title: Hopeless, burned out, and questioning: achieving personal resilience in the midst of organizational turmoil.
abstract: There are not many personal reflection pieces about professional resilience published as health care professionals are still among the least likely to raise their own personal problems--especially in the field of emergency health care. Writing afirst person piece about the journey to finally finding professional resilience, I describe factors faced by many new and mid-level professionals that are not written about in academic journals yet contribute to: premature career termination, poor customer service/patient care, and lack of motivation. I conclude with a way forward that could be a map for others currently struggling with their career choice. As a mid level psychologist, I can now look back on the past 8 years of my development and see the obstacles I was faced with. The irony is that at the time I knew they were challenging times, but I lacked a context for them, and did not know what normal was. Now that I am a relatively safe distance away from those hard years, I can appreciate more fully what resilience means to me, and respect the years I spent secretly in crisis. This article is a blend of academic information about professional resilience and compassion fatigue, contrasted by those very concepts playing out in my own life. The recommendations I provide for leaders and those in the thick of a professional burn out are concepts I know would have made a difference to me, even in survival mode.
authors.affiliation: Joint Military Attache School, Washington DC, USA. abbey-robin.tillery@dodiis.mil
authors.forename: Abbey-Robin
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Tillery
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002055:Burnout, Professional / Q000523:psychology*; D006772:Hospitals, Military / Q000592:standards; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008887:Military Medicine / Q000592:standards; D011586:Psychology, Clinical / Q000592:standards; D055500:Resilience, Psychological