Katherine May

It’s beginning to look like burnout is one of the hallmarks of our age. This feeling of complete exhaustion, coupled with anxiety and foggy cognition, can be understood and even healed, but it takes patience and a commitment to the long, slow work of change. In this talk, Katherine May explores the causes of burnout - from screen time to the moral injury of living in such complex age - and explain why it’s so often emerging when people attempt to return to normal after the pandemic. She also looks at the ways that we can recover from burnout, both as individuals and organizations, and suggest that the solution lies in acknowledging our whole selves again, learning to rest actively rather than passively, and finding a way to balance our need for solitude with our sense of interconnection with the people around us.

This topic can also form the basis of a workshop or retreat, in which participants work with May to explore the roots of their burnout, and develop strategies to live more sustainably in the future. May is an experienced facilitator who has supported many groups to creatively explore burnout.

This talk can be adapted to specifically address neurodiversity:
Burnout can be a particular issue for the neurodivergent community. As an autistic woman, May is able to talk from first-hand experience about the additional burdens of masking, passing, working in ways that don’t suit your mindstyle, and dealing with sensory stressors. However, she will also argue that neurodivergence can be a guiding light for those finding their way out of burnout.

We often imagine our lives as an upwards line on a graph, as we grow ever wealthier, happier and more successful. In this talk, Katherine May suggests that this should not be our goal at all. Not only is it rarely possible; it’s also undesirable. Instead, she’ll suggest that human lives are best lived in a cyclical way, travelling with the natural rhythms that sometimes urge us out into the world to grow and create, and sometimes invite us inwards, to retreat, reflect and restore. When we abandon a life lived according to the outward signs of success, we can find a rich and meandering pathway through our adult lives, one that prizes interconnection over competition, restful JOMO over exhausting FOMO, and gentleness over force. Key to this is a sense of enchantment, the value that urges us not to abandon our childlike sense of fascination, but instead to nurture it so that it can help us to feel awe, humility and wonder through our entire lives.

Winter: everyone’s least favorite season, a time to be endured until spring comes. But in dark times, winter can teach us the secrets of survival, and even flourishing. Drawing from her book Wintering, Katherine May explores the adaptations made by the natural world to survive the cold, shares some of her own adventures in icy landscapes, and points to the applications for humans and organizations. The key lies in acceptance of lean periods, and even learning to see their beauty and transformational potential.

Reigniting your sense of wonder might be low on your priority list during these tumultuous times. But in this talk, May shows that enchantment is not a naïve indulgence, but a crucial tool for the twenty-first century. Fostering our enchantment can help us to engage with our values and reconnect with our communities, but most importantly, it creates a way of life that’s worth saving. The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch: we just need to return to the tingle of magic that we felt as a child, and start to notice the stories that our ancestors encoded