The Broken Meter

THREAT ASSESSMENT

“I used to be good at this. Now I'm not. Which means I never actually was.” The Maslach model calls this reduced personal efficacy — a collapse in felt competence that's the third dimension of clinical burnout. The meter is broken: burnout-impaired performance and genuine incompetence produce identical readings on a depleted instrument.

KNOWN SIGNATURES

• ▸Work that used to take you an hour now takes three, and you're reading that as proof of decline instead of depletion.
• ▸You've started over-checking, over-apologizing, and over-explaining — because you no longer trust your own output.
• ▸Every small mistake is filed as evidence in a case you're building against yourself.

TARGET LIST — ACTIVE INSTANCES

• ▸“I used to be good at this — now I can't do anything right”
• ▸“These mistakes prove I've lost it for good”
• ▸“My work is so bad right now I'm embarrassed to submit it”

FIELD INTELLIGENCE

PERSONNEL

COUNTERMEASURES

• The meter that's telling me I'm incompetent is running on the same depleted battery as everything else. I don't calibrate instruments while they're broken.
• This output is what burnout looks like — not what I look like. There's a difference and it has a name.
• I pull one piece of old work I'm proud of and I hold it next to this. Same person. Different conditions.