The Burnout Diaries - 1 Week On

It's a week since I saw a clip that lead me to the realisation that I'm on the road to burnout, if I wasn't there already. While the cough is still there, I feel a whole lot better and woke up this morning feeling energised and a lot more like myself!

It's curious that the clip from Dr Rangan Chatterjee was the first thing I saw when I went on Instagram. I'm a great believer in things happening for a reason so perhaps, the universe needed me to see that clip?

Since I came to that realisation, a lot of things have changed and I believe my body went into recovery mode as soon as I wrote the post about it. It brought a lot of the decisions I'd been making and behaviours I'd been displaying into sharp focus and what seemed fairly logical to me in the days, weeks and months previously, now seemed utterly ridiculous and made me wonder what the hell I was thinking!

The week gone by has brought a lot of realisations to me. The first is that the week in the sun doing nothing would help relieve some of the symptoms but not necessarily treat the root cause. A holiday is definitely a priority for me though.

The other realisation is that the learnings I took from Dr Chatterjee's podcast, an interview with Mo Gawdat on Steven Bartlett's podcast and reading Steven Bartlett's Diary of a CEO book, I knew already, practiced them previously and were a huge part of how I coached people.

I suspect a lot of this comes from feeling lost when the pandemic came along and trying to please others in order to keep the business going.

As I know now, the more you try to please others, you dilute your value and lose sight of who you really are.

Next Steps

It's only been a week but already, I feel like a huge weight has been lifted and I'm beginning to feel like me again. There is a long way to go though and I'm only really scratching the surface.

I've enjoyed rediscovering things that have been a huge part of me before and I'm looking forward to practicing them again.

The key learning I want to share with you all is to stop searching for that magic pill, that inspiration/motivation to go do the things you want. You already know the answer, it's already within you although if you've been like me, you know how easy it is to have lost it in pursuit of what you think you want or what social media makes you believe you want.

Take a break, think back to some of the finest moments you've had on your journey until now, the habits and behaviours that helped make them so good and go practice them again.

Why try to fit in when you were born to stand out?