I burned out this summer. I'm ready to talk about it.

Sometime in August, I brought an urgent request to my therapist: “I need you to help me figure out whether I need to quit my startup.”

I had celebrated my three-year anniversary with Kona only a month prior. Our team had dedicated countless hours to researching and building a burnout prevention platform. It brought me a lot of pride and joy. I was proud of our growing team, our wonderful customers, and our mission-focused product.?

And here I was, ready to give it all up.

“I need you to help me figure out whether I need to quit my startup.”

My therapist shifted in their seat and listened as I considered my words. Saying my deepest fear out loud suddenly made it real. Even entertaining the idea of quitting was enough to bring tears to my eyes. I felt like a coward and a failure. The other founders I knew would rather take a bullet than abandon their startup.

But I was desperate. More importantly, exhausted. “I’m super burned out and I don’t think I can handle this anymore.”

The irony of that moment wasn’t lost on us. My therapist and I shared a laugh about it. I was building a startup to fight burnout and here I was, suffering from burnout. How embarrassing.

I went on to describe my impossibly long to-do lists and six-hour blocks of meetings. How the occasional late night turned into an entire summer of 7 am sales calls and 10 pm dinners. How I worked myself silly to prepare for a week of PTO and then worked through a family trip to Hawaii. How weekends never felt long enough, how I woke up during the week exhausted, and how the following Sundays filled me with dread. Rinse and repeat.

I was building a startup to fight burnout and here I was, suffering from burnout. How embarrassing.

The week leading up to my therapy appointment, I couldn’t stop thinking about quitting. In the spare six minutes between back-to-back meetings, I’d look at the plants on my patio and imagine running off to a farm. It’d be some beautiful acreage in the middle of mountain-lined nowhere. I’d grow arugula and tend to sheep.

“I think I’d be a good farmer,” I said, “I could learn how to knit the wool into fancy sweaters.”

“I’m sure you would be. I know you’d work hard at it,” they said, “With the way you’re currently working, it’s clear you won’t last a few more years doing the startup.”

“Exactly.”

They nodded. “Quitting is an option, yes. You also have several other options available to you. Is there a way to make work more sustainable? You have a team, could you pass some of your tasks to them?”

I was stumped. When it came to solving my burnout, “doing less” didn’t feel like an option. I had a set list of tasks to do and not enough time to do them. It was my fault that I was failing at my job. It didn’t feel right to make that another teammate’s problem.

It took another half hour and a giant list of my current responsibilities to realize I was wrong.

I had committed to an inhumane number of tasks each week. Adding them up, I think my weekly to-do list would take over 70 hours to complete. With each task, I told myself that only I could do them “correctly” and used that to justify my long hours.

The answer was so obvious, and yet I’d been missing it for months. I’d been failing to delegate.?

***

I went back and forth for a few weeks about sharing this story. It’s ironic to burn out while working on a burnout prevention app. It’s embarrassing to admit that I struggle to maintain the well-being that I try to advocate.

I’m sharing this though because it highlights some important aspects of burnout and how sinister it is.

#1 - It’s really hard to admit that you’re struggling with your coworkers.?

Burnout has a funny way of creating feelings of worthlessness––I believe the official term is “professional inefficacy”––that makes admitting burnout feel like admitting incompetence. When hard work is the currency of startups, any inability to work hard feels like a character flaw.

For me, the hardest part of delegating wasn’t passing my tasks. It was admitting to my coworkers that I was struggling and that I couldn’t do those tasks by myself. In any other company, that could be deemed underperformance.

When hard work is the currency of startups, any inability to work hard feels like a character flaw.

I had to realize that as a leader, delegating is not struggling. That’s what I’m supposed to be doing. I had to do the heavy lifting when it was just us founders. Now that we hired experts, I don’t need to spend my weekends writing outreach messages or fixing the website anymore.

Leadership is about creating more leadership. I can’t do that unless I give my team an opportunity to execute challenging projects, troubleshoot, and take ownership.?

It took a few weeks, but I stopped seeing delegation as a failure and started looking at it as my most important job. It helps me grow as a manager and it makes my team learn new things and become more skilled than when I hired them.

To encourage teammates to seek help, we need to see our coworkers as more than just their output. We need to create environments that nurture the employee’s whole self and see well-being in alignment with business outcomes.

#2 - It’s really hard to realize you’re burning out.

Burnout is an incredibly difficult issue to get ahead of. In my case, I had normalized overworking (and encouraged it in myself) for months. I failed to catch the early signs of continued stress until those problems affected my sleep and mental health. By the time I could name the problem, I was almost ready to quit.

If you’re managing a team at a high-growth startup, there’s a high chance that someone is burning out. They may not realize it and oftentimes they realize it too late. As a manager, it’s your job to catch your team’s burnout.?

But who’s there to catch yours?

We inherently cater to other people’s needs more than our own. At least that’s the case for me. I would never book six hours of back-to-back calls on somebody else’s calendar, but I do it to myself more than once a week. When you don’t report to anyone, there’s no one to check that you’re taking care of yourself.?

I would never book six hours of back-to-back calls on somebody else’s calendar, but I do it to myself more than once a week.

People say the “L” in leadership stands for something. For me, it’s “leave yourself out”. I check on my reports before I check on myself. It makes my team’s task load manageable, while mine is a graveyard of tasks other people didn’t have time for.

I was lucky. Our founding team practices Radical Candor where we take the time to have uncomfortable conversations with each other every week. While it was embarrassing that I burned out leading a burnout prevention company, we also built a safe company culture that allowed me to address my burnout and recover from it.?

Having studied the problem for years, I know I’m one of the lucky few. Most people never recover or lose something along the way.

#3 - Burnout requires more than unlimited PTO to solve.

There are dozens of reasons why people burn out. Continuous stress at work can be caused by company culture, bad work habits, or something else entirely. The solution, therefore, is not always as simple as taking a long vacation.

In my case, I tried PTO. I went to Michigan to spend time with my partner’s family and I was blissfully kayaking on a lake for a week. When that week came to an end, however, I had some of the worst anxiety I’ve had in a while.

In my case, I tried PTO...When that week came to an end, however, I had some of the worst anxiety I’ve had in a while.

A vacation wouldn’t have created the behavioral change that learning to delegate would. The real solution was a lot less sexy than kayaking on a glimmering lake. It required taking a deep look at my calendar and releasing the grip I had on my habits.

Treating burnout requires the right questions and a determination to change. As my therapist said, quitting is always an option. But there are often other options on the table as well.

Why I think I recovered from burnout

I've learned the hard way that burnout doesn’t care about your resume, title, or responsibilities. According to our research, higher-level executives burn out at a faster rate. A CXO leaving costs the company 5 times their yearly salary and it takes up to 14 weeks to replace them. These scary stats barely capture the impact that attrition has on company culture, direction, and engagement.

Most people can’t recover from burnout without switching jobs. If my burnout continued into Burnout Syndrome, I would’ve joined the statistics.

In the end, I was saved by our company culture. Our team had the psychological safety to talk about why I was struggling without shame or blame. I had the resources to ask for help and receive it.

In the end, I was saved by our company culture.

When you suspect that somebody on your team is burning out, the conversation you can have with them strongly depends on the culture and the relationship you have built with them. That’s where trust and psychological safety get put to the test.

It was up to me to take my own advice and unlearn the habits that were making me burn out. But I wouldn’t have recovered alone. I’m thankful that our company culture threw me a lifeline.

Are you or someone at your organization struggling with burnout? You're not alone! Check out our free mental health resources for remote teams.

Leaders can book a free 15-minute organizational health consultation and get started with Kona, the burnout prevention platform, for free. Leave a comment or email me at [email protected] to get started.