Working well without burning out in the voluntary and community sector, from Life Coach and Certified Burnout Coach Louisa Daubney.
Introducing our new monthly column
I don’t know about you, but after taking some proper time off over the summer and feeling rested and recharged, I always have the best of intentions to hold onto a little of that summer holiday energy before work fully takes over again. But within a few days, I often feel like I’ve never been away!
Before work routines pick back up and workloads start to build, we thought this was the perfect moment to look at what’s actually within our control when we’re working in the voluntary and community sector, so we can try and protect some of that precious recharged energy for just a bit longer.
With this in mind, this felt like the perfect time to launch our new monthly column, where we’ll hear from Life Coach and Certified Burnout Coach Louisa Daubney, who’ll be sharing grounded insights and reflective prompts on how to work well in the voluntary and community sector, without burning out. Some of you may already know Louisa from the introductory workshop she ran with OCVA last September on spotting the early signs of burnout.
Each month, Louisa will explore what’s actually within our control, exploring topics such as what are some of the internal drivers that contribute to burnout and how to break the pattern, how to redesign the way you work, and how to build sustainable habits that protect more of your energy.
You can’t fix the triple crisis. But you can influence how you respond to it.
Why this, why now: the challenge facing the sector
If you’ve been feeling stretched too thin for a while now, you’re not alone, and there’s real evidence about why this is happening from charity leaders in our own county.
According to a BBC Oxford News article from July 2025, Oxfordshire charity leaders described how staff are struggling with burnout as a result of a “triple crisis” across the sector: rising demand, less funding, and increasing costs. Catherine Flutsch of Ark-T, who took part in the roundtable alongside OCVA’s CEO Laura Price, told BBC Oxford that exhaustion runs from junior staff to CEOs.
Kate Parrinder of Oxfordshire Community Foundation pointed to charities increasingly filling gaps that government support used to cover, often for genuinely vulnerable people with nowhere else to turn.
Across the county’s roughly 4,000 registered charities, it’s easy to see why so many staff in this sector are running close to empty.
But this isn’t just about the workload or the long hours. It’s about carrying work that matters to the lives of the people we’re there to support, which is why it can be so hard to fully switch off at the end of the working day.
Looking beyond the workload
One may think that burnout is something that happens to us, caused by too much work, too little time to get the work done, or not enough funding for vital services. This is all true. But there’s often another layer working alongside those external pressures: the internal patterns we bring to the work ourselves.
Naming these patterns isn’t about blame, or about seeing burnout as something we’ve brought on ourselves. It’s about increasing awareness, and awareness is where some genuine agency starts to come back into the picture, even when the wider environment isn’t something you can control alone.
What is burnout, really?
I trained under Jayne Morris, the UK’s leading Executive Burnout Coach, to become a certified burnout coach because I want to help my clients to understand their patterns of burnout risk and stop them in their tracks.
Jayne defines burnout as the combined effect of internal drivers, such as perfectionism, people pleasing and taking on too much, and external stressors such as the “triple crisis” I mentioned earlier.
She goes on to explain that left unchecked, these factors can culminate in prolonged stress and poor lifestyle choices, severely depleting the adrenal glands and immune system, and ultimately leading to burnout.
This can be a helpful definition because it holds both truths at once: the environment matters enormously, and so do the patterns we bring to it. Neither tells the whole story on its own.
What’s the challenge?
Of those two truths, there’s a lot here that isn’t in our control. So the real question is: what can we control that will help us manage these external stressors more effectively? Part of the answer may lie in the internal patterns we bring to the work ourselves.
In this sector, the work and the cause can start to feel deeply personal, often because it’s exactly what attracted you to this work in the first place. That’s not a flaw. But when it feels this personal, that care can tip into:
- Perfectionism. Setting the standard so high that your own work rarely feels finished or good enough, especially when the cause matters so much
- People-pleasing. Struggling to say no, even when you’re at capacity, because someone else’s needs feels more urgent than your own limits
- Over-responsibility. Carrying the weight of outcomes that are genuinely beyond your control, as if they rest on your shoulders alone
Take a moment: does one of these feel more familiar to you than the others?
Recognising what drives you
A drive for things to be done properly often shows up as perfectionism. A deep care for others often shows up as people-pleasing. A wish to hold everything together often shows up as over-responsibility.
The very qualities that make someone excellent at mission-led work are frequently the same ones that can put them at greater risk of burnout. That’s because each one can keep you giving more than you’re replenishing, whether that’s extra hours chasing higher standards, energy spent managing everyone else’s needs, or carrying the weight of responsibility that was never fully yours to begin with, until the energy reserves run dry.
If you recognise one or more of these traits in yourself, it may simply mean you’re the kind of person this sector tends to attract, rather than being a warning sign that you’re at risk of burnout.
I recognise these traits in myself too, developed over years in the sector. I wish I had learnt how my internal drivers were affecting the way I worked, and I believe that understanding would have significantly shaped my approach to work – giving me more time and space to recharge outside of it.
Even writing this article, I noticed my own perfectionism creeping in: re-reading sentences, wanting to get them exactly right. Individually, these traits are common. Together, and left unaddressed, they can become a quiet but potentially reliable route to burnout.
What can we learn from this?
The lesson isn’t to stop caring or become less committed to the cause. That’s what brought you here in the first place. It’s that burnout in this sector often isn’t just about how much is on your plate, but about how you relate to it: the standards you hold yourself to, and how much of the outcome you feel personally responsible for.
That shift in perspective matters, because it changes how we think about addressing burnout. If burnout were only caused by the sheer volume of need, the solution would be to somehow make the need smaller. But in this sector, that isn’t realistic. There will always be people who need support, problems that need solving, and more that could be done.
So if we can’t remove the demand, part of the work may be about changing our relationship with it: the standards we hold ourselves to, the responsibility we take on, and our ability to recognise what is and isn’t ours to carry.
What’s in your control to change?
Here’s where you can start: notice and gently challenge the internal patterns that add extra pressure on top of everything else.
- Naming when perfectionism is driving a decision. Ask yourself what “good enough” would actually look like in this situation, and whether the extra time or energy you’re about to spend is genuinely needed, will make a significant difference to the overall outcome, or is more about how it will make you feel.
- Practising a pause before saying yes to something. Before agreeing to take something else on, give yourself a moment or two to check whether it’s genuinely yours to take on, or whether you’re saying yes because it feels uncomfortable to say no. That pause may be as simple as saying “let me check and come back to you” rather than answering on the spot. If it’s genuinely something you are responsible for, try offering a trade-off: “I can take on X, but I need Y to be taken off my plate.”
- Separating what you’re responsible for from what you feel responsible about. You may feel the full weight of an outcome, a client’s wellbeing, a project’s success, an organisation’s future, even when you’re only one part of a much bigger picture. Getting clear on where your actual responsibility starts and ends can lighten a load that was never fully yours to take on.
Changing these internal patterns doesn’t happen overnight, and it isn’t about “getting it right” every time. But awareness is what makes change possible. It’s the difference between reacting on autopilot, which often happens when you’re already exhausted, and knowing you do have a choice in the moment.
What’s one simple takeaway or action you can take?
This week, try this: notice one moment where you feel the pull to overwork, overpromise, or take on more than is genuinely yours, and pause before you act on it.
Ask yourself: is this pull coming from what’s actually needed, or from a feeling that I should be doing it?
You don’t need to change the pattern immediately, a pattern that may have been there for many years. Just noticing it offers a first meaningful step towards working well without burning out.
In summary
Burnout in the voluntary and community sector isn’t just a consequence of the significant challenges around resourcing. People, time and money are all stretched, and those pressures are real and significant. It’s also shaped by the internal drivers many of us bring to mission-led work: perfectionism, people-pleasing and over-responsibility.
Recognising these patterns, and gently challenging them, is something we can influence, even when the wider landscape isn’t within our control. Small shifts in awareness can be the start of a more sustainable way of working.
Meet Louisa
Louisa Daubney is a trained life coach and certified burnout coach who works with purpose-driven people who feel overwhelmed, exhausted, or stretched too thin from constantly putting work, and others, first.
After 18 years as a fundraiser at Mencap and Oxfam, and as a former trustee of a local refugee organisation in Oxford, she understands firsthand the emotional weight of mission-led work, and what it takes to sustain it.
She supports her clients to understand what’s driving their overwork, build healthier boundaries, and create more sustainable ways of working that allow them to make a meaningful difference in the world without burning out in the process.
She believes the world needs changemakers who are energised, grounded, and working within, rather than beyond, their limits.
Find out more about Louisa’s work here.
From awareness to action
Following the success of last September’s introductory session with OCVA, Louisa’s back with a follow-up workshop on creating healthy boundaries.
During this session, you’ll discover your biggest energy drains at work, and build a boundary to deal with one of them. Walk away with a boundary ready to put in place this week, and a framework you can return to whenever you need to set another one.
Thursday 8 October, 9.30am – 1pm
Want a space to talk about workload, boundaries and how to work more sustainably? Louisa’s exploring a monthly online drop-in clinic. Interested? Email her at hello@louisadaubney.co.uk.