Burnout is a very serious matter for a lot of business owners. People get into business to get out of a nine to five, but a lot of the time, what happens is they find that instead of working a nine to five, they’re working a 5:00 AM to 9:00 PM, a five to nine. They don’t get to see their family as much. They don’t get to spend as much time at the things they were doing before, but as long as you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you continue to tell yourself that this isn’t work, this is fun. That’s perfectly fine, but everyone knows that you can’t have the good days without the bad days.
Take a Step Back
When it comes down to it, sometimes you need to step back and distress. We’re going to talk about different ways that worked for me. It’s been 19 years or so since I started my business, and over the 19 years I’ve gone through weeks where I’ve worked 105 to 110 hour weeks of time in the week, and I did that for six weeks in a row. I never felt this way, but I went from talking normally and being reasonably happy, go lucky to feeling depressed all the time. I hated the fact that I’d created this business that was holding me hostage. I created an environment that I had more responsibilities, more security as well, more responsibilities and less time to spend with my friends and family.
After the few weeks that I’d been working 110 hours each week, I developed a stutter, I was shaking, I was a mess, I was just destroyed. That is not a good position to be in mentally. When someone comes to you, a new client that wants to do business with you and you’re destroyed, you’ve got to be able to step back and take a break, sharpen your soul so to speak.
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Evaluate Your Life
I did a lot of research into meditation, hypnosis and the food that I was eating to make sure that it was having a positive impact on my life. As much as you shouldn’t have to schedule away time for yourself, it’s an incredibly important activity to do, probably more important than working in the business itself. There are lots of different statistics and reports that have been made around the benefits of working less than 50 hours a week. I would suggest you guys go out and have a look at them. What I started doing in the morning is that I’d make sure that I’ve reviewed what I wanted to achieve for the day. I then went outside and I would just sit in the garden, not in the dirt exactly, but on the grass and think about what I had achieved previously.
Try Writing Lists
I wrote a list of everything in my personal life and everything in my business life that I really enjoy doing and that I really despised doing. For the bits that I despise doing, I started trimming back on and removing from my life. That led me to have a list of things that I’ve really enjoyed doing and only very few that I didn’t enjoy doing.
You have to do these things sometimes, but the fact that there’s been acknowledged means you can appreciate when you’re doing them, and you know how long that’s going to take. Lists are an amazing tool.
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Remove Negativity
Being able to use that list, I realised that there were toxic people in my life that were sucking away my energy. Sometimes the hard facts are you’ve got to think maybe the people that are sucking away the energy, they might be loved ones. You just need to know and acknowledge that, and once you’ve done that, you can then make an assessment as to whether or not you might be distancing yourself or changing relationships, which I’m by no means suggesting to do, but it might be better for you in the long run. If it’s gonna make you a healthier person mentally, you’re going to be able to make better decisions in your life.
Reflect on the Positives
Another great reason lists are fantastic is that you can go back to your previous list, look at it and go, wow, look how many things I’ve done off this list. I made a list couple of years ago that had stuff around the house and the other one was stuff in the business. And I went back and had a look and I’m like, okay, the business list had 600 items, the house list had 150. Two years later I had only 30 items on the house list and 150 on the business list, and I thought, wow, sometimes you do the day to day and you forget how much you’ve actually achieved and where you’ve been able to come with that. Having a list, let you see the progress, lets you see your goals and aspirations previously and let you see the direction that you’ve come.
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It’s fantastic because especially this list isn’t just one term, the list could be anything such as SWOT analysis, business plans, anything like that. You can then reflect on it retroactively and go okay, this is where I’ve come, this would have been able to do. Once you’ve then reflected in the garden or wherever you find is your happy place, come back inside, breathe deeply 10 times in, and hold it and then let it out. Breathing is something that we take for granted, we do it autonomously, but we don’t do it enough. Breathing really helps you relax. Turning your phone off or turning it upside down on mute is a fantastic exercise to not be interrupted for an hour.
Take a Break at Work and in Life
I would suggest anyone try to have a lunch break, walk around the park or somewhere that isn’t at your work as this can help remove you from the stress. If your business is heavily reliant upon technology, remove the technology from your life. I run a technology business, yet one of my favourite things to do is to go camping without technology. I love stepping away from this technology so I can appreciate it when I come back to it and see that you’ve missed it. You can’t miss something that’s always there in your face.
Give Basic Meditation a Go
If you aren’t interested in reading books or looking deeper into mediation, just sit down in a dark room with a lit candle in front of you and stare at the flame-breathing deeply for 10 minutes. Just look at the flame, blinking slowly, breathing deeply and see how you feel after 10 minutes. Once you’ve been able to relax and then you go to bed, your mind isn’t rushing. If your mind isn’t rushing, you can sleep and actually get into your deep stages of sleep and make sure you’re going through the room process as you should be.
Persevere
Don’t fall victim to some crutch that you’ve got in your life that you need or you feel that you need to stay with. It takes 21 days to break a habit. Doing these small things takes around half an hour or an hour of your whole day. You will feel like a different person full of energy and you’ll feel fantastic. I cut out a bunch of businesses that were very profitable, but the clients weren’t making me feel happy.
They were making me feel uncomfortable. They were making me work longer hours, although that was profitable, it wasn’t profitable in my heart and in my head, it was only profitable in my bank account. At the end of the day, the number in your bank account isn’t as important as the health score that you put on your life and in your body.
Closing Thoughts
Burnout is something that needs to be said and addressed, especially if you’re early on in a business. You need to get that balance because you will not build your business built freedom without balance. Make sure that you’ve got that downtime so that when you’re on your uptime, you’re as best as you can. Silly for you to be sitting there spinning your wheels and not actually moving forward. I hope this has been of help for some people. Feel free to email through at Dorks.com with any other ideas or things that you’d like to have advice on. You guys stay good.
