[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 with you again and welcome to this week's episode on avoiding burnout paralysis. In other words, if you're descending into burnout, demotivated, pissed off, exhausted and hopeless, how not to let that paralyze you so you don't stay stuck in the worst possible place. It's basically how to find the hope, energy, self belief, clarity and motivation to get off the mark and start beating burnout, not just sit in the middle of it

[00:00:55] and not move at all. And before I get into that today, I got a message from one of the listeners and she says here, So curious, any reason why your podcast is focused on helping men? I came across it this morning and listened to an episode. Then I heard the intro and was dismayed that it was for men.

[00:01:15] I've been the sole breadwinner for my family for 22 years and I'm sure I'm not alone. Seems the risk of burnout for women is even greater than men. I do get asked this quite frequently, actually. And here is the reason why I work with men. Originally, I got into this because I could see that the suicide rate for men in Australia and in other parts of the developed world was worse than it was for women.

[00:01:41] And a lot of the mental health circles that I was connected with at that time were reflecting back because men, to some extent, are culturally expected to be the strong ones and not to need help and not to reach out for help. And accordingly, a lot of those male suicides were unexpected. They're not people who've been identified as being in trouble .

[00:02:05] And I feel very strongly that I'm able to reach out to those people who are in burnout, who are having a very difficult time of it, and help them steer onto a better track. And it's private, it's confidential, you don't need to tell anyone else it's happening. So I felt that I must help men. Partly because of that, and partly because in the industry of life coaching that I work in, almost all of the coaches are women.

[00:02:32] Anecdotally, I would say it's at least 95 percent women, some work with men or youngsters , but a lot of it is women working with women. And I felt that there was market saturation in that area. And so I teach a lot of female coaches to coach on burnout and that's my contribution to the female side of the market.

[00:02:55] I still mostly work with men because there are so very many men suffering silently in burnout and still stigmatized too much to reach out. Having said that, I do take the occasional female client if they fit the Type A professional behaviours of burnout. If you are yourself in burnout and you'd like to come and speak to me.

[00:03:17] Go ahead, I'm happy to speak with you. But that's why. All right, so coming back to today's topic. It really is natural for somebody experiencing burnout to feel highly demotivated and to just want to give up and stop trying. And if problems appear insurmountable at work, if you're getting up in the morning feeling groggy, fearful, disillusioned, trapped in your misery, it is quite tempting just to crash and give up.

[00:03:54] With the huge accumulation of exhaustion and despair that comes with burnout, it's really not surprising that a lot of people get into the middle and stop. And mostly for professionals, what that might look like is showing up for work mostly, but possibly a little bit late maybe underslept, undernourished, over caffeinated, probably unrecovered from the previous day or even the previous week.

[00:04:21] Overwhelmed, anxious, dreading the day and its problems to come, worrying about yesterday's incomplete tasks or fails, It's really likely to include a great deal of negative self talk, low mood, very low motivation and low confidence. So maybe then getting on into work, doing the bare essentials to keep the lights on.

[00:04:47] At the same time, probably procrastinating, avoiding people and meetings and tasks making very few decisions, spending a lot of emotional energy on being mad with your situation and with other people. Resisting. Complaining. Blaming. Justifying. Probably just inside your head, maybe out loud. Feeling trapped.

[00:05:09] Feeling helpless. Willing themselves to tackle the overflowing inbox that they just can't face, but not really getting there. Wondering what to say to people they've let down. Knowing they're going to fail again today. Arriving home demoralized and cranky and wanting to slump in front of the TV alone.

[00:05:31] So if you recognize some of those, if some of those are happening for you each day, Crikey! It's not surprising if you've lost momentum at work, that's a heavy load. And it's not surprising if you feel like giving up. But giving up at this moment, freezing frame while you're in burnout, won't improve anything.

[00:05:51] You can't rest your way out of burnout. Unfortunately, you can't take a holiday and have burnout go away. If you're getting stuck in the middle of burnout and you haven't got the motivation to do anything about it, really, You're going to get up tomorrow feeling equally desperate, which I find a very difficult thought to get my head around, but that's how I was in my burnout.

[00:06:14] I just never wanted to get up and go in and I couldn't get up enough steam to do anything about it. I didn't know what to do or who could help me. So I've got a couple of ideas today that might help you find enough power to take action, or at least make a decision about taking action.

[00:06:30] The kind of action that can change your burnout situation and help you move through and out of burnout. Firstly, of course, if you're going through hell, keep going. Don't just sit still because stalling now cannot possibly help. In fact, stalling is part of the problem. You're likely to experience a great deal of Negative emotion in burnout, including helpless rage, irritation, frustration, overwhelm, anxiety, and very many others.

[00:07:02] You're likely swimming in a sea of negative emotion and it's sapping your strength. If you're in the river of misery, don't stop. You must keep moving. And to keep moving under a burden of negative emotion, instead of blocking it, you're going to have to simply accept your emotions and feel them because blocking them is what's stopping you moving through, not the emotions themselves.

[00:07:27] So you're going to need to stop resisting and pushing those emotions away. Emotions have a function. They're there to tell you something's wrong and it needs to be corrected. They're a warning. Just like pain tells you something is wrong with your physical body. So ignoring the emotion's warning just makes it come back stronger and warn you again.

[00:07:51] The only way to dispel an emotion properly is to stop fighting it. Stop resisting it. Stop wishing it would go away. Stop distracting yourself from it, or acting it out and projecting it onto other people. Just accept it. Listen to its message and let its energy play out harmlessly, in fact, through your body.

[00:08:13] It's just a vibration in your body, a feeling. So if you can let it play out in your body as that feeling without reacting, without acting out on it, Then it will just pass through. Because if the purpose of an emotion is to warn you that something is wrong, it's got a message for you. And when you accept that message, when you listen to the message, the energy of that emotion can disperse.

[00:08:39] It's done its job. And that's true of even anger, even rage. Which, when they're blocked, harden into hatred and resentment. So you don't want to hang on to them. So when you release them, even anger and rage, if you don't act out while you have them, they just pass through your body harmlessly.

[00:08:56] And most of us are trained not to let our emotions do that. We're trained to resist and block our emotions because it's almost as if some emotions have been presented as acceptable and some have been presented as unacceptable. In my childhood, it wasn't acceptable to be angry. So I just ate my anger down.

[00:09:18] I never expressed it. I just chewed it like a brick. No surprise I ended up in burnout later. But scientific research tells us that an emotion only lasts about 90 seconds if it's unopposed. If we don't block it, then it just fades away. The only way it endures, in our mind, in our psyche, in our body, is if we resist it.

[00:09:42] If we block its message, its signals and its warning, then we trap that energy of that emotion in our body. And we can trap it for hours, or days, or weeks, or months, or years, until it causes sickness in us, until it weakens us. And a part of your burnout is the weakness of blocking those emotions because it takes a lot of energy.

[00:10:06] You might even view burnout itself as a collection of this energy. All the persistent negative feelings we couldn't face that we've got dammed up inside our bodies. Refusing to hear them, or feel them, or see them, until they compress and consolidate into burnout. I got a vision then of just this mountain of crushed cars in a junkyard.

[00:10:33] Being squashed down and down inside us. So really the antidote is simple. Accept all your emotions. Simple for me to say, not quite so simple for you to do, I'd imagine. The thing is, there's not really any alternative. If you accept them and let them pass through you, delivering their message and disappearing, leaving no trace inside you, you can learn from them.

[00:10:59] Listen to what they're telling you. What is their warning? What is out of kilter in your life that's causing you to have this emotion and then respond to that in your life circumstances.

[00:11:12] But for most of us, this will be true that we've been running from our inconvenient feelings for decades or a whole lifetime. Really just feel them. Feel them and let them go. Let them pass through you. And if you have an experiment with this, you will discover that those emotions of themselves can't hurt you, they're just energy passing through your body.

[00:11:38] If you simply watch them as the observer pass through without acting out, they can't do you any harm. If you're ashamed of your feelings, and this is quite common, I know certainly a lot of men tell me about this. If you're ashamed of your feelings, shame is a feeling itself, right? So accept and allow shame.

[00:12:01] You can work skillfully with shame in order to disperse that, and then it can help you work with your other feelings as well. So let shame too, tell you its story, where you've not felt good enough. What's going on there? If you learn and understand and respond to that, then you can disperse shame itself, as well as have access to your other emotions.

[00:12:25] So when the emotion passes such as shame, you just take wise action based on what you've learned. Review what brings up shame for you, and choose to release that shame and change the beliefs that gave rise to it. So we feel shame about ourselves. What is it about ourselves that we feel shame about?

[00:12:47] Do we really need to feel shame for that thing? Do we really believe that? Or can we discard that belief in ourselves? Because you're allowed to be fully human. And to be fully human is to have the complete range of all the emotions. It's okay to have grief, weakness, failure, uncertainty, loss. It's okay to have insecurity, embarrassment, humiliation, imposter syndrome.

[00:13:18] It's okay to feel less than. It's okay to have feelings. It's okay to be you. And the massive upside to accepting and feeling your feelings is with practice, your depressive thinking diminishes. Your energy comes back, your vitality, your determination, your belief in yourself, and of course, your positive emotions come back.

[00:13:44] When you stop blocking negative emotions, you invite all of your emotions back in. And in burnout, you've probably blocked so hard. You probably had precious little enjoyment, fun, love, compassion, excitement, fulfillment, contentment, peace. Because the depressive thoughts of burnout really are just the chronic pushing down or denial of negative emotions.

[00:14:12] And because of that, depression leaves us at best numb, lifeless and frozen with an absence of positive emotion. When you can give your emotions permission to be there, your positive ones come back too. This is the promise for coming out of burnout. You start to get your positive emotions back. Once you have freed up your emotions, and along the way probably done a little bit of a stock take about what they're telling you is wrong and what beliefs you have about yourself that led to those emotions.

[00:14:47] It's also extremely helpful to examine how you were talking to yourself about yourself. If you're relentlessly self criticizing, that could do with some attention. Because who, after all, can survive an endless barrage of criticism? Not me, I know that. But just imagine, If your self criticism went entirely silent, if your self criticism suddenly disappeared, how would you then relate with yourself?

[00:15:22] If you suddenly found yourself instead worthy, useful, competent, efficient, popular, successful, cheerful, admirable, what would change if the voice in your ear fed you compliments all day and told you you could achieve anything you want? I'm serious, just think about this in your own case. Could you stay in burnout if that happened?

[00:15:48] With such a generous and compassionate cheerleader whispering in your ear every day. Could you stay in burnout? I'm going to suggest probably not. So to move through burnout, You might want to examine this internal narrative of your inner critic because it isn't the truth. It's just what other people have over the years, particularly during your youthful years, instructed you to believe about yourself.

[00:16:20] So that internal narrative really reflects other people's insecurities and worries. Way more than it says anything about you. If our parents struggle with money, for example, and never have much in the bank, then they'll teach us to believe that we're going to turn out the same. They'll teach us what they know, which is how not to have much money.

[00:16:43] And they'll teach us not to amount to anything as a reason for having little money. Something like that. Or they'll teach us that we have to be a doctor or a lawyer to be okay. But half of my clients are doctors, and I'm tempted to say the other half are lawyers, but that's not strictly true. But you get my drift.

[00:17:03] Our parents pass on their failures unconsciously with the intent to protect us from those failures, and they pass on their worst fears to us with the intent to protect us from those Fearful outcomes. So really they're trying to protect us but actually it sets us up for those exact same failures because that's how we're going to believe about ourselves.

[00:17:28] We'll believe about ourselves what they believed about themselves and taught us. Inevitable. No blame here, of course. No parental blame at all. It's just how humans are. But it's good for us to be aware of that. Best intentions in a scenario like this don't always produce the best result, sadly.

[00:17:51] Every parent does the best that they can. But sometimes we inherit things that aren't very useful to us, and sometimes that can impact us later in life, in experiences such as burnout and many others.

[00:18:05] So we acquire this set of beliefs as we grow up. But our narrative about who we are and who we should be, they don't match. So our parents might tell us, son, you're no good with money, but when you grow up, you must buy a house for your wife and kids. Or you've got nothing good to say, shut up. But when you grow up, you need to be popular,

[00:18:29] so make sure you're friendly and impress people. There's a lot of those kind of mismatches in who we've been told that we are and who we've been told that we should be. And the gap between those two things is painful. In my particular experience, I found it painful. So you're probably acutely aware of your supposed personal deficiencies in this context compared to the definition you received of what a good person is like.

[00:19:00] Anytime you're scolded as a kid, this gap will have been reinforced. So think about your chart topping self criticism and your outlawed feelings versus your true nature, the one you hide from everybody else. What mismatch here is contributing to burnout, do you think? Because half a person cannot thrive.

[00:19:25] What do you tell yourself about yourself that fails the test, that makes you feel less than, that brings shame, and that cramps your work performance and success? Which parts of the real you have you had to hide or abandon to get by? What beliefs about yourself that you learned when you were a kid to gain acceptance are simply not true.

[00:19:50] Even if you still believe them, a lot of them won't be true. But when I ask you that, If you're drawing a blank, the tragedy really is in burnout, you've probably forgotten who you are. You probably can't even answer those questions because you've forgotten who you are and what you like to do.

[00:20:08] You've erased it. You're greyed out, running on one cylinder, not the four you came equipped with. And burnout recovery then is really about colouring you back in. Bringing all the good bits back. Finding the confidence and brilliance and wonder of the real you. Because your authenticity is who you are designed to be.

[00:20:32] And every time you erase part of yourself, vitality is lost. It's another energy burden you're placing on yourself. And burnout is, to a large extent, loss of self. No wonder it doesn't feel too good. So to transcend the paralysis of burnout, the first thing you need Is to feel your emotions. It's an act of courage and renewal.

[00:20:57] And I can help you with this actually. I promise you it will be a lot more fun than it sounds. Because you'll quickly gain confidence and the freedom to be. And then you'll start finding renewed energy and power. And the recipe for how to do this is in podcast episode 95, Mastering Your Emotions.

[00:21:18] Which I'll put in the show notes for this episode. The second thing you need to reclaim who you really are from the swamp of false ideas other people have given you about yourself that are not true. Because those ideas emerge as self criticism and they're poisoning you. Actually they're a bit like a boa constrictor choking the life out of you.

[00:21:38] Yet you believe them entirely. So the second thing is to review what you want to believe about yourself. And say to yourself in order to have a full life of love and fun and connection and success. And I can teach you this too. You're gonna love this bit, but you can also listen to episode 131 on childhood conditioning for how to do this.

[00:22:01] It's in the show notes. And the third thing you need is something to help you get off your ass and take action. Any action to start moving out of burnout. Instead of sitting stuck paralyzed in the middle of it, the paralysis of burnout right here, because You're demotivated and a little bit depressed, but if nothing changes, burnout will continue and deepen.

[00:22:29] It will not spontaneously resolve, even if you change jobs or you quit your job or you get a new boss or whatever. Burnout recovery is an active process that you alone can make happen and you must make an active choice to pursue that process. There's no winning the lottery escape. There's no knight on a white charger.

[00:22:55] I think it's an emergency when we're in burnout to start doing something different. Don't you feel that? And in my work, I make this as easy as possible for you. If you are totally fed up with burnout, make the decision to team up with me and I will lead you out of burnout. Just decide to come and talk to me.

[00:23:17] After that, I've got your back. I'll lead you through the rest. Because motivation usually rests on hope and self belief and energy. If we have hope that things will get better and self belief in our ability to affect the necessary change and energy to take action and create that change. if we've got all of those things, hope, self belief and energy, we'll probably start to take action.

[00:23:45] But in burnout, trouble is we've got none of those. Burnout feels like a hopeless condition. We've lost faith in ourselves and in life. And burnout itself tells us nothing will get better. So one of my first acts as your coach will be to help you develop enough motivation and energy and hope to make the changes you want.

[00:24:10] So you come to believe in yourself through burnout recovery in a wonderful way. That actually resolves burnout forever, because otherwise, if you're all on your own, it's going to be tough. You're going to have to find out for yourself how to develop the motivation it takes to believe in change, to choose change, to make change, and that's hard.

[00:24:32] And it's one of the reasons so few people recover from burnout on their own. And if you're relying on your organization to help you, that help also may not arrive in a timely fashion. Or it may not be particularly effective. So I wouldn't wait for that unless it's already working for you.

[00:24:52] So the other reason that very few people recover by themselves is they don't have enough insight into their own patterns, their internal and external obstacles to thriving, and everything that's happening for them that contributes to burnout paralysis. Most people can't see their way out of that by themselves.

[00:25:16] But that's the third thing anyway. You need hope, self belief and energy. The ability to motivate yourself to move forward and heal your burnout. And there is a fourth thing. Once you're motivated enough to choose burnout recovery, and start taking action, you have to know how. So you need to understand the dynamics of burnout, what it is, why you're in it, what got you here, why you can't fix it on your own, and what skills and techniques will get you out of burnout forever.

[00:25:49] And that part, my friends, is where coaching comes in, because I've done all that for you. My program is a fast track out of burnout that removes all of the barriers to success. Healing all the parts of you that need help, teaching you the skills to be resilient at work, any work, for the long term, and cultivating the compassion that fosters authenticity and your highest contribution, and as well your best relationships with people.

[00:26:17] And it renders All of life, I think, a great deal more pleasant. So do come and talk to me if you'd like help with that. Because if you're in burnout, it's fixable. I invite you to come and talk to me for free. Let's make a plan for you to recover quickly and sustainably and get back to your best performance,

[00:26:38] leadership, success, and most of all enjoyment inside working out. You can book an appointment at DexRandall. com. If you enjoyed this episode, please help me reach more people in burnout by rating and reviewing the podcast and sharing the podcast with your friends who are in chronic stress and burnout.

[00:26:57] Thank you very much for listening today. Thank you for the listener who sent in that question. You yourself can send me questions via SMS in the link in the show notes.