Can Coaching Help to Prevent Burnout?
By Hazel Anderson-Turner
As the author of Coaching Through Burnout, I’m often asked whether coaching can truly help prevent burnout in leaders and their teams. My answer is a resounding yes.
I recently had the opportunity to discuss this in detail at the June ABP ‘Meet the Author’ webinar. In this article, I’ll share key highlights from that session: what burnout really is, why I wrote the book, and how coaching, especially Acceptance and Commitment Coaching, can be a powerful antidote to burnout.
Understanding Burnout
Burnout is often associated with crisis, the moment when your body and mind simultaneously scream, “Enough!”. But burnout doesn't suddenly appear; it develops gradually over weeks or months, often unnoticed until a breaking point is reached.
Christina Maslach and her team identified three key symptoms of burnout back in the 1970s, which remain relevant today:
- Overwhelming exhaustion
- Cynicism and detachment
- A sense of ineffectiveness
These symptoms often interact, creating a downward spiral that’s difficult to escape without intervention.
The World Health Organization (2019) defines burnout as “a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” While short-term stress can sometimes enhance focus and performance, especially in sports or goal-driven settings, problems arise when stress becomes chronic.
A useful framework for understanding why burnout occurs is the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model by Bakker and Demerouti (2007). According to this model, burnout risk increases when job demands (e.g., heavy workloads, time pressure, unsafe environments, complex relationships) are high, but resources (e.g., support, autonomy, tools) are low. In such environments, individuals are more likely to feel exhausted and disengaged, accelerating the path to burnout.
Since the context in which an individual works is a major risk factor for burnout, prevention therefore requires:
- Improving working environments
- Supporting individuals to navigate these challenging contexts
Specifically, individuals need support to work out what is within their control to change. This is where coaching comes in.
Why I Wrote Coaching Through Burnout
My motivation for writing Coaching Through Burnout came from my experiences coaching and teaching coaching skills within the NHS. Consistently, the feedback from participants in my ‘Coaching Through Burnout’ training programme pointed to one clear insight: the quality of conversations matters. High-quality, coaching-informed conversations can significantly impact an individual’s ability to spot and prevent burnout, both in themselves and others.
I wanted to both share the content from my courses with a wider audience and share some of the approaches that I use in my one-to-one coaching practice. Therefore, the book is structured in three parts. The first explores what burnout is and what causes it. The second shares practical exercises and coaching tools to help readers build foundational coaching skills. The third introduces readers to Psychological Flexibility and a specific evidence-based approach known as Acceptance and Commitment Coaching.
Acceptance and Commitment Coaching
Acceptance and Commitment Coaching (ACC) is grounded in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a psychological approach with a strong evidence base in clinical and organisational settings. ACT-based coaching helps individuals:
- Increase their awareness
- Connect with what matters most to them
- Take action aligned with their values, even in the face of internal or external challenges
As a Business and Coaching Psychologist, I’m committed to using approaches backed by evidence. Research shows that ACT interventions can lead to decreased work stress, increased self-efficacy, improved wellbeing, better goal attainment (Skews, 2018), and reduced burnout rates (Spitznagel et al., 2022; Szarko et al., 2022; Towey-Swift et al., 2022). Additionally, Bond and Bunce (2000) found that ACT improved both wellbeing and workplace performance.
Time and again, I’ve witnessed how clients who develop Psychological Flexibility can better identify unhelpful patterns in their thinking or behaviour and take meaningful action. They stop spinning in cycles of overthinking or helplessness and start making small, values-based positive changes to things within their control.
Rethinking Resilience
From an ACT perspective, resilience isn’t about “toughing it out” or grinding through adversity. Rather, it’s about being flexible, like a tree that bends in a storm instead of breaking. Resilience is the ability to respond consciously and adaptively to challenges, rather than react automatically in habitual ways.
This flexibility enables us to pause and choose our response based on what really matters to us, rather than being driven by old habits or stories our minds tell us (e.g., “I can’t say no” or “I must always be available”). ACT helps people recognise these mental patterns and shift toward actions that align with their deeper values.
By teaching people how to navigate their thoughts and emotions more effectively, ACC builds self-awareness and helps prevent the unnoticed slide into burnout. When people learn to spot burnout early, before it escalates, they’re far better positioned to course correct.
Coaching as Culture Change
Coaching doesn’t just help individuals. It changes team dynamics and workplace culture. Leaders trained in coaching skills are more likely to listen, ask powerful questions, and empower their teams, rather than defaulting to 'fix-it' mode. This shift reduces dependency and builds capability, both key to long-term resilience.
Coaching conversations allow people to step back, gain perspective, and consider what’s truly within their control. They promote reflection over reactivity and open up space for new ways of working. This is especially important in high-pressure environments like healthcare, where burnout is prevalent.
Final Thoughts: A Message of Hope
Burnout is a complex but preventable challenge. While it’s understandable, given the chronic stress many of us face, it doesn’t have to be inevitable.
Coaching, particularly Acceptance and Commitment Coaching, offers a practical, evidence-based way to build the skills needed to respond more flexibly and effectively to difficult circumstances. It helps individuals reconnect with what truly matters to them, recognise what’s within their control, and take meaningful action. When leaders use coaching skills to support their teams rather than stepping in to fix, they foster resilience, capability, and trust.
Ultimately, creating a workplace culture grounded in coaching and Psychological Flexibility can help individuals not only avoid burnout but thrive, even in high-pressure environments.
About the Author
Hazel Anderson-Turner is a Certified Business Psychologist with the ABP and a Professional Certified Coach with the ICF. After a career in Leadership and Organisational Development she started her own consultancy in 2017, specialising in resilient leadership. She is the author of Coaching Through Burnout, which supports leaders to prevent burnout in themselves and their teams and is based on her experience working with the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hazel trains coaches worldwide in Acceptance & Commitment Coaching and co-hosts The Coaching UnpACT podcast.
References
Bakker, A B, & Demerouti, E (2007). The Job Demands‐Resources Model: State of the art. Journal of Managerial Psychology.
Bond, F W, & Bunce, D (2000). Mediators of Change in Emotion-Focused and Problem-Focused Worksite Stress Management Interventions. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5 (1), 156–163.
Maslach, C, & Leiter, M P (2016). Understanding the Burnout Experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry: Official Journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), 15 (2), 103–111.
Skews, R (2018). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Informed Coaching: Examining Outcomes and Mechanisms of Change. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Spitznagel, M B, Updegraff, A S G, Was, C, Martin, J T, Sislak, M, Wiborg, L, & Twohig, M P (2022). An Acceptance and Commitment Training Program Reduces Burden Transfer, Stress, and Burnout Among Veterinary Healthcare Teams. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 260 (12), 1554–1561.
Szarko, Alison; Ramona, Houmanfar; Smith, Gregory; Jacobs, Negar; Smith, Brooke; Assemi, Kian; Piasecki, Melissa; Baker, Timothy (2022). Impact of Acceptance and Commitment Training on Psychological Flexibility and Burnout in Medical Education. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science.
Towey-Swift, K D, Lauvrud, C, & Whittington, R (2023). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for Professional Staff Burnout: A systematic review and narrative synthesis of controlled trials. Journal of Mental Health (Abingdon, England), 32 (2), 452–464.
WHO: Burnout An ‘Occupational Phenomenon’: International Classification of Diseases. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2019. Available from: https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases