Episode 020 – How You Created Your Burnout – and How to Fix It

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Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

Does it ever feel like the things you were once excited about and created from a place of pure enthusiasm, passion, and curiosity later become the greatest source of stress in your life?  Whether it’s the business you start and grow  to hate, the relationship you enter into that turns toxic, the perfect job you land that turns into the job from hell, or anything in between.  If so, you’re certainly not alone and there is a reason for it.  Dreams can turn into nightmares and the things we once enjoyed can lead to burnout – so let’s talk about how to fix that.

What You Make Matter, Matters

This topic was inspired by a conversation with a couple (as in boyfriend/girlfriend and business partners) of my private coaching clients.  In fact, it’s a conversation I’ve had with many clients in the past, as it seems to be a recurring theme – especially among entrepreneurs and business owners.  This couple in particular had an idea for a business, launched it, and went from zero to over $50,000/month in revenue within a few short months.  But with that growth came several challenges, and their profits started to decline.

Naturally, they started feeling more stressed out.  They found themselves overworking themselves to get business back to where it was.  Soon enough, the stress of running the business trickled its way into their relationship as a couple.  So they reached out to me for some support, because they realized that the business they had built was different from what they had originally envisioned.  After giving them some coaching, they mutually decided to let go of that business and start something new that they were more passionate about.  A few months later they found themselves in the same situation – zero to $50k/month, feeling stressed, overworking, and negatively affecting their relationship.

Here’s what I explained to them: embedded into anything you create are all aspects of your consciousness – your faiths, your fears, your resentments, your decisions, your courage – all of the things that you believe are congruent with what you desire to create AND are not in alignment with the vision you have.  In other words, what matters to you internally becomes matter in your physical reality.  It becomes embedded in the materialized form of the business you start, the relationship you enter into, the job you land, and so on.  It’s no longer just an idea – it’s real.

So what happens is that as your creation continues to materialize, it begins to illuminate the very parts of you that still need healing.  It contains all of your personal insecurities, doubts, and limiting beliefs and begins reflecting those things back to you.  You begin to think that you’re not good enough to make it work, or that you have to work harder in order to be successful, or that you’re not as far along as you should be, for example.  Now it’s important to realize that these thoughts and beliefs have always been there.  But as you become entangled with that which you have created, situations and circumstances arise that reflect those thoughts and beliefs back to you.

REAL Growth Occurs When You Take A Step Back

This presents us with an opportunity – a chance to step back from the thing you’ve created (ie. your business, your relationship, your job, etc.) and use the challenges they’re posing as an opportunity to do the inner work.  To really take some time to reflect and become aware of what it’s bringing up inside of you, which is the first step to letting go and healing it.  When you do, one of two things will happen – the thing you’ve created itself will change or it’ll fade away and something better will emerge.

In the case of my clients, they realized that in both of the businesses they had built, they found themselves pursuing growth for the sake of growth.  They started them from a place of inspiration and excitement, but soon enough found themselves driven by speed and a fear of missing out on opportunities.  But that same fear materialized itself into the business and ended up being the downfall.

By taking a step back, they were able to see that the whole point of being entrepreneurs and building these businesses was so they could have the time and financial freedom to relax and enjoy their lives.  But in their pursuit of growth, the business took away those abilities.

Fear Vs. Faith-Based Decisions

One of the distinctions we teach is that whatever you’re feeling in the moment when you make decisions and take action, you’re going to create outcomes that will reflect that feeling back to you.  So if you’re making decisions out of worry, overwhelm, stress, anxiety, anger, resentment – no matter what you do – you’re creating a future experience that is going to create the same emotion inside of you.  So it’s important that we don’t take action from a primal state or make decisions out of fear.  Instead, we must do the inner work required to operate from a powerful state and make those decisions out of faith.

In other words, we have to teach ourselves to say “NO” more often, even when opportunities are presenting themselves to us that our mind convinces us we “should” take out of fear of missing out or not getting another chance.   Doing so is what allows you to actually create something sustainable that can provide you with extraordinary financial abundance and prosperity.

Then, the question becomes how do you know which opportunities to take advantage of or not?  The answer is that you need to be really present with your thoughts and emotions and self-aware enough to realize whether you’re making a decision out of fear or faith.  So you can ask yourself:  Is it in alignment with your vision?  Is it congruent with your values?  Or are you simply taking advantage of an opportunity because it might not come along again?  If it’s the latter, it’s a recipe for future disaster – as my clients experienced multiple times over.

“How The Hell Did I End Up Here?”

I’ve experienced this feeling of stress, burnout, and growing to hate the thing I once loved firsthand.  When Carol and I first started this business back in 2016, we had zero attachment to it.  We had a vision for everything we wanted to create and achieve, but they were all just ideas – they didn’t exist yet.  Operating from faith allowed us to generate $25 million in revenue from 2017 to 2021, but we still had things that we weren’t aware of that we “made matter” throughout the process.  

In 2021, our growth came to a halt when our paid marketing efforts came to a standstill.  My anxious and worrying tendencies started showing up, as did Carol’s need to control things.  We’d become so attached to the business we’d built that it started burning us out.  Doing things that once seemed effortless required more effort.  Things that were working before stopped working as well.  Team members who seemed like the perfect candidates on paper turned out to be poor fits for our organization.

These were all signs that within what we had created were aspects of ourselves that needed to be healed or transformed – but we weren’t aware of them until we started experiencing this level of burnout.  We were trying to force this business to work when it wasn’t meant to work.  Instead,  it was meant to reflect back to us and educate us on those things inside of us that needed to be healed so that we could change – and only by changing ourselves could we begin to change the business.

Where You Create Space Is Where Your Growth Is

In both my clients’ case and Carol and I’s experience, the lesson is in thinking back to what inspired you to do something in the first place – whether it’s starting your business, getting married, building your dream physique, whatever it may be – and being appreciative of the progress you’ve made and the journey you’ve been on.  When you can do this from a place of gratitude and faith in the future rather than resentment and fear of what comes next, you create more space to open up for the next evolution of that which you’ve created – and within that space is where your growth is.

Nobody forced you to start your business, nobody forced you into the relationship you’re in, nobody forced you into the job you don’t love, nobody forced you into any experience or situation that’s currently causing you undo stress and burnout.   You wanted those things, so you created them.  But over time our creation takes on a life of its own and if we’re not aware of how different pieces of us that are wanted to be transformed have embedded themselves in what we’re creating, then we start to become victims to our own creation.

So it’s important to take the time and space to really consider what it is you were thinking and doing when you created those things in the first place – when you weren’t attached to the outcome.  What was motivating you?  What inspired you?  And what are you doing differently now that’s preventing you from experiencing it the way you want?  When Carol and I were facing that fork in the road with our business, we both took inventory of the things we were doing that we no longer enjoyed.  We may have enjoyed them originally, but we changed over time.

This is critical to understand – you’re always growing and evolving and, with that, your priorities, values, and desires will change.  This is why I recommend to all of my clients (and to you) to take a step back every couple of years and re-evaluate where you were then, where you are now, and what needs to change to get you to your next destination in your evolution.  Some things may need to be let go of so you can plant new seeds and spring forth new opportunities in the next chapter of your life.  

Realize that there are aspects in everything you create and achieve that were created out of your old consciousness that are now either calling you to change or illuminating the fact that you’ve already changed.  And even though you may have put a lot of energy and effort into that which you’ve created, if you can let go of the things that are now causing you stress, you create the space for something new to be born.