130: Spotting Burnout Early – How To Coach Yourself Back To Balance

[00:00:00] Welcome back to the shoot at straight podcast. My friends, I am so glad you’re here today. I’m really excited about this talk. Also, I’m a little nervous because I’m getting a little vulnerable with you. If you’ve been here for a minute, you know that I don’t mind getting vulnerable. I don’t, I’m an open book.

[00:00:18] I am that way on the podcast. I am that way. If you meet me in person, I’m that way. If you send me a DM, I am an open book and I’m always happy to share, but that doesn’t mean that sometimes it’s not hard or it doesn’t feel like a little bit of a stretch. And that’s kind of what we’re doing today. I’m talking about burnout and how to spot it early and specifically how to coach yourself back to balance, to get yourself out of that burnout that we dread and that nobody wants to be in.

[00:00:49] Right. And the reason why it’s a little hard is because I’m getting personal and I’m sharing some personal stories with you like I always do here on the podcast. So unless you’re brand new, uh, and if you are welcome, I’m so glad you’re here, but you know, the listener, you know that I have survived burnout many, many times.

[00:01:08] I, it’s not new for me. I’ve survived it. I’ve studied it. I’ve continued to learn about it. I’ve coached other women through it. I have been coached through it and I definitely know more about this topic than the average person. I will say I’m an expert. I’m not like a professional expert, but I do know a lot about this topic.

[00:01:29] Again, going through it personally, coaching people through it, studying it, being coached through it. I mean, I just, I know so much about this topic and I really am passionate about it. And yet no matter how much I try, no matter how much you try, burnout will always be there. It’s always going to be there.

[00:01:50] And in today’s episode, I’m going to coach you through how to, you know, get yourself out of burnout. But I’m also going to share a story about something that I posted on Instagram last August, and it got a lot of engagement. I received so many DMs, boxers, and text messages about it. And it’s about burnout.

[00:02:11] So let’s dive straight in to today’s episode. Welcome to the shoot it straight podcast. I’m your host, Sabrina Gebhardt. Here, I will share an honest take on what it’s like to be a female creative entrepreneur while balancing business, motherhood. and life. Myself, along with my guests, we’ll get vulnerable through honest conversations and relatable stories because we’re willing to go there.

[00:02:36] If you’re trying to find balance in this exciting place you’re in yet willing to talk about the hard stuff to the shoot it straight podcast. is here to share practical and tangible takeaways to help you shoot it straight.

[00:02:53] Let’s first talk about what is burnout. I know that burnout is a hot topic and everybody hears it and talks about it all the time, but do you really know what it is? Like, do you truly understand or do you just throw the term around? This is something that I coach deeply on inside my mastermind root to rise and also with my one to one coaching clients, so I’m not going to get that deep into it today because I don’t want to take away from those students, but I do think it’s important to understand the basics for this discussion for the purpose of today.

[00:03:27] What is burnout? What are the physical, mental and emotional signs of a burnout situation? Physical signs and symptoms. This is also known as like how burnout, burnout, like manifests itself in your body, physically a few things. You can have shortness of breath. You can feel like the physical tension of anxiety, right?

[00:03:51] All the physical symptoms that are attached with anxiety, exhaustion, deep exhaustion, like. You know, early pregnancy level exhaustion. All right. And also you can be in really poor physical health, right? Like maybe you’ve been ill for what seems like months or you’re going from one ailment to the next ailment to the next ailment.

[00:04:13] It’s something’s always feels like your body’s breaking. It’s a fighting against you. Okay. That can also be a sign that you’re deep in the throes of burnout. There are also mental signs. This is a K a how it affects your brain. Okay, how burnout affects your mind, racing thoughts, a general disinterest in things.

[00:04:34] You feel like you’ve lost a spark or a passion, everything just feels super meh. Those are all like mental symptoms of burnout. Everything’s mediocre. Right? Overall, emotionally, you feel like you don’t enjoy anything. You maybe have thoughts of just wanting to burn it all down, just shut it all down. I want to run away.

[00:04:56] I want to start over. I don’t like anything that kind of thought. And you may also feel depressed or borderline depressed. That’s when you’re like very deeply in the throes of burnout. You’ve probably heard me say before that burnout and depression are close friends. They’re close friends. So those are the symptoms, the signs of burnout.

[00:05:17] And specifically for female photographers, which is the vast majority of you listening. And also I’ll say just female business owners, female creatives. What I see that shows up for us when we are struggling with burnout uniquely for the female creative entrepreneur. I see there’s, there’s three, what I’ll call causes of burnout.

[00:05:41] Three most common things that I see show up over and over and over again. And it is a lack of boundaries, a lack of support and overcommitment. Those three things. Lead to burnout with our group of female creative entrepreneurs over and over and over again. Again, that’s lack of boundaries, lack of support and over commitment.

[00:06:07] I say that I see these things causing burnout and I want to rephrase that. Those are the three common things I see that cause business burnout, but there are different kinds of burnout. Okay. This is why we can’t ever escape it. So to speak. And what I coach this group of women on these female creative entrepreneurs is that there’s other two really common types of burnout that we face over and over and over again.

[00:06:33] Yes, there’s the business burnout, right? We don’t have boundaries. We don’t have support. We’re over committing ourselves. We are burned out when we consider our business, but there’s two other things that can affect you. And that is life burnout. Which is the things that are happening in life around you, a lot of which you don’t have any control over.

[00:06:54] Think about a surprise cost cross country move or ailing parents or a major medical diagnosis or things like that that just happen that can cause burnout in your life, but they’re not really things that you can have control over. Okay. Life burnout. And then there’s what I call mothering burnout. We all know what that is.

[00:07:16] Motherhood is freaking exhausting. We are wearing the mental hat of motherhood, carrying the mental load of motherhood, which feels like the weight of the world. Have we fed them? Have they slept enough? Are they healthy? Do they have a fever? When’s their next play date? They need new shoes and on and on and on.

[00:07:36] So you can feel burnout from motherhood and feel great in your business. Or you can feel burnout in your business, but feel like you’re rocking and rolling as a mom. You can also have burnout from all three of these things at the same time. And it’s really, really hard. So those are some things that I want you to kind of understand about burnout for today’s podcast episode.

[00:07:59] Okay. Now I’m going to kind of back up. I’m going to share a story about something that happened to me recently. And after I get to the other side of the story, then I’m going to coach you through how to spot burnout and how to coach yourself out of it. But I want to tell you my story first. So last August, it was actually the first week of school to be exact.

[00:08:22] Okay. And historically I love the first week of school, like love, love, love the first week of school. I would say that it’s one of my favorite weeks of the year. I say it all the time. I love my kids, but getting a quiet house. And time to just think straight after a long summer is the best feeling. I thrive off of routine.

[00:08:48] I thrive off of having time to myself. I don’t do great with a lot of noise. And so I rock and roll in the summer and I try to be that fun mom and, and all those things. But man, the first week of school is such a refresh for me. And I really, really love it. And I also love the energy of the start of a school year.

[00:09:10] Feels very similar to that new year energy to me where I’ve got like a clean slate on my calendar and I’m getting the kids activities lined up and my fall schedule lined up and it just, I don’t know, I just, I love that week of school. But this past August, the first week of school, I was not feeling like I normally feel that time of year.

[00:09:33] I found myself feeling exhausted and paralyzed for that entire week. I knew something was off. It was so unlike me to feel anything other than bliss the first week of school that it was sending off alarms. Right? And here’s the thing. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, I have been through this burnout process so many times that when I noticed myself feeling Different and feeling that way, those symptoms, that exhaustion and that paralyzation for several days in a row.

[00:10:07] It was a huge red flag that something was off. I knew immediately, oh man, I’m burned out. How did I get here? And so I thought through how did I get there? How does someone who coach on this and who’s been through this and who’s put protocols in place and boundaries in place and all of us, how did I find myself here?

[00:10:31] So I thought through what was happening, what was happening around me, what got me to that point. For me, it was a little bit of business and a little bit of life. Like I had mentioned, summer had literally just ended and our summer had been so busy. We had so much travel, like so much travel. The kids had so many camps.

[00:10:54] requiring so many carpools. There were so many moving parts, you know, during the school year, I expect to have 10 alarms set during my day for various things, moving and shaking meetings and carpools and get to school and pick this up and call this person, all that. And the summer you, I kind of expect to have like a break from that, right?

[00:11:13] A little more flexibility, a little more free flowing. And that’s not what the summer was. It was go hard the whole summer. And in business, I had been planning to launch a brand new course in late August. So all summer I’d been planning the marketing and outlining the course and getting the things buttoned up to launch and that plan was to do the very last step, which was record the videos.

[00:11:40] The very last step I was planning to do the first week of school and then that was the last step and everything was ready to go live. All of the, you know, resources had been created, the marketing, everything was done. I just had to record the videos and I was saving that for the first week of school when the house was quiet, obviously.

[00:11:56] Right. Well, one thing to note here is that in addition to a super busy summer and planning to launch this new thing, I had also spent half the summer coaching a new round of root to rise. Okay. I had around the fall round of roots rise last year started in July. So half of July and all of August, I was already coaching students and having coaching calls and boxer and all of that.

[00:12:22] I had also been coaching a brand new mastermind group that I did last year for the first time called the education blueprint, which involved another retreat and another group of students and coaching calls and Bach boxer, et cetera, et cetera. I had also launched another new course earlier in the summer in June.

[00:12:42] So when I tell you that there were a thousand moving parts last summer, I am literally meaning a thousand moving parts. When I tell you all this now out loud, uh, it sounds insane. Like honestly, Sabrina, you knew better. You knew better. What the heck were you thinking? But in real time, I can tell you, I didn’t feel overwhelmed in real time.

[00:13:03] I was excited and I was rocking and rolling and I was in the flow, right? Like I was truly in the flow. I was loving our summer travels. Um, I was loving all the adventures. I was so happy that my kids were getting to do all these camps and things they wanted to do. I was feeling in the flow and my business with launching these new things and coaching these new groups.

[00:13:24] But when you say it out loud and when you see it all laid out on paper, like what was I thinking? I should have known better, but as it so happens with burnout so often, I was doing great until I wasn’t. I was doing great until I wasn’t. And it didn’t take much. To knock me off kilter. And that’s exactly what happened.

[00:13:46] My life was very, very, very, very full. And one little thing pushed me over the edge. Today’s episode is brought to you by route to rise a four month mastermind and retreat for female photographers. That is where personal development meets business growth. During the four month experience, students have weekly calls focusing on a variety of topics that both better their lives and their businesses.

[00:14:15] Think topics like goals, boundaries, money, and marketing, and many, many others. The program also includes incredible guest teachers. a private Facebook community and weekly Voxer hours where you get individualized guidance and mentoring from me on topics that matter to you and your business. One of the best parts of the experience is definitely the three day in person retreat.

[00:14:41] Consider this the most fun girls weekend ever. We eat well, do yoga, photograph three sessions, work through portfolio reviews, take headshots and build deep friendships. I can tell you that the women who have gone through this program have had some absolutely incredible transformations. I’m going to be talking about how you can get on the waitlist to be notified when enrollment opens again.

[00:15:09] Soon. You can head over to the link in the show notes and get on that list. And now back to the episode.

[00:15:17] So the little thing was that that first week of school, our internet went out. And I know that sounds so dumb and so frivolous and you’re probably rolling your eyes or maybe you just spit out your coffee. Our internet went out, but let me tell you, it wasn’t just a regular old outage. It was this super complicated, involved five technician appointments and a specialist type of outage.

[00:15:49] Okay? It ate up literally every second of my brain space and every moment of my free time for that entire week. That entire week that I had planned on being blissfully alone at the house. that I had planned on recording these videos for this course, that I had planned on giving myself white space because that’s what I always do the first week of school.

[00:16:11] None of that happened because I was dealing with the internet outage from health. No one could figure out the problem. It was service appointment after service appointment, after service appointment, after phone call, after service appointment, after repair, after it was nonstop every single day. And it just, it was the one little thing that pushed me over the edge by the end of the week.

[00:16:35] I could not peel myself off of the couch. I was fried mentally and physically. I was fried. And that is when I knew what was happening. I knew that I wasn’t just frustrated about the situation. I knew that it wasn’t, you know, my hormones or the time of the month or anything else. I knew that I was burned out.

[00:16:56] That physical and mental paralyzation is my own personal red flag. And I’m going to be honest when I realized what was happening, I was really pissed off at myself. I was pissed. I knew better. And I still found myself in this situation. I call myself an expert on burnout. I coach women on burnout all the time.

[00:17:20] And yet here I was. I was angry and ashamed. And then I decided that I needed to snap out of it because I knew exactly what I needed to do to help myself. And the first thing I told myself is that burnout is not unavoidable. I do a really good job of setting up boundaries and systems and having people support me and doing all the things that I coach women through.

[00:17:49] But life still happens. And this was truly a perfect storm situation. Had I overdone it in the summer? Yeah, I probably did saying it out loud, looking at all the things. Yeah. There was too much last summer, but on paper I had that whole first week of school open. I had one very small task of recording videos for a new course and I had nothing else on my calendar.

[00:18:14] I should have in theory, a ton of time to reset and recover. That’s what I always do. I give myself the first week of school. It’s basically all white space to recover and like reward myself for a long summer. And then I jump into work. And when that didn’t happen because of this whole ridiculous internet situation, it, it threw me off.

[00:18:39] I was, I was over, I was over the edge. I just, I had to remind myself what I remind women all the time. It’s not unavoidable. We can do the best we can to set ourself up for success most of the time, but it is still going to happen. And that’s why I wanted to record this episode today, because if you can spot it early, you can coach yourself out of it better.

[00:19:01] And that’s what we’re going to talk about again, in case. In case you’ve never found yourself in burnout, or maybe you’re feeling weird currently and you’re not sure what it is. Here’s a couple of the symptoms and warning signs that you might be there. Okay, I told you mine is like I, I feel physically and mentally paralyzed.

[00:19:20] I can’t do anything. And that’s a huge red flag for me because if you can’t tell already, I’m a doer, I’m a doer. I get things done. I achieve a lot. I have a lot on my plate. That’s just me. I am. I have a higher capacity than most people. And so paralyzation is so polar opposite of what my norm is that I know that that’s what the case is.

[00:19:44] I’m burned out, but that may not be your red flag. Some other ones are physical fatigue, like we talked about. Being fully emotionally detached. That’s that, you know, everything is boring and meh. That loss of passion, the paralysis, which is what I feel. Disinterest in things you used to love. Feeling super blasé about everything and everyone.

[00:20:07] Not having your normal drive to get up and go and do things. Sometimes it’s being really short tempered. In situations where that’s not your normal M. O. So those are some different warning signs that could be coming up for you because not everybody’s the same. But when you recognize that it’s coming or that you have just recently become burnout.

[00:20:29] Okay, it’s so important to acknowledge it as soon as you see it, because when you don’t acknowledge it. And you’re stewing in it and you just keep moving forward with your life and try and push past it and ignore it. That’s when we step over into our sister, our sister, neighbor, friend, depression. Okay.

[00:20:50] And I’m speaking from personal experience here. They are so closely related. They are such best friends. They are such close neighbors that one can become the other very, very easily. So it’s so important not to ignore burnout and to catch it as fast as you can. The sooner you can catch it, the more likely you can coach it, coach yourself out of it.

[00:21:13] And so I’m going to give you five steps. Five steps to help coach you out of a burnout situation. And this is what I did for myself. Number one, I acknowledged and accepted what was happening. And I’m going to say, I hope that you will acknowledge and accept what’s happening without judging yourself.

[00:21:31] Obviously I judged myself. I hope that you will not, you have to remember that burnout is not unavoidable. We can only control what we can control. I want you to control the controllables. So that you are minimizing your risks and, uh, stopping it as quickly as you can, but life happens. Things happen around us that are out of our control that can absolutely lead to burnout.

[00:21:59] And you need to be able to get out of it when you’re in that situation. Step two, assess your priorities and let go of anything that’s non essential. I don’t mean forever. I just mean while you’re getting out of the rut. Okay. So for me in last August, I immediately backed out of a whole lot of things. The first thing I did, which was the biggest and the hardest to do, and I had to swallow my pride was I canceled my course launch full stop.

[00:22:28] I said, I absolutely can’t do this. I not only am I not going to record these videos, but I do not have the mental bandwidth to go through a launch of a brand new course. It’s off, off, totally put it on pause, didn’t have a date, didn’t, didn’t know when I was going to do it. It just literally got shelved.

[00:22:46] Okay, that was the first thing I rescheduled a bunch of meetings that I had that week and the following week. I moved appointments, anything that was not a non essential. I moved those appointments. I rearranged my schedule and all of my commitments to give myself time to reset. Not everything is, you know, negotiable or can be rescheduled.

[00:23:07] And I fully understand that. I don’t want you to not show up to the important things, but I think you would be surprised at how much is non essential, how much can get rescheduled and moved around. Is it going to be ideal? No, but you have to realize that you have to put yourself first in this situation or you’re not going to coach yourself out of it.

[00:23:30] And then we’re going to be approaching our neighbor friend that we don’t want to see over there. You have to prioritize yourself and give yourself time to reset. And here’s the beauty of it. The quicker you catch the burnout and can coach yourself out of it, the faster your reset is the faster you will recover from this.

[00:23:49] Instead of it taking months, maybe it’ll only take you a couple weeks. Okay. But you have to be willing to let go of all of the non essentials to give yourself as much bandwidth and free time as possible. The third thing I did was I set boundaries to protect my time. And here’s the thing. I didn’t really need to do this because again, mine are pretty solid.

[00:24:12] I have done this so many times to protect my, to protect my time and to make sure that I did not land in a burnout situation all the time over and over again. But when I coach women, this is a really crucial step for them. Oftentimes this is the missing step. If you are listening to this and you are thinking to yourself, I am literally on a burnout loop.

[00:24:37] I am consistently finding myself in this perpetual burnout where I just feel awful. And then I kind of get out of it and then I keep going with my life and then I feel awful again. And it’s just this, this terrible circle. Boundaries around your time and your schedule are probably what you need. That’s probably the answer.

[00:25:00] It’s probably the thing that you’re avoiding. Step four was implement small self care practices. Okay? If you’ve been a listener to the podcast for a while, you know how important I think self care is and when you’re trying to pull yourself out of burnout, it’s absolutely crucial to lean in and go hard while you are resetting.

[00:25:22] I cleared all the non essentials off my calendar and I got a massage. And I sat outside and I went on a lot of walks and I watched TV, which I never do. And I read books and I did puzzles and I just allowed myself to be so gentle with whatever felt good and with whatever I needed, it was like allowing myself to be on a little staycation at my house while my kids were at school every day.

[00:25:50] That’s the kind of gentleness that you need to allow your system to reset when you have found yourself in burnout. And then step five to coach yourself out of burnout is to lean on community for support. How can others support you in this process? Personally, I talked with with friends and my husband and I got carpool help.

[00:26:12] And I looked for a few after school and weekend play dates for my youngest, so he, you know, felt loved and special without needing me in the moment. Those were the biggest things for me in this example, but thinking through how can others support you? Can you get your partner at home to help out a little bit more or to do dinners for the whole week?

[00:26:31] Can you just commit to doing takeout? Can you ask your big kids to do the clean the kitchen every night? Can you ask your in laws to come over and take the kids like where can you get support? To allow more time for you to be gentle with yourself. So again, really quickly, those five steps to coach yourself out of a burnout situation when you catch it early, that’s what I want you to hear.

[00:26:56] These five steps are not going to fully get you out of the situation if you are so deep. If you have found yourself in this perpetual, really deep burnout pit, you need more support than what these five steps are. But when you can catch yourself. In a burnout situation, very, very early, these five steps can get you out of it on your own.

[00:27:19] Okay, number one, acknowledging and accepting what’s happening to you without judging number to assess your priorities and let go of all non essential tasks. Number three, set boundaries to protect your time. Number four, implement a lot of small self care practices and number five, lean on your community for support.

[00:27:41] Again, for the hundredth time, if you did not hear me any other time in this episode, Burnout is not avoidable, but it should be rare. If you feel like you have worked so hard to avoid it and yet you find yourself creeping towards it in this season, I hope that this episode encourages you with how to handle the situation because when you catch it early, you really can coach yourself out and trust me, it feels so good to know that you’re capable of supporting yourself in this way.

[00:28:12] So in closing, I want to ask you to do two things today. Number one, share this episode with a friend who might need it. Have you had a conversation with somebody lately and they’ve mentioned they’re feeling burned out? Share this episode with them. And number two, Take one small action today that will protect your energy.

[00:28:32] That’s going to be unique to you, but what can you do today to protect your energy? That’s it for today. My friends. I’ll see you next week. Thanks so much for listening to the shoot it straight podcast. You can find all the full show notes. And details from today’s episode@sabrinagehart.com slash podcast.

[00:28:53] Come find me and connect over on the gram at Sabrina Gehart Photography. If you’re loving the podcast, I’d be honored if you hit that subscribe button and leave me a review. Until next time, my friends shoot it straight.