Addy---The pride I have for our profession’s professionals increased even more while reading the several responses to your message. We are at our best when we truly promote the spirit of the “clan.” I like to think that I can be in their good company as we champion the cause of overworked, overwhelmed, underappreciated, and underpaid development officers. Sometimes we can provide direct and workable counsel to our beleaguered colleagues. Other times, all we can do is commiserate. In any event, we do try to help our colleagues in distress as best we can, as we would want the same support when we are in need.My reading of your burnout story, as painful and bewildering as it is to you, nevertheless prompts me to relate to you from another direction. And I hope that you will take my comments in the spirit intended---that to help you out of your malaise and that I am not at all insensitive to your plight. As we have all said, at one time or another, “I’ve been there!”
However, I see everything about what it is you have gotten out of the many organizations with which you were associated, to be title, responsibility, salary, and type and comfort-level of work. I see nothing about what it is you want to bring to them. As a matter of fact, the “job-hopping,” while troublesome to you, is no doubt as troublesome, or more so, for the organizations which had invested in you, and had high expectations of your performance---only to have you shortly leave and hop to the next job. Not only is that damaging to those organizations, but think of it for your next job; What potential employer is going to consider hiring you with your nine jobs in ten years track record?
Maybe it’s about time you went into a job with a great deal more focus on what the organization’s needs are and pledging that you will work to help meet those needs---rather than somehow feeling the job should only, or mainly, be doing something for you.
Optimism is part of a successful development officer's temperament. In nearly every campaign I have been involved with, there came a time when the storm clouds gathered and the only light came from the optimism manifested by those of us working hardest to reach goal.
Along with that optimism a development officer needs dogged determination. The best development officers just don't know when to quit. Their natural tendency is to put their head down and push a little harder.
That’s the only way I know it will work.
How about you? Are you ready? I believe you can be. But, you need to believe it too.
Tony Poderis
