Fitness Business School – Business Mistake #6 – Overwhelm and Burnout

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here, and I want to talk with you about a couple different business challenges that I see on a very regular basis and how to overcome them. And really there are things that happen to all of us. The first is being overwhelmed and then the second is being burned out and they really usually kind of come from the same place. They’re rooted in the same challenges. So I want to spend some time on both of these in this episode, so we can get past those and start building the business that you want to own. Let’s get to it.

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All right, so let’s talk about both being overwhelmed and being burned out. And first let’s talk about where those two are different. Being overwhelmed is often just feeling like we don’t have the capacity for all the things that we feel like we should or could be doing. And we’re just not very clear on how we should be spending our time. So everything feels daunting. Everything feels like the weight of the world is on our shoulders and we just don’t know where to start. So we get paralyzed and, you know, there’s just this, this kind of cloud that hangs over us and then being burned out a lot of times feels like being overwhelmed in some ways, but it just kind of drags on, and it’s, you know, this, this kind of uncertainty about why we’re doing something or not knowing what to do and just kind of being stuck in neutral and knowing that, Hey, you know what, I’m not sure exactly where I want to go is just not where I’m at right now. So, you know, both of these things are common challenges. I think I probably talked to three or four people each and every week that are members of coaching programs or perspective members of our coaching programs who experienced some degree of overwhelm. And then, you know, probably at least once a week, I talked to somebody who’s feeling kind of burned out.

So let’s talk about solutions. Let’s talk about how we can get past those challenges, because I think the same type of approach can break you free of both of those and kind of get you back in motion, feeling good about where you are, and maybe just as importantly, feeling good about where you want to go. So the, the really underlying problem with either is not having clarity. If you don’t have clarity in really much of anything, it’s hard to make progress. It’s hard to feel good. It’s hard to, to, to really wake up motivated and inspired about the day. So one of the first things that I recommend that you do that I know I do personally, is do what I call a brain dump. My wife calls it a mind spill because I think brain dump doesn’t sound quite eloquent enough for her. But you know, it’s just all the things that are kind of bouncing around in my head. I want to put down on paper and I want to have in front of me so I can see things and kind of get a handle on them.

And I think that’s important really it at all times, because a lot of the things that maybe we’re were overwhelmed by or concerned with are these hypothetical problems. They’re not even problems that exist today, but they’re problems that we’re kind of borrowing from the future. Things that could happen, that haven’t yet become a problem, but we’re already worried about the worst case scenario of these things that there’s a high probability of never really coming to fruition. So we need to put that down on a piece of paper. We need to set that aside and understand that, you know, that stuff’s not going away. Now we can rationalize why we’re feeling that way. But the reality is we need to have all those things that are kind of serving as anchors for us right now. We need to be able to set them aside because really we need to get clear about where we want to go.

And then we have to build a plan on how to get there. And so if, if we’re clear about where we’re aspiring to go, that’s a lot of burnout, right? Like that’s a lot of what we’re burnout is rooted. It is really just kind of knowing that we’re unhappy with something that’s going on right now. Maybe we’re unhappy with our current role. If you’re an employee, maybe you’re unhappy with your current role in the business or the way you’re being compensated. If you’re an owner, you may be just as unhappy with the way things are going, but then you may even be a little bit unhappier because perhaps your, the cause of some of it, right? Like you’re the one who put yourself in a position to only be compensated to the level that you are, or to only be attracting the type of clients you’re attracting. So maybe we don’t know where we want to go yet. We just know it’s not where we are today. So one of the ways, ways to break through being burned out or even being overwhelmed is to get clear again on where we’re trying to go. Mine is to, to lay out kind of a three year vision, okay, this is what I want my business or my career to look like tag. This is the, the type of person I want to work with. This is the format through which I want to serve that person. This is the number of clients I want to have. This is what I want to be paying myself. This is what I want my schedule to look like. So we put that together. Then we break that down and we reverse engineer that and say, okay, in the next 12 months, what do I need to be doing? Or what do I need to have in place to be on track, to go where I want to go? And we can look at all those same things. You know, we can look at, you know, what the business, this looks like, what your compensation looks like, what the schedule looks like, what your ideal client looks like. We can look at that. And then we want to break that down to a quarterly target. We want to break that down and say, okay, what do I need to accomplish this quarter to be on track? And then beyond that, we break it down to monthly and then weekly. And once we’ve broken it down and know, okay, here are the things that I need to do week after week that the cumulative benefit.

The cumulative outcome or result is going to be achieving that vision that I originally put down, that it really going to be where I want to be three years from today. Now why three years? I don’t know about you, but for me, 10, you know, a lot of people talk about 10 year goals or 10 year vision. It just feels very abstract, so much changes. And that type of time span, right? I don’t even use five years because it still feels a little bit too far off, but three years, three years is something I can feel like I can wrap my head around that it is very tangible. It’s very real. And I can say, okay, this is a dream come true result, but it’s realistic. It’s something I know I can do. And so in turn, the steps that I’m going to take are all going to be realistic, attainable steps. So there was a question I asked some clients the last time we had an in person meeting and I said, okay, how many of you would feel like adding a hundred new clients this year would be really over? And you know, a lot of hands went up really, probably three quarters of the room went up. I said, okay, well, how many of you have had a month where you’ve added at least 10 new clients, every hand, but one shot up. Okay. Well, if we added 10 new clients every month, that’s 120 for the year. So if we break things down and understand, and that those, those smaller milestones, even beginning step a step, further 10 new clients in a month is basically, you know, it’s two and a half clients a week. We’ve all had weeks where we’ve added two or three clients. So that’s how we want to break this down.

And it feels much less overwhelming because we can say, okay, what things do I need to do to add those two clients, to get me on track, to go towards where I want to go. And when we put that in perspective, there are a couple things that happened. One, overwhelm kind of dissipates because we’re now looking at it from here’s what I need to do to get the result that I want to get. Instead of here are all the things that I potentially could do. All those things on that brain dump list that we started with. And then too, we get past some of the burnout because we’ve mapped out precisely where we want to go. We’re not just trying to escape from this place that maybe we’re not happy with right now, but we’re actually pursuing this thing that we want to have. We’re pursuing this goal that we want to attain, which is probably what we’ve done with almost every success we’ve achieved in our life personally or professionally. We’ve had this vision of where we wanted to go and we set out to get there. But now we’re back on that track. And we’ve broken things down in a really step-by-step simplistic fashion that allows us to look up and feel like man, I’m, I’m making progress each and every week. And I know that the outcome is something that’s gonna make me happy. Instead of just saying, man, I’m just kind of punching the clock and getting through the day, all that stuff that normally leads to burnout, that leads distress. And then we start to grab at things randomly that ultimately leads to overwhelm. So there are some thoughts on how you can break free from both overwhelm and burnout. Put those in place, get clear about where you want to go, figure out what success looks like to you and put a simple executable plan into action to get there and overwhelmed with burnout will no longer be a problem.

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