Burnout Recovery

Ep#25 What's Your Why?

March 18, 2022 Dex Randall Season 1 Episode 25
Burnout Recovery
Ep#25 What's Your Why?
Show Notes Transcript
  • How great leaders inspire us with their WHY.
  • Why we make decisions from feelings.
  • What WHY will get you out of burnout?
  • I share my WHY for the work I do.

Simon Sinek https://bit.ly/3tlM7zO.
Viktor Frankl https://amzn.to/3C2L4Zt.

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Hi everyone, my name is Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout to Leadership podcast, where I teach professional men to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work. Hello my friends, this is Dex, I hope you're having a wonderful day. I really wanted to talk about motivation today, why we do what we do. Why I do, why you do, why we all do? And of course, I'm gonna stand on the shoulders of giants here. I mostly do, to be honest, the view is pretty good from up here. So firstly, Simon Sinek, he wrote the book, It Starts With Why, it's a terrific book, I recommend you read it. Or if you're impatient like me, he did make the third most watched TED Talk ever, just ahead of my other favorite Brene Brown, and it's called How Leaders Inspire Great Action. You're probably familiar with it already. So Simon reckons great leaders inspire with the what, the how and the why. And he put in a work context, if you're talking about your work, everyone knows what they do, some of them know how they do it, but very few know why they do it. And when you listen to most marketing, marketing usually starts with what, what product they make, how it's better than everybody else's, and then, would you please buy it? But great leaders start with why. People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And I've been thinking a little bit, I haven't really taken much of a stand on it, and I don't talk about it a lot. I have a very compelling why. And it really came to mind the other day when I was being interviewed for a podcast by an end of life coach, and she asked me, what was on my bucket list? And I said, Nothing. I don't have a bucket list. There's nothing missing. I said, The only thing I wanna do is what I'm doing now. I want to work with people in burnout, I want to help people recover from burnout. And it was kind of a surprise to me when I said that, because I really feel this is my calling. I've been brought to this work, it's taken me quite a long time, I transitioned out of a career in IT, which went for most of my lifetime, and I came through a lot of self inquiry and spiritualism, and energy heal... I became an energy healer and worked with that for a while, because I knew I wanted to work with healing people, but eventually I landed on burnout. And there are some things I am really passionate about, but burnout is so far ahead of the pack, I can't even tell you. My mission in life is to make recovery from burnout available to every person experiencing burnout. And there's a whole lot of reasons for that, one of which is, burnout is quite widely misunderstood in the world at large. Research science is not really on top of it, psychotherapy isn't really on top of it, industry and commerce, not really offering solutions. And in my practice, I work with people one on one, and I can bring them out of burnout, the chunky bit of burnout in less than four weeks, and I can help them sustain that recovery and increase and improve it over time and never ever go back into burnout again. That is my mission, to help people recover from burnout sustainably and quickly. And I was so shocked how easy it is to come out of burnout that I became very, very sad that none of us knew this before. I mean, I'd never heard about it before. One of my triggers was, I went to burnout myself, it took me a long, long time to crash out of my IT career. I probably had about five years of deteriorating performance and in jobs, and then finally I did crush out and burnout, and I had a major heart attack, I was lucky to live through it. And I wanted someone to help me and there wasn't anybody. I was already aware of a lot of people working in the mental health field, the physical health field, the coaching field, nothing really touched sides for me, and I learned how to come out of burnout by coming out of burnout myself, really, by practicing coaching techniques once I learned them on myself. I was self coaching my way out of burnout. And it was so easy, and it was so successful, I just thought kids should be learning how to become this resilient in school. Because the resilience that I had, it made me understand I never needed to live in anxiety and depression, and hopelessness and despair, and imposter syndrome, and all of that, and be angry and defensive all the time and fretful all the time, and I didn't even need to be in any... I never needed to have that experience, had I learned when I was young, how to create resilience. And it's quite simple, there's just a little formula that you follow, and that's why I can help people out of burnout, because I've got the formula and I know how to teach it to people, and I know how to help them learn it for themselves and create and maintain and sustain their own recovery from burnout. And the reason that that's so important is, the people I work with in burnout are just championship, wonderful people. They're delightful, powerful humans who've been brought to their knees by some experiences they've had in their life and how they've responded to those experiences. And when I kind of help them set themselves back on their feet again, they start to flourish and thrive, and then they start to work with a mentor, the people who are around them, who are also in burnout. So, my mission is to make this burnout recovery available to all people in burnout. So, my clients do this for me, and also the coaches that I work with do this for me. They spread the word and they also spread the skills of working through burnout. And I'm not a special person. There's nothing remarkable about me. I'm not clever. I'm not famous. I'm not well connected. I'm extremely introverted and shy. I would never go and stand on a soap box normally and tell people what I do. They're like, why I do it? And I've been asked recently in... I've been doing some advanced coach training, and they keep pleading with me to tell them more about why I'm doing this. So I felt right, I'm gonna make a podcast on it. This is why. I'm doing it because an inordinate number of people are suffering. There is a burnout pandemic in this world right now, and it's being fueled by our COVID situation from the last two years. It isn't going to get better. Modern culture has deteriorated to the point where a large proportion of the population is sunk in depression and anxiety, more or less full time disconnection, isolation, loneliness and all of that. It's just... It's not going to get better, if we don't do anything, it isn't gonna get better. And I just... I look at the suicide statistics in the developed world, places like UK and Europe, America, Australia, suicide in 2019, that's when it first came to my most peaks attention. Suicide was the leading cause of death for men between 40... 15 and 45, and also in the older age groups, 55, 65, 75, it was still about second or third. And I just thought, well, that's incalculably awful. I mean, I'm kinda laughing about it, because I can't... Even now, I can't get my head around it. Why so many men, particularly more men than women are committing suicide? And in a way, it makes sense. We've had a cultural decline, of course, we've had all of that, we've had disconnection, dislocation. We're living online, which is great, except for the bits that are not great, that don't work out for us as communal people, as herd animals. And I just thought stuff it. The only thing that's worth me doing with the rest of my time, I haven't been a particularly big contributor in the rest of my life, I haven't been out and done lots of good in the world, that's not really been me. I've just been kind of scared and withdrawn and just put my head down and got on with my work most of my life. So this is my big opportunity to come good, this is my opportunity to give back. It's my opportunity to share a skill that comes easily out of me that I totally, totally love doing the work as well. So, when I'm listening to somebody like Synagis, he's kind of encouraging me to come out of my shell a bit and talk about my why. The way that I can reach more people in burnout is not by coaching one to one, which is what I've been doing in the last number of years. It's really by either finding a way of delivering what I do to the masses or teaching other coaches to coach on burnout the way that I do, because I have a formula that is incredibly successful. I've got a little program that I run on with people, it's almost flawless. I guarantee that people will come out of burnout, when they come to me. I think, well, okay, I'm gonna teach that to as many people as I can, because then they can help other people come out of burnout. They can maximize the effect. It's a multiplier for me. And then I'm also gonna start working with groups and online programs so that I can just let everybody have it. And one of the other things... You know, I started this episode, we're talking about what's your why, he's another person who's very much influenced me about why. Viktor Frankl, who survived his time in, I think, it was Auschwitz. He wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning about how he survived that experience and he motivated himself very much by his thoughts about his wife who he had been separated from on entry into the camp, and he had no idea whether she was still alive or not. But he communed with her, he talked to her every day, and that provided him with enough meaning to get through the whole experience. And when he writes about Man's Search for Meaning, of course, all of us have a very, very strong driver to have a purpose, to have a calling, to have meaning to what we do. There's countless, countless books written about even work performance, how incredibly motivating it is for people to perform and have new ideas and be loyal to an organization and provide exemplary service if they know why they're doing it. If the why resonates with them. So people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And so, to me, it kind of all ties in back together, even with the topic of burnout and suicide, because really burnout, depression, and that style of thinking is cultivated in people who've lost their sense of purpose, they've lost their sense of meaning, they've lost contact with their why and everything has become kind of like a hamster wheel, it's become hopeless, it's become helpless and meaningless to them. And the burnout is, I can't get out of this. When we're in burnout there... It comes with a flavor of despair that says, "I can't fix this, I can never fix this, I can't turn this around. I used to have power and potency, now I've got nothing, I can't get out of burnout, I'm stuck." And it's just a life of infinite kind of drudgery and effort in front of me, I'm not gonna enjoy. So, what I encourage as well for the people who come and work with me is, "Okay, why, why do you want to get out of burnout? What's gonna happen for you then? What will change for you then? Who benefits from you being out of burnout? And really, for most of the people that I'm talking to, there is a huge number of people who benefit each time one person comes out of burnout. It's not just that person, it's not just the team of that person or the colleagues or the reports of that person, it's also their partners, their families, their friends, the young people they know who they can mentor up in the business. The benefits are actually huge. Even they can be very influential in as public figures or as speakers, as academics, whatever it is that they're up to, they usually have a very wide sphere of influence, and they're usually very charismatic, articulate, intelligent, smart people. So, I rely on them to some extent to help me get other people out of burnout. And very often I see... That's what I see happening during the course of the work that we do together. Not because I tell them to, but because that's their natural desire, that once they get their energy back, that's what comes out of them. So the next thing is why... When you ask yourself why do you want to get out of burnout? The question really is, who are you gonna be then? How is that different from who you are today? What is the power that you will regain once you come out of burnout? And what are the hidden dreams that you've always had about how you can contribute in this world, how you can live your purpose in a way that you haven't been able to even consider for years, probably because you've been so downtrodden and feeling like it was an impossible dream, you didn't wanna taunt yourself with. With most people who come to me in burnout have absolutely no contact with their dreams, they just wanna feel better and suffer less, and sleep more, and have less anxiety. They can't even think about what would happen after that. But what if you already have those hidden dreams and they're still tucked away inside of you somewhere? And with the acquisition of resilience, of equilibrium, of energy, of wisdom, even if you like, it might open a door for them to come back out again. And that's what I see time after time in my clients is those hidden dreams, once they come back to their own power again, they start to bubble back up to the surface. And the level of potency people have after they've recovered from burnout, the level of skill and confidence and I guess, passion, and joy that they have when they come out of burnout are way more than they had before they went into burnout in the first place. It's a big multiplier in what can be achieved for most of them in the world. It brings out all the good in them that's been latent all of this time before burnout not just even in burnout. The other question, I think why would you... When you're considering why you wanna get out of burnout is, how do you already contribute? Because most people in burnout have this kind of impostor thing about not being worth the space they're taking up, not being good at their job, not being seen to be good at their job, not being appreciated, not having a big contribution and of basically having a big vista of fails all over the place. And this is wildly inaccurate for most of them. Most of them are very consummate professionals, leaders, technicians and all of that, but they've never really stood in the power of that, and they've told themselves that they're not good enough in a whole slew of different ways, and they've been experiencing constant disappointment in themselves. And that disappointment is completely redundant. All of these people are wonderful underneath. And so, it's worth asking, Okay, how do I already contribute? If I was going to be my own best friend here, what would I say about my contribution until now? What am I doing? Who do I care about? Who are the people I'm trying to support? Who are the people I'm trying to keep afloat here? Who are the people I'm already trying to mentor, even though I'm completely burnt out myself? So ask yourself some of these questions. If you can't come at the answers for all of these, Who benefits, who you're gonna become, what if you had hidden dreams, how do you already contribute, if you can't come at the answers to those questions because you're in burnout, because you're in despair, because you can't see the wood for the trees right now, sit down next to somebody who knows you really well, and ask them about you, and see what you can come up with. Because really, I'm gonna take a punt on this and say that you have just a super abundance of good hidden inside you trying to find the way out, and I think recovery from burnout, bringing back your energy, your joy, your enthusiasm, your passion, your contribution, your sense of purpose and reward kind of reignites that, and it allows you the freedom to light the fire again, and that's what I truly want, for all of the people that I work with, I'm just one person. Oh, I can't do so much by myself, but they can. All the people that I work with are amazing. And they can do a lot of good in the world. So, I think why is the most important thing that you can consider by yourself if you're thinking about coming out of burnout, and if that is you, if I'm speaking to you, if you're hearing this, then come and talk to me. You must come and talk to me about how to recover, because wasting your time in burnout doesn't serve you, it doesn't serve any single human in the world. So if you can recover from burnout, if you can come and work with me, recover from burnout quickly and sustainably, you'll never need to go into burnout again in your life, you'll come back to your best, why wouldn't you? I can't stand the idea of people being in burnout, I can't bear to even think about it, to be honest. It's making me appear emotional, thinking about all the people out there who are in burnout, don't be one of them, come and talk to me if that is you. Anyway, that was quite forlorn, wasn't it? Thank you very much for listening today. Really appreciate you being here. All of the best now, catch you next time. If you're in burnout and ready to recover, come and join my Burnout to Leadership program. You can book in to talk with me at burnout.dexrandall.com. Just tell me what's bugging you and let's make a plan to fix it.