
What the global research actually shows
What stress is, in precise terms
What burnout is, and how it differs from being tired
Diagnosing both inside an organisation
Why stress arises and which factors drive it
Why burnout occurs, which is a different mechanism
Auditing an organisation for the factors that produce both
How culture either prevents or manufactures burnout
The role of senior leadership
The role of the line manager, who has the most influence and the least training
Where a people function fits
Conducting the research properly
One-to-one conversations as a diagnostic instrument
The link between stress, burnout, turnover and engagement
Employee experience and the factors that demotivate
Training managers to handle stress and burnout in a team
Transferring knowledge and giving them usable tools
Monitoring whether they actually apply it
Building a report on stress and burnout
The role of pulse surveys
Automation tools that keep the measurement running
How emotional intelligence develops
Influencing through logic versus through emotion
Emotional intelligence and relationships
The ability to resonate, and what a resonant person does to a room
What emotional charging is
How to energise other people rather than drain them
The role of stress
Recovery, and why it is the first thing dropped
How an emotionally engaged person behaves
What low emotional intelligence looks like from outside
Assessing it, and its components: self-awareness, positive attitude, social intelligence
The benefits, stated concretely
Awareness as the starting condition
How people actually change
Positive attitude
Moving from a negative to a positive mindset deliberately
Whether fear motivates, and for how long
The power of single-mindedness
Coaching with empathy
The inspirational conversation, rapport, and the elements of coaching
The ideal image of yourself and what it is for
Feedback measured against it
Cycles of life
The pyramid of life
Analysing the environment you work in
What outstanding leaders do differently
A shared vision of the future
Group social identity and social groups
The process of change in a person
Choosing which competencies to develop
The three development zones
Bringing it together
The pressures that changed how work feels
What happens when people stop coping
The classical model of wellbeing at work, and why it is no longer sufficient
The modern factors, and what the research shows
Preparing the ground before launching anything
Acting as the agent of the change
How companies that succeeded actually did it
Preparing the case for leadership, and creating a picture of the future
How a negative culture erodes wellbeing regardless of programmes
Finding the hidden factors
Assessing the culture, and conducting an audit
Identifying what is not working
Forming the team that owns it
Generating the ideas
The invisible work that makes the visible part function
Why awareness alone changes nothing
How behaviour actually shifts
Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and the role of a bonus system
Autonomy, meaning and development, and building a nudge system
Why iteration beats a single launch
How a new habit is instilled
Evaluating reaction, learning and behaviour
Assessing outcomes, perception and organisational impact, plus global practice
What a crisis does to every people process at once
Recruiting under uncertainty
Attracting people to a company with visible problems
Hiring below market rate, handling negative reviews, and using internal resources
The methods available for reducing payroll cost
Retaining people without revising salaries
Bonus systems funded from the value the person creates
Reducing benefits with the least damage, and adding some with no budget
A fair development policy when there is nothing to spend
Organising internal training
Free courses worth using, and a corporate library
Starting mentoring, and building a development plan with no budget
Assessing people quickly and defensibly
How the decision about who leaves is actually made
Raising the effectiveness of those who remain
Assessing capability without a budget, and organising development afterwards
Communicating news nobody wants to hear
What regular all-hands meetings do during instability
Collecting feedback anonymously
Supporting morale, running events on nothing, and addressing stress and burnout
Managing change in genuinely difficult conditions
Building a contingency plan
Managing risk across the business
Restoring a sense of safety, which takes longer than the crisis did
How the recruitment system works and how vacancies appear
Types of candidates and types of recruiters
How salaries are set and how recruiters search
Where the best roles are advertised, and how CVs are assessed
What a strong CV is and the path it travels
How a recruiter evaluates it, and in how many seconds
The structure and layout that work
Handling weak points honestly, and the mistakes almost everyone makes
Handling the telephone screen
How the interview runs and how the decision is made
Types of interview and the recurring questions
Preparing properly, and the mistakes that end it early
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Burnout is usually treated as a personal failure of stamina. It is more often a predictable result of specific working conditions, and the research on which conditions is quite clear.
That matters practically. You cannot fix with willpower something that was produced by a system.
What this course is actually about
Resilience is not endurance. Endurance is what people try first, and it is why the second burnout arrives faster than the first.
What holds up over a career is different: understanding what produced the exhaustion, recognising it earlier the next time, having emotional tools that are practised rather than theoretical, and keeping enough optionality — skills, network, savings — that a bad situation does not become a trapped one.
Understanding the mechanism
Forty-two lessons. Six on how stress and burnout are actually produced at work: what the research shows, the difference between the two, the organisational factors that generate each, the role of the line manager, and how the whole thing is measured rather than guessed at.
Then eight on emotional intelligence — resonance, energising rather than draining people, recovery, self-awareness, empathy-based conversations, the ideal self, and how a person genuinely changes. Then six on wellbeing as a designed system: the classical model and why it stopped being enough, cultural audits, behaviour change, nudges, and evaluating impact rather than participation.
A note on those blocks. They were recorded for people who build these programmes inside companies, and I have kept that framing rather than disguising it. Understanding the system that exhausts you is part of surviving it, and if you manage a team you need both views anyway.
Setbacks, the search and the plan
Then six on working through a crisis: hiring and being hired when budgets are cut, pay under pressure, development with no money, how redundancy decisions are actually made, communicating hard news, and restoring a sense of safety afterwards.
Then six on the job search: recruiter logic, CV structure, interview preparation, burnout during a search, salary negotiation and finding hidden roles on LinkedIn.
And ten of career coaching, which is the most practical block: the dream career model, identifying talents and values, impostor syndrome with the career cube, a skills audit with a balance wheel, soft skills assessment, search strategy, CV and profile, personal financial planning, burnout diagnosis and staged recovery, and an A-player audit.
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. I have also run the redundancy conversations from the other side of the table, which is why the crisis block is not theoretical.
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
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 first.
Where to start
Write down the three conditions at work that drain you most. Not the tasks — the conditions. Most people find that at least two are structural and could be changed, and that they had been treating all three as personal shortcomings. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.