Welcome to Visionary’s Pursuit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to turn your bold and inspiring ideas into reality. I'm Carolina Zuleta. I'm a life and business coach and your host for this podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here.
Hi. Welcome back. This is episode 74 of the Visionary's Pursuit Podcast. Listen, we are open for enrollment for a Visionary Mindset program, this is our program for entrepreneurs who have a proven concept, who are committed to growing their business, who wanna take it to the next level. One of the most beautiful things about this program is the community you find in it.
Entrepreneurship can feel so lonely. I remember when I started this business that I would be sitting in my office and be looking around and thinking, I wish I could talk to someone about this. I wish I had a team. I wish I could figure this out. Is this happening only to me?
Well. In this program, you will find a group of other entrepreneurs who are like you, building their businesses, finding challenges, growing, having wonderful ideas, and you'll find all the support, inspiration, encouragement so you can continue building yours. Our doors for enrollment are open until March 16th, so make sure that if you're interested in this program, you talk with me so I can tell you all about it.
Together, we can make sure that you're the right fit for it. And the link to book an appointment with me is here in the description. It's a free hour in which we'll talk about of course, the program and also your business, where you're at with it. But one of the incredible things that happens in this hour is that you will have a breakthrough.
You will get an insight that is gonna be incredibly valuable to you. So one more time, go to the description of this episode and book some time and let's explore together if the Visionary Mindset Program is the right program for you.
So what I want us to talk about today is burnout. So here is something I believe we can say is a fact. We need energy to grow our business. There's a moment in between, when you've proven your concept, you have some revenue, you have some clients until the next level. That is you have a team, your scaling, you're moving forward that there's a lot of work that depends only on you.
And that the journey feels lonely, where you're throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. And it can be very energy draining. So what I want us to talk about is does burnout come from? Different types of burnout we can experience and what we can do depending on the type of burnout to feel better, to re-energize ourselves and to keep moving forward.
Many of the concepts I'm gonna share with all of you today come from the biggest research on burnout. Her name is Christina Maslach. She wrote a book that's called Burnout, the Cost of Caring, and also Tony Schwartz, that he talks a lot about energy and creating energy within ourselves. One of his most famous books is The Power of Full Engagement.
So if you're a nerd like me, you can go look at those books and go deeper,
There are two types of burnout that can happen at this stage that I mentioned, right? When we have a proof of concept and we're growing our business, we have, you know, we are paying payroll, we have visibility expectations, but we're not scaling.
So the first type of burnout is a physical burnout. It's the burnout that happens because we're working long hours because we're answering Slack messages and emails in the middle of the night because we are working on weekends. It's when we're solving the problems our business has by putting more hours into them.
We can think about this type of burnout as physical exhaustion, and we know it because all of a sudden, like we're sleepy throughout the day, or we're staying up at night because we're so overstimulated that we can't rest, or we feel like our brain can't shut down, or we start feeling aches here and there, getting one cold after another because our immune system is not very healthy.
So if we think about burnout as physical exhaustion, then the best way to recover is through self-care. And when I talk about self-care, I mean. Setting boundaries with work, actually taking breaks, making sure you're sleeping 6, 7, 8 hours a night, making sure you're making time for your meals that you're not eating while you're working on your computer, that you're exercising or going for a walk, right? It's that exhaustion that comes because you haven't taken care of your body. So what we need to do is take care of our body.
Usually when we have this physical exhaustion, we can also start noticing ourselves becoming very irritable or impatient or anxious. We might find ourselves not being able to be present with our family, always thinking about work. Not making time to do activities that we enjoy, some of our hobbies or connecting with friends.
So again, when we're feeling this exhaustion, that is coming from simply the amount of work we're putting out there and the little time we're allowing for self-care. The solution for that is self-care, is rest is taking breaks, is making time for the things that you love and you have fun, and to make time for connecting with your loved ones. And here it's very important because what I've identified working with many entrepreneurs is that the reason we don't take those breaks is because we have a belief that the more hours we put into our business, the bigger results we're going to create, the more money we're going to make, the more effective we'll be.
But we need to really question this and take three steps back and really look if actually more hours is taking you to where you wanna go. Or are you putting more hours because you're putting out fires all the time and you're actually not creating systems. You're not spending enough time to analyze what's happening with your business so you can create solutions that are more sustainable in the future.
And also I want you to ask yourself how effective do you think you are when you're feeling this level of exhaustion? My hypothesis is that it's very little. So if you've been saying lately, I feel so tired, I feel so exhausted, I feel like I'm burning out, and you know it's because you haven't been taking care of your body.
Start there. Decide right now. What are some of the things that you can do to be able to recover and build, you know, take care of your body, build some routines? I've been playing with a, a routine, I haven't fully established it of in the middle of the day doing a 10 minute walk in nature without my phone, without anything.
And the days that I've done it, it's amazing. Like I really feel refreshed.
So that's one type of burnout. The other type of burnout is more when we start feeling like we no longer like our jobs, that we can't focus, that we are constantly reacting to what's happening.
That there's so many crisis that you feel like you don't love your clients that you feel they're taking advantage of you?
You know, I have this beautiful client who has built a business in the last 15 years, and she's amazing at what she does and very successful. But she came to me because. She had lost the love for her business. She started her business from her passion, from her passion to do what she does to offer the services that she currently offers. Something she felt so strongly about, and 15 years later, she was considering closing it and quitting because she's like, I no longer enjoy doing this.
So when we started looking deeper into this as to why is it that you lose the love for the work you do, why is it that you start feeling detached and not engaged and kind of like dreading? You know that feeling of when you wake up in the morning and you're like, Ugh, I really don't wanna go do this again.
That type of burnout is called cynical detachment, and. It won't be solved by exercising or going for a walk or taking a break. That cynical detachment comes a lot of the time because of the stories our brain has created about our business.
Because when we think about our business, we're focusing on the negative parts on the clients who are complaining on the employees that are not performing. Instead of just thinking about them and complaining and feeling like a victim to those circumstances, we could be again, looking at the problems if they exist and making decisions from a very empowered place.
This client who has more of a cynical detachment, right? Like she has lost love for her business. One of the things we did together is really pay attention to the story she had been repeating in her head about her business, and one of the things that would come up is, Hey, my clients are always asking for a discount that's because they don't value my work. So she felt undervalued often and that made her not wanna work harder. Or the other story she had was that her employees didn't wanna perform well, didn't wanna do the job well, that it was really hard to find good people to work with her.
And although, yeah, I mean finding a good team, building a good team can be challenging. When we start feeling hopeless, when we start feeling like it's outside of our control, that's when we start losing our detachment or our engagement for the work, and we blame it on the circumstances instead of paying attention to the meaning we're giving to those circumstances and how that is impacting us.
So when we have a physical burnout, it comes a lot because we think we need to control more things than we actually have to. So we're trying to do everything ourselves, where our hands and our brains are into every little corner of our business, and that's why we end up working so many more hours.
The cynical detachment type of burnout comes more because we feel out of control, because we feel that the circumstances, the markets, other people, something outside of us is creating some results inside our business that we don't like.
Listen, this is not black and white. It's not like you're burnout or not burnout or you have one or you have the other. You might have a combination of both. You might be, you know, a little bit physically tired, but really not excited to go to work, or even that detachment, right? Like that lack of engagement and excitement about your business can make you feel physically tired or vice versa.
My goal here is that as you're listening, you pay attention to what could be some of the symptoms or the causes for your exhaustion and your burnout. To ask yourself simple questions like, am I sleeping well? Am I drinking water? Am I taking care of my body during the day? Am I taking breaks? And on the other side, what is it that I'm thinking about my product or my service, my clients, my investors, my employees about myself and my ability to execute in this business. Because I believe that if you do an audit of both your physical needs as well as your emotional, mental, and spiritual needs, you will be able to understand what is causing you burnout and then solve it from there.
Because one of the biggest mistakes I hear is people feeling like they stopped loving their business. And what they do is , I'm just gonna take a break. And they go on vacation, or they start working part-time. And what that does is make them even more detached from their business. Or people who feel very committed to their business, they love it, telling themselves a story that they cannot take a break.
You know, one of my mentors says that we as the founder of the business, we are the most important asset of this business, and we need to take care and protect this asset. So here are four ideas of things you can do to take care of the asset that is you.
The first one. Design recovery, like if you were a professional athlete, when are you resting? How are you recovering? What does your body need? How much sleep, water, vitamins, all those things. Two, separate your self-worth from your business outcomes. When you start thinking that you are not good enough. When you start thinking that the business is underperforming because there's something wrong with you, you'll start losing your energy, feeling exhausted, detaching from your business in a way to protect you.
Three sit down and do what I call a thought download that's when you get a piece of paper or a page on your computer and you start writing all the thoughts you have about your business. You can think about what are my thoughts about my clients, about my investors, about my employees, about my business partner, about my competition? And when you look at those thoughts notice which thoughts are draining your energy and which thoughts are giving you energy. Because that's how you can create more energy within you.
So there you go. Think about if you're experiencing exhaustion, if you're experiencing cynical detachment, and come up with a plan to solve for that type of burnout. And I just, I'm just gonna say this. In the Visionary Mindset Program, we have an entire month in which we focus on capacity on expanding your capacity physically, mentally, emotionally, so you don't have to fall into burnout.
All right, my friends, I know this was short, but I hope it was valuable, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.
If you're currently pursuing a big, bold idea and would love some support, let's talk. In my coaching program, I'll teach you how to manage yourself, your own thoughts and emotions. as well as your team and your money so you can turn your beautiful idea into a reality. Go now to carozuleta.com slash consult that is c a r o z u l e t a dot com slash consult and complete the form to book a complimentary call with me.
See you there!
