Welcome to episode #205 of the Own Your Best Life Podcast. Have you ever experienced burnout? The kind of chronic fatigue where you’re tired and running on reserves for more than just a day or a week at a time? 

You start to wonder if that exhaustion will ever end but keep telling yourself that it only be one more project or one more month until you find yourself wondering if you need to quit that job and move on. 

Today’s podcast on how you don’t need to burn out to succeed will help you find the sweet spot between working hard and burning out so that you don’t have to quit before you’re truly ready.

We’ve all heard that if you find work that feels like play, then you’ll never work another day in your life. Some of us have taken that concept even further, spending all our waking hours thinking about work or working because we truly care about the work we do or the people who are on our teams. It’s often hard to “turn our brains off” when we have questions and problems that haven’t been answered or solved. There’s a deluge of information and work constantly available through our phones and computers.

Working hard to exhaustion is often worn as a badge of honor and a testament to how tough we truly can be when it’s needed. So we think that if we just aligned our passion with our work, we wouldn’t burn out but that’s simply not true.

You can love your work, be incredibly engaged and still burnout. 

Just because you find meaning and purpose in the work you do, doesn’t mean that the demands and the volume of work isn’t creating a mental load that leads to burnout. 

We all know of professions where people deeply care about what they do or who they work with, but these people are still humans at the end of the day. They still need to have their basic necessities met. They need to sleep, eat, rest and connect with other humans. They need time to not only work but to do other things in their lives as well.

Many of us think about typical industries like professional services or healthcare where people are working around the clock because the needs are around the clock. Yet, even there – they have to mandate some kind of rest or they risk having their people make costly or even fatal mistakes on the job.

It’s not just in these industries that you find burnout. You’ll find it everywhere. I remember thinking that if I left certain kinds of companies that I would find easier jobs with less burnout, but that simply wasn’t true. Every company – even the one you create yourself – is available for burnout. You might have experienced it so frequently that you start to associate it with success – and that’s the same mindset that often gets carried from company to company, leader to leader.

What happens if you don’t stop that cycle where everyone believes that they must work themselves non-stop in order to succeed? Or that if you care, you’ll need to be a martyr. You breed team members who either don’t want to get promoted because they don’t want to take on even more and feel even worse mentally and physically. Or you might breed team members who believe that this is what it takes to succeed and work themselves to exhaustion or sickness – and ask others to do the same. Or your personal life suffers and you risk damaging or not building relationships with friends and family in the short time you have on this planet. You might even become so deflated and exhausted that you quit, get sick and leave.

It’s almost an unspoken ideology of leaders that they don’t want to promote a good lifestyle because that means they’re not working hard enough. Yet, people who are coming onto the job scene don’t want to do things the way they have been done for that very reason. This is often why your best people will leave without telling you exactly why they left. There’s a way to still work hard, show that it takes work ethic and promote discipline and commitment to work, without promoting poor physical health. 

What does it take to actually succeed without burning out? Specific, high-performance practices.

One of the ones I teach my clients how to engage in are Flow Activation Rituals™ which are a specific set of activities that help them decide how to prioritize and work more effectively. These practices remove the mystery of when and how much to work – or even what to work on – so that the amount of energy applied towards more creative, innovative solutions and thinking increases. The amount of time spent wondering and guessing decreases, and the volume of meaningful output starts to become more and more noticeable, not just to yourself but others. You’ll know when you need to slow down and take a rest versus when you need to keep plugging away to get to the other side of a big deliverable or complex task that you keep wanting to put off.

The reason this works is because you learn how to work instead of just working constantly and on whatever comes your way. You stop associating the number of hours spent with success and instead really start to evaluate yourself based on what’s truly most important. I call these people Overworked Achievers because they want to get out of the exhaustion they’re in, but they don’t feel comfortable doing anything different because they’re so busy in their day-to-day. They haven’t gotten past the list of things they wanted to work on last week to truly feel like they can think more strategically about what’s next. They just know they don’t feel great about work – even if they love the type of work they do. They’re exhausted.

Often people forget that what they have truly been put on this planet to do isn’t what they spend most of their time doing. In any waking moment, you can create more than just a certain number of written emails and stressed responses. Yet, overworked achievers will forget that the way they work is setting an example of the kind of person and leader they believe are successful. 

We often wonder what it takes to embody that sense of confidence to make decisions, innovate and not waste as much time – and it’s within these practices that you can have a whole new kind of work energy. It’s exactly this kind of energy that we can change. We can become the kind of people we would want to be led by. The kind of leaders that help you feel relief, decrease stress and increase results because of their presence, not in spite of their presence.

However, how you work is a decision. If you’ve been running the burnout and success playbook for a while, it might feel hard to let go of being the angry and demanding person who works themselves beyond the point of where it’s intelligent. Yet, you also have the option to work towards a new playbook that high performers who are committed to improving their career and lives are practicing. Using spiritual, high-performance principles dedicated to helping you carve out time for becoming the person you want to be and to live a richer, fuller life beyond the to-do list.

If you’d like to choose the latter and become a spiritual achiever, I invite you to watch the free training on how to Stand Out and Lead, using spiritual, high-performance strategies: STAND OUT AND LEAD.

You can apply to join my Spiritual Achiever® program, where you’re going to create your next chapter with spiritual and high-performance strategies to achieve time and financial freedom using my proven method. It’s risk-free. You either start seeing results within your first month or I give you your money back. Schedule your call here at www.mayempson.com/contact.  We’ll see you inside.

Want to know more about what happens when you join?

1. When you join Spiritual Achiever® Coaching you’ll be supported for a full year: Career Revelation Academy: A 5-step career change process (if you have a job you want to stay in, I’ll show you how to love it even more) that can launch you into your next career chapter in 30 days.
2. 2x/month group training and coaching on Spirituality, Achievement, Earth Energy and Harmony. You’ll know how to design your days for breakthroughs, create a personal brand and community, lead yourself and others through change, become more physically and mentally fit, reduce stress and reinvent what’s possible in this next chapter of your life.
3. Discover your Leadership Strengths and Branding Workshop: Increase your awareness of what makes YOU different from others and how to become even better at your genius zone.
4. Your Best Year workshop: Create your one year plan and design this next year, no matter what time of the year it is.
5. Your Next 5 Years one-day virtual retreat: Vision what’s possible 5 years from now and break out of your old routines so you can step into new habits, behaviors and routines.
6. Tickets to all in-person Spiritual Achiever retreats (discounted rates): Highly immersive and intimate gatherings where we spend time in nature, experience energy work, eat and move well – all while making big decisions and committing to what’s next for us.
7. Monthly 1:1 Coaching Sessions: To help you break through obstacles, define your individual path, and to work on both strategy and mindset.

The next step?

Schedule a consultation to get clarity on how coaching can help you on your journey.

Once you’re accepted into the program, you’ll receive a calendar invite for a 2-hour deep dive 1:1 session to map out your personal goals and your own year-long journey.

You’ll have immediate access to the Spiritual Achiever process and philosophy – how to achieve your biggest goals and reinvent your life.

You’ll have immediate access to 5 modules of Career Revelation Academy – to love your career even more and launch that next chapter of your career in 30 days.

You’ll have the calendar invites for the upcoming group calls and retreats.

If this speaks to you, I can’t wait to talk to you live: Schedule a consultation.

Reach out at www.mayempson.com/contact for more information on my Spiritual Achiever coaching program. You’ll figure out what’s next and actually go and do it. 

That’s it for this week. Have an amazing one and I’ll talk to you next time.