This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

High performance and burnout are not opposites. They are two outcomes of the same behaviour, and which one you get depends on whether there is a system underneath it.

The people who burn out are rarely the lazy ones. That is the part nobody says out loud.

Why the usual advice fails

Productivity advice tells you to do more in less time, which is useful right up to the point where the constraint stops being your method and starts being your capacity. Then the same techniques accelerate the problem.

Meanwhile the advice about balance is aimed entirely at the individual — sleep more, set boundaries, take breaks — and ignores that most of what drains a week is structural: a workload that assumes no interruptions, a manager who does not know your actual load, and recovery that has quietly become the thing you drop when busy.

What makes someone genuinely strong at work

Thirty-seven lessons. Eleven of them on individual performance, drawn from research and from how the most selective employers assess people: a personal audit across talent, mindset, the potential matrix, engagement and burnout; managing yourself; working with your manager so autonomy grows rather than shrinks; contributing to a team without becoming its overflow valve; overdelivery defined concretely through OKR; an agile approach to personal work for people that GTD never fitted; growth; sustaining your own motivation; and communicating your work so it is understood a level up.

The mechanism, the regulation and the recovery

Then six on how stress and burnout are actually produced at work: what the research shows, the difference between the two, the organisational factors driving each, the disproportionate influence of a line manager, and how it is measured rather than guessed at.

Then eight on emotional intelligence — resonance, energising rather than draining people, self-awareness, recovery, empathy-based conversation, the ideal self, and how a person genuinely changes. This is the block that decides whether you can regulate your own state or only observe it deteriorating.

Then six on the working week: SMART, the ABC method, the Eisenhower matrix, 4D, Pomodoro, Kanban lists, GTD, time audits, time-blocking, procrastination and its causes, and recovery treated as scheduled rather than earned.

And six on wellbeing as a designed system: the classical model and why it stopped being enough, cultural audits that find the hidden factors, behaviour change and nudges, and evaluating actual impact.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals, watching which high performers lasted and which ones did not.

This is a professional development course, not medical or psychological treatment. If you are currently in crisis, please speak to a doctor or a qualified professional.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Where to start

Write down the three things about your working week that drain you most, then mark each as a habit or a condition. Most people expect to find habits and find conditions instead, and conditions respond to a decision rather than to more discipline. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.