Avoiding Cabal Leader Burnout - Practice Emotional Hygiene

Original article courtesy of Psychology Today, Squeaky Wheel Blog LINK, but you can find more information HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Being a cabal leader (or cabal manager*) can be a very stressful "second job'. While there are a lot of

Protect yourself!
(From Funcom's Media Library)

high points, you are also ground zero for the complaints, the drama llamas, and the people who think they can do your job better than you can. This is not a good spot for the faint of heart - and one of the reasons that 'cabal leader burnout' is so prevalent.

So how can you help take care of your own mental health and safety to avoid burnout?

Emotional hygiene means adopting mindful, small habits that monitor your stress levels and deal with them as appropriate.

After all, you probably brush and floss?
What do you do to maintain your mental health?

You probably put band-aids or antibiotic ointment on cuts and scratches?
How do you identify and treat psychological 'wounds'?


1. Pay Attention to Emotional Pain

Pain is a vital signal to let you know something isn't quite right. However, while identifying a toothache or a headache is pretty easy, identifying how you're feeling emotionally isn't a skill most people practice.  By naming your emotions as you experience them, and asking yourself why you're feeling them is good emotional hygiene to understand how you're feeling.

For instance, if someone starts griping in cabal chat that the event you planned is at a time that's inconvenient for them, and it makes you angry, pause to ask yourself what you're feeling, and why. Are you angry because you feel that this person takes you for granted? Are you angry because you're afraid you're not giving your cabal the events that it wants?  

Being able to "meet yourself" and ask how you're doing is an important part of emotional hygiene.

Alexithymia is the technical name for a condition in which one has difficulty naming ones own feelings. This can be the consequence of a neurological disability or past trauma or just from lack of training and support in knowing and expressing ones feelings.


2. Stop Emotional Bleeding

Sometimes, there's an "emotional wound" that keeps bothering you. Maybe you screwed something up, and now you're feeling less self-confident, or helpless, and that makes you more likely to fail in the future. You need to identify these kinds of emotional wounds and 'treat' them. By paying attention to emotional pain, maybe you can identify what's bothering you.  

Now what?

While you're busy asking yourself what you're feeling and why, ask yourself what soothes you, or recharges your batteries?  Maybe it's a couple hours of Call of Duty, or playing with your kids, or hitting the gym hard.  When you find yourself feeling beat up - deal with the problem in an adult fashion, and then make it a point to reward yourself with some "you time".

If the problem is more serious then take it more seriously (at your own pace). Figure out how you helped create the problem, decide to change what didn't work, and then move on.  You can't change the past, and so don't let it preoccupy you more than is appropriate.

Don't blame and don't bitch - not even to yourself. If you start the process of trying to figure out who's at fault (which is different than figuring out what went wrong), you're going to create a negative atmosphere in your cabal.  Instead of blaming, find some more neutral things to say "We saw things differently" “I gave it my best shot, but it didn’t work.” 

Focus on what's next.  So the thing you tried didn't work? Don't keep dwelling on how and why it didn't work more than is helpful.  You need to take your focus off the past event that you cannot change, and instead put your energy toward what you're doing next.

In short, quit bitching.  Focus on what's next, and try to do it differently next time.  No one wants to hear you bitch, and it's not good for you.

3. Protect Your Self-Esteem

The author of the original article indicates that self-esteem is like an emotional immune system.  This gives people greater resilience.  (Resilience, in this sense, means that you can recover quickly from upset or disturbance.)  In all actuality, the things other people say aren't what determines our self esteem - it's how you react to what people say that determines your self esteem. In this case, YOU are your own worst enemy.  Realize this, and deliberately, intentionally, and mindfully, game the system.

It's a natural human reaction to think about distressing events. This is good and helpful because this focusses our problem solving capabilities on finding ways to avoid or manage distressing events.  However, once you have done the problem solving that you can, you need to stop - otherwise you can excessively dwell on the things that have gone wrong.  This sort of self-centered ruminating or brooding isn't healthy mentally or physically (LINK).  When you identify that you're thinking about something excessively, then find something else to do, fast.  Read a book, watch a movie, find something that engages your brain entirely and doesn't give you enough room to spare (intellectually speaking) to brood.

4. Find ways to be happy.

Research from Harvard (LINK) and Berkley (LINK, and LINK) has shown that being intentionally grateful, and expressing it to the people you're grateful to, has immensely positive effects on you. Take a moment and thank the people that make your life a nice place to be. When you're feeling blue, this can be a great lift. Not only that, but it helps build stronger ties within your cabal, and lets these people know that they're doing a good job (and should keep it up!)

Generosity (LINK, LINK, and LINK) is an extremely important mood-lifter.  Altruism and volunteering have been shown (scientifically!) to make people happy.  So get out there and do something nice for someone for absolutely no reason whatsoever.  Hang out in Kingsmouth and offer to help people on quests.  Get newbies through their first Polaris.  PUG nightmares with some new folks (courtesy of the Noobmares channel LINK).

As a cabal manager - YOU are a very important part of your cabal, so take good care of yourself!


* Cabal manager is an inclusive term that indicates a cabal leader, a cabal officer, or a cabal veteran that is widely looked up to even without a formal leadership title.