They see misery in the workplace and offer company

“Making It Work” is a series about small business owners trying to survive tough times.

When Karen Schiro, a real estate agent in Fairfax Station, Virginia, realized she was suffering from burnout last year, she reached out to a burnout coach, Ellyn Schinke, based in Tacoma, Washington. “I knew I was burned out, and I just didn’t know how to fix it,” she said.

In six months of weekly video calls, Ms. Schiro, 45, learned how to trim her overflowing to-do lists. Making changes like adding a line to her email signature saying she won’t respond to messages sent after 6 p.m. seemed like “dumb things,” she said, but it took an outsider’s perspective to identify those tweaks.

“When you’re burned out, it’s hard to think about such things and put them into practice,” Ms. Schiro said.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted how and where people worked, the World Health Organization recognized burnout. In 2019, it defined the hallmarks of this type of chronic workplace stress as exhaustion, cynicism and ineffectiveness — all traits that make it difficult for people to recover on their own, said Michael P. Leiter, a professor emeritus at Acadia University in Nova Scotia who studies burnout.

“It’s hard to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps at that point,” he said. “It’s really helpful to have a secondary standpoint or some emotional support.”

Meet the burnout coach.

Because it exists in a grey area between psychotherapy and career coaching, and without formal qualifications and oversight, “burnout coach” can be an easy buzzword to advertise. In principle, anyone can put up a sign.

As a result, more people have been branding themselves as burnout coaches in recent years, says Chris Bittinger, a clinical assistant professor of leadership and project management at Purdue University who studies burnout. “There’s no barrier to entry,” he says.

Making a profit is another story. When Denver resident Rhia Batchelder began her career as a burnout coach in 2021, she initially lived off her savings, supplementing her income with freelance legal work and dog walking while honing her sales and marketing skills.

“Coaching is generally a very unregulated industry,” she said. “I’ve probably spent hundreds of hours researching burnout.”

This lack of oversight makes it difficult to say how many burnout coaches are out there, but researchers who study burnout, such as Mr. Leiter, say that a corporate culture that revolves around the pressure of the pan, a lack of mental health resources and the disruption of The pandemic has created a critical mass of burned-out workers looking for ways to cope.

Kim Hires, an Atlanta-based burnout coach, said few people knew what she did when she started her business a decade ago. “Now I don’t have to explain it,” she said.

But burnout coaches struggle with a lack of qualifications. Some earn certifications through organizations like the International Coaching Federation, a large coaching nonprofit. But unlike a life coach, executive coach or wellness coach, a burnout coach does not have a specific certification.

They say they need to tie together certifications and continuing education in topics like stress management and sleep health. Even proponents acknowledge that this can make the practice sound like a gimmick.

However, educational institutions are responding to the growing interest.

Terrence E. Maltbia, director of the Columbia Coaching Certification Program at Columbia University, said the university is adding the topic of burnout to its continuing education curriculum after a biennial survey of coaching program alumni and leaders found that interest in burnout increased dramatically between 2018 and 2022. He called the increase unprecedented.

“The market is driving it, because people have to work, and work is more stressful,” he said.

The last annual questionnaire by the American Psychological Association found that 77 percent of employees experienced work-related stress in the past month. Help to deal with that stress is often hard to find: More than half of the U.S. population lives in an area with inadequate access to mental health care, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration.

Brett Linzer, an internist and pediatrician in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, says some people prefer to talk to a burnout counselor because there is still a stigma surrounding mental health.

“There’s a cultural narrative that doctors have to figure things out for themselves and can’t rely on others,” Dr. Linzer said. Talking to a burnout coach made him more empathetic and a better communicator, he said, and helped him cope with the deaths of two friends and colleagues.

Personal experience also plays a role in the pitches of many burnout coaches. Ms. Batchelder, the Denver coach, left a career in corporate litigation that left her disconnected and exhausted.

“I started researching burnout to help myself,” said Ms. Batchelder, 33. Learning stress management tools such as breathing exercises, setting boundaries and establishing routines gave her insight to help clients.

These coaches indicated that they do not replace therapists, but provide a different form of support. Some clients indicated that they appreciated the fact that a burnout coach could empathize with the challenges at their work.

“She could understand what I was going through,” said Tara Howell, a communications manager for a Baltimore nonprofit who began working with Ms. Batchelder while she was also seeing a therapist.

“My sessions with Rhia were much more practical,” said Ms Howell, 28. “I had considered working with career coaches, but that didn’t seem right for what I wanted.”

While some employers may pay for sessions with a burnout coach under the guise of professional development, most coaches and clients report that people pay out of pocket for coaching — which can cost $250 or more for a 45- or 60-minute one-on-one session, with session packages running into the thousands of dollars.

The interest in burnout coaches stems from changing views on well-being in the workplace. William Fleming, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, found that many employer-provided wellbeing services, such as sleep apps and mindfulness seminars, largely fail to deliver on their promises to improve health. mental health.

“Not only do these interventions not work, they are counterproductive,” said Kandi Wiens, co-director of the master’s program in medical education at the University of Pennsylvania and a burnout researcher.

Mr Fleming said these initiatives were ineffective because they focused on the individual rather than on the issues such as overwork or lack of resources that lead to burnout. “You’re trying to alleviate the symptoms of the problem without addressing the root causes,” he said.

Burnout coaches themselves acknowledge that they are not a panacea. “There is definitely a limit to what coaching can do,” Ms. Batchelder said. “There are so many institutional stressors.”