SPI 868: Managing Energy and Expectations When Burnout Kicks In

SPI 868: Managing Energy and Expectations When Burnout Kicks In

Pat Flynn: Hey, entrepreneurs, this is gonna be a really important episode, whether you are listening in April or not. And the reason I say that is because it’s this time of year that a lot of things get very difficult. We get a creeping sense of burnout. The initial excitement we had at the beginning of the year is starting to go away.

And if you’ve been wondering where your January motivation went, well, you are not alone. So again, whether you’re listening to this in real time in April of 2025 when this comes out, or later in the year, this is gonna be important because we’re gonna get back on track. Now, let’s think about why April in particular is a tough month.

Yes, it is a few months after the beginning of the year when we have a lot of excitement. This is the end of the honeymoon period, if you wanna call it that. And things start to get tough when it comes to trying new things and experimentation. You know, things might not be going the way we want them to, and now is when we’re starting to realize that.

But there’s a few other things to consider as well. It’s also tax season. Tax season is very tough for a lot of people. It’s when you start to have to write checks that you don’t wanna write, or there might be some unwelcome surprises. There might be some good surprises to refunds and things like that coming your way, but nonetheless, looking at your financials and the situation is often something that brings in a lot of pain and anxiety. And then finally, spring often brings the reflection on our progress in Q1 or perceived lack thereof. So you might begin to measure how far or how well you’re doing compared to the goals you set out for the year where you know you should be.

And if you start to see that you’re falling a little bit behind, then we start to lose some momentum and we start to have this potential negative feedback loop, and the burnout kicks in. You start slowing down the procrastination, so on and so forth. It could be a very negative spiral, and that’s the point of this episode.

I wanna give you practical strategies to restore your depleted energy reserves. There’s things more than you can do than just like eat better, drink lots of water, which yes, are very important. There’s the physical side of this, but there’s also a lot of other sides to this as well. I wanna give you tools to recalibrate your expectations without lowering ambitions.

And finally, a sustainable approach to entrepreneurship for the long term that prevents future burnout cycles. And trust me, I’ve experienced burnout myself, and a lot of times when I think about my 17 year entrepreneurial history, April always has been a moment of stress. A large part of it is, again, because of tax season, but it’s also just simply because the Q1 progress and seeing how well I’m progressing towards certain goals, things like that.

I mean, this is tough. We start to see and compare ourselves to other people who might be doing better or who might be crushing it. And we go, whoa, my gosh, like we haven’t even gotten started yet. I. It feels like, right? But before we can address burnout, we need to recognize it. Many entrepreneurs, and you might’ve made these same mistakes, mistake burnout for laziness or lack of passion, which leads to pushing harder, which is exactly what you don’t need. You don’t always need to push harder. You might not just need to push in a different direction and recalibrate, like I said. So there are four different categories, if you will, of warning signs and indicators and symptoms that I wanna share with you. So the first one is physical.

Physical warning signs. If you are experiencing any of this, you might be experiencing what we’re talking about today, the burnout or the fatigue as a result of the first part of the year. So these are, again, physical warning signs. Number one, a persistent fatigue. You’re always sort of feeling tired and it doesn’t improve with a good night’s sleep.

Two continual changing sleep patterns, maybe insomnia or wanting to sleep a little bit more than usual. It’s just kind of starting to get irregular. Your sleep, sleep is, if you didn’t know the most important thing when it comes to your physical health. It’s something that I wish I knew earlier in my thirties.

I definitely burned the midnight oil to get some stuff done and sacrificed a lot of health as a result of that. It took me a lot of time to get it back. Number three, increased susceptibility to colds, headaches, digestive issues. I’m not a health practitioner, I’m not a doctor, so please, these are just my opinions and my thoughts, so please consult with a professional.

If you are experiencing any of these sorts of symptoms, and perhaps they’re related to some of the burnout from the entrepreneurial work that you are doing, or maybe not even entrepreneurial work, you might be stressed out at your job as well. I mean, these are all important signs to consider.

Again, we’re on physical warning signs number four. Tension headaches, jaw clenching muscle tightness. And number five, decreased appetite or increased comfort eating. You just start to get a little bit lazy with how we worry about our food intake. And again, these things like food, sleep, drinking enough water, all extremely important. But in addition to the physical warning signs, I want you to think about the emotional indicators that you might have.

Perhaps number one, some cynicism about your business or customers asking yourself questions like, what’s the point or why should I keep going? Number two, a detachment from your original mission and purpose. Have you swayed a little far from your initial purpose? Number three, increased irritability with team members, family or clients.

Your mood starts to swing a little bit more than usual perhaps, and you start almost a snap. Number four, feeling like you’re just going through the motions. You’re in automation mode, which isn’t always bad. It’s good to automate and have systems, but. You’re just not even there. You’re not present. You’re not living in the moment.

You’re just kind of doing the thing. And number five, for emotional indicator, a diminished satisfaction from achievements. You’ve achieved something, you did it and it would’ve been exciting, or it should be, but it’s just not exciting you anymore, right? It might be a little bit of a, of an emotional burnout from the work that you’re trying to do.

Now cognitive symptoms, that was emotional. These are cognitive. These are brain-based symptoms, so your decision paralysis, even small choices that you might have day in and day out start to feel overwhelming. You have a lack of creativity, a creativity drought. If you will. The ideas just aren’t flowing like they once did.

Number three, difficulty focusing during important tasks more than usual. I know a lot of us, especially today with a lot of distractions, we get pushed and pulled into different directions, but more than normal, you’re starting to notice that you’re starting to focus less on the things that you should be and doing kind of more random things outside of that.

Number four, you’re just forgetting things. You’re missing details that you would normally catch. And number five. Just kind of thinking about the worst case scenario when it comes to your business, right? Catastrophic thinking about your business challenges, thinking that it’s like doomsday, right? These are all really, really important symptoms cognitively that are indicators or signs that you know, you might be experiencing some level of burnout or headed that direction.

And again, we’re here to course correct. And then number four, behavioral changes. Procrastination on important but challenging tasks. This is the time of the year that that really gets me. I start to procrastinate on really important things. Thankfully, I’ve learned my way out of that using a lot of the things we’re gonna talk about today.

But in the beginning, oh my gosh, April and May, and then I’d use the summer as an excuse, and I really wouldn’t get back into work like I did at the beginning of the year until September. So I wasted a lot of months. If you can start to correct yourself now in the April, may months, you’re gonna be much, much better off in the trajectory of what it is that you’re doing in, what you’re putting time into by the end of the year. Secondly, for behavioral changes and increased time on low value activities, maybe an excessive amount of social media, or maybe going into your inbox and using that as an excuse, right? Oh, these emails are important, but then you’re avoiding the tougher tasks, a withdrawal from networking or community events.

I mean, this one. If you are like me, you don’t normally go out there just kind of naturally to network. You have to put yourself in situations to do that, like events and things like that. But even at those events, I’ve noticed that at certain times of the year, I. I’d be in my hotel room more, even though I’m not there to just hole up in my hotel room the whole time.

I do sometimes when I suffer from burnout and I’m just not feeling it, I will just kind of head back to my hotel room and not want to talk to anybody. Resistance to opening emails or responding to messages, right. You kind of let them stack on each other. All of a sudden, that red notification number is in the triple digits.

Lo and behold, it’s in four digits. Now you’re just avoiding anything. So April brings this. Really a perfect storm of burnout triggers, right? The adrenaline of starting something new has worn off the financial pressors mount. With tax season, you’re facing the reality that business growth takes longer than those overnight success stories suggest, and it’s really important again, that we understand the four domains.

Again, the same ones that we just talked about, the physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral. And we’re gonna go into some things that you can do to restore. So let’s talk about physical energy first. We’re going into restoration tactics already. So again, I’m not going to say that these will work for everybody, but these are things that have worked for me.

So number one, micro breaks. Micro breaks are amazing. And what I mean is, I mean, there’s a lot to this, right? There’s a lot of science. There’s, I think it’s like the ultradian rhythm of 90 minute focus cycles that has been studied. You go longer than that. It can really start to wane on you and reduce the energy and the effectiveness of your work.

So taking breaks, like two minute breaks to stretch, to go on a quick walk, breathing exercises. And as much as I absolutely hate my Apple Watch when it says, Hey, you should stand up now. I do stand when it tells me to. And then it says, yay, you did it. And I always feel like when it says that, it’s like, yay, you did it, you stood up. I always see it as sort of a sarcastic mocking kind of tone for my watch, but either way, this, that’s just a little random fact, but I. I do get up and it does help and I do get a stretch in. I might go on a five minute walk or just go get the mail or walk around just for a little bit. Even breathing exercises can work really well in sort of a two minute to five minute break every at least 90 minutes, I would say.

Especially if you’re cranking on things, they reduce and prevent energy debt accumulation, right? It almost kind of gives you a nice little reset. And there’s a lot of apps and things like that that can help you with these kinds of things. Pomodoro timers, Timeout is another app that can help you with that, but just being cognizant of the micro breaks that you’re taking, but also having an end time to the break.

That’s the second part about this because. Sometimes when I’m working and I might be writing or recording a number of podcasts and I take a break, I, I might take a break for like two hours and then it’s just hard to get back into it. But if I put a timer and I put like, okay, five minutes, I’m just gonna grab a quick drink of water, walk, get my mail, come back, get right back into it, my timer goes off, boom, my mental is back into where I need to be, and physically I can go back to where I need to go.

Let’s keep talking about physical energy renewal, though. Sleeping, cannot stress that enough. There are a lot of things that go into sleep that can affect your energy levels, right? Whether you get a good sleep or a bad sleep. There is a book called Sleep Smarter by our good friend, Sean Stevenson. He wrote that book, love It.

Have implemented a lot of those strategies. From a coffee curfew to a cooler room when I’m sleeping to no blue light an hour before bed. There’s a rule, I think it’s called like the ten three two one zero sleep rule. So no caffeine 10 hours before bed, no food, alcohol, three hours before, no work two hours before, no screens one hour before, and the zero is zero hitting snooze.

And that quite honestly is very hard for me to do, to not snooze. I still do that. I’m not perfect, but the no caffeine, the no food or alcohol, three hours before, like not snacking before bed, has been huge for my sleep. And then I’ve been trying to get into like a hot tub or something like that, or hot shower before bed to relax the muscles and to sleep in a, again, a cooler room. Completely dark. That’s why we sleep so much better in hotel rooms, right. It is actually your most important business meeting is, is your sleep just by far. And then in the morning, right, having a morning routine, doing some energy, something I, I like to go outside and put my feet on the grass. Have a gloss of water with some lemon in it.

No, I don’t do the morning routine where I rip off that tape for my mouth and I put water with ice into a bowl with lemons and dunk my head in it. And then do all this random stuff that you might’ve seen on TikTok. Some people do. I just try to move a little bit, right? And I don’t have coffee immediately.

I have coffee one hour after I wake up. And then finally just like eating well, right? It’s not that hard just trying to eat well. I don’t follow a diet like keto like I used to. Every body is different. You have to find what works for you. But I try not to just over complicate it. I reduce as much sugars as I can.

I drink as much water as I can. I do little challenges with myself and try to eat as much broccoli as I can every day, and a lot of protein I, I mean, I try to get my body weight in protein, and that alone has really helped with not just my physical look, but just like my mentality, right, my mental and my creativity.

So let’s move on to mental energy restoration, right? We talked about physical restoration. After we talk about restoration across these different categories, we will be going into moving forward into the rest of the year. How can we prevent burnout, right? We don’t wanna go through cycles of burnout, then recover burnout, then recover burnout, then recover.

That’s just gonna be like a battery that, you know, over time eventually just will not have the ability to charge anymore. We want to be able to have long lasting creativity, effort, and success, of course. So let’s continue now by talking about mental energy restoration. So one of my favorite things to do when it comes to mental energy and navigating that is batching, so task batching implementation.

So when I record like these podcasts, I’m recording multiple in one day. That way I can wake up in the morning and I know that this is my day to record my show, and I’m mentally prepared for that the night before. There’s nothing else on the calendar that’ll get in my way. That’s not always possible.

When possible, try to batch your things, right? I have themed days or time blocks. Tuesday is my podcast recording day. Wednesday is my meeting day. Friday is my Pokemon Day, right? It’s beautiful to do it that way because when you transition between too many different kinds of things, it takes time to get into that float state for each, and that reduces the amount of time you then have versus let’s just go from one to the next, to the next, to the next.

I’m batch processing. I’m getting my reps in. Things are getting faster. You get that momentum. Batching.

Next, deep work that is identifying your highest value deep work activities. With the limited time that we all have, we wanna make sure that it is going to places and into activities that are the highest leverage for us.

For example, what’s the difference between spending two hours go on social and just hit reply and comment and join some community threads. I mean, that is important. Yes, but that’s not necessarily deep work activity. A lot of that kind of activity is often a distraction or an excuse that, Hey, yes, I am doing work, versus writing your book or outlining that next course that you’re gonna do, or creating that webinar that you were going to do or building that sales page, right?

Higher level deep work activities. Identify that and time block. Put those in the calendar and make sure they get done, right. When you start to build that progressive deep work muscle, right? Start small, but get into deep work and try to get into that every day for a little bit or on the daily themes. Do it then and you’ll start to build that muscle and it starts to be amazing.

Next, creating digital boundaries, right? This is gonna help protect your mental, because we are getting bombarded from all angles. To try to fight for our attention when we know our attention should be in certain other places, right? So notifications, turning notifications off has been huge for me. I’m always in do not disturb.

I am always in do not disturb. I control my time. I don’t let anybody else control my time. Social media versus creation, this can be a difficult one, and this is where again, the calendar comes into place. Yes, you need to be on social, but when you’re on social, you’re gonna see these other things and get bright light syndrome.

You’re gonna get inspired by this thing. You’re gonna go here and you’re gonna go there. So when you go into social, ask yourself this question, what is my purpose for being here? Then go do that thing. And then finally, and I, again, because I’m not disciplined as I wanna be, I put a timer. I have times during the day where I am on social that again, I go into those moments having a goal, and many times I don’t stick with it.

But at least I have the 30 minute timer such that, or at least something else on the calendar where at the end of that 30 minutes of that social time, which for me it’s 30 minutes when I go on, I’m done and I, I can move on and kind of turn that off, which is really good. And yeah, taking digital sabbaticals can be great too.

We’ve seen people do this more publicly, Hey, I’m gonna take a month off of social to be more present or be with my family, or take a vacation, or whatever it might be. You don’t have to go that hard with it. Even taking a day off can be huge for mental renewed energy.

Now, let’s shift over to your emotional energy management. And a lot of this has to do with just what we tell ourselves about what we’ve accomplished so far, and it can be very easy. To just fall into that trap of we’re in Q1. I haven’t even made any progress on what I wanted to for the year. I’m already behind.

I’m bad, I’m never gonna make it. I’m no good. You need to find and have ways to counter that. So here are some suggestions to get some energy back already considering the progress that you have made already, despite where it should be, you’ve made some progress. Or if not, this is at least a moment for you to start and starting is better than not starting at all. You still have several months to get things done, and just knowing that you now have caught yourself and you’re now gonna get started is huge. Celebrating, this is the biggest thing for me and for many entrepreneurs, we forget to celebrate little things.

We forget to celebrate the moments that we’ve achieved something big and small. That momentum, that mental positivity, kind of just getting those reps in again of celebrating can be huge as you continue throughout the year when things especially start to get tough, right? You can even go so far as creating a weekly win log, right?

What is a win that you’ve had this past week? Doesn’t matter this size. Write it down so that you can start to see a list and actually gather information and find truth in the fact that you are still doing well. Maybe despite not being where you want to be yet, but you’re making progress. Entrepreneurs also need connection.

We need support. Doing this alone is very difficult, and if you’ve been alone doing it alone so far, I would advise that you try to find a person or some other people or a community of people that can support you here on your journey. I mean, everybody needs support, but especially the entrepreneur building something like a mastermind group or a personal board of directors, accountability partnerships, right?

And you wanna be sure that you kind of separate with these connections that you have. Venting sessions from solution sessions. They’re both important. And I find that in our mastermind groups we have both. But going into one, sometimes I know I just need to vent ’cause something happened and I just need to share it and get some advice.

Other times it’s a solution session where I’m looking for specific how to or so what should I do next? Or you know, who has done this before? Can you help me? And one thing I love about the SPI Community is we mastermind match you with other people inside some of our upper tiers that you could join. If you go check out SmartPassiveIncome.com/community, you’ll see all of the different levels that you can have access to and be with other amazing community members just like yourself for this very exact purpose.

I mean, this is one of the number one benefits of being in a community like SPI is that accountability opportunity, the masterminds, the connections, the partnerships, et cetera. What I like about the mastermind in particular, right? I’ve been in two that have been around for over a decade each is, I know that every week there is a group of people there who are gonna be able to listen and help, and just knowing that they’re there, even though I don’t always need their help per se, is such a reassuring thing.

Because I know that even if, for example, I’m in April and I’m behind, I know that I can have other people listen to hear where I’m at, and to offer suggestions, help support emotionally more than anything, for sure. And then finally, for emotional support. I mean, this one, I don’t wanna sound too corny here or cliche, but things are cliche because they’re true.

You have to love yourself. You have to be proud of the work you’re doing and realize that you just might be still in the process of doing the thing, right? You might not have gotten results yet, and that’s okay. Be proud that you’re getting up, you’re doing the thing, you’re listening to the podcast, but also hopefully taking action.

And that’s something that most people won’t even do. So reframing where we’re at so that we have momentum going into the rest of the year is really key. Which perfectly leads us to purposeful energy renewal. Meaning why are we doing what we’re doing? We forget at this time of year why we are even doing this in the first place.

And when I sit down with some students and we chat sometimes in our office hours, sometimes one-on-one, I find very, very common at this time of year that people just forgot why they made the decision to do this in the first place. They might question. Right. You have that question that’s on your mind, like, why am I even doing this?

And then sometimes it just takes somebody on the outside like myself, and I’m gonna ask you, the listener right now, why are you doing this? Think back to your why. Reconnect with it. You didn’t just like randomly choose to do this. You chose it because something around it is important to you. Something within it and on the other side of it, what is that? If you have any customer impact stories go back to them now. One thing that I’ve done ever since 2008 when I’ve started is I’ve collected all of the feedback, positive feedback and negative feedback, but that’s in a separate folder. But I have positive feedback and the testimonials all inside of an archive that I can look at when I’m forgetting.

‘Cause I do still forget. Why am I doing this? Because I’m so deep into my work right now. I’m so deep into my book, Lean Learning. It is, I’m recording the second part of the audio book tomorrow, and I’m like, why am I going through all the stress of marketing this thing? Like I didn’t have to do it. And then I think about my kids and who I wrote this book for, the world we live in now, and how important this message is to me.

And then I get so much energy just immediately when I think about that, when I reconnect with my why. When I think about my students and the success that they’ve had, people like Rob and Carrie from Disney Travel Secrets, who I just reconnected with a couple weeks ago, they reached out to say that they have crossed an incredible eight figure milestone.

I don’t wanna get specific with numbers, but gosh, their business is doing so well. It’s incredible and every once in a while, Rob just reaches out and says, Pat, it’s all thanks to you. And it’s like, it’s freaking incredible. So that dispels any sort of myth that I’m not helpful or that I cannot do this.

And so go to your customer impact stories or go make them happen. Make an impact even on one person’s life. It’s gonna unlock that motivation for you and the purpose. If you’ve been trying to sell something to a hundred people and it’s just not working, why don’t we just bring it to one first? To unlock that energy, get that momentum back and go from there.

So reconnect with your why. I also think a great way to get motivation from what it is that we’re doing is to teach or mentor. That’s something that hugely motivates me. And even if you’re in the middle of something, if you have a moment, I mean, don’t do what many people do, which is like as you are starting a business, you start a blog and a podcast about starting a business because you wanna teach it.

Yes. That reinforces a lot of stuff. Yes, it is amazing, and you can have an impact and may many people have made an impact doing that, but get your business up and running first. Or if you’re doing more of a watch me build sort of journey almost publicly, journaling your process, make sure you primarily focus on getting results from the business outside of the business teaching stuff first. That is what definitely contributed to my success early on was I had the architecture business before I taught entrepreneurship. I had a real online business and it just made talking about things so much easier. If you might remember from a few episodes ago, we talked about authority building.

Using your own case studies is the number one way to build authority. Nobody has those same stories and same examples like you do, so do that. A few more things on purposeful energy renewal, and this is a big one. Find meaning in the struggle. Find meaning in the struggle itself. Sometimes when I’m doing work and I’m like, why am I doing this?

This is hard and I wanna give up. I’ll tell myself this. Not I have to do this, or Oh, I have to do this right? Like that kind of tone. But rather I get to do this, I get to do this. That’s what’s insane. It completely changes and reframes how you think about the work that you’re doing, right? Not I have to do this, I get to do this.

Awesome. Alright, let’s create your burnout prevention plan. I. Maybe you’ve gotten some energy back already just from listening to this, reconnecting with your why, thinking about how you’re gonna batch process things, thinking about and embracing the struggle and how we get to do this. And, and it’s a choice that we made.

You know, I’m not gonna say that everything that happens that is bad is something we could turn around. I mean, sometimes we’re just in, in deep crap and we just need time and a little bit more effort to get through it and a little bit of luck too. And, you know, I like that’s a part of business as well. I feel like a lot of the hard times are the universe’s way of just testing us to see, do we really want this?

Because I think entrepreneurship are for those who do get tested, but then prevail who follow through, who see things through. So, okay. Let’s talk about your weekly energy audit practice. So every week I like to do this on Sunday. A simple five minute energy inventory process. Let’s think about across all those domains.

Are there any red flags? Let’s identify any red flags. Hey, this past week I’ve been eating like crap. I. I am gonna manage that better this coming week. Okay, cool. I have been not sleeping well. Okay. We’re gonna change that a little bit. What could I do better there? Cool. Okay. This thing is really stressing me out and it’s coming up this week feeling a little anxiety.

Great. How do we reframe ourselves around that? How do we maybe ask for some help, get some accountability, et cetera. Simply checking in with yourself every once in a while because we work so hard. All of you do. And we forget to just pause. Let’s step back a little bit. And let’s assess how are we doing?

Where are we feeling a little bit of anxiety today or this coming week, right? And again, before I shut things down on Sunday, kind of after dinner, things are winding down. I think about my upcoming week. I do this five minute energy inventory process, right? What red flags were there this past week that we can chop down this coming week?

Now it’s important to also identify your unique burnout precursors. Right. I think everybody has their own signs. I think some very close people I know when they’re feeling stress and anxiety, they break out in hives and rashes and that is a sign that they are burning out. Others I know get kind of a cold sore on their lip, and that’s like a physical sign.

There are other signs. We’ve talked about some of the symptoms before. You might be a little bit more on the procrastinator side as a sign or symptom, and again, identifying those things for you. And they’re almost kind of like rumble strips. I don’t know if you’ve ever driven on the road or have seen on the road, little jagged marks in the asphalt on the side.

They’re very common, especially in more rural areas or cliffs or something like that where you don’t want to go off the road. So they build in or actually like create an imprint on the edges of the roads and they call those rumble strips. They, they do save lives and we need our own version of rumble strips in our lives.

What is going to be that signal for you when you sort of start to procrastinate, for example, or you start to not sleep very well, how can you then kind of feel the rumble and then come right back into the lane where you’re supposed to go? Accountability partner. Meet up with your accountability partner on the regular and check in with one another.

Literally have each other. Ask the other person. How are you doing? Being brutally honest during those conversations is gonna be really key on both sides right now. You can get technological with some of this stuff. I know a lot of you might use an aura ring to count your sleep. I use a whoop for that.

Some of you just might use your Apple Watch, or there might be some other more digital indicators for you as far as how things are going and and your burnout and all that kind of stuff, and how your sleep is going, et cetera. One thing to think about an audit is the past four months here, and it doesn’t matter when you’re listening to this. In the past four months, what are the tasks that you have done that suck the life out of you that take your energy away? I want you to write those things down. And then through that list, I want you to circle the top two that you believe you can let go or offer to somebody else.

You know, some of them you might not even need. Some of my students do this when we do a similar exercise as we write all these things down and, and then they go, why am I doing that? Well, you just were in automation mode. You didn’t even know it just was a part of your process, but now that you see it on paper and you have somebody else identifying it for you, this is a great thing to share with an accountability partner as well.

Your entire list of tasks that you’ve done, and especially those things that suck the life out of you, pick the top two and see if there are ways that you can unload those. Maybe in the next few months you might look to outsource these things or have some automation happen, or find some tools that can do a lot of these things or cut some of the work for you.

Another question to ask yourself related to this is if this were easier what would it look like? This is a play on the question. If it were easy, what would it look like? But it’s for those things that you’ve written down and circled, if these were easier, what would they look like? Again, you might find that you can get rid of some of them.

You can consolidate. Some of them you might not even know just how many things you do that you shouldn’t do. And again, the things that you do do, you can be proud of and know that you’ve done them and will continue to do them. And then you’d wanna also consider on top of all this your non-negotiable boundaries.

What are your minimum viable self-care options? A lot of times in our businesses, and I see this with a lot of entrepreneurs who are bosses of teams, right? Managers or, or just CEO type levels of people, they say, these things must happen in the business or else the business is gonna fail or we need to stay on task.

Cool, great job doing that for your business, but what are you doing for yourself, what are the minimum viable self-care procedures that you will offer yourself? For me, for now, now, I mean this is huge. Seven hours of sleep minimum. I have to get seven hours of sleep minimum or else nowhere else. It’s just non-negotiable.

I have to get seven hours of sleep. I also have to have a lot of water every day too. So those are a couple just examples. Right. I also have to not have a ton of distractions on social media. That is a non-negotiable for me too. I very much find myself getting sucked into the rabbit hole of social media if I don’t have those boundaries.

So I have to, it is absolutely important that I create boundaries around my social media use. Now, there are tools again out there that you can use to help you with that too. Next, resource integration. So apps. Picking one or two for you to use to help you manage the things that you need to manage to unload some of the things that you don’t need to keep in that brain.

I know that Tiago Forte, for example, building a Second Brain is a very popular program and style of learning so that you can kind of dump things out and have a almost like a Google search for your brain. If you want to go deep into that Tiago Forte’s book, building a Second Brain, highly recommended finding apps, again, that can help you putting yourself in communities.

Shout out to SPI. And using tools and technology that automate more energy draining tasks, like I said before. So burning out is not failing. It’s very common, especially among those who are very, very motivated upfront. We get so motivated that we lose ourselves. We get so motivated that we start to question everything.

And if you are in April now and you’re stressed and you’re freaking out and you’re experiencing anxiety, number one, you are not alone. Number two, there’s plenty of year left for you to get back on track. And number three, great. This is all about course correction and remembering that there are a lot of people who at this point in the year give up.

And that’s not gonna be you. That’s not gonna be you. Preventing the burnout in these next few months is gonna be more important and less costly than having to go through another recovery period, right? We don’t wanna go burnout, recover, burnout, recover. We just wear ourselves out. We just wear ourselves thin versus let’s prevent, let’s get smart and let’s move forward.

The entrepreneurial journey, as you know, it’s all ups and downs. It’s never gonna be steady. It’s never gonna be perfectly balanced, but it’s just about the idea of not teetering too far over to one side, getting burned out, and then having a long recovery period. And it’s also not about just kind of sitting still and not trying anything because we’re too afraid.

I think it’s really, really important to do your best to know that it’s going to be a process and realize that this isn’t a sprint, it’s not even a marathon. This is an ultra marathon and I’m ultra proud of you. So consider those four energy domains and some of the prevention tactics that we talked about.

Go get that energy back. It is the end of Q1 here of 2025, and we still got three quarters to go, baby. Three quarters to go, to build, to create, to support, to serve, to experience awesomeness, and just wanna wish you all the best. You got this. Let’s go. Oh my gosh, I’m just looking at my book cover here. Lean Learning coming out June 3rd.

Check it out, LeanLearningBook.com with the bonuses available and stuff. And uh, I’m gonna put my own words that I’m telling you in this podcast episode into practice for myself as well. We got this. We got this. We’re a community here. Appreciate you for being a part of it. Cheers.