Lisa Bennett On Overcoming Burnout And The Importance Of Perspective As A Changemaker

Lisa Bennett is a coach, workshop facilitator, speaker, and author with decades of experience as a mission-driven leader.

She helps leaders and teams tackle today’s challenges with greater clarity, courage, and purpose.

Through her signature program, Ordinary Heroism in Extraordinary Times, she empowers organisations to better navigate uncertainty, overcome burnout and overwhelm, and build the skills and capacity to address today’s complex challenges.

A former Harvard fellow and award-winning journalist, Lisa has worked with CEOs, nonprofit leaders, university presidents, and other changemakers. She has led workshops for the Institute for the Golden Gate, the Packard Foundation, and other mission-driven organisations. She speaks on leadership, resilience, and managing change.

Lisa is co-author of Ecoliterate with Daniel Goleman, editor of Women Amplified, and author of the forthcoming Ordinary Heroism in Extraordinary Times.

Lisa discusses why purpose driven individuals commonly experience burnout when trying to generate sustainable impact, and what practical tools and strategies you can use to manage your wellbeing and stay on track when helping others.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - Could you share what led to your work in mission-driven leadership and impact?

[Lisa Bennett] - It's funny, I usually answer that question by saying I started out as a journalist because I was so curious about everything. I was exposed to a lot in that experience. It dawned on me as I was thinking about speaking with you that the seeds of our work start much earlier.

In my case, I happen to have been born in the first mass produced suburb in the world. What that meant was it was one of the least diverse places in the world. These were homogenous little monopoly houses, and in my experience, a lot of us living there were similar. We were uniform in our thinking and appearance, so I had this burning curiosity to understand difference because I saw none of it. I knew there had to be more.

That's what encouraged me to see the world and evaluate what's going on. Journalism seemed like a great way to do that.

I was very quickly exposed to people who did harm in the world, but also, more interestingly, people who did some amazing things in the world. All of a sudden, I started seeing everyday people having this profound impact.

I remember meeting this mum who lived in Nebraska. She ended up fighting for her daughter to have the right to play on what was thought to be a male sports team and it led to Title IX, the right for girls to participate equally in sports.

When we think about change, we often think it's this top-down process. Your audience probably doesn't, but a lot of people think they need to have a lot of power in order to inspire change. I kept meeting these people who did not have a lot of power by any means, but they had passion. That fed into this big question for me of how do everyday people rise to extraordinary challenges?

As I started looking at the larger social changes that were happening around equality or climate action, the same thing seemed to hold true. I ended up working for a number of organisations dedicated to those causes, and what I observed was that often the most powerful agent of change was one-on-one connection. I love that, especially in these times when a lot of people don't feel very powerful.

What does your work primarily involve and how are you supporting your clients to maximise their potential to create change?

Over the last half-dozen years or so, I collaborated with a lot of changemakers to help get their stories out because it was so clear to me people needed hope.

There were so many good people doing things in the world, but they didn't necessarily have the time or the inclination to tell their story. I thought that I have that skill set. I can partner with them to help get those stories out there.

That was cool because I learned more about how these change projects happen. More recently, I've started focusing on capacity building for mission driven leaders and teams. The reason I got into that field is here in America we have a few things going on.

There is this principle of when do people engage in challenges? It's not only when they have a passion for it, but when they have some sense of an equivalency of skills to engage.

That's the concept of flow that's been written about for quite some time. We're in the ‘flow’ when we feel prepared to perform a task. If not, people disengage, and we've certainly seen high and growing rates of that for a long time.

With all the pressures on mission driven leaders now, and the complexity of the issues living in a poly crisis and having this political tidal wave, it makes most missions far more difficult. What is critically important is not just the decisions make, the actions we take, and how we make change happen, but also how is all of this affecting us? How can we sustain ourselves on this journey?

That's the impetus for my current work. We coach leaders, give workshops, talks, and so on. It's all about focusing on getting clear, becoming calm, and impactful; trying not to get overwhelmed despite the fact it's overwhelming.

Having spent quite some time in different mission driven organisations, I see how burnout happens. It's easy to feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. We have two extremes going on in terms of how people engage or don't engage in the big issues of our day. For some people, it's too much and they end up checking out. There’s the flight or fight response.

The people who are actually doing the fighting, they can be vulnerable to burnout. I know it isn't always a welcome topic because other issues all seem so much more pressing than our own wellbeing, but that's not a sustainable strategy.

What sustainable strategies should people who are looking to lead change be trying to apply to manage their own wellbeing?

I write about this weekly in a Substack newsletter called Ordinary Heroism in Extraordinary Times. Foundationally, you need to understand what the journey is when taking on some big quest.

The way I look at it, people who are trying to create positive social change are the ordinary heroes of our time. Not everybody feels comfortable with that term, but all it means is you're acting with courage, altruism, and integrity. The tricky part is doing that in these times, which are so daunting.

The first step is to understand what this journey looks like. We get to dive into the classic hero or heroine’s journey, and what you see is there's this clear mission, but in the person who's pursuing that mission, there's also a little doubt.

Then there's the surmounting of that doubt, which usually happens with the help of somebody else, a partner, mentor, whomever it might be. There’s also going to be a million setbacks, and you have to learn how to deal with that. It's a matter of trying to dedicate a little bit of time to step back and take on a new perspective.

I'm very influenced by what's going on here in America.

if you're hammered daily with a lot of setbacks, it's easy to feel demoralised. If we keep in mind there is a journey that happens for doing any work like this, that's an important step to maintaining the right mindset.

You have to consider what’s realistic for you as a single individual, while also remembering it’s not all on your shoulders. Bringing the growth mindset can also support developing that perspective as well. The growth mindset is often applied to welcome changes, like when we want to go climb a mountain or run a marathon. It's also critically important for unwelcome challenges: how do we see this tough stuff as calling upon us to grow profoundly?

You are the author of the forthcoming book Ordinary Heroism in Extraordinary Times. Could you share more about that book and the key insights you gained in the process of writing it?

The book, workshops, and the talks, they’re united by this idea of the journey. They take the time to look at each step of the journey and what strategies can help at each stage. I take a focused look at the role of perception, presence, and power. What are our relationships to those conceptss? How are we looking at these daunting challenges?

I've interviewed several neuroscientists who say we are simply not wired to navigate these challenges. We're not even wired to understand them. That's a humbling thing to have to acknowledge, but I also find it brings relief. This stuff is bigger than us. We have to find our right sized way that allows us to engage with a sense of calmness, because if we are calmer, we're going to be more effective.

The element of presence is really where I bring in the emotional intelligence work I did with Daniel Goleman and apply that in looking at the emotions that get triggered by the issues we're facing. Whether it's climate change, a decline of equality, or what have you:

We need strategies for dealing with our emotions that get triggered and space to address them. Since so much of this work is urgent and important, it's easy to think we'll have time for ourselves later. We have to have time now, because the alternative is burnout.

Does burnout often occur because of a changemaker’s inability to draw on their existing passion and feeling the weight of prolific challenges on a day-to-day basis?

Absolutely, and that's where perspective is so incredibly important, because if you're holding up this bar of what you want to achieve, and it's only a win or lose scenario, that's going to become super discouraging.

If we bring more realism to our work (which might be a hard pill to swallow_, it’ll allow people to stay engaged for the long haul, and we need that.

What advice would you give an aspiring changemaker in order to help them overcome barriers and elevate their long-term impact?

Connection is one of the most important words here. There's a researcher, Shawn Achor, who shared with me a story that blew my mind.

He said that according to his research, when people look at a mountain on their own, that mountain appears bigger to them than when they are looking at that mountain with other people.

It's such a powerful testament to how we feel, see, and experience everything differently when we're not trying to change the world on our own.

There are many dimensions to that finding as well. You can consider who you can connect with in different organisations, and finding role models, both living and dead. When I first started getting involved in this kind of work, I decided I was going to read all the Nobel Peace Prize speeches. It was fantastic because I got to see how we’re part of this ongoing tribe of people who are holding up a light.

What sentiments did you see in people aiming to solve pressing challenges across different eras?

One that always jumped out at me was the Red Cross. They won the Nobel three times, one after each of the two world wars and then another on an anniversary. When they won it after the second world war, one of the things the person accepting the prize said was that they felt like they had hardly achieved what they wanted to achieve. That’s what we’re talking about. It’s often this need for humility, and I find that humility is a bit of an ointment that allows us to keep working.

Did you find their perspectives mirrored the attitudes of today or were their perspectives on inspiring change different?

I found it sounded universal. The phrase about creating a tribe is something many of us have heard often, but that's not just an external tribe, there's also an internal tribe. Who do you want to allow yourself to be inspired by inside of you?

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive change?

Several of them, but I'll just mention two. One is The Frameworks Institute which is a MacArthur award-winning communications firm. What's fascinating about them is that they help social change organisations with communicating these issues in a way that lands with people.

It's insightful in how the target population thinks about these issues and how to connect with them in a genuine way. It’s important to be empathetic with where they're at and then to find a way to connect around shared values. After that, it’s about moving forward with the education effort of whatever your mission is. We're not just hammering people with our cause. It's much more relational than that.

There's another one that I'm writing about for Substack called Values Advisor. It's an interesting project co-founded and run by a woman named Lisa Renstrom. She had this insight 10 years ago that it would be beneficial to help people move their money to socially responsible causes. She convinced a lot of people to do this but couldn’t find anybody who knew how to complete that work.

She founded a non-profit platform connecting people with advisors who can help them make good decisions about where to invest their money. If they don't have a ton of money to invest, they’re told what bank should represent their deposits, what checking account they open, and the credit union they should use.

One of the reasons I love this is it's pretty inclusive. It's not just for people with a lot of money to invest, it's for everyone. It's a project offering a concrete way for people to have an impact by voting with their dollars in our world.

To finish off, what books of resources would you recommend to our audience?

Definitely the Nobel Peace Prize speeches! There's also a book I love that had a great impact on me called Forged in Crisis. It's written by a Harvard professor, Nancy Koehn, and she tells the stories of leaders who came to power in crisis.

It clearly shows that people who do amazing things weren't just born that way. There is an opportunity for learning and growth in the midst of crisis.

Koehn tells amazing stories and pulls out lessons along the way. Brené Brown's Daring Greatly I’d of course recommend, and another that might not seem to match (but it spoke to me) is Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote. He talks about how we all have four thousand weeks on average in a lifetime. The book is about achieving happiness if you recognise your constraints.

I hadn't thought about it until right now, but the resonance there is similar to what we've been talking about. When you recognise there are some limits to what you can do, you actually have more freedom to act.