What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from The Burnout Challenge: Managing People's Relationships with Their Jobs
Wendell had coached youth basketball and mentored new coaches for over a decade, and lately he found himself irritated by questions he used to enjoy answering. A parent asked him something simple after practice, and he heard himself respond with more edge than the moment deserved. He wondered whether he had simply become a worse person. A longtime colleague suggested something different, that Wendell's caseload of mentees and teams had quietly doubled, with no added support and no acknowledgment that his role had changed shape. Wendell began to consider that his irritability might be tracking his actual workload, not some decline in his character.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
More people to guide, and less say over how many
For a coach or mentor, workload often grows through caseload, more mentees, more athletes, more sessions, added without a matching increase in time or support. Control shrinks in parallel when a program or organization decides who gets added to that caseload, leaving little room for the coach's own judgment about capacity. That combination produces exhaustion that can look, from the outside, like simple crankiness or reduced patience.
When a program expands its intake specifically because current coaches have a track record of success.
Set an explicit cap on how many people you can meaningfully support at once, and name that number out loud to whoever assigns caseload.
Progress that belongs to someone else, and few peers who understand the work
Reward in coaching and mentoring is often indirect, since the visible progress belongs to the mentee, not the coach, and public credit rarely flows back. Community can be scarce too, particularly for coaches working independently or across multiple sites without a regular peer group.
For coaches or mentors working alone, without an organization that schedules any peer contact.
Find one other coach or mentor for a regular exchange about the work itself, not just logistics.
When the program's priorities stop matching why you started coaching
Fairness shows up in how resources, recognition, or difficult cases get distributed among coaches, sometimes unevenly. Values tension appears when an organization prioritizes metrics, win totals, completion rates, over the developmental relationship a coach actually values, creating a quiet erosion of meaning in work that still looks the same from outside.
When funding or leadership ties a coach's standing to metrics that do not reflect the relationships actually being built.
Name one relationship you are proudest of and notice what made it different from what gets measured.
The program shapes the conditions, even when you shape the relationships
The book's authors argue that organizations hold the primary responsibility for redesigning caseload, recognition, and fair processes, rather than expecting coaches and mentors to simply build more resilience. Most coaches cannot redesign the program they work within, but the six areas still function as a private lens for noticing exactly which condition has shifted, and for making a specific case to whoever manages the program.
Taking on more mentees to increase visible impact can directly worsen workload and control, the very conditions most likely to produce exhaustion. Building peer community by attending more meetings can also eat into time that would otherwise go to the people being coached. There is rarely a way to expand reach without straining capacity, and a coach feeling that tension is reading the tradeoff accurately.
Name one thing, honestly
- Has your caseload or scope grown in a way that has never been formally acknowledged? - Where does your sense of reward come from, and how reliable is that source right now? - What would it look like to protect your own capacity as deliberately as you protect the people you guide?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Name one relationship you are proudest of and notice what made it different from what gets measured.