Hi there, entrepreneur. Today we’re going to talk about hard work versus hustle and how to heal from burnout, so you have a sustainable business for many years to come. And it’s also so you can show up with more joy, happiness, ease, and freedom in your business right now. Because you don’t have to wait until you hit your goals to experience happiness.
Are you ready?
How And When Does Burnout Happen?
Most of the time when burnout happens, it’s because day to day, you’re feeling like there’s so much you need to do. You have the thought that you can’t fit it all in. So then you’re rushing around, you’re overwhelmed, you’re frantic. Then at the end of the day, you’re exhausted, you wake up in the morning and you feel like you haven’t had a moment to replenish, you still feel tired and drained. And then you look at your schedule and you feel like you have to do it all over again. This is what really leads to burnout. And I know because I’ve been there.
When I first started my business years ago, I had a crazy schedule. I remember looking at my day and all this stuff that I wanted to create and all these people who I wanted to help in my business. And then I saw my one-to-one schedule, I was seeing private sessions intermixed between yoga classes, intermixed between maybe a workshop or a webinar I was doing. It was just jampacked. So no wonder why I didn’t feel like I had room to breathe.
Shifting Your Mindset
So it’s shifting from this mindset because it’s a mindset in some ways. It’s not that our schedule just happens to us, even though there might be certain scenarios and circumstances that are not within our control. Instead of focusing on what’s not in our control and just feeling reactive to our schedule and our day-to-day, it’s instead focusing on what we do have control over and learning how to plan and set boundaries for ourselves.
And I know that’s kind of a hype word, especially in the mental health world, and I’m not speaking it from the viewpoint of if you’re needing to work with a psychologist, of course. I’m talking about boundaries in your day-to-day, boundaries in your schedule and why you might not be setting them, or maybe why you might be setting them but not sticking to them, because it’s those subtle chips in a way where we’re chipping away with our needs, our wants, and the container that we set for ourselves, to care for ourselves that really chips away at our energy.
This eventually can lead to lack of motivation in our business. And it starts with micro quitting. Maybe you’re not showing it up as much to marketing or you’re feeling more lackluster to show up to your one-to-one sessions when you used to love to showing up to that. It’s this micro quitting which then leads to bigger quitting. And we wonder why we’re doing it in the first place. And I don’t want you get there.
I want you have a sustainable people business. Because your people need your help and you can have a business that helps you afford lifestyle that you want to live. The dream, the vision that you have for yourself and your family, it is possible.
So it is an art and it’s a balance and we’ll work on making it less elusive in this blog. Let’s start in the details.
Learn how to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset by reading this blog: https://igniteurwellness.com/entrepreneurial-mindset/
Looking Into The Details On How You Can Avoid Burnout
Burnout sometimes can feel very overwhelming and all-consuming and that can lead to more feeling burnt out and overwhelmed. So what you need to do is focus more on the details.
So for example, think about a day where you have felt good at the end of the day, or maybe even just ok, you helped a lot of people, you got a lot done, you were tired, maybe did a little bit more than you thought you wanted to but you felt ok. Compare that to a day where you felt like you used all your reserves. What are the differences there and write them down. What were you thinking? What were you feeling? Specifically, circumstantially, what was different about those two days?
Maybe you had more sessions, maybe you did it, maybe you did more backend work in your business, what made those two days different? Take the time to sort it out. Your brain will start to notice the details if you spend time doing this.
For example, scheduling in a patient session at the end of the day when you should have been leaving for home, or putting in a client session in your lunch, or picking up a subbing class you had no business subbing because it wasn’t even in your niche and you have driven clear across town, or going over a session here and then there later in the day. So by the end of the day, you spent almost an hour going in all the minutes adding up, going over sessions. Or maybe you tried to hire someone and they didn’t work out. So then you had to do their job.
Focus on What You Can Control In Your Wellness Business
Your brain will want to focus on what you didn’t have control over, and that will put you over in the victim mentality, which doesn’t serve you. So in each of those scenarios, there are parts that are within your control.
Let’s take the scenario where you booked a patient at lunch or you booked a client at the end of the day when you should be going home. So you don’t have control over someone canceling, rescheduling, reaching out at the last minute, unless you don’t have protocols and systems in place for rescheduling or canceling last minute, or the protocol planting seeds of planting ahead of that time. But life happens for your people, and you need to be able to maneuver and work with them where they’re at as well.
So it’s natural for sometimes someone to call urgently and need to get in. That you do not have control over to a certain extent. However, you do have control over what you’d say and what you’d feel in the moment. And typically, it’s what you feel or what you want to avoid feeling that leads you to say certain things. So for example, if you want to avoid feeling the discomfort of telling your client that you’re unavailable and you actually have a wait list and they need to wait a week or two or more, then you’ll squeeze them in. Or if you don’t want make them mad or upset them, then you might squeeze them in.
But here’s another question to consider. How could it actually benefit them to wait? How could it benefit your client or your patient to wait? So for example, in this scenario, let’s say you do have a boundary, you want to leave your office by 5PM or you have a lunch and you want to follow through with that lunch, and someone calls urgently needing to get in and you have space next week for them and you honor your boundaries and you say, “I’m booked today but I can book you in next week at this time.” How could it benefit them to wait? They’ll become more resourceful.
You can offer text or e-mail support in between as much as you have the time for. You can right there on the call or the text, give them a few simple exercises or strategies that they can work through so they meet you next week. They can realize that you’re a busy person and in the future, they probably should plan ahead and not wait so long to schedule so last minute.
Often what comes up though is we have a fear of upsetting our people or we have the fear that, “Well if they wait a week and they realize that they don’t need me, then they will stop working with me.” And that’s not necessarily true because when they solve this one problem right now that you’re helping them with, eventually, a new problem will come up and they’ll need your help for that too. Or you might realize that you need to create a system or a protocol for scheduling your clients and patients.
Importance of Having An Organized Structure In Your Wellness Business
For example, when I work with my one-to-one clients, it’s a six-month program, so we work together for six months. On the very first call or after the call when we settle on a date and time, I schedule out all their appointments for the six months. They know exactly what to do to reschedule. What’ll happen if someone in their family’s sick or they’re sick and they need to reschedule or one of us is traveling, they know all of that in advance.
So it takes a lot of pressure off me and it takes a lot of pressure off that. So number one is examining why you might be squeezing someone in and that is the work that maybe you can bring to your own coach or reach out to me. And number two is what kind of strategy can you implement to streamline this process for you, to take pressure off your own time, of having to schedule people here and there and having all these texts and calls that you need to follow up with during your lunch hour or after your day is over.
Just to segue here a bit, I’m going to be having a blog and social media post coming up about this if I haven’t posted them already. This is part of the reason why I always teach to have packages or programs even if you do one-to-one versus just doing one off sessions here or there. Because it’s easier to implement a streamed line process that benefits both you and your business and your lifestyle and it also benefits your clients.
And if you’re less burnout because you’re spending less time rescheduling and scheduling and squeezing people in, then you’ll have more time for rest and replenishment. Your patient and your clients and your students will benefit, because you’ll show up to your session and your classes and your program with more energy. You’ll be more creative. You’ll have more to give to them.
Read this blog so you know where to spend your time in your wellness business: https://igniteurwellness.com/where-to-spend-your-time-in-your-wellness-business/
Preventing Burnout By Learning How To Plan Ahead
Part of burnout prevention strategy is learning how to plan ahead. Often, when we’re in a burnout phase or we’re starting to feel the effects of burnout, we’re in reactive mode. So it feels like everything is happening to us, our schedule is happening to us, our revenue is happening to us, life is happening to us and we can’t get our head above water.
But if you just take one thing, one area where you feel like you don’t have control and start to notice where you do have control and how can you systematize it to make it a little bit more streamlined for yourself or where my boundary needs to be put in place so you can conserve and replenish your energy and you know when it’s okay to let your brain go, when you know that this is your time to rest and you’re not going to feel guilty about it, then you’ll be more likely to rest.
So it’s part of burnout prevention is learning how to plan ahead and it’s also learning how to embody success right now. Sometimes we rush towards our goals because we want the feeling of whatever hitting those goals will bring to our lives. So for example, if you have a goal to hit a certain amount of revenue or you have a new program and you want certain amount of clients or students to be in it, you want the feelings that’ll create simpler moments.
Think of your goal that maybe you have for 2023, what does success mean to you? What will you feel in that moment at the end of the year?
Create your ideal schedule with this blog: https://igniteurwellness.com/burnout-prevention/
Setting Too Many Goals In A Short Period Of Time May Lead To Burnout
For a lot of you, maybe it’ll feel joy, it’ll feel proud of yourself, maybe some freedom or accomplishment. But here’s the thing, you can start to bring those emotions into your day-to-day now. How can you bring more happiness into your day-to-day now? How can you bring more joy or freedom or ease or pride or accomplishment into your business right now?
This is embodying success and here’s the thing, no matter your goals, there are always be more goals. So you’ll hit one goal and then immediately, a lot of the times if you’re in hustle or franticness which leads to burnout, then you’ll set another goal and you’ll feel like you have to push towards that next goal.
And the reason why you feel like you’re having to push is often because you’re tired and you never gave yourself time to celebrate the success. You never gave yourself time to be in the having and the completion of that goal. And it also tells me that you are racing towards the goal to feel the end results of the goal, instead of being in the place that you can start to feel some of those emotions now.
Expanding Your Timeline To Help With Feeling Burnout
And the second part of this is when you’re always hustling towards a goal, that is what brings a lot of the frantic energy and the overwhelm and the pressure that leads to burnout. So it’s noticing when you’re in a hustle energy to attain something, versus just working hard from a sustainable energy and from confidence and grounded belief that you know you’ll hit your goals.
And so for me, sometimes, where I like to get a lot done, I’m one who can pressure myself to try to do a million things in one day. But for me, often it’s just taking a moment to breathe and realize, “Oh okay, what really needs to get done? Where do I have a deadline? Okay, podcast needs to get record or podcast needs to get published, so need to write the show notes.” If I focus on one or two of these things, then the rest is a bonus.
And if I can slow down, then I’ll create more quality content for you and I’m still moving forward in my business. And what helps my mindset with this is expanding the timeline. Knowing like, “Oh okay, well I do have goals that I can hit for 2023 and I’m going go after them a hundred percent and I have the capacity to handle failure if I don’t hit them.” And all it means is that I’ll try again next year.
So maybe instead of taking one year to hit my goals, it takes two. It doesn’t matter, I can expand timeline. And from this place, I don’t make failure mean that something’s wrong with me or my business capabilities. All it means is that somewhere I have to refine something along the way or, maybe I was too ambitious with my goal and that’s okay too.
So it’s troubleshooting and working through that to continue to go forward. And I don’t beat myself up along the way. And the beating the self up, that can be a huge energy leak as well. So if you’re adding through all these layers, you’re adding pressure to get so much done and then you’re not getting done want you want to get done, so then you add another layer of guilt and shames. Those are all energy leaks. Those are what lingers why our brain keeps going when we want to leave work and we’re home and we can’t turn off our entrepreneurial brains, it’s because we’re trying to sort through all these layers of emotions and seeking relief from all this.
The Relief Will Only Come When You Can Handle Any Emotion
But the relief doesn’t come from adding more to your schedule or squeezing patients in or sending out last minute texts and phone calls when you really should be with your family. The relief will come when you’re able to handle any emotion. When you’re able to sort through your energy leaks and realize what Tara Brock and the Buddhist mentality would say is, many arrows to the heart or the second arrow to the heart that’s just not needed.
How is it true right now that you can have a sustainable business, you can show up feeling grounded, calm, you might be busy, you might be working hard, but not from a place from hustle, a place of serving your people, whether they’re paying and serving your people who are non-paying through marketing and valuable content and you leave your day and you feel accomplished. How can that be sustainable for you? So you don’t have to set one goal and push towards it and then set another goal and push towards that, that layering, that adds to the burnout.
Why You Need To Compromise
For me, I love to work hard, but there’s a big difference of me planning and executing my plan, which isn’t perfect, I’m definitely not a very detailed planner at all, so hear me then, I planned to the best of my capabilities and I execute and I work hard in my day. But when my day is done, I know that I’m going to go home and I’m going to be my family and I’m going to rest and I’m going to replenish most weekend.
So like for example, this weekend, I’m going through a coaching certification right now, and I love it. It helps with the unconscious patterning and shaking that up. And it was Saturday and Sunday. But the particular reason why I signed up for this specific training was not only the knowledgeable teachers and the content and the experience, but they had the weekend trainings that were going to be recorded. And then they also built in extra practice times for those of us who couldn’t attend at that specific time zone or day.
So I made a compromise for myself. Saturday, I attended the training live and went through it and I was up at my house with my daughter and she had a friend over and I could hear them and every so often I would jump off the call and help them grab a snack or whatnot, so I felt like I was still present in my home and I didn’t feel strained as if I was multitasking. I felt grounded, I felt I was happy with my decisions. And Sunday, I let it go. I knew that I needed a day of just rest. I knew I needed a day with my family so I could show up to work this week feeling energized and replenished.
So I made a commitment myself to show up to next practice time, which I did put in the work then to learn the new material. And so, where in your business and where in your life can you compromise or instill more?
Let’s take the subbing example, because this happens a lot. Maybe establish a criteria for yourself that you’ll say yes to subbing classes, if it’s within your niche and you know you might be reaching a new market, reaching new people that could benefit from your service, you don’t have to drive very far, the picking up of the class is not going to be additional energy drain, meaning the teacher or the studio is not going to be texting you a lot and there’s not a lot of new protocols or systems that you need to learn to pick up the class or you don’t have to drive very far. So that criteria are boundaries out for yourself, the classes that you choose to sub or not sub. What’s the criteria for when you’ll add an extra client or patient to your day or not.
Understand what to price your wellness services at to prevent burnout: https://igniteurwellness.com/wellness-coaching-prices/
Conclusion
Where else in your business do you find yourself reacting? Maybe it’s hiring. How can you plan that ahead of time? What systems and processes do you need to create there? Where are you putting pressure on yourself and why? And where might the energy leaks and how can you seal out those holes?
And if your brain throws resistance against solving for those problems, that’s the work to bring to a coach or reach out to me. That’s specifically what I do when I work with my clients. We work on a specific strategy or problem and then they implement it. My clients will implement it and notice, “Ok, in the implementation of that system or strategy, what works? Do more of that. What doesn’t work? Don’t let that go and problem solve and troubleshoot there.”
And then what are the thoughts and feelings that are serving my client in the moment and what’s not? And what can we re-pattern? What can we train in the nervous system and the brain to help make that system and strategy more effective? So that way you don’t feel like you have to do all the things. You don’t feel like you have to add more to your schedule to make more, to get more done. It becomes quality versus quantity. It becomes, yes, working hard but not hustling. They’re very different energies.
So read this blog a few times. Sit down and use the prompts as journaling questions so you can sort it out for yourself. Begin to just ask yourself right now, “Where is my energy leaking and why?” And allow your brain to integrate a process this. The answers will come. Don’t force it in the moment if it doesn’t happen. Maybe you need to read this blog a few times and write the questions down and sit with it. Or even better yet, just show up to a consult call with me. This is what we do on the calls. I can help you sort it through and if The Awaken program is good for you, I’ll let you know.
But ultimately it’s your choice. What you’ll leave with is clarity on some of these answers. So if you feel stuck, reach out. The sooner that we get started on this, the sooner you’ll have more energy, the sooner you’ll feel more freedom and space in your schedule instead of always racing from one thing to the next, to next to the next. Because I know you’re ambitious. I know that you have a lot to do and I know your people love working with you. But let’s create a sustainable business that you love to work in so you can show up for years to come.
Because here’s the real truth, if you burn yourself out now, then you might give up on your wellness business altogether. Then what will you have? You had given up on your dream and your people, they will not get the help that only you can provide. Because only you have the exact certification and experience that have gotten you to this point to have the specific skills that you have right now to help your people.
So there you have it. That might be a strong, compelling reason to start to sort out this exhaustion and burnout problem before it becomes a bigger problem. I’m here for you. And also try to read my previous blogs. There’s a bunch of blogs also on stress and anxiety, which can also be another energy leak. And I give you tips and techniques on how to work with it and how to become aware of your triggers as well. So all these blogs will really complement each other. So you can show up to your business day after day for many years to come, with joy and happiness and your people can get the help that they need.
Get started right now with this free training on how to audit your schedule to prevent and heal from burnout in your wellness business: https://igniteurwellness.com/schedule-help/
Book Your Free Consultation with Alison here: https://igniteurwellness.com/business-coach-for-health-coaches/
