Hopeless, burned out, and questioning: achieving personal resilience in the midst of organizational turmoil.

There are not many personal reflection pieces about professional resilience published as health care professionals are still among the least likely to raise their own personal problems--especially in the field of emergency health care. Writing afirst person piece about the journey to finally finding professional resilience, I describe factors faced by many new and mid-level professionals that are not written about in academic journals yet contribute to: premature career termination, poor customer service/patient care, and lack of motivation. I conclude with a way forward that could be a map for others currently struggling with their career choice. As a mid level psychologist, I can now look back on the past 8 years of my development and see the obstacles I was faced with. The irony is that at the time I knew they were challenging times, but I lacked a context for them, and did not know what normal was. Now that I am a relatively safe distance away from those hard years, I can appreciate more fully what resilience means to me, and respect the years I spent secretly in crisis. This article is a blend of academic information about professional resilience and compassion fatigue, contrasted by those very concepts playing out in my own life. The recommendations I provide for leaders and those in the thick of a professional burn out are concepts I know would have made a difference to me, even in survival mode.