[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 this is Dex once again welcoming you to this week's episode on how to get your mojo back. Let's start here. Are you in burnout? If you are, where is your mojo? What happened to it? Can you remember when you last saw it? Because I think it's a real marker of burnout, if you can remember a time when you worked with purpose, flair, enjoyment, when challenges were fun but that time is now so distant.

[00:00:53] You can't really remember how it felt because you sure don't have a flicker of it now. It's probably more likely dead, empty despair, dejection that fills your days. Dragging your ass out of bed in the morning. Bleary before you even start. Cursing at traffic, people, messages, and almost anything else.

[00:01:17] Flogging yourself to get things done, and not really liking your results so much. And not having people on side like you used to, to spar and to chat with. That was before you got so grim and surly, right? So is that how it feels? If it is, that's survival mode for you.

[00:01:35] Your nervous system driving you into the bunker, keeping your head down, at the cost of anything delightful ever happening for you. Because happiness comes second to survival, right? But, thing is, your nervous system is meant to be used in an emergency, not every single day for five years. Or 15 years, or however long it's been for you.

[00:02:01] If you feel like an empty shell, it's because you are. Half of your system isn't actually working when you're in chronic stress. All your rest and repair functions, your positive emotions, your social system, sexual function, decision making, problem solving, it's all gone. So I beg you, if you're experiencing burnout, no self blame, no shame.

[00:02:27] It's not your fault. You cannot control your nervous system, right? 

[00:02:32] Looking at the latest Wellness at Work survey for 2024, 66 percent of workers have felt burnt out in the last three months. That's up from 53 percent in 2022. Productivity is up 2 percent since then. Employer commitment to wellbeing is up a whopping 1 percent since then. It's now 53%. But you knew that, right?

[00:02:57] And you remember, you know, as we were pulling up out of COVID, how bad things got. Work changed during COVID and mostly not in a way that we liked if those numbers are true. So don't blame yourself. But can we please go back and resurrect your mojo? It's a job worth doing. Whatever's gone wrong for you at work, you still deserve joy, not deep grinding daily misery.

[00:03:28] Your mojo is still back there, right where you left it, waiting for you to reclaim it. I promise you. And when I think about my own mojo and my own burnout, I'm going to tell a little bit of my story. Perhaps you'll relate and possibly find a little glimmer of possibility for yourself in there. And I think Mojo lives inside of us someplace.

[00:03:48] For me it's the secret sauce that makes us successful. That makes life and work easy and flowy. A delightful game that we're skilled at. It's our flair for getting things done just right. Perhaps even as other people flounder. When we're on our game, I think our Mojo is our genius.

[00:04:09] Do you recall that? That kind of situation? And I'm going to talk a little bit to boomers and Gen X here. Mostly because younger professionals will have come up through different conditions. But probably when we were young and a bit rambunctious, a bit full of ourselves, fresh out of college, ducking and weaving, partying, maybe, getting up just in time for work, we might have looked at all the sad old people working there in their ties and thought we were better than them.

[00:04:39] That work was just easy and they were making it too hard. And maybe not much of our thought was going into the future, career planning, settling down, having a family. All those ways that life slows us down. Nothing was ever really a problem back then and we were so light on our feet. Because there were so few consequences to failure.

[00:05:01] Like most of my clients in senior roles now, I was highly employable back then. The only thing required was really to show up and get on with it and it would turn out okay. Or I'd simply move to another job or another city. I could be speaking only about myself there, but I really doubt it. In that era, life was like that.

[00:05:22] Study, follow the bouncing ball, you'll be okay. But I think that Boomers and Gen X in that way often had it much easier than their parents, for example, who grew up through wars, strikes mass migration, mass unemployment, times of poverty and hardship. My own father told me he didn't own a pair of shoes as a lad, and he fought to stay on at school after 13.

[00:05:46] That certainly hasn't been my experience. And I think , those two generations, had it easier than for youngsters now, who are burning out in college. Worrying about securing their first job, moving out of their parents house, affording housing, and all the rest of it.

[00:06:02] Untethered I see them as a little bit lost, challenged to find belonging, work, meaning, optimism, and equilibrium, really, right from the start. But if you remember yourself starting out at work, that power you felt in your younger professional years, You might detect in that the seeds of eventual burnout right there.

[00:06:28] So where is that mojo from that time? Where did it go? ' cause what you've probably done is kept your foot on the gas, done all the right things, got the promotions, the mortgage, the cars, the family, kept your head down and watched the horizon blackening with descending clouds over the years. As your options diminished, as work became a place rigged to stifle you, constrain your genius, strangle your talents, bind you to a tighter and tighter enclosure, where you could be more easily controlled, where your duty to serve got perverted away from serving your patients or your clients or whoever.

[00:07:08] Towards servitude to the machine, where you experienced diminishing respect, autonomy, and latitude, where your genius had to be penned inside guardrails. The joy got squashed out as you focus more and more on numbers, risk, what the boss thinks, and staying out of trouble. And watching those youngsters still coming in, carefree, nimble, in a way that you've lost. 7pm, 8pm, 9pm alone in the office. Turning out soulless paperwork for the system. Forgetting why you ever started this career. Unable to quit. Because for what? Your empty eyes and tired face reflecting how much you've given up inside. You've lost this glorious, ripe essence of you. Your spirit of exploration and fun.

[00:08:00] It all drowned in the ubiquitous pressure of life in and out of work. Because parenting somehow became an oppressive regime of rules, appointments, milestones, and the desperate need for education, success, freedom, wealth, and wellness for your kids. Things that you yourself no longer even enjoy. So maybe you can relate to parts of that.

[00:08:24] But here's the thing. Stage one of burnout recovery is taking a really clear look at where you are, how you got here, and what parts of it you don't like that need to change. We're basically taking a bit of an inventory. And armed with that clarity, you can really start to move in a better direction and rescue yourself from the doldrums.

[00:08:46] So I'm going to ask you to hold tight, really allow me to explain the dynamics of burnout here. And exactly why 66 percent of the working population are in it. And let's agree beforehand that this says nothing about who you are, or your human potential, if you're experiencing burnout. The things I'm going to say are really not a club to beat yourself with.

[00:09:09] Because burnout is not a choice. No one gets up in the morning and thinks "Hey, why don't I try out a little bit of burnout today?" So are we agreed on that? No self blame. Okay, right then. Stay with me. In fact, stay with me a while because the best bit is always at the end. So the flame out you've had, if indeed you've had one, does it align with the possibly jaundiced view you've developed about work, people, life, your merits, relationships, and the possibility of fulfilment.

[00:09:46] Does it reflect your belief about the availability of joy? Somehow, have you relinquished your right to have your basic human needs met? To wiggle your toes in the stream of life. And now maybe you're an automaton. A bit greyed out. A cardboard cutout of your former glory. So let me ask also, do you still recognize moments of connectedness to people and to this earth?

[00:10:13] Or has that somehow seeped away? Until you turn around and only see the bags under your eyes and the relentless demands of a calendar. Because we are what we believe we are. We experience the world not as it is, but as we are. So the color of your glasses matters. Wearing dark glasses every day will send you blind to the colour and the warmth that you seek in the world.

[00:10:41] Your good mood is perpetually at the mercy of your beliefs, much more than at the mercy of circumstances. If you flood yourself with self criticism, neglect your own human needs, abandon your soul, your mood will dampen. Still no self blame though, no self blame. All I've done here is explain the mechanics of chronic stress and anxiety.

[00:11:06] Anxiety folds in on itself, creating more fear and more anxiety, and we shut down more. But all that happens inside our heads. Our environment actually doesn't need to prompt it very much. And when the implosion is complete, when burnout smacks you to the ground like an empty sack, telling you your prospects are over forever, probably, calling you names, weak, stupid, pathetic, unlikable, difficult, lazy, when all of that's happening, it lies.

[00:11:38] Burnout lies to you. The flame has been ground out in you. Yeah, it has. And it seems impossible that any good will come of this, no matter what you do. But I have not found that to be true. Burnout is not the last stop on the line. It wasn't true for me, and I make it my business to find ways to show how it's not true of my clients.

[00:12:03] Hope may have left the building, but I think your mojo is indexed to your soul, to your spirit. I don't think it can be killed. I used to work with horses. And dogs, actually. In my experience In the early part of my life was that if you break the spirit of a dog or a horse, it will be a soulless plodder for the rest of its life.

[00:12:26] It's done. Much later in my life, I rehabbed a broken-spirited dog. She came to me by accident, actually, just for a few months, and I nourished her and her spirit woke up. She was actually gorgeous. And then I started thinking about that and I started learning about revival and resurgence and what people actually meant when they talked about spiritual revival.

[00:12:53] I previously thought that was all bull, by the way. Faith, healing, baloney. I'm laughing because I have to admit now, I was wrong. And I started learning about miracles. I started looking for them and listening to them. Miracles in truly dire circumstances, in concentration camps; with rescued child soldiers; in African genocide;

[00:13:20] mass rape survivors and things like that. And I started meeting people who had bounced back against much, much bigger odds than I'd faced. To me, inconceivably bigger odds. So I had to question my beliefs, which believe you me, was a good thing. But even though I could see evidence now of these miracles, this resurgence, this revival, spiritual renewal, whatever you want to call it, even though I'd seen those examples, I didn't think it would work for me.

[00:13:49] I'd been too broken for too long. And I lacked faculties. But somehow I hung in there, I kept plodding, and I hit the concrete wall of burnout really in 2017. And the lead up to that was very long. I'd call my last years a comb over if that wasn't way too polite an expression for what really happened. I was very down and almost all the way out.

[00:14:15] And I had the heart attack. I could have given in then, but somehow I didn't. Then I got hit by a car. I did not give in. And what I discovered is somehow things hit a point where you can't stop. And that's when you find out what grit you actually have. How deeply programmed we really are for homeostasis.

[00:14:39] I discovered that the flame out of burnout actually leaves the pilot light on. Quiet. Unseen. I lay punctured, basically. Deflated, on my sofa for many months. Virtually unable to move or care for myself. And I took up couch yoga. I'm not even kidding.

[00:14:59] This was courtesy of Jon Kabat Zinn. He is a spiritual and scientific man, renowned for working with people at an advanced stage of human collapse, basically. And he wrote a book called Full Catastrophe Living. It was horrible. The whole experience was awful. It was all extended play mindfulness and achingly slow exercises.

[00:15:23] He is actually quite irritating to me. Type A people, please don't feel that this is required. But still, I was committed. I followed his process to basically rehab back from the edges of function. And I had stuff all else to do, so I started researching burnout recovery from my sofa. The car that hit me, hit me two weeks before the final exam of a two year kinesiology diploma, which was somewhat disappointing.

[00:15:51] I never graduated. But I had studied quite a number of energy healing modalities. And Eastern medicine before that. So fine. I thought, tell me what I don't know. And I began to research and learn and I made a bunch of new choices for myself. And I'm going to tell you some of them that I made because they have all been part of the solution of burnout for me.

[00:16:13] So I decided to invest in self relationship. Wasn't being very good to myself. So self relationship, kindness to self. A reduction in self criticism and self neglect. And to do that, I chose to generate more self belief. So I chose to find myself good enough as I stand, or in my case, lie.

[00:16:36] And I gave up waiting to be rescued. This is a big one, I think. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's spent much of life waiting to be rescued. I gave it up. It's not going to happen. I also dealt a little bit with hope and fear, and I studied quite a lot of Buddhism, which is very helpful in this regard. Their principles are very much about reducing hope and fear and living a life in the present moment.

[00:17:00] And at the same time, I could see I needed to change my beliefs, so I needed to start being really blunt and honest with myself.

[00:17:07] You might want to try this one too. It wasn't just about facing the ugly truths about myself and finding all the good parts. It was also about giving away my excuses for doing nothing and staying stuck. Reclaiming my self responsibility and through that my power. All the power I've been giving away, seeing other people's needs as more important to meet than my own.

[00:17:33] It's really, it turns out, quite hard for the world to crush a person if they don't think they deserve to be crushed. I declared myself enough, and I created a sense of safety in the present moment. So I could stop trying to force other people to create that sense of safety for me. And when I did that, I stopped needing to control the universe just to calm my nerves.

[00:18:00] The inescapable pain and fear I realised were coming from my own brain. This relentless self judgement. So I had to let go, live in the now. If I didn't want to live in burnout anymore, I had to turn off the flamethrower. Get present on my damn sofa. Notice that now is always okay. It's always workable.

[00:18:22] Once I aim for this underpinning kindness to myself. When I create safety inside, then the external world becomes much more manageable. So that's a shopping list, but one of the reasons I touched on those things is because a lot of them are what I teach now in burnout recovery, and turns out they work for everybody .

[00:18:41] Anybody who's suffering those conditions can recover from them. So it worked well for me and it continues to really help my being flourish more and more, right up until now. And I've added on, of course, many insights over the years, but those are the fundamentals that I see. And I distilled the things that I learned into a burnout recovery program, and it showed me that the initial recovery from the thicket of burnout is quite quick.

[00:19:12] Once I'd refined it all down, the method I use now produces a transformation within three months in people for whom burnout is the main problem. And I should add that although my burnout shut down was in 2017, in 2011, I also had a crunch point. I had many, in fact, but 2011, I had one where I was going off the rails really.

[00:19:34] And at that time I decided to straighten myself out a bit, which really entailed caring for myself by stopping hanging out with self destructive people, starting to take practical care of myself at a much higher level, nutrition, sleep, alcohol, spirituality, that kind of thing. I took myself in hand. 

[00:19:53] So in 2011 I declared it my year of letting go and I did that because I realized that my M. O. wasn't working very well. Oddly, that year of letting go was only modestly successful. I did feel better, but not as good as I wanted. And it turns out that DEXs aren't so good really at letting go. And also I didn't get a lot of help.

[00:20:18] So 2012 was also my year of letting go. So was 2013 and 2014. In fact, every year between then and now. I gave up on reaching the end of that project. However, every successive year was better than the last in some way or ways. And punctuated as that era was with various disasters and illnesses and failures on my part, I did get around to working out my troubled relationship with my parents and that changed a lot.

[00:20:49] But then in 2018, I finally found out how to recover properly from burnout and I packed the flamethrower away for good. Things took a big turn for me. I began to understand the mechanics of joy as opposed to pleasure. I think of pleasure now as an empty, fleeting indulgence, whereas joy is fundamental, soul feeding, richly rewarding.

[00:21:17] I actually read a book called Joy on Demand. Quite why I needed to do that after studying Buddhism for 20 plus years is anybody's guess, but still I did. And I learned from that how to create the feelings that I wanted. It's about how to create joy. On demand, oddly, yes. I found evidence in myself that my pilot light was always on.

[00:21:39] That I didn't need other people to keep relighting it for me. I found more and more parts of me that held up to the light, glittered and shone a bit. In a modest way, but in a pleasing way. A reassuring way. Slightly twinkly. Enough for me to crack a smile. Turned out that tender little pilot light was enough.

[00:22:01] I don't need a raging inferno to feel warm. I'm reminded here of lepers standing too close to the fires, because they lose their ability to feel heat. That used to be me, I used to run very cold, like a lizard. Funny, now, I'm ketogenic, I run quite a bit warmer. For the one listener who's still listening, probably because they're replacing the sump on their tractor, too far from their device to be able to turn it off.

[00:22:27] For you then, I'm getting to the good bit, it's all yours. Although even then, if you don't like the woo, get a rag, wipe off your hands and tune out now. Okay? I'm sharing this next part with you because I now see that people are energy. The world is energy, quantum physics if you like. You could choose to believe this too, and it might work out tops for you.

[00:22:52] Because getting bogged down in a world of matter makes changing anything at all terribly slow or impossible. For example, your boss or your industry. Whereas with energy, unlimited potential is available right now. Time, distance, matter are really not relevant to your results. Hold that thought. Or just ask Dr.

[00:23:17] Joe Dispenza, he's a scientist.

[00:23:19] His learning, his moment came when he had a spinal injury during a triathlon. His bike got hit by a car, like me. And he cured it by himself, with energy. Google it if you want to learn more. And, quantum physics is a bit beyond me, but it did help me accept some truths that, as a highly sceptical, analytical Type A person, I had found it pretty hard to believe.

[00:23:45] Head like concrete, what I know is the only truth. Hard to shake that off for me, but here's a clue for you to ponder. For burnout recovery to really take effect in you, you have some beliefs to unbelieve.

[00:24:01] So back to this weekend when my higher power dropped in to say hello. I'm laughing because I've never had a tangible higher power before. One you could talk to. Yet here he is. He tells me I've passed all the tests, whatever that means. And I knew he was around because I had, I Will Wait by Mumford and Sons on the brain for days.

[00:24:25] Louder and louder. And when I get songs on the brain, it always turns out to be my subconscious trying to tell me something. But this time, surprise, higher power. So I said, okay, what is it you're waiting for me to do? Long and short, he showed up to explain. Very chummy, quite amused by the whole thing. Gave me a bit of a pat on the head, said, Good boy, you've been diligent with the letting go.

[00:24:50] You've tried to be decent. You've passed the test. It's enough now. Relax, you're there. Things will be easier now. No more doing things the hard way. And by the way, you're going to live until 72, and that's going to be fine. So don't worry about a thing. I was really just waiting for you to catch up with all that news.

[00:25:09] So I'm floored by this, and my subconscious is too, because that night I had a dream about a mother duck with some ducklings, and the mother duck died, and the ducklings were dying too, and I tried everything to save them, distraught, I was desperate,. But they all died. And the people around me didn't seem too fussed, but I was devastated, and I asked my inner self what that dream was all about.

[00:25:36] And 16 year old me, because energy, right? Pipes up that I can't afford hope. I can't afford to believe that things will get better in case they don't, because I'm just not that strong. And I realized that this refusal to hope and the refusal to deserve more had driven me for the whole of my life. It's almost my theme song.

[00:26:01] It's how I kept my own head underwater, and drove myself into burnout. Never daring to believe that I could or would have better. So I got up out of bed, took myself down to the water, and I listened to the birds and I watched the sun coming up and the water lapping in. And even though nature's my constant joy, I don't think I've ever really felt such a deep contentment as that little visit to the beach.

[00:26:27] The contentment was really in having that moment, and knowing that it wouldn't last, and that it didn't need to. And as I was preparing to record this episode, I had Spotify playing random songs that I didn't know, and We Have All The Time In The World by Louis Armstrong came on as I was thinking that thought.

[00:26:49] Get out of town. Anyhow, look, this has been the longest Shaggy Dog Story episode I think I've ever made. Thank you for listening, like the wee gem that you are. I hope something in there was what you needed to hear. If you're in burnout, indeed, if you're a human, know that there isn't a single thing fundamentally wrong with you, even though once someone suggested there was.

[00:27:11] And you were a kid and you believed them. But there isn't. If you've been trying to turn off the tap of the real you to appease others, please don't. You're good. You're a unique and special flavour of good by design, meant to take up exactly your amount of space on this planet. Not to be ashamed and cowed.

[00:27:32] I wish you better. And maybe there's someone trying to tap you on the shoulder and offer you love. You never know. If you're in burnout, it's fixable. I invite you to come and talk to me for free and let's make a plan for you to recover quickly and sustainably and get back to your best performance,

[00:27:50] leadership, success, belonging and enjoyment, inside work and out. You can find me at DexRandall. com If you enjoyed this episode, and why wouldn't you, I know I have, please help me reach more people in burnout by rating and reviewing the podcast and by sharing the podcast with your friends who are stressed or in burnout.

[00:28:12] Feel welcome to text me your thoughts as well via the link in the show notes.