It Burned Me All Down by Erin Durant

Erin Durant

Author

It Burned Me All Down

Erin Durant's career took a sharp turn when she suffered a devastating burnout while working at one of Canada's largest law firms. Even as a law firm partner, she found herself isolated and with little control over her career. These factors as well as the stresses associated with being a millennial woman in law contributed to her personal crisis. The author describes her personal struggles to manage the riggers of a Big Law practice in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and provides advice to organizations and professionals dealing with mental health issues in high performing workplaces. This book is a must-read for law firm management and for anyone supervising a high performance team. Individuals undergoing their own crisis may also find comfort in the text as it describes the author's journey back from the darkness and forwards towards a successful career.

Reviews

Durant lays out how law management and organizations can recognize signs of burnout in their employees and how people can recognize burnout within themselves. Durant is persuasive and educational about the effects of burnout–the result of “chronic workplace stress” that has “not been successfully managed”–within individuals and its impacts, with results including energy depletion, mental distance from one’s work, negative feelings about one’s job, and “reduced professional efficacy.” Drawing on her own experiences working at one of Canada’s largest law firms, Durant details how to tell if a place of employment is detrimental to one's mental health, and calls on employers to understand the risks and warning signs and to supply the resources for employees not to get to a state where they reach burnout at work.

It Burned Me All Down offers a highly intimate look into the mental health strains on lawyers or other high-performance professionals. As a law firm partner, Durant found herself highly successful in her career, but spiraling into depression and burnout in her personal life. The stress of working as a lawyer during the pandemic and the little time she had to work on her own mental wellbeing took a toll that eventually caused her to leave her high-profile position. This raw, candid book chronicles Durant's journey back from darkness and into a more balanced personal life and career.

It’s also a resourceful guide for management of high-stress professional organizations, for individuals finding themselves facing the symptoms of burnout, and for anyone who may not fully recognize the signs. Durant's story is an inspirational first-hand account of facing the darkness of burnout and depression, and then taking the best steps for one's mental health and setting healthy workplace boundaries. This quick read is packed with insightful guidance for high-performance employers and employees.

Takeaway: An intimate, firsthand account look into professional burnout and how to cope with it as an employer and an employee.

Great for fans of: Amy Shah’s I'm So Effing Tired, Beverly Potter’s Overcoming Job Burnout.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

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