Alyssa Birnbaum

I remember the stomach flutters before my first performance review and my first job out of college.

To say I was overeager to perform is an understatement.

I was grinding.

I worked around the clock.

I spent hours finessing my PowerPoints, took meticulous meeting notes, and never missed a deadline, which is why I felt completely blindsided when I actually received my review.

My boss sat me down and told me that I needed to work on connecting better with my clients and building relationships with them.

Apparently,

Nobody knew anything about me.

Building relationships with my clients, that's what they cared about?

I couldn't understand when I was working so hard to deliver quality work.

And I wish I could say I underwent some immediate transformation where I became some fabulous connector and lived happily ever after.

But in truth, I didn't really know what to do and I fumbled for a few more years.

My clients were remote most of the time.

I wasn't working with them and I didn't know how to relate to them because they were so much younger than me.

It was years later that I was pursuing my PhD and like the old saying goes, research

is MeSearch.

And my initial MeSearch focused on burnout and work engagement because I knew what it was like to experience burnout.

And what was surprising to me was that I always assumed that burnout was just the result of having too much work and feeling really depleted from too much work.

But in fact, there's so many other factors that can play a role.

And an important one was community and connection.