What Everyone Should Know About Burnout (But Experts Get Wrong)
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Your goal is your desired outcome. Your system is the collection of daily habits that will get you there. This year, spend less time focusing on outcomes and more time focusing on the habits that precede the results.”
I've never been one to dip my toes in the water. I'm diving in or I want nothing to do with it, so I'm sure I've missed out on things because of this. But it's also provided a valuable lesson that's kept me turning out a weekly blog since 2017. Persistence trumps talent any day of the week.
In author Ryan Holiday's Stillness Is The Key he helps us battle the noise of the deafening Push harder! the world screams into your eardrum. "Yes, there is purity and meaning in giving your best to whatever you do — but life is much more of a marathon than it is a sprint."
Are you treating life as a marathon or are you sprinting up every mountain and falling down the other side in exhaustion?
A call to my boss while I choked back tears because I was worn out, used up and afraid to face another day, tells you this was a lesson I still had to learn.
Burnout does not have to be a cycle.
It's not something you should come to expect like the passing of a season. It's 100% avoidable. Experts that tell you otherwise might have to reevaluate what it is exactly they're an "expert" on.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
It's one or the other. That's a hard truth to swallow. If you're a go-getter, you want it all.
It's like the kid who refuses to let go of a handful of cookies — except they end up with a fistful of crumbs because they wanted nothing less than everything.
My nervous breakdown was of my own making.
The moral of the tale as Holiday explained is: "The email you think you need so desperately to respond to can wait. Your screenplay does not need to be hurried, and you can even take a break between it and the next one. The only person truly requiring you to spend the night at the office is yourself. It's okay to say no. It's okay to opt-out of that phone call or that last-minute trip."
But Chris, you don't understand my job. Maybe I don't. I don't need to. Life is short. If you don't have coworkers, a boss or people around you that support your choices to make your health and wellness a priority, you sure as hell don't have people that care about you. So why do you care so much about pleasing them?
Dr. Seuss put it bluntly. "Those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
You have talents and gifts that no one else brings to this world. You owe it yourself and the rest of us to bring them to life. You're not going to be able to do that if you're not taking care of yourself, or if you've pushed yourself to the breaking point.
You probably feel like you're letting people down if you say no. You're not. You're letting people down when you show up exhausted and running on fumes.
Because as Holiday said, "good decisions are not made by those who are running on empty." And let's be honest "what kind of interior life can you have, what kind of thinking can you do, when you're utterly and completely overworked?"
Guess what Chernobyl, Bhopal and every other manmade disaster ever have had in common? Exhaustion.
Humans make bad decisions when we are overworked.
You are not the exception.
And let's be honest, 99.8% of us do not have jobs that mean someone will die as a result of us slowing our pace. Ironically, far more people are killed as a result of us moving too fast.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T starts with you.
Slowing down and checking my priorities has been like a rocket ship for my career.
It's given me the ability to show up week after week and bring every single ounce of energy and presence to what I'm doing. That's as valuable as any skill, any degree or any amount of money you toss at a problem.
It's worth reading one final reminder of what's available to you at any given moment from Dr. Seuss: “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go."
Why do we put off decisions that could give us a better future? I've been at that crossroads many times in my life. Whether it was a decision to start my own business, launch a podcast or even ask my partner to marry me. I knew all three of these decisions would give me a better life. But in the back of my head, all I could think about is what if I ended up being a colossal failure?