Have you ever been burnt out in your business or personal life?
Have you ever hit that threshold of being exhausted, physically and mentally?
Burnout — the mental and physical exhaustion you experience when the demands of your work and personal life consistently exceed the amount of energy you have available — has been called the epidemic of the modern workplace by the expert today.
Burnout can wreak havoc on your health, happiness, relationships and job performance.
The key is being able to ANTICIPATE burnout and learn how to effectively manage stress so that you can avoid burnout altogether.
In this video blog, I share how I avoid burnout and how to prevent it from even occurring in the first place. These strategies have been useful for me and can help you to continuously grow, without burning yourself out.
Watch the video below:
(Click here to watch on YouTube)
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Video transcript
Hey, everyone, this is Stefan from projectlifemastery.com and in this video I'm going to talk to you about how to avoid burnout. You know, maybe you're facing burnout in your business, in your life, towards achieving a goal, everybody faces it at some point, where you're working away, you're taking massive action, you're excited, you're passionate, maybe you have all these massive energies but eventually you hit a plateau.
That plateau basically is just like, “Oh my God, like I just don't want to do anything,” or you're so exhausted at a certain point, maybe you lose your motivation, your desire and it can be very challenging to go through that.
I face that time and time again in my business because if you're an overachiever like me you're extreme, you take massive action. For me, I spend so much time on my business and my goals, and everything like that and I actually really get a lot of fuel and energy by taking action in my life and achieving my goals. But eventually, I understand that if I don't take calculated breaks or rests, then I'm going to get burned out and it happens to everybody out there.
Make sure that you're proactive
I've got a few tips for you, guys, things that have helped me. Number one, making sure that you're proactive and you're preventing the burnout from even happening. I find this to be very important because a lot of people, they don't plan breaks or rest time in their life or in their business or towards their goals.
If you don't plan for it, it's just inevitable it's going to happen. You don't want burnout happening when you're in the middle of a big project or there's something very important. Again, you want to make sure that you're smarter than that, you're being proactive. You're anticipating the potential burnout that can occur and you're planning and preparing for it.
Now I'm often reminded of just, like fitness and gaining muscle and working out. One challenge that a lot of bodybuilders or fitness people face is you're working out, you're following a certain workout routine, and if you follow that same routine or the same meal plan week after week, month after month, eventually what happens is you hit a plateau.
That plateau basically, your body stops growing, you stop getting the results, you stop losing fat and it's actually … You can try to push through it but it's just not going to work because you hit the plateau. What you actually have to do is you got to take a step back, and that step back that you might take, it might seem like you're making some less progress, but you're actually taking a step back so that you can take 5 or 10 steps forward.
You're going to have to take a step back at some point, but again, if you are a smart person that anticipates you can see the plateau, the burnout that's going to happen and you can plan and prepare for it. If you're a fitness bodybuilder person you might take a week off from the gym, give your body rest. Because then when you go back at it, you're going to shock up the body again and it's going to start to grow or you're going to switch up your routine a little bit.
There are certain things that you can do:
1. What I found to be important, is making sure that I have a rest day at least one day out of the week. It might be different for you, it's different for everybody, but for me one day out of the week. I need a day just to take a break from everything, take a break from my business, from some of my goals and use that as an opportunity to recharge.
If I'm working out … As much as I love to workout every day, I recognize that I still need a day off to give my body a rest to prevent that burnout. Because if I just workout every day without factoring in that one day rest, then I'm going to hit that plateau faster and I'm going to experience burnout.
One day a week I need a rest day. Usually, during that rest day, I spend it just doing nothing or doing things that can help recharge me in some way. For example, for me it might be doing a ritual, a morning ritual, it might be a meditation. It might just be spending time with my girlfriend or friends or family or doing something fun or going to the beach, just laying down or whatever, or maybe it's just reading or whatever.
Just doing something to relax, something that doesn't require a lot of thinking, because the thinking, I think there's mental burnout as well as physical burnout. Mental burnout is when your brain is just constantly thinking, overloaded with so many things that you just burn out from that.
Having a day where I don't have to think about much, I don't have to use a lot of creativity and a lot of brain power, I found that to be amazingly useful. Maybe it's getting a massage, and I think the body and mind are connected, so resting the body, getting a massage, doing certain healing things to your body will also help your mind and vice versa.
Things you do for your mind are also going to help your body. It might even just be doing a cleanse. Sometimes for a day, I might just do a cleanse and only have juice or raw food or whatever, and that's just another way to cleanse my body, relax and detox.
Having that day out of the week and another part of that too, I like to spend time alone. I'm more of a natural introvert by nature. I am extroverted, I am outgoing as well, but my nature is more introverted. I also need a day, I find, part of that day is just doing things by myself. I find for me just, that's the way that I recharge, is just being alone, being with my thoughts, being in nature, going for walks, etc. That really recharges me and helps prevent and avoid that burnout as well.
2. Another thing when it comes to rest is, I found to take a break every three months. That break is usually more extended break from my business, that might be, for example going away for a week on a trip somewhere and just doing nothing, having fun. It might be just disassociating from my business, like for example I've got a trip coming up at The Grand Canyon, where I'm hiking and doing whitewater rafting for five days.
No technology, no phones, no wifi or anything like that. During those five days I'm just disconnecting from my business and stuff, and what I find is when I take a more extended break, it gets me more energy, excitement, passion to work on my business.
Oftentimes, by taking those breaks I come up with different ideas and thoughts that can actually help my business grow. It's interesting when you get outside of your business, it's like you get altitude and you're looking at things from a different perspective. There's a lot of incredible benefits from doing it that way as well. I think another thing that's worth considering, I'll give you one more tip.
3. Make sure that what you're doing in your business, you love, you enjoy. This has been another important factor to avoid burnout because you shouldn't be getting burnout too often, your business really should give you fuel. It should excite you. You should be passionate about what you're doing in your business or towards your goal.
I find for me, I've been able to be in a position now in my business where I spend less time doing the things that used to drain me. For example like, I remember doing customer support, I just can't stand customer support. I love my customers, don't get me wrong, but there's a lot … When you deal with customers there's a lot of frustrating things you've got to deal with, because a lot of customers are amazing, but you always have certain customers that are bad apples, that can be frustrating and you have to put out fires and deal with certain issues.
For me, I remember when I used to do customer support, my business, it just drained me. I just would dread it and I would try to escape and avoid things for my business as a result of that.
When I got a customer support team to handle that, that freed up a lot of energy for me and I prevented a lot of burnout from that. Being in a position where you can do what you love each day, that's the ultimate gift because now your work doesn't feel like work. It doesn't feel like a job, but it's now your mission, your purpose in your life, your passion.
That's a position that I feel blessed to be in, because, for me, I love doing what I do so much that it doesn't matter where I am in the world. I just love to do it. I love interacting and engaging with fans and followers and creating content and doing a lot of the things that I do. I think when you're in that position, when you love it so much, again, that burnout is not going to happen.
Thank God, it's Friday
A lot of people that have a job and unfortunately they hate their job, if you hate your job you're looking forward to five o'clock when you can checkout. You're looking forward to the weekend. The fact that there's TGIF, “Thank God, it's Friday,” is crazy because people, they dread five days of the week, they're only looking forward to two days out of the week. That's just not an intelligent way to live your life, to spend that much of your life doing something that you hate, that you dislike.
I couldn't imagine that. I've never … Before I had a job and I was, I faced that in my life, but I'm so grateful that I took the actions necessary to get out of that because when you're doing something you hate all the time it's draining your energy. When it's draining your energy you're going to face burnout, you're going to want to recover, you're going to want to avoid it.
When you're doing what you love you want to do it more often. It's almost like you love … you meet someone new and you're so passionate about that person, you want to spend all your time with that person. That's kind of what it's like falling in love with your business.
Regardless how much you love your business you still will face burnout, and again, you just got to anticipate it and calculate it and decide, “You know what, I need to force myself a day out of the week, every three months I'm going to take a week off, I'm going to take whatever,” whatever is realistic for you, but take time off and do things that are totally unrelated to your business.
Again, that's what's really helped me in avoiding the burnout and hopefully, some of these tips can help you as well. Thanks for watching this video and make sure to leave a comment below, and like this video if you enjoyed it, and subscribe for more videos like this. Thanks for watching.