A lucid guide to burnout with valuable content for employees, employers, and medical professionals.
A physician offers a prescription for overcoming burnout.
According to Khan (Unlocking the Natural-Born Leader’s Abilities, 2017), “workplace burnout is becoming a national epidemic,” and it has not yet been identified as “purely a medical or psychiatric illness.” The author’s antidote is a “self-care solution”; he offers intelligent, if at times repetitive, advice to diagnose and treat burnout. Khan begins with lyrics to a “Burnout Awareness Song” as well as “Burnout Self-Care Poetry,” both of which seem a bit odd, yet they immediately put the problem on a personal level. Of greater significance is the material concerning self-assessment in the first chapter; in addition to addressing how personality plays a role in the condition, the author includes a scoring tool that helps readers determine their burnout levels. Khan then presents some research regarding the condition followed by a discussion of workplace burnout. One of the more engaging and perhaps strongest aspects of the book is how the author relates burnout to the medical profession. He provides useful advice for primary care doctors about the diagnosis of burnout (again using a scoring tool), but he also adds a very personal element to the book by discussing his own professional experience with the condition. During his career as an attending physician and pulmonologist, Khan was under tremendous pressure as his responsibilities dramatically increased; he had “to learn how I did all that extra hard work with excellence without severe burnout.” His keen insights and observations of himself and others lend a particularly powerful element to this manual. Later, the author identifies what he believes are “eighteen phases of burnout,” describing each one and adding his recommendations for dealing with it—instructive, if somewhat overwhelming. It is the “Step-by-Step Self-Care Solution” that is likely to be the most pertinent portion of the volume. Here Khan gently but firmly walks readers through a series of steps to avoid burnout and treat it. He also talks about how to prevent future burnout and offers some helpful ways to reduce workplace stress in order to minimize the condition.
A lucid guide to burnout with valuable content for employees, employers, and medical professionals.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4808-8332-1
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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