Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm specializing in helping teams and organizations optimize their working experience. You know, it was actually my own not-so-hot working experience that initially inspired me to start the business I run today. I had been in my last full-time job for a while

when I decided to call it quits. And I remember when I started telling colleagues I was leaving,

and I didn't have a plan around what was next, the default assumption was that I had hit a wall

of overwork and overwhelm. I remember them saying things like, oh, you must be fried. You must be

exhausted. You must be ready for some time to breathe. You must be so burned out. And they were

right, but only on that last point. I was burned out. But actually, it was due to an excess of breathing room.

I was in a season of underwhelm.

And I was experiencing a specific brand of burnout, not well recognized then, but that

today, many are starting to call bore out.

These days, as I'm working with companies to amplify their employee experiences, I'm uncovering

a surprising amount of boreout in my pulse checks. So today, let's talk about what it is and how we can

work to fend it off. So what is boreout? Well, according to Laudeau, an assistant professor of

organizational behavior at EM Leon

Business School in France, Borout is chronic boredom. A number of factors can cause chronic boredom,

including working in a demoralizing physical environment or feeling underchallenged over prolonged

periods of time. But the fundamental experience of boreout is meaninglessness.

The experience that the work doesn't really have any purpose, that there's no point.

Ugh, how miserable does that sound?

And can you imagine doing your most amazing work under those circumstances?

And so we're left with the question of, if this is your

experience, what can we do about it? So here's how I'm starting to advise client organizations.

First, there are things that leaders can be doing. And here are some of the recommendations

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