[00:00:00] Hi everyone, my name's 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.
[00:00:22] Hello my friends, Dex here with you again, and I'm going to talk this time about being open to receive. And this is hard on the heels of the last episode about being willing, or becoming willing, to ask for and accept help. Asking for help and being open to receive are both a pretty hard sell to people in burnout, despite their entrenched suffering.
[00:00:48] But hold tight because I've really got some great news for you today. So we're less than a minute into the podcast and if you're still listening, congrats! You're either not suffering from burnout or you're a coach here to learn about burnout or you're in burnout and really ripe to discover and possibly even embrace a solution.
[00:01:11] So ripe in fact that you are willing to accept help and ever so slightly curious about becoming open to receive. So stay with me on this. You're okay. In fact, take a really big deep breath right now and drop your shoulders down as you breathe out and stay with your curiosity. Keep your mind open a little bit.
[00:01:36] Even if you feel a bit angry or hopeless or helpless, just let yourself listen to what's coming by you today. So here's the thing, Type A personality, what they used to call Type A personality people, who end up in burnout, a. k. a. hyper autonomous self sufficient super achievers, like to fix their own problems.
[00:02:00] That's actually a slight understatement. Give me a tight nod if you can relate. Okay, if you did that now just drop your shoulders again. It's okay, because deep inside you're fundamentally a good person and you're going to get better.
[00:02:18] So maybe if you're in burnout, you've seen yourself as the rock. Type A personality typically do. You're going to be probably the fixer. The all powerful human who doesn't need any help, thank you very much, and certainly doesn't need a lot of petting and cossetting, no matter how much duress you're under.
[00:02:37] I mean of course you can fix it, you can fix burnout, just like you fix everything else. People look up to you, they depend on you, you're the rock. You're not supposed to fail. Is that it? Am I close? So even though that's true, that really won't have stopped you trying all sorts of things yourself to fix your burnout.
[00:02:58] If you're in it, you're a very committed, intelligent and hardworking person. So you're giving it your best shot. Trouble is, has that worked? I guess maybe you're still looking. If you're listening to this podcast now. But if so, here is the great news, the best news. You can fix burnout. You're just probably right now doing it the wrong way.
[00:03:25] You don't know the right method yet. And I can show you how, but if I do, the work and the victory will be all yours. Now, even so, some people never choose this. Maybe they're a little bit proud or stubborn. But really, what I see is there's a line round the block of people who've tried to fix their own burnout and failed.
[00:03:47] Eventually, a little piece of them silently gives up and dies. And they accept this degraded condition and resign themselves to it for the rest of their careers. And you can imagine what those careers look like, what they themselves look like. These grey ciphers plodding through their day, attracting no attention, shut down, missing in action.
[00:04:13] Nothing interesting happens. Every day, same dread on waking, same road rage. Same drudgery and frustration. Same anxiety and unfinished tasks. Same third cup of coffee, probably, that still doesn't make it all look any better. Same irritating people. Same lack of joy and reward. These are not the people who are going to get promoted or get a better job.
[00:04:40] They'll lose the joy of connection with their loved ones, kids, hobbies and friends. Everything will be more or less meaningless toil, dragged from an empty tank. And I really hope that's not you. I really hope that doesn't describe you, but if it does, keep listening. And really, when I made that description, if you related it, ask me how I know.
[00:05:04] I'm laughing at myself now, not you, because my own life was a very dark shade of gray at the end of my burnout. When the flame went out, it left a vacuum I couldn't fill. And I hated all of it. How I was feeling, how I was performing, how my prospects looked. Well, finally, I didn't really have any prospects anyhow.
[00:05:26] So I think it's fair to note that the method of successfully overcoming burnout is different from your current MO if you are in burnout. And what I really mean there is trying harder or working harder will not fix anything. So recovery is actually different than anything you've ever been taught. It's probably also different from what your therapist says.
[00:05:51] Many of my clients have plowed through a great deal of therapy without managing to beat burnout. And many therapists themselves agree that this is a problem. The method's probably different than your boss or your HR department or your executive coach say too. Only you know the results there. But did any of them help you feel and perform better?
[00:06:15] Or do you now feel even more stress, more pressure and guilt than before?
[00:06:19] So really, burnout recovery depends on a number of new skills that I will teach you if you come and work with me. And those tools that I teach will help you feel safe on the inside. Balanced, resilient, capable, resourceful, successful, enthusiastic, engaged, sociable, collaborative. And you're gonna feel those from the inside, within you.
[00:06:45] They're not gonna be stuck on by someone else on the outside, like spaghetti thrown at a wall. They're going to become natural and normal states as your mojo returns and you begin to thrive. All that can happen if you are open to receive. That's why I'm making this episode. But you probably aren't that open to receive right now, particularly if you are in burnout.
[00:07:12] You're probably feeling deeply skeptical about what I just said, all the things I just told you. You probably can't even imagine yourself pulling off a feat like that. Although a piece of you wishes you could, right? So does asking for help right now seem pointless to you? Is that how it feels? Because if it does, I get that.
[00:07:33] That's the burnout itself talking, but I promise you, the things I'm talking about are the results my clients generate every time. Recovery from burnout, it turns out, is simply learning and applying new skills in a step by step reliable process to alleviate all the pain points of burnout.
[00:07:56] And those are the skills I discovered myself in my own burnout recovery journey. Some of it is self taught, some of that I picked up from various other people. But what I've done is I've put them all together in one program that systematically improves your work experience and performance day by day, week by week.
[00:08:13] And freeze up your energy to reconnect with the good, the good of you, primarily, and believe it or not, the good of work, because you'd like to enjoy work again, I'm really betting. Because you need purpose, right? And work supplies that. You need your passion back. You need to re engage with that. And, when you go through the recovery process and learn these skills, they're also going to help you enjoy the humans in your life, at work and outside of work.
[00:08:44] Don't you really miss genuine connection? Aren't you sick of being cranky with yourself and everybody else? And I think maybe the person you've really lost connection with the most is yourself. Because do you even know who you are anymore? Do you know what you enjoy doing? Probably not in burnout.
[00:09:03] So being open to receive really means receiving goodness. The goodness you felt so shut down from, any kind of goodness, your own heart and vibrant body, partnerships, kids, work challenges, nature, freedom, spirituality, pets, altruism, music, whatever you want. Whatever you used to love and now somewhere inside probably still are pining for.
[00:09:35] Because being open to receive is actually a skill. You've probably neglected this skill a little bit. For safety reasons, you're probably not doing it now. Particularly if things have gotten really bad for you. You've probably self protectively shut down. Makes sense, right? The only thing is, shutting down keeps out the light as well as the dark.
[00:09:58] It's really a last resort, isn't it? So by removing the pain points of burnout, what happens is you're going to feel safe enough to open back up and let in some of the light. You've already got plenty of dark. Let's mitigate it with a bit of light. Shall we? Let's redress the balance. And then you can learn how to open to receive.
[00:10:19] Receive what's rightfully yours. And really enjoy doing that and feel good about the process, rather than feeling guilty, ashamed, scared, deficient, undeserving, failing, whatever you want to describe it as. Because your birthright is actually not to be burnt out, it's to be a fully functional human, with a heart of love, and a sense of belonging, and some purpose and thriving in the world.
[00:10:48] Just pause for a moment, imagine yourself as a child, sometime when maybe you felt like you'd done something wrong, or that you'd failed somehow, let somebody down somehow, but just in a small way, but it probably felt enormous. And you were suffering and no one was there to console you. We're doing this of course with the usual caveat, people, please do not open traumatic wounds here.
[00:11:15] All we're doing is we're looking for a tiny moment in the past, as a child, when you felt a little bit guilty. Perhaps you felt alone, sad, inadequate or undeserving, ashamed, a little bit nervous, and no one was there for you. So when you're thinking about that kid, maybe you get an image in your mind, so Imagine or visualize that kid in your mind's eye right now.
[00:11:42] Do you remember how that felt? Can you feel it now? And was that kid maybe dreading being found out? Or had been found out and was dreading the consequences? So when you're seeing that vision of that kid in your mind's eye, what do you feel about that kid now, who's you, right? Earlier in life, all alone. Do you feel a little bit moved to console them?
[00:12:05] Do they deserve a little bit of love and care? Because I believe that love and connection are our natural state, and we innately possess the faculty of returning to that natural state. Burnout, on the other hand, is an unnatural state of disconnection and despair. It's a contortion or a dysfunction that persists through our distorted perceptions of ourselves
[00:12:31] and our worthiness, that caused us to shut down to avoid pain. So really, I don't think you're designed to stay in burnout. None of us are. We deserve better. So being open to receive is one of the ways that we free ourselves from burnout. We find first of all ways to create internal safety, a sense of okayness and acceptance about who and how we are.
[00:12:58] And we cultivate a kinder and gentler way of relating with ourselves and with our world that allows us to open our hearts. We open the gates to goodness, developing inner and outer resources, and we choose to re enter a world that then no longer looks as hostile. So this is what you're going to learn in burnout recovery with me.
[00:13:25] When you decide to accept help and learn how to receive, you can make your journey back to thriving, collecting your work mojo and your social mojo along the way. That's your hero's journey. The goodness is yours. It's already yours and you can reclaim it. All I'm going to do is be your guide. I will show you how.
[00:13:47] So if you're in burnout and you're ready to let in a bit of the good, You must come and talk to me about how to recover quickly and sustainably, and get back to your best performance, leadership, success, and most of all, enjoyment inside work and out. You can book an appointment to talk with me at DexRandall. com. If you enjoyed this episode, please help me reach more people in burnout by rating and reviewing the podcast. I really do appreciate your support with it. If you know somebody else who's heading towards or in burnout, please send them the podcast link. Because I always try to give, as you know, some practical tips for burnout recovery.
[00:14:28] And I recommend that new people listen to the first five episodes to get started. Thank you so much for your time today. Do not forget that I believe in you completely and that your goodness is waiting to be claimed. Maybe that encourages you to open to receive and to ask for and accept help. And if that's true, I am here for you when you're ready.
