How To Handle Burnout: Why People Hire A Coach

The cause of burnout is unsustainable results over a (short) time.

Often time, we need new perspectives to get folks out of burnout. That's where my co-worker John and I came in. We were "loaned" from our perspective teams and tasked with better managing all the code changes for over 400 locations. The biggest hurdle was getting some control over when changes occurred.

 Five ways to manage burnout when it happens:

1.  When you notice it, CHANGE SOMETHING
2.  Get quick wins!
3.  Work In Rest to the process
4.  Leave bad environments
5.  Control what you can; EX. Exercise, diet, sleep 

- Apply for a FREE 30-minute coaching session, to be shared on YouTube, here: 

https://www.shawnbuttner.com/free_coaching_session_on_youtube 

-- Apply for a private 1-hour high performance strategy session here:

https://www.shawnbuttner.com/your-strategy-session

Transcript:

Shawn Buttner: [00:00:00] All right. So when we experience burnout, it's probably because we've been working in a very unsustainable way, meaning we've neglected relationships that are important to us, and we've neglected our own health. So what do you do when you experience burnout? I had a video earlier that said, you he head burn out and quit your job.

Hey everyone. Welcome to Coaching Moments with certified High Performance Coach Shawn Buttner, where we're going to highlight little mini coaching sessions coming forward.

But we're doing a quick series upfront talking about some of the high level reasons why people end up hiring a coach or needing some help or needing some significant change in their lives. We're talking about burnout today. . That's go. So have you ever been working so hard on a goal or something at work that you forgot to take care of yourself and you hadn't seen your family didn't recognize [00:01:00] you cuz you had been away for three months or whatever?

At this project working, so when we have people work long hours without. That's a classic recipe for burnout and it's not sustainable over the long term. So when we talk about high performance, we're talking about how do you succeed over the long term at with higher levels of output, quality, and all that type of effectiveness, efficiency.

All that stuff, but we need to be able to do it in a way where we love our lives in the process, right? And burnout is the exact opposite of loving your life during the process. Really at a high level, we have burnout. We're neglecting our body, right? So there's a pyramid. You're neglecting your body so you're not eating sleep.

Eating nutritionally, sleeping enough, getting enough exercise, getting enough sun, those types of basic things that we talk about all the time in high performance. At the next level of the pyramid, you're not getting your social needs met, [00:02:00] so you're not able to see the kids. You're not able to blow off steam and play some board games.

Whatever social things that you do that help you feel happy, that help you feel energized, that help you feel refreshed, and at the top of that pyramid, you've lost that sense of joy that comes with each day. And I know that sounds woo or kind out there, but really what I mean,

The first thing to go when you are stressed, when you're overwhelmed, when you're overworking or working in an unsustainable way are hobbies are, things that help bring you joy each day, right? It's all work. It's not reading, it's not playing music, it's not any of that stuff and all of those.

That checklist right there, that high level checklist of am I taking care of my body? Am I taking care of my social needs? Am I taking care of that sense of joy? Each day is a quick checklist to see if you're burned out or not. So if you're not sure ask yourself, number one, [00:03:00] how joyful do I feel today and how joyful do I expect the day to be?

And if it's. If you were rating yourself on a scale of one to 10, 10 being awesome, if it's not in that seven to 10 range for how joyful you feel or how you expect to feel joyful then you might be burned out. And especially if you think back like, how was the last week, how was the last month on that scale?

And if it's again, averaging less than a seven, you might be burnt out. How have you been connected with your social group? One through. And then again, look back last week, last month. Again, if it's below seven, you might be in the burnout zone. And then of course, at the very bottom, how well have you been taking care of your body, one through 10, 10 being awesome.

You get the point. , but that's a quick test to you know, am I doing work or am I going at life in a way that's unsustainable, that will have me crash, help me or prevent me from being as effective as I could be [00:04:00] and just not sustain the mission. I've worked on projects where, it's like the DOOM Project.

It's supposed to go six months, you're on year. Nobody's happy, this particular project I'm thinking of early on in my career, like there were people working 24 7 trying to do fixes and patches and trying to manage it all, and it was a huge mess. Because, for a lot of different reasons, we don't need to go in here, but at the end of the day, there's a team of about like a hundred people that just hated life.

They hated, she owned up to work. You could see it in their face. Anytime there was any little thing that deviated from what the designator process was, they people would just blow up in anger because it meant more work. It meant more stress. It was introducing uncertainty into the project, and so it was a bad scene, right?

Nobody wants to work on a project that has a reputation for. Missing deadlines consistently and working people until they quit or had nervous [00:05:00] breakdowns or had, you were actually sent to the hospital for health reasons because of stress. And that's, I had a couple of friends that had like nervous breakdowns during that, that work on that project.

And it's okay, this is terrible. And so that's the extreme end edge of burnout. But the thing is There are things you can do to manage burnout when it happens or to recover from it. So we're gonna talk about five different ways to manage burnout when it happens to you.

Because again, like as a coach, a lot of times when someone's Hey, I need to leave my job. I need to leave this relationship. I need to move, You switch towns, all that kind of stuff. It's usually because people are so fed up that it's blow up their life and do whatever they have to change, right?

And that's not strategic usually, and usually it's not super helpful. So we don't want you to do that. We want you to be able to manage it and then strategically shift your life as you go forward. So here are five reasons or five ways to manage burnout when [00:06:00] it happens. So first thing, when you notice it, it's time to change, right?

When you feel like that sense of dread, when you feel like, oh, I don't wanna wake up and get started with work, or an aspect of your life, then it's time to again go back to that pyramid. Check, are you taking care of your body enough and getting enough sleep, nutritious food, exercise, sunlight, all that kind of stuff.

And get that scheduled on your calendar and then go up, do you have your social needs met? So how can you add a couple of meetings with your friends or do something fun with your family? Or preferably both to where you have that social connection that helps you feel happy each day. And then how are you doing, or how are you on your hobbies that's cultivating that sense of joy each day. So are you in the garden? Are you playing music? Are you reading books? Are you writing books? Are you, whatever [00:07:00] brings you joy in that moment? Is that on your calendar also? , when you notice burnout, change something point number one. Second point is to get quick wins, right?

So sometimes, especially if you're on a doom project that's been going on forever and you don't feel like any of your work matters because nothing is advancing the project. Everyone is stressed out. There's always more work than there are people, and it never ends, right? , how can you get some quick wins to help move the project forward?

And that might involve, leading other people to having quick wins too. So on that Doom project, me and another coworker were brought in to help manage the code. And really our job being outsiders was to just simplify the process, right? There were 400 different sites that had 400 different versions.

The supposed one software system that was supposed to rule them all. And [00:08:00] so some systems were half patched, some systems had older versions of code. It was a huge mess. And so with that volume of sites, that's why there's this 24 7 like triage of hey, this is broken here. We need to do a fix. Nobody was tracking what was going where, and so it was nuts.

And so we proposed an idea of we're just going to stabilize the release schedule so we can push to get one version of the system out. And then as fixes come in from the different sites, you fix it one place, push it out to everywhere. And you don't really need to know the details of the solution.

But what we're able to do is to get some stabilization in the short term on when things were going out. So we weren't doing five hot fixes a day and then trying to have a big release and stuff. We're like, no, we're gonna do hot fixes until we do this one big release. And so everything's on the same [00:09:00] schedule.

And then we're going to have certain dates where you have to have your code in by. We will launch and release the code to all the sites here. This will be the window to do any hot fixes for things that that breaks, repeat the process every two weeks or whatever it was. So get quick wins can really help turn the team around.

And what was great is you started to see. The office clear out at night, you started to see people joking around after there was a little bit of movement. And of course being new guys too, we had to win some trust, but showing that we could help and having results to pr back that up really shifted the mood of the team so that we could get a handle on it.

So get quick wins. Okay. Number three. , it's important to work rest into the process, right? As the high performance research shows when we are, we can, we are diminishing returns the longer we work without a break. And we recommend in high performance that every [00:10:00] 50 minutes you're taking a 10 minute break to stretch, get some water, do a bio break, no matter if you're in the middle of something or not.

And that's shown to be that block time is shown to be hyper effecti. And raising people's productivity over the course of a day. It doesn't have to be like, oh, I'm gonna take a five hour lunch, or whatever. It could be every hour you're taking 10 minutes to move, just do a little bit of movement, rest your eyes, meditate, whatever you gotta do.

And that ends up working really well. And so with a coaching, with coaching clients, they tend to really love this really tactical block. Technique because it helps people focus and it helps you get those small wins. So it all ties together, but, working in that little rest process is super big.

So use block time, which is work focus for 50 minutes on one task, do 10 minutes of rest about a big a being by a boom. Okay. The fourth thing to do when you're experiencing burnout [00:11:00] is that, , you are changing how you're showing up with your workouts and health, with your social time, with cultivating that sense of joy.

If you're trying to get quick wins, if you're trying to work rest in the process and it's still not working for you, then it's time to consider what are the pros and cons of leaving a bad environment, right? And that could be shifting teams within an organization. It could be doing a whole completely new.

But what you wanna do in that particular case is if you're going to quit your job because you're burnt out, is get as much perspective from mentors and friends, and this is a chance where a lot of people will hire a coach, right? Knowing when to quit something and having that conversation where it's systematically how well have you thought this through?

What are your contingency plan? All that kind of stuff is really amazing. And so if that's you, if you're like, Hey, I'm considering leaving my job cuz it's really terrible or leaving this situation cuz it's really [00:12:00] bad, I wanna let you know that below this video I have an offer for a free one hour high performance strategy session where we will talk through your situation, right?

So if you're thinking about leaving your job, we will go through your life tailored. And have you come up with a custom plan so that at the end of that you're like, okay, I know what I gotta do to improve things. I know what I gotta do to leave. I know what my trigger points are. I know when you know this happens, then I do that.

So I. Make sure you hit that below. If you take me up on the free one hour strategy session, I'm gonna pull clips and post it on this YouTube series to inspire others to, to show the magic and power of coaching in action. And if you're like, Hey, I'm interested in coaching, but just maybe not on YouTube, then there's also an option for a private session, and that's 197.

If you want to do that. Yeah, take me up on the free option. Let's help inspire others to [00:13:00] leave their bad environments, to get clear on their lives, to transform and live life in a way where you feel like you are making a difference. You are growing and you are experiencing joy. So that's what we want.

So I fifth point now. When you experience burnout, the final thing to do is to remember that you can only control what you can. So exercise, diet, sleep, social time, all that kind of stuff. And there's, there will be things that you can't particularly control maybe in the short term, but you could start to make big strides over the long term.

And you have agency, right? Leaving a bad environment is a choice. Sticking with a bad environment's a choice. Focusing on the aspects of your job or life that you can control can be helpful in getting out of it as long as, again, you are taking care and you're fixing the sustainability part of, Body [00:14:00] social joy that, that little pyramid.

Alright guys take me up on that coaching offer for the strategy session again below here. Share this video with someone you think that might needs it. I'd love to hear from you. And then coming up next, we're gonna be talking about how people make excuses and that stops them from advancing their lives.

And that's sometimes why people get a coach. We're gonna have a couple more of these videos and I'll start release. The little bit of the mini coaching clips, the coaching moments title of the series. Make sure to watch the next video and we'll see you guys soon. Take care.