quite a while. However, if you look at where the rock is under the surface, the water never changed.
In life, a lot of things on the surface seem crazy, but they’re not vital. I have to remind myself every now and then, “Don’t be shallow, Brett. Go deep in life. Am I on top of the surface where things are kind of crazy, or am I deep where it’s calm and quiet?” It’s a good visual reminder for me when things get hectic to gauge how important things are. It gives me proper perspective.
Learn to Say “No”
There have been times in training camp where we’ve had treatments from 8:00am to 12:00pm, and a player will walk in 1-2 minutes before the training room closes. Instead of staying late to treat them, I walk out. Even if they’re upset, I don’t give in. He had his opportunity to come see me earlier, and he lost it. The next day though, that same player will show up to the training room much earlier.
When you start giving in on those things, that’s taking away from you. If you keep giving yourself up, you’ll burn yourself out. So, you have to establish those standards. People will burn you out, if you let them.
Hobbies
Pick one. Do one. Have it. Whatever floats your boat. You need to turn your brain off at some point in time. Get out there and find something. I know it sounds simple, but say, “Yeah, I want to learn the guitar.” Just go out and do it! It’s such a great way of mentally taking your brain off things for a little while. When you come back to the problem, it’s never quite as bad as it was the first time.
Positive Self-Talk
As athletic trainers, it’s so important to practice positive self-talk. No one’s going to be saying, “Hey man, keep going! You’re doing a great job!” You usually don’t get that on a regular basis, so you have to find ways of motivating yourself.
Joyce Meyer said, “You can’t have a positive life with a negative mind.” If you speak negatively on a consistent basis, you start becoming negative. Conversely, the more you speak positive about things in your life, it gets inside of you and it brings you up. How we speak determines how we’re going to react. You have to speak to yourself positively, encourage yourself, and believe in yourself.
Communicate
Develop proper communication channels. Learn how people communicate in your job: your coaches, your athletic directors, learn how they communicate best. It’s going to make your job so much easier.
The other thing for me was I had to communicate to my family. When I got home from work, I wasn’t in the best mood for the first five minutes. I had to communicate to my family to give me five minutes just to decompress and let things go. After that, I was good! Let people know what you need. Don’t be afraid to say, “I need these things from you.”
Set Boundaries
Stick to your treatment times. For athletic trainers, sit down with the coaches, athletic directors, and your bosses before the season occurs and discuss what times are you going to cover and what times are you not going to cover. Have those conversations in the beginning of the season with your people. Whatever you guys decide, stick to it.
Keep Learning
No one knows it all, so don’t ever stop learning. You’ll gain more wisdom, the ability to understand things more, and you’ll have less frustration. As professionals, we always want to get better, and it’s fun for us to learn new things that are really effective. Use your drive time to listen to podcasts, stay active in your continued education courses, never stop striving to learn more and be better.
Have Proper Expectations
One of the mentors in my life was an old chiropractor. He pulled me aside when I was younger and he said, “Until you learn this, you’re going to struggle: the 80-10-10 Rule. 80 percent of people you treat are going to get better, 10 percent you’ll kind of help, and there’s going to be 10 percent of people that you’ll never get better. Learn to accept that.”
It sounds like that’s a negative, but it’s actually real. I think as athletic trainers, we tend to have this savior complex. We feel we have to be the knowledge of all and save everybody; however, that’s not our job. Our job is to be the best we can. Nobody can treat everyone and get everyone better. That’s why we’re all different and have different skills. Don’t ever put yourself in that box.
Compartmentalize
As athletic trainers, you have to compartmentalize. You can’t let one thing lead into the other. It really gets back to, what’s really vital and what’s trivial?
It’s easy to let one thing flow into the next; but you have to understand, the next athlete that comes your way had nothing to do with the previous situation you were just dealing with. You’ve got to somehow put a wall up and say, “All right, I got you. I’m going to deal with you, and I’ll deal with that later.” It’s hard, it takes time, but the more you do that the less stress you’ll have.
Brett Fischer, PT, ATC, CSCS
Fight, Fight, Fight!
I’m going to leave you with this, you got to fight, fight, fight!
You’ve got to fight every day. We’re givers, it’s fulfilling, it changes lives, but we have to be deliberate in what we do each and every day. Be a planner. Deliberately do things that are going to build you up inside.
We should love what we do.
Our profession is worth fighting for!
About Spooner:
Spooner has been promoting movement in the Valley of the Sun since Tim Spooner, PT, FAFS, CEO started the practice in 1990. From employees to patients to community and healthcare partners, Spooner’s core purpose is helping people achieve. Our physical therapists and hand therapists strive for the greatest possible outcome and we promise an exceptional patient experience. We value greatly our community relationships and the loyalty of our patients whom we have had the pleasure to serve. We will employ these same philosophies and dedication to athletes as we forge the path to bringing an accessible and world-class sports medicine program to all corners of the valley.
Spooner is working in conjunction with the Fischer Institute Team to bring the best in Sport Medicine to all 22 Spooner locations across the Valley.