076: “How do I show up for business when burned out?”

Oct 30

So, how do you keep showing up for your business when you’re burned out? It depends.

If you’re a regular listener of Building Balance, you know that I don’t like to share super prescriptive advice here since I feel like I need to know you and your situation better before I can start to tease out solutions with you.

But what I can do here is share what are the kinds of things I’d keep in mind, or take into consideration when finding potential solutions – and I hope that these 5 questions can help you get started with managing that burned-out feeling.

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Show notes

Recently I was in a monthly group call that I get to attend thanks to being a past client of the group’s host. During these calls we can ask questions related to her expertise, or we can just talk about business in general.

And there was someone who asked the group if we also deal with burnout, and asked the host “How do you show up when burned out?”

And because that’s been something I’ve heard here and there, especially after these past couple of years we’ve lived through, I thought that I’d talk about it here on the podcast.

First I wanna quickly share how burnout is described in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), so that we’re all on the same page:

“Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:

feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and
reduced professional efficacy”

But what I can do here is share what are the kinds of things I’d keep in mind or take into consideration when finding potential solutions for a client who asks this – and I hope that these questions can help you get started with managing that burned-out feeling.

To start, I thought of 5 things that I would ask or dig deeper into with a client, if they asked me how they can keep showing up for their business when burned out:

1 – What’s your financial situation?

It’s not the most important thing, but I know that it’s often a big worry. So checking in on how dependent you are on your income staying the same or increasing, like truly, survival-dependent you are, will affect how you might want to move forward. For someone who is financially ok even if business is slow for a while, solutions can look different from someone who’s not financially ok if revenue dips.

This is important to consider honestly – because at the end of the day, for many of us, our mental, physical and emotional health is more important than hitting some arbitrary revenue goal – it’s just easy to get sucked into the whole 10k month thing when it’s all that people talk about.

2 – What’s your capacity?

How much, if anything, do you have energy for? Are you ok still doing your client work, and just need a break from constant launching or visibility or churning out content? Or does even the client work feel impossible right now?

3 – What’s causing the burnout?

I’m not the type of coach who will just give you some mindset exercises so that you can trick yourself into getting stuff done and somehow over-riding your feelings of burnout, lost motivation, or energy. I want to find out what’s causing the situation.

I tend to analyze the situation based on my productivity ecosystem.

If you don’t know about my productivity ecosystem, I’ll give you a quick recap:

Rooted in my Finnish upbringing, my experience as a business owner, and my training as a psychologist, I’ve developed a three-part Productivity Ecosystem. This ecosystem covers the factors that support your productivity and help you keep showing up long-term for your business without hustle and push.

WHOLENESS. Living a life outside of your business matters. When you feel well physically, mentally and emotionally, you do better with everything you put energy into.

DESIGN. Putting in place systems, practices, and routines that support you, save you time, and allow you to spend your work time on the tasks that make an impact (and that you’re usually the most excited about)

SISU. Boosting your ability to stay determined, motivated, and realistic towards what you want to accomplish, even when it feels challenging or requires iteration.

(Sisu is a Finnish word that roughly translates as resilience, grit, and determination.)

There are two parts of the ecosystem that, when neglected, are sources of burnout that people are familiar with: having too much to do (which is a DESIGN problem) and not making enough time for yourself outside of work (wholeness problem). These two things often show up together, because generally having more work to do decreases the time available for your life outside of it.

But, there are circumstances where you can suffer from burnout even if your workload is just fine, or even if you have plenty of time for life outside of your work.

That’s where the third element of the ecosystem, sisu, comes in.

If you regularly have to do work you don’t feel good about, if you constantly have to work against your values, goals, or personality, if your services don’t match the way you feel most comfortable working, if you don’t like the type of client you serve, or if you don’t feel supported and in fact feel pretty lonely in business – that can all chip away at your sisu, aka at your motivation and resilience.

Hei – Jenna from the future here. I’m hopping in to add something that I can’t believe I forgot to mention here in the sisu piece. Sometimes it’s not even about “doing the wrong thing” or doing something unaligned, but it can be about *feeling* like we’re not doing the right thing, because we’re not getting the kind of feedback that confirms what we’re doing matters. This can come in the form of words from others, like our clients or other supporters, but it also could be for example sales. Getting sales can tell us that our offer is working etc. So lack of signs, this lack of feedback, that we’re doing the right thing can make us doubt ourselves or what we’re doing, make us feel like we’re not good enough or like we don’t know what we’re doing, or like we’re not doing what we’re meant to do.

That’s why a disturbance in the sisu piece of your ecosystem can be the sole cause of burnout.

Recognizing what’s causing burnout can give you clues about what you can do to reduce the risk of burnout in the future.

4 – What do you need right now to get through this?

This is something that can also be looked at through the lens of the ecosystem. But I think you’re smart and probably have a sense of what it is you need – and maybe now it’s a matter of getting to a headspace where you give yourself what you need. For example,

Do you need a break? Especially if you’re a high achiever, I know this can be challenging if it feels like you’re not yourself if you take a break.

Do you need to ask for support from someone? It can feel really hard to say that you want help. Many people believe that they are inadequate or it would mean failure to admit that they need help. I struggle with this too, I’ve gotten much better about it but I used to struggle with it a lot – but I keep reminding myself that we all need each other, we’ve all needed each other for thousands upon thousands of years, and no one should be expected to handle everything on their own. Social support enhances your quality of life and can make hard life events feel less intense – but we gotta lean into it.

So, what do you need right now to get through this?

5 – What feels doable, practical, and/or easy?

When you’re burned out, stressed, or overwhelmed, your brain is not going to be easy to convince to do tasks and activities. So the more doable and easy a task feels, the more likely it is that you can follow through on it – because the more effortful something feels, the more your brain will steer you away from it.

This is your brain working exactly as it’s supposed to, btw – it’s trying to save you from even more rough feelings. Your brain doesn’t realize that avoiding *all* work also brings about more rough feelings.

So, depending on your capacity, as I mentioned at the start of these 5 things to consider, there may be some tasks that you could do that take minimal effort.

Now, a caveat I wanna say here is that if the only thing you feel like doing is something like scrolling IG and commenting on some posts, I’d almost rather see you go do something to take care of yourself. Unless this is genuinely a good strategy for you; if it’s something that brings you business.

Otherwise, I’d stick to tasks that you know have some kind of return on investment.

And hey, sometimes the return might be that you actually pick up some energy and feel motivated to do a bit bigger of a task – so I don’t want to completely dismiss the idea of doing something on IG if it in fact does help you.

Again – since we’re not having a two-way conversation right now, it’s hard to give specific advice.

I hope that these questions got you thinking about what might be going on and what you need if you’re feeling burned out – and showed you that there are things that you could change without having to push yourself, without having to force anything while you’re feeling this way.

Jenna Hellberg