Ep#55 Entrepreneurial burnout and how to get through it.
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What exactly causes burnout among us mom entrepreneurs?
I’ve had multiple businesses but it wasn’t until I started my online business that I truly experienced burnout for the first time.
According to my research, burnout happens when we’re under constant stress and we feel helpless, exhausted unhappy, and even a bit detached from life.
We feel stuck and cannot see the way out of the misery.
As I have become more and more obsessed with how we master our time as mom entrepreneurs, I have learned a ton about how our relationship with time, what we think time is, and how we have been conditioned to approach our management of time has to lead us to this place where we burn ourselves out.
We tend to think that burnout comes from what we do. Specifically, doing too much. When in fact, burnout has nothing to do with how much we have going on in our lives.
You’ll know this as true if you’ve ever had a ton of projects happening at the same time and yet you still felt energized by it all.
Doing is a vital part of being an entrepreneur. If we didn’t take any action on the crazy ideas we have nothing would exist in reality. In fact, entrepreneurs find momentum in action (together with clarity) and momentum is what we thrive on as entrepreneurs.
It’s when we feel like we’re not making progress (a.k.a no momentum) that we experience a heightened sense of stress and frustration.
In the book The Entrepreneurial Personality Type, Alex Charfin writes:
“Entrepreneurs are momentum-based beings. Meaning they have a mental, physical, and biological response to momentum or the sensation of moving forward. As such, they also have a negative response to constraint or anything hindering their ability to move forward. This affects their emotional state and their understanding of where they fit in the world.”
The bottom line, if we’re not making progress, we feel stuck. When we feel stuck, we spin in what feels like a never-ending thought loop of worse-case scenarios and negative beliefs.
And it is this thought loop that actually exhausts us and leads us down burnout street.
To simplify and understand how important momentum really is for the entrepreneur, we must understand the three states of momentum first:
Progress
Moving backward
Standing still
PROGRESS
This is when you’re in the flow. Things feel easy, and if they’re hard you’re like: “bring it on baby!”
Progress is when you feel like you can accomplish anything and that no goal is too big.
MOVING BACKWARDS
When we feel like we’re moving backward, we typically fight back with an urge of figuring it out. We’re actively looking for solutions. We get to work and solve the problem. It’s in this state where we grow and evolve.
We need challenges, the entrepreneur in us loves to figure things out.
STANDING STILL (a.k.a Burnout Street)
If we reach a point where we feel stuck, helpless, and exhausted. The longer we stay “stuck” the faster we reach burnout.
The important thing to understand is that if we’re in the flow and we know we’re making progress, even if it’s slow, we thrive. Time and space actually disappear when we have momentum.
Your friends and family might even ask you how you manage to get it all done and still have energy left at the end of the day.
In order to get back into our flow state, we need to be able to spot our patterns. When we know what our pattern is we can change it.
The way you discover your pattern is by noticing what you do and saying to yourself when you feel “stuck”.
Check-in with the mental chatter going on in your head. What pattern or thought loop are you stuck in?
Make a list of your dominant thoughts.
Notice the emotions that go with those thoughts. How do they feel? Name them.
If you want to get back into the momentum state and make progress you need to break the thought pattern and DO something different! Shift your state by breaking the pattern and doing something different.
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