The most tiring thing is not the work you do, but the unfinished work replaying in your mind: "Perspective on the Workplace Iceberg" and four survival stances of burnout

Seeing the current situation clearly is always the starting point for action, and the same is true for internal conflicts in the workplace. You must first see it before you can consciously adjust it and even turn it into a force to propel yourself.

I agree with this statement, but the most troublesome thing about internal friction is that it is often difficult to see.

Speaking for myself, I was involved in high-speed industries such as the Internet and media in my early years, and now I am maintaining and operating several websites and product lines by myself. I have long been accustomed to being busy. But over the past few years, I have gradually discovered that what really makes me tired at the end of the day is usually not the things that are completed, but the fragments that are not completed but are replayed over and over in my mind. It’s like a letter that hasn’t been answered yet, a meeting that you feel you didn’t perform well enough, or a paragraph that you’ve clearly finished but you’re still checking for the third time.

The workload can be calculated, but this consumption cannot. In the past few years, I have written about How Fake Effort Can Devour Your Energy, which talks about the other side of the same thing: looking busy may not mean that you are really making progress. Li Chongyi and Xie Jiayun co-authored “Perspective on the Workplace Iceberg: Satir Helps You to End Internal Friction and Create High-Energy Action Force” (opens in a new tab) (Tianxia Culture, July 2026), which writes about this difficult-to-calculate matter.

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Tired people usually don’t speak out

Li Chongyi quoted a research report in the author’s preface, saying that nearly 70% of office workers around the world are experiencing some degree of career burnout, of which about 30% are silent burnout. Calculated, two out of every three colleagues around you are in a state of exhaustion.

The book does not indicate the source of this number, and I have not found the corresponding original research, but I believe it is true. What’s even more intriguing is why tired people usually don’t say anything.

Why don’t you say it? The author’s explanation is very sharp: “It’s not that most people don’t care about themselves, but they have already learned one thing: opening their mouths often leads not to understanding, but to judgment.”

This sentence explains a phenomenon. Discussions of stress in the workplace mostly focus on visible aspects such as working hours, project load, and difficulty with supervisors, because these are easy to understand when spoken out, and it is equivalent to playing a safety card. As for “I don’t think I’m good enough” and “I’m afraid of being found out that I’m actually not that good”, once these words are spoken, the risk is transferred to yourself. So they stayed there, becoming a constant replay in the background.

This is why I said before when talking about Office workers running personal brands that many people are stuck not because they have no time or material, but because they are afraid of exposure. What I fear is not the exposure itself, but the judgment after the exposure.

Li Chongyi’s career background undoubtedly makes this book more convincing. He served as president of a Silicon Valley software company and vice president of a U.S. listed company. He stayed in the information industry for more than 20 years, and only returned to Taiwan in his middle age to become a Satir model communication leader. The exhaustion he talks about is not theoretical derivation, but coming from that position. Co-author Xie Jiayun is a certified coach from the International Coach Alliance. In the past, she worked in the human resources consulting and headhunting industry, and looked at the other end: why people come in and why they leave.

The small patch on the water

Virginia Satir’s iceberg theory is the skeleton of this book.

Its metaphor is simple: all we can directly see is the behavior of a person emerging from the water, which is probably a small piece of the entire iceberg. Below the water surface are coping postures, feelings, opinions, expectations, desires, and the bottom layer is the self.

The number of layers is actually not the point. What’s really useful about this structure is that it forces you to ask a question: Is that thing you think you’re angry about really the thing you’re angry about?

Different people’s opinions on the same matter can be vastly different. The supervisor pointed out the problem with the briefing. Some people interpreted it as “he just likes to cause trouble for me”, some people thought “I am so stupid and so shameless”, and some people thought “he was coaching me and I learned new things”. The thing is the same, but the amount of internal friction is completely different. This is exactly what I felt when I read “Key Thinking Power”: Separate the facts from your interpretation of the facts, and life will indeed be much simpler.

Xie Jiayun wrote a sentence in her author’s preface that I read over and over again several times: “What makes people suffer is often not imperfection, but not allowing themselves to be imperfect.” She also used a very precise metaphor to describe herself as being like a race horse. She kept running, and the people around her were cheering, but you had no idea where the end point was.

A core concept of the Satir model is that “people do not need to be perfect, but must be complete.” In the workplace, this statement almost sounds counterintuitive, because the workplace evaluation system only recognizes results. But it is precisely because of the headwinds that it deserves to be said.

Which posture are you accustomed to using to survive?

Among the icebergs, I think the most practical one for the workplace is the “coping posture” layer.

Satir summarized four ways to survive under pressure: to please, to blame, to be super-reasonable, and to interrupt. The National Taiwan Normal University Student Counseling Center has a very clear introduction (opens in a new tab), which uses “self, others, and situation” to distinguish: people who please are concerned about others and the situation, and ignore themselves; people who accuse are concerned about themselves and the situation, ignoring others; super-rational people only care about the situation, ignoring themselves and others; and interruption is not touching the three. The fifth type is consistency, taking into account all three.

Well, you probably have it figured out in your head. What I most easily fall into is super rationality: when encountering a stressful conversation, my first reaction is to turn it into data, analysis, and a well-structured document.

There happens to be a corresponding case in the book. An engineer used a super-rational way to deal with his boss for a long time, wrapping his anxiety in more than a dozen pages of briefings and data, which resulted in chronic fatigue and insomnia. Later, he expressed his opinions in a more consistent way, and his supervisor was willing to help him gain manpower.

Seeing this, we can easily come to the conclusion: super rationality is bad and needs to be changed. But the National Taiwan Normal University article added a paragraph that I think is more important: “Inconsistent communication postures are not necessarily bad. Each posture contains treasures and resources… It is not that there is a problem with the communication posture, but that it becomes a problem when we become rigid in a certain communication posture.”

People who please people are easy to get close to, people who criticize have power, people who are super rational can analyze calmly, and people who interrupt can ease the atmosphere. The question is never whether you know this trick, but whether you only have this trick left.

This change of mind was very helpful to me. It replaces the doomed goal of “I want to change my personality” with an achievable goal: practice one more posture to give yourself a choice.

Return your attention to the controllable half

The most specific tool in the book is what Xie Jiayun calls “frequency modulation” and the three indicators of workplace consistency she proposes.

The definition of frequency modulation is: “Refocus your attention on the controllable parts of your inner being, so that energy is no longer wasted, but returned to yourself.”

The three indicators are:

First, be able to distinguish external events from internal feelings. According to the book, you will feel the sting, but you will be able to recognize that “it’s something that’s bad, not that I’m bad.” This sentence is the most touching one in the whole book.

Second, be able to express rather than suppress or divert. The book gives a sample sentence: “I was negligent in this matter. I am willing to improve, but at the same time, I also hope that you can listen to me first about the situation at that time.” Admission and defense can coexist at the same time. This is a skill that many people have not learned in the workplace.

Third, be able to preserve yourself in relationships. The author’s statement is that connecting with others does not mean losing yourself.

The author writes the energy cycle of the consistent person into four actions: I feel, I understand, I express, and I adjust. The book also makes a judgment that I think is very powerful: “We often think that the real challenge in the workplace is too much external stimulation, but the truth is that external stimulation is never controllable… What really depletes your energy is actually the chaos of internal and external inconsistencies.”

As I read this, another thing came to mind. This set of logic is actually the same as the automation I’m doing: you can’t control when customers send in demands. What you can control is whether you have a stable processing process. I wrote about this as a Six-step workflow for the AI ​​Legion, which talks about how to change “Wait until I have time to deal with it” with a path that can run every time. The same is true internally, emotions will come, the only difference is whether you have a way to catch them.

I put the pitfalls and experiences of running a one-person company with AI every day, as well as experiments like this to solidify the methodology into a process, into the free e-newsletter. If you also want to receive first-hand field notes on a regular basis:

Giving in is not losing.

Another concept in the book that I like very much is called the “happiness concession principle.”

The author starts with the fable of two goats who refused to give in to each other on a single-plank bridge and finally both fell into the valley. Then he gave a sentence: “Whoever has more inner happiness will choose to give in at this moment. What’s even better is that giving in actually does not mean losing, but winning the great wisdom of life.”

Translated into workplace language, this sentence means: Those who refuse to give in on small things and insist on fighting to the end are usually not because they are strong, but because they have no extra psychological resources to lose at the moment. On the other hand, if you find that you have become prone to getting angry over small things recently, it is not a question of cultivation, but a question of stock.

The author also reminds us to know how to distinguish between situations and life. When a project goes awry, it’s the situation, not your life. Once these two things get mixed together, people will be trapped inside and unable to get out.

If you only do three things

After reading this, I’m actually not in a rush to draw an entire iceberg right away. There is an exercise attached to each of the eight chapters in the book, which is homework that needs to be done slowly. What I think can really start this week is the following three things.

1. Next time you feel irritable, ask yourself, “Are things bad, or am I feeling bad?” Just being able to distinguish between the two can save a lot of useless effort.

2. Find out which posture you use most under pressure, and then don’t rush to change it, but deliberately practice another one. The goal is not to become a perfect communicator, but to give yourself one more option.

3. Speak the truth. It doesn’t have to be a big announcement, it could just be “I need a little more time on this.” The psychological safety that the book has been talking about can only develop after someone speaks for the first time. If you happen to be a supervisor in this matter, the order is even more critical: I talked about it in Four Keys for Supervisors to Lead People with Hearts. Whether the team is willing to tell the truth or not depends 70% on what the immediate supervisor demonstrates first.

Seeing the situation clearly is indeed the starting point for action. But I would like to add: Just because you see it clearly doesn’t mean it will be better. After you see it clearly, you must be willing to take the time to sit down and talk with the self that has been replaying it.

To be honest, what this book gives us is not a solution, but a pair of glasses to see under the water. As for how to walk after wearing the glasses, it is still our own business.