Are you a social entrepreneur or a purpose focused business owner? I’m sure you’re no stranger to the hustle and productivity hacks to help you do more with less as an entrepreneur, but be mindful not to do more with less so you can do even more!

That’s the nature of the game today if you’re chasing the attention economy and why there is much more to putting ZEN in your business, as it’s really about putting more ZEN in your thinking and reconsidering how to run your life and business without burning out.

“Burnout has turned into an interesting phenomena.”

It was once seen as a level of unmanaged chronic stress and fatigue in fields like medicine, nursing and social work.

The pattern: Highly repetitive work, important life and death decision making, and compulsively locked in by a deep sense of meaning and responsibility in service of others.

Today, answering high volumes of emails and slack messages, worrying about politically incorrect tweets with cancel-culture, our “awoke” social justice pursuits, and constant social media dopamine jabs have essentially put anyone on the Internet on the path of potential burnout. Burnout pervasively went from how we tried to industrialize altruism now into corporate and startup workplace culture as we shifted to a service and attention-focused economy. Now combine it with the volatility of being a founder in an early stage business or venture, it can be very mentally and emotionally taxing, especially when areas like maintaining growth in other areas of your life like finances, relationships and family enter the mix.

I’d recommend reading a classic Inc article: The Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship, as a quick primer around the reality of survivor bias and how many of us get started idolizing entrepreneurship on our paths for more career autonomy. Having worked in a high-growth technology corporate environment, and also as an entrepreneur and business owner, I can appreciate where entrepreneurs would require more cognitive flexibility. Dealing with strategic thinking and decision making, and rolling up your sleeves to execute on the front lines with bootstrapped resources to compete in a very distracted and novelty-filled marketplace. Unlike run-of-the-mill career titles, being an entrepreneur fulfills an identity, a way of living and our self-worth and value for many. It’s almost as primal as being a father or mother to a child.

“Failing as an entrepreneur, in a statically high failure field, can eat away at who we think we really are and be a very traumatic event.”

So how does the field of modern entrepreneurship successfully navigate burnout so we can fulfill our missions and commercial desires? Let’s start with some definitions when it comes to burnout.

At the Burnout Clinic: we define burnout “when you expend more energy than you can recover, as a habit.” Your self-regulation of energy is a lot more unconscious than we believe it is, driven by our beliefs, with energy drained by our suppressed emotions and inner conflicts and vulnerable to a simple emotional trigger that can instantly sap all your energy at any given time. While I appreciate that the corporate workplace can drain you just as much, what I’ve noticed in the startup life is much akin to trying to launch a rocket into space. The amount of energy, resources and pressure to get out of the atmosphere is massively disproportionate, clinging onto the notion that once you're in stable orbit you’re good to go. This is what entrepreneurs experience when doing the unsustainable tasks first, across product development, marketing and sales, financially bootstrapping, and developing brand differentiation to validate an idea and get product market fit. Working with entrepreneurs who enter the clinic from exhaustion and burnout, whichever stage of their business they are at, generally fall into being habitually stuck with an early stage hustle mentality, coupled with a crushing feeling of immense burden of responsibility.

Many come in burned out before, and now it’s returned faster and more painful. Finances, family, customers and employee livelihoods are all at stake. So how do you begin to address it. Ideally, it’s recognizing the burnout indicators so you stop yourself from going off a cliff or seeking help when you’re right at the edge. The Burnout Clinic offers a confidential burnout inventory survey that you can start with at: theburnoutclinic.com/survey

Prevention is pretty straightforward, here are the typically recommended categories:

Prioritize Self Care
Focus on priorities instead of tasks
Learn and practice meditation and mindfulness
Get resilience training
Consistent exercise and good nutrition
Staying hydrated
Retraining breathing with breathwork
Getting good quality sleep
Reduce and stop energy-draining thoughts, habits, and behaviors

You can learn these life-related technical skills with books, on YouTube or podcasts; nothing here is a magic process that requires higher education. Don’t worry about the why as much, just focus on the action. If you can’t “DIY” it, that’s when a good coach or accountability buddy is very beneficial. They just need to have the skills and tact to keep you on track and accountable. Now if you’re beyond that point of no return (and everyone is different with their own thresholds), then it’s important to confidently rise up to seek professional support.

“Don’t let self-sabotage get in the way of your mental and emotional wellbeing, especially if you’re suffering.”

Unfortunately with later stages of burnout, it’s insanely and scientifically difficult to willpower out of habitual burnout behaviors because you’re already fatigued, likely experienced mild to severe traumas, emotionally volatile, and bear too much mental and emotional baggage. It’s the kryptonite of grit and willpower, and no number of PhDs or super intelligence means anything when it comes to trying to control your own unconscious behaviors.

If that’s you, then book a free confidential call with the Burnout Clinic team and you can learn more about our clinical processes that clears the mental and emotional triggers and emotions, limiting beliefs, and inner conflicts that drive the root cause of your burnout.

Once all that baggage and unwanted deep programming is gone, it’s easy to lay new foundations without having the limiting beliefs and emotional triggers trap you back into your old thinking and routines. Just like cutting the chains and weights that hold you down, when you apply that same upward energy to clear the atmosphere, you’ll get a slingshot effect. The path to recovery begins with learning the skills and clarity to tap into your deepest internal drivers and align it with your business, career and life choices. It stops the chasing for the sake of chasing. Other areas that I recommend, covered in our Accelerated Burnout Recovery Program with NLP include:

Effective State and Energy Management
Connecting to Purpose and Meaning
Leaning into your natural talents and strengths
Installing Mind+Heart decision-making strategies
Aligning to a more supportive environment and developing supportive social relationships

It’s no secret that you have a desire to design your life where you can flourish, and be in more control of your entrepreneurial career and life without it controlling you. That’s probably why you got into entrepreneurship in the first place right? I can deeply appreciate how burnout can be a moment of a dark night of your soul, and I can reassure you that with the proper support, it can also be a very empowering experience.

“The mission of the Burnout Clinic is to empower the way we work.”

— Duncan So

That’s why everyone that leaves our clinic comes out with a fundamental identity shift, and access to the mental and emotional bandwidth to tap into deeper, more powerful resources than before.

About Duncan So and The Burnout Clinic

Duncan So, Founder & Executive Director at TheBurnoutClinic.com. Duncan has been a child of corporate burnout that has led him professionally into the field of human flourishing for over a decade working on systemic social change projects. He’s a social entrepreneur and change agent, on a mission to create more passionate world-building systems and programs for companies and communities on the path of making social good.

Board Certified with the Association of Integrative Psychology. A Master Practitioner in Mental Emotional Release, NLP and Hypnosis.

At the Burnout Clinic, we help HR Leaders and Entrepreneurs develop and integrate burnout intervention programs within their organization. Our flagship 2-day burnout retreats stop the cycle of high anxiety, fatigue, creative slumps, and burnout, and rapidly returns leaders back happy, productive and creatively engaged at work.

Contributor post by Duncan So

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