Entrepreneurs are nothing if not problem solvers. I think we can all confidently agree that if anyone brings us a struggle. We can usually come up with a pretty solid solution.
What becomes difficult, however, is when that mirror is turned towards us and we become responsible for taking care of ourselves, especially when it comes to our mental health.
I don’t know about you, but for me, experiencing burnout as an entrepreneur is one of the most frustrating, defeating feelings, and it takes so much work and energy to get out of that state and in a more positive place. I just went through a really challenging season in my life this year where I experienced burnout in a way that I’ve never quite felt before.
So today, I want to talk about burnout from my personal lens and experience in hopes to shed some light on some of the darkest shadows in a small businesses journey. So many of us go through burnout often alone, and it’s my mission to start more conversations about the hard parts of entrepreneurship so that we can grow together as a community and not feel so isolated.
Now, I’m not a mental health expert, but I would love to share my personal journey with you and the actions that I took to recover and create a more sustainable path for myself and my business.
How to Overcome Business Owner Burnout
So, I’ve been through burnout before. It was much earlier on in my business journey, pretty much right before I started scaling.
I was at that very complicated point where I was wearing all the hats, had very little systems in place, and was simply just drowning.
Fast forward to this year, I’m in a very different circumstance in my business and in my life. I have an incredible team, solid operations, have immersed myself in a CEO role. I have a daughter, a beautiful life, and all these things I have now today that I worked so hard on creating because of that burnout that I experienced all those years ago.
So, needless to say, I was quite annoyed that I was feeling burned out when I thought I had fixed it and equipped myself with the tools to prevent it from happening again.
But here I was, feeling drained of energy while being overloaded with obligation, feeling an unexplainable sensation of hopelessness when it came to my goals and the state of where I was in my life and my business. And the worst part, waking up every day feeling the same as I did the day before.
I had never experienced something like that before, and I think it’s the closest thing to depression that I’ve ever felt in my personal life.
When I started asking myself why I was feeling this way, looking for a solution out of this, I found a messy culmination of circumstantial and emotional things that were happening in my life. I had waaay overcommitted myself in my time.
I was feeling defeated in my goals with unrealistic expectations of where I should have been. And I simply could not make myself feel better with sheer stubbornness, which is what I usually rely on to solve my problems.
So, here are the actions that I took to get myself out of burnout. And I share them with the hope that it could help somebody else.
I don’t think it was any one of these things that was truly the secret, nor is it a plug and play solution by any means, but I know so many entrepreneurs who struggle with this quietly and alone. So, if I can be open and vulnerable, just to let someone else out there know that they aren’t alone in this. That’s a win for me.
So, here we go…
Here are the actions that I took to get myself out of burnout.
Let me preface all of this by saying I tried absolutely everything. I had never been burned out for so long before. So I was absolutely desperate and was trying to think of everything that I could to get me back in a positive space.
#1 purge your calendar
The first thing I did was clear my calendar as much as possible. I got rid of any unnecessary meetings, gave myself buffer time in between activities, and tried to have focuses for the day where my mind didn’t have to shift between so many topics, like my team, networking, family, etc.
I find that whenever I get overly ambitious (which is my entire personality) that I tend to make exceptions to my boundaries when it comes down to my time. I start taking on more things. I opened up my calendar just a little, or a lot, and I scheduled things that I know I don’t have time for, but would help me achieve my goals.
All these things start to bleed into my mental health. These short term gains are never worth it for me, and I need to constantly remind myself to protect my time and my energy. But because I was feeling in that state of just like, I need to be able to accomplish more. I need to hit my goals. I was willing to sacrifice my time.
And I think that’s what led me to my initial burnout to begin with – my brain was just overloaded. My calendar was overloaded. And so in order to solve that I had to go and cut those things. I had to be able to trim down my calendar, get back my time, and give me some more peace and focus on the things that really moved the needle without having it be at the expense of my energy.
#2 embrace the quiet
Another key aspect of my personality is the love of learning. I try to be as productive as I can with my time by filling up space with opportunity. I am a lover of podcasts and audiobooks. I’m an auditory learner. So I would listen while I cooked dinner, walked my dogs, drove to pick up my daughter from school.
I love this habit of mine as I’m able to multitask and make the most out of my time. In this state of burnout, my brain was on all the time. I was constantly trying to solve the problems in my head, and all the learning was doing was just pushing me deeper and deeper into a feeling of failure. It wasn’t true by any means, but my education time was no longer productive or healthy for me.
A good business friend of mine was telling me about how she takes a walk every day and specifically chooses it to be phone free. She wants time every day to clear her head and get some space away from everything. She loves that quiet time and it gives her the clarity and breath she needs to restore herself and get back into her business or her family feeling refreshed.
So I went to try it. It became my mission to embrace the quiet. This was so hard for me to do because I felt like I was abandoning a characteristic of myself that I was so proud of and attribute so much of my growth to, but I needed to seriously overhaul my routine if I was going to fix what I was going through.
So I decided to cold turkey it and give my brain a break. I took walks, drove without listening to anything, calling anyone, started listening to music that I enjoyed, sat in the sun with my thoughts, focused on myself and my energy, or sometimes just nothing at all.
#3 guided meditations
So, something else to help me really embrace the quiet and refocus my energy was meditation. I’ve always been terrible at meditation, sitting still, breathing, pushing thoughts away. Very challenging for an entrepreneur who has a hundred ideas a day. But one of my employees is actually really knowledgeable and big on practicing meditation.
He starts every day by doing it and he speaks about how it really helps just focus him and prepare him for the day.
So, I downloaded an app called Balance. And I started using it mostly when I was sleeping, doing guided sleep meditations to help me sleep sooner and more restfully. But I was also practicing meditations as I like started my day, as I got ready in the morning, just honestly anything to be able to bring my mood up, to connect me with what I was going to do that day, to encourage me to go and take the steps I needed to, to successfully make it through the day.
Sleeping better and really clearing my brain before I fell asleep was another thing that I was really trying to accomplish. So another habit of mine was to listen to audio books before I fell asleep. These were fiction books, not business. I chose to read at night. So I would start up my book in bed, turn on a sleep timer, and drift to sleep with my books.
Again, filling my head instead of giving myself space and quiet. This was another thing that was really hard for me to give up, because again, this was a habit that I was proud of and a hobby that I enjoyed, especially to get me out of that business state of mind. But desperate times led me to experiment with my routine.
What I found is that I got to sleep so much faster with guided sleep meditations. I started creating a really good sleep routine. Instead of having varied times I would fall asleep, I would just focus on my breathing with a guided instruction, felt centered and grounded in my body, and focused on restoring myself instead of distracting myself, which I think is a lot of what I was doing with all of the input I was receiving in my head.
#4 Experiment with joy
So next, the next thing I did was experiment with joy. I was talking about my burnout with another entrepreneur in this little mastermind group that I was in and he asked me, when was the last time you did something that was just for you, not your business, not your family, that you enjoyed? I literally could not give him an answer, which was a wake up call for me.
The past decade of my life, I have been pursuing growth, the growth of my business, the growth of my family, the growth of myself. Everything I spent my time doing was to know more, do more, be more. And I realized that my routine had left no room for the simple pleasures in life. I had built a life so strategically that I had extricated the little things that I didn’t view as productive.
I started thinking hard about what I could do that would give me joy. Something that was just for me. And it took me an embarrassingly long time to come up with things. But, I committed myself to doing them, as many as I could, just to get my mind in a place of joy again. So, I started painting.
I started a garden.
I would grab my favorite food across town, connect with old friends, again just trying to give myself quiet and space to let me reconnect with myself.
I really wanted to test to see what I liked, what I didn’t. I specifically tried to do things that didn’t require strategy because I was trying to free up that part of my brain.
I experimented with joy in my business too. I had to think about things in my business that I truly enjoyed and things that I didn’t.
Fortunately, I had scaled my company where I was out of the day to day. So I already had a lot of freedom in my tasks and my work routine, but nonetheless, I still took a serious look at my activities, auditing my time to see where I was spending my efforts and which tasks were draining me.
I delegated away the non essential things like meetings, admin tasks that didn’t need to be on my plate, projects that I’d taken ownership over, but could really be more well suited for other members of my team.
So, then all I was left with were the things that filled me up and gave me joy in my company and my role.
I think this is something really important to practice on a regular basis in your business. Being able to make sure that you stay in your zone of genius, as they call it, being able to find those moments that fill you up, that make you really say, this is why I’m here. I love doing this. I love spending my time this way.
So much about entrepreneurship is sacrifice. I don’t think that’s how it should be. I think we should really be able to build strategic companies that allow us to truly live out the passion that we literally started this business to be able to do.
#5 Don’t be afraid to talk about business burnout
The final and most important thing I did to help me get out of my burnout was talking.
Talking to other people about what I was going through.
You’ll notice that almost every one of my actions was inspired by someone else. Burnout is not a fun thing to talk about. It’s so much easier to talk about your wins and the things that are going well.
It’s easier to put on a facade and answer the obligatory, how are you with “business is great, staying busy.” Instead of really answering the question and being honest with yourself and others.
But pride and surface level conversations were not going to serve me. If I had been too embarrassed to open up to the people closest to me, I wouldn’t have gotten the advice and solidarity that I received.
Along with all of these suggestions, almost everyone I talked to had gone through something similar. So many people experience burnout and they have all gotten through it in their own ways.
So by being vulnerable, I was able to learn from others who had already been there.
I think as entrepreneurs, we have one of the most isolating jobs. Very few people understand what we go through every day, the decisions we have to make, the rampage of thoughts we cycle through, the things we sacrifice.
Because very few people understand, I think we as a community tend to internalize a lot of things. We’re not honest about how we’re doing. We don’t talk about our struggles because not a lot of people truly understand.
We carry the world on our shoulders because everything starts and ends with us.
This doesn’t serve us. Isolation doesn’t serve us. Staying quiet about what keeps us up at night is not good for us. If we start talking about the hard things, the burnout, the failure, the struggle, I think we’ll find that we aren’t so alone instead of judgment and shame, we’ll find community and support.
So find your tribe, find the people you can talk to. Open up to your family, your partner, your friends. Open up to your therapist, your colleagues, and even your employees. No one is going to think less of you, and if they do, they don’t belong in your life.
Recover from burnout in your business
I am happy to say that after a few grueling months and a whole lot of experimentation, I am out of burnout and I’m actively working on ways to protect my energy, time, and business.
As painful as burnout is, I think it teaches a lot about who you are and how you need to build your life and structure your business.
Having the infrastructure in place to let me take the time I needed to recover, to have a culture of incredible employees who make my business run, to give me the freedom to determine how I spend my time are all invaluable assets that help my company continue to scale.
So, I hope this episode was helpful as untraditional as it may be. And if I can leave you with one thing, it’s this: you are not alone.
Until next time,
Keep Succeeding Small
