PMI-LA Events

Project management now sits among the highest-risk occupations for burnout – roughly half of project managers report it, alongside nursing and teaching. And the conditions are worsening: Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 found manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, with global employee engagement at its lowest level since 2020. Yet Gallup's data also shows that managers drive roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement – which means a depleted PM is not a private problem.

This is a candid, evidence-grounded hour for project professionals who are very good at managing everyone's risk except their own. We'll separate ordinary project stress from clinical-grade burnout using the WHO's three dimensions, map the six workplace conditions that actually predict burnout onto the realities of delivery work, and then get practical: a breathing protocol that outperformed mindfulness meditation in a Stanford randomized controlled trial, five stakeholder scripts you can steal word for word, and a Personal Burnout Risk Register that uses the risk discipline you already own. Participants leave with a completed action plan and a participant handout of reusable tools.

This session is peer education for working professionals, not clinical advice.

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Distinguish ordinary project stress from burnout using the WHO's ICD-11 criteria, and identify the leading indicators that precede a decline in performance.
• Assess their own exposure against the six evidence-based Areas of Worklife (workload, control, reward, community, fairness, values) and identify their highest-priority risk area.
• Apply three regulation techniques – including cyclic sighing, the Three-Signal Check, and the four recovery experiences – that can be executed between meetings.
• Construct a Personal Burnout Risk Register with defined triggers, response strategies, and a pre-committed escalation threshold, and use five stakeholder scripts that convert absorbed pressure into shared decisions.

Speakers