[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 coming at you from a sweltering Sydney today. Oh my goodness, it's hot. Anyhow, welcome to this week's episode on how to start feeling better when you are in burnout. And I think this is the most urgent need along with regaining energy, surely. So this one today, it's going to help you lift your mood, find a little bit more hope, and feel a sense of momentum starting to gather,

[00:00:47] as you learn how to beat burnout. And a really quick recap, the 10 power tools I'm going to teach in this series of the podcast are really the distillation of everything I've learned, taught, and coached on for the last seven years, condensed into 10 tool sets that you need to recover from burnout. For a deeper dive into any one of the 10 power tools, see the additional resources in each Power Tool episode's show notes or visit the Power Tools page.

[00:01:17] There are exercises you can try right now. There's also an e course, there's a study guide and a burnout self assessment, as well as a plan to get started on burnout recovery. And two episodes ago, back in episode number 155, I introduced the 10 Power Tools for you, so you can go back and listen to that to get up to speed to get started.

[00:01:40] And in last week's episode, number 156, Power Tool number 1 was about relieving suffering. A critical concept that in fact is the core of every power tool and everyone's recovery from burnout.

[00:01:55] All the tools in this series actually are designed to uplift your daily experience, so you can recover your energy, mood, enthusiasm, and finally your zest for work and life.

[00:02:07] So, building on the exercises for reducing suffering that start to give you back a little bit of control over your anxiety and mood, today we're going to look at starting to feel better. If you're burning out, it's the most urgent project, no? And the backbone of feeling better is going to surprise you.

[00:02:26] It's not about having less to do, or trading your boss in for a caring human. It's not about switching jobs. It's not about changing your own habits like sleep, exercise and diet. It's not about changing any other human or anything outside of you. It's really about discovering the wealth of goodness that's already inside you, abundantly available to boost your well being far more than you currently believe.

[00:02:54] It's about letting your mojo rise again, like the body returning to homeostasis. It's about championing yourself, your real self, because your mojo is still in there, right back where you left it. I don't care how long ago it got sidelined, how old you are, how awful your job is, and how entrenched your suffering, that pilot light of your mojo is still on, or you wouldn't be here.

[00:03:22] Yet you're not using it right now. You're letting your inner critic run rampant over you, with its incessant monologue of blame that hurts and defeats you so very much. So it's really about changing your perceptions, of yourself and the genuine wonders of you and of how things are, how the world is, how it's treating you.

[00:03:48] Because as the old quote says, we see things not as they are, but as we are. If we, to use a random example, find eating snails abhorrent, then we're not going to enjoy eating one. Our view doesn't just color our experience, it creates it. It's the same at work. If another person speaks or acts in a way that is not consistent with our own beliefs and values, we're likely to feel a bit of rising opposition and resistance.

[00:04:18] We might feel drawn in to correct them or persuade them to our view and gather other people around us in support of our rightness. We might fight them, avoid them, try to bully or harass them, or gossip about them. If we happen to be burning out, exhausted, anxious, and feeling generally put upon, we're quite likely to gnaw on this bone of contention for quite some time.

[00:04:45] Days. Weeks. Even years, certain that we're in the right, and let the bile that this produces inside us affect our mood, sleep, internal organs, and eventually our lifespan. Because essentially, when we oppose others, about 99 percent of the suffering occurs inside us, not them. It's the old thing of drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

[00:05:15] They've probably forgotten about the dispute entirely by now and are sailing gaily on, right? So, if any of that is even remotely true, can you agree right now that if changing perceptions will improve your state, you will suspend disbelief and try it? Just as an experiment. That's all I'm really asking.

[00:05:39] Just to find your truth with it. Because don't believe me, the question really is, are you willing to change in order to feel better? Because burnout recovery involves change. Doing what you're doing now will only create more of the same suffering. So really you can either be right or recover. So again, are you willing?

[00:06:06] The biggest predictor I found of burnout recovery in my clients is commitment, which I think has three components. Number one, the willingness to seek and accept help from an expert with a proven solution. Number two, the discipline of effort. And really, this is a professional attribute that you already possess.

[00:06:29] And number three, full commitment to creating change. If you have those three, you're teachable. And if you're willing, committed, and teachable, you can recover fully from burnout. Whether you achieve that by yourself using these power tools that I'm going to share with you, and whatever personal resources and support you already have, or whether you use this series just to open your eyes, to learn some new skills, and to come and work with me one on one to accelerate your results.

[00:07:01] Changing habits is a lot easier with expert support and guidance. I actually know how to get you out of burnout, but don't underestimate your power to create change with the power tools. That's why I'm here sharing them with you. So think about your year, how it's been for you so far. If you want next year to be the same for you, okay.

[00:07:25] But if you want to improve results, enjoy yourself more. You need to change your effort. In fact, the way I see it, you need to transform who you are being if you're in burnout now, and you'd like to recover and enjoy your life. The current you, in other words, the blueprint for you now, if you're in burnout will not create a different future.

[00:07:50] It'll just keep recreating your past. So what you need is some new skills.

[00:07:55] Returning to the question, will you demonstrate your commitment to improve your own future today, by committing to practicing the power tools that I'm going to share with you? Because they're exactly the tools that I teach my one on one clients, and I guarantee their burnout recovery. So go back and actually use the techniques I offered last week

[00:08:17] in episode number 155 to reduce suffering. Prove to yourself that it's not hard. It's just a bit unfamiliar. Prove that you will use the tools. So that's my pep talk. If you accept the challenge of commitment, Let's move on, shall we? To start feeling better. This week there are two tools that you need.

[00:08:39] Number one, self reflection. And number two, remodeling your responses to challenges. So number one, self reflection. It's fairly simple. It's just knowing what your mind is doing. Paying attention, listening. Most of our reputed 60, 000 or so thoughts per day are subconscious. Because the brain uses 20 percent of our calorific intake per day.

[00:09:07] And it's cheaper for our subconscious to recycle yesterday's thoughts than for our conscious mind to formulate a new thought. Hence, of course, the difficulty humans and animals have with change. We use our thought habits, the thoughts we've repeatedly had to get through all known situations in life, particularly as adults.

[00:09:31] And that's why we have learning, memory, and emotions. They support that system. They teach us what to repeat and what to discard in our daily patterns of thought, speech and behavior. Of course, we as animals are primed for survival. We seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy in order to survive. So pleasure includes things like food, warmth, sleep, shelter, sex, community.

[00:10:05] Pain that we need to avoid includes danger, accident, injury, illness, conflict, abandonment. And energy really means we eat food and don't waste effort. So our brains don't like to waste fuel having new thoughts. But we can be seduced by the rewards of chocolate or alcohol or social media. And we avoid excess work, strenuous exercise and the great unknown.

[00:10:35] All this to say then, that in order to change, it's good to know what we're doing now and why we're doing it. Something we don't often inspect, huh? Self reflection is the tool that we will use to do this. And we can start really to get honest about not wanting to talk to someone, or procrastinating on an urgent task, or ducking out for a cigarette.

[00:11:02] We can see ourselves and the choices that we make, in order that we can evaluate them. And self reflection really is a mind body practice. Becoming aware of what's happening in our minds, and as well in our bodies. And sometimes gently loosening things up , letting go of the stuckness.

[00:11:22] To allow a better flow of energy. And examples of the self reflection might be meditation. Might be massage or yoga or Tai Chi. It's getting to know yourself better and the processes in your mind and body. If you've already got such a habit, you'll already know you're in touch with your inner world.

[00:11:42] It will be familiar to you. But for other people, remember I said that humans are wired to avoid pain? Well, if your mind and body are in pain now, you might routinely avoid going anywhere near that. For every person I think I've ever met in burnout, including myself back in 2017, avoidance feels like what you do to survive.

[00:12:04] It's a way of blunting or hiding the pain that we don't know what to do with and can't face. It's a way of avoiding shame about our state, our perceived difficulties and failures, imposter syndrome, rage and helplessness and fear, blame and conflict that we might experience at work. For those of you who, for whom that's true, I'm going to recommend the following simple five minute only daily practice of self awareness.

[00:12:35] Some people call it journaling. I call it a thought download. So here it is each morning, sit down somewhere quiet and for five minutes listen to and record your stream of consciousness. You probably won't want to do it. So do this especially when your mind is racing, full of doom and gloom, where you're dreading your day.

[00:12:56] Especially when you don't want to. Especially if you have depressive or anxious or angry thoughts. Especially when you feel helpless and hopeless or just aren't in the mood to do it. That of course is when it's going to be the most beneficial. So to do it, take a pen and paper or your device, as long as you don't allow yourself to be sidetracked by social media, messages, news and all of the rest.

[00:13:26] And just sit and listen to your subconscious mind. Tune in. You might know your subconscious mind by another name, the inner critic. So tune into it as an observer. And for five minutes, simply listen to and write down all the sentences that your inner voice says. Whatever's running through your mind, write it down.

[00:13:48] You don't need to edit it, spell check it. There's no pauses, just keep scribbling. Scribble it all down. It doesn't even have to make sense. But most especially, no editing and no judgment. So don't use this exercise as an excuse to spin off into self judgment. Any thought is just a thought. There's no good or bad, it just is what it is, and we're just writing it down.

[00:14:15] And when you do that, what you're trying to see here is how your mind is programming you for your day. Recreating old dramas, maybe. Terrifying you with what ifs. Mulling on failures. Telling you you can't get everything done. Fretting about someone being nasty to you yesterday, or vice versa. Mulling on some family situation.

[00:14:39] Even wondering what to wear today, or fretting about some old injustice. Doesn't matter what your mind is doing, whatever it says, don't judge, just write it down. There's no wrong thing to write down. If your mind said it, write it down. And at the end of five minutes, stop. Your mind, of course, will keep going.

[00:15:00] It'll keep talking, but you can tune in again anytime you like later. What we're really going for here is a five minute sample. And when you get into this exercise, if you do it for a few days, your subconscious mind will realize you're doing it and it will use that five minute window of opportunity to tell you things it's been trying to tell you for ages, but maybe you didn't hear.

[00:15:20] So, let's say you've written down your five minutes worth of thoughts that pass through your mind, your stream of consciousness. Notice that whatever you heard and whatever you wrote down, you became conscious of it. That's really one of the reasons we write it down. Some of it might surprise you, but if you repeat this exercise every day for 30 days, for just five minutes, you're really going to get to know yourself a little bit better.

[00:15:46] And be in touch with your subconscious mind, which after all for most of every day is driving the bus of your life. So that's it really simple. First of two practices that will help you to start feeling better through reconnecting you with yourself, with what's happening for you, with what's on your mind, with what your needs are.

[00:16:08] Number one, it's really just self reflection and self awareness.

[00:16:12] Number two, remodeling your response to challenges. This is where it gets interesting. Once you've written your stream of consciousness down as this thought download, you'll have maybe a page or two of notes. So when you look back over them, does anything in there attract your attention as a problem that needs solving?

[00:16:31] Chances are a few things do. So we don't want to let those things sit on your mind and keep bothering you all day. So the next practice is remodeling your response to challenges. And we use a tool here called the self coaching model. And it works like this. Pick one issue that's been bugging you.

[00:16:52] Preferably a fresh one that happened in the last 24 hours if you can. And don't pick the World War 3 one while you're learning. Preferably pick a smaller, less emotive one to start with. And what we're going to do is write down and analyse how you responded to this issue at the time when it arose.

[00:17:12] And we do this to help you understand your own reaction to the problem, whether it worked out okay for you, or if next time you'd rather pick a different response. And the self coaching model I'm going to teach you in a minute, by the way, is based on cognitive behavior therapy, using the premise that the way we think and feel affects the way that we behave.

[00:17:34] And our behavior in turn affects the results we get when we're dealing with a problem, particularly. It's used in psychotherapy to work with depressive and anxious thoughts. And it works sensationally for burnout. Specifically, this modelling tool often provides a quick way to change your habits and can be practised swiftly at home or at work on real time issues once you develop the skill.

[00:18:03] I'm teaching it to you now because it's one of the most effective ways to improve your skills. Of uplifting your human experience at will. This is how you can start feeling better. So I'll give you a simple client example. And if you visit the Power Tools page or look in the show notes, you can also see episode number 46 where I further explain how the model works.

[00:18:27] But let's jump in with my client Jim. He said his friend texted him at 5pm on Monday. This happened to be while Jim was writing a very important email to his boss about the future of his job. The text said, tell me something good. And Jim thought his friend was really just seeking amusement, and concluded that he was wasting Jim's time, which made Jim angry.

[00:18:51] So he texted back that he was busy. Unfortunately, Jim then felt that he'd been a bad friend and that sat on his mind. It sounds like a trivial problem compared to, for example, the challenges of burnout, but it was very real to my client.

[00:19:05] Most human interaction challenges give rise to stronger emotions, and stronger emotions produce in us stronger reactions, and also leave a lasting residue of emotional backwash. So really, I think this was a great topic for a model. I would go so far as to say that most of the suffering of burnout, Is in fact emotional.

[00:19:32] Even when the issue at stake is functional, reputation, about your health or something. Life is all about relationships. And relationships are emotional. So, we'll go on to analyse Jim's problem using the model by writing down the five lines that describe the problem. If you want to write this five line model on your own problem, here is how you do it.

[00:19:59] Line number one is the circumstance. It's what happened out in the world, in a single moment of time, that Jim reacted to. In this case, the circumstance is "My friend texted me to 'tell him something good' at 5pm on a Monday". Now when we write down a circumstance we confine ourselves strictly to the neutral fact of what happened.

[00:20:24] Neither good nor bad, just what happened. We leave out any emotive words, judgments, interpretation or opinion. And we also exclude backstory. If you want to, you can write the backstory first. Or the context of this circumstance, whatever it is, in a thought download. That's one use of a thought download. But the backstory does not belong inside the model in circumstance line, because we'd like to keep the circumstance as concise as possible.

[00:20:54] Keep it down to as few words as possible, representing the fact of what happened in that single moment in time.

[00:21:03] We can really think of the circumstance as the part of the problem that is outside our control. Jim's friend texted him. Jim had no control over that. The pub test for your circumstance line is, if there were three lawyers standing next to me, would they all agree that the circumstance I've come up with is a neutral fact

[00:21:24] about what happened? That's line one, the circumstance. Jim's circumstance again was, "My friend texted me, 'tell me something good' at 5pm on Monday". Line two of the model is the thought. So when the circumstance happened, what was my thought about that? You might have had many. Pick the most important one.

[00:21:45] Probably the one that provokes the biggest emotion and reaction in you. And write down just one thought, one phrase, as short as you can. But use the words that actually ran through your mind. Don't pretty them up, don't edit them. Say it like your mind said it. And don't judge yourself for that. When you write down your thought, if it's more than one phrase, if you can see an AND, BUT, THEN, OR in what you wrote down, that's actually more than one thought.

[00:22:15] So pick the most important thought. There's a single phrase, no joining words, and discard all the rest. So Jim's thought was, "He's not entitled to waste my time". In fact, Jim too had a whole bunch of thoughts, but he edited the thought line in his model down to,  He's not entitled to waste my time". So line two of the model is the thought.

[00:22:40] Line three of the model is the feeling you have when you think that thought. And for Jim, when he thought, he's not entitled to waste my time, he felt angry. Typically the feeling is going to be one word, angry, resentful, confused, disrespected, or whatever. It's never a sentence. If you're trying to write a sentence down, what you're really trying to write down is another thought, not a feeling.

[00:23:06] A feeling here is the emotion that comes up for you when you think the thought. You may or may not feel this as energy in your body. So anger, for example, is often felt as rising heat in the body. Anxiety, on the other hand, is It's often felt in the guts, being burdened, in the shoulders.

[00:23:25] Maybe that resonates for you or not. It doesn't really matter for now. But really try to identify how you feel as one word and write down that word. Specifically, it must be the feeling that the thought you wrote down causes in you. Don't write down a mismatched pair like, If you had a thought of "He can't talk to me like that" and a feeling of superior.

[00:23:47] Not sure that matches. You might have felt superior later whilst explaining this situation to someone else. But in the moment when you thought  He can't talk to me like that" , your feeling was more likely to be something like insulted or outraged. Okay. Got it? It's a timing issue. So check with yourself.

[00:24:08] When I think this thought, I feel this emotion. In Jim's case, he might also have felt disrespected by his friend, but when he thinks he's not entitled to waste my time, he feels angry about that particular thing. So line three is the feeling that comes from the thought that you had. And line four is the action.

[00:24:33] This is whatever you did as a direct result of the feeling in line three. In Jim's case, his thought again, he's not entitled to waste my time, caused him to feel angry, which caused him to take the action of Texting back, "Dude, I'm too busy." The action line, in fact, is the only line that can have multiple entries.

[00:24:58] If he did several things, he could have written down several things there. In practice, when Jim was angry, alongside texting his friend back, he might also have thumped his desk, yelled, stomped off for a coffee, or whatever. Just the actions propelled by the anger. Not what he did after he calmed down and had another feeling.

[00:25:20] So line four is the action. Line five is the result. What you write here is the result that you created for yourself by the actions you took. Jim's result is that he made himself feel guilty for being a bad friend. Notice it's the result Jim created for himself, not for his friend, not for his boss who he was writing to at the time, for himself.

[00:25:45] And Jim quite possibly continued to feel guilt until he made a new decision, had a new thought, And took a fresh action to remedy the situation. So the model showed Jim that he'd had a thought which caused him to become angry. The text from his friend is neutral. A text that arrived on his phone is not capable of producing anger in Jim.

[00:26:09] Only the thought Jim had caused his own anger. And in this way we think the circumstance in the model is neutral. It cannot cause your feeling.

[00:26:19] So I think you can see from that model that Jim, as we often do, created a reaction that he himself didn't want by thinking a particular thought. And the real juices here is that once we think, once we see that we've done this, we can simply choose a different thought that causes a different emotion, giving rise to more useful actions.

[00:26:46] And creating a better result. In other words, a result we like better. We call this process neuroplasticity, of course. We can change our habitual thoughts to diffuse difficulties and produce results we want in our lives. We can change our beliefs and make new possibilities available to us in this lifetime.

[00:27:07] And that's what Jim did. He had a second go at this model, choosing a new thought to put in it. So the circumstance is still the same. My friend texted me, tell me something good, at 5pm on a Monday. The second go Jim had at creating a thought was, I recognize him trying to waste my working hours.

[00:27:29] Notice this hasn't changed very much from his first thought. But it created a feeling in him of resolve. And the action he took from feeling resolved was he delayed replying. And the result was he decided to give his friend a good response later. So although the change to the thought that he had was quite small, it produced a completely different feeling in Jim, from which he had more agency to take the right actions to create a result he wanted.

[00:27:59] By choosing how to think about this situation, Jim created a different emotion that caused him to behave differently and he was able to create a result he preferred. You too can learn to do this. This has really been a little brief introduction to what will turn out to be a quite nuanced skill. But give it a go.

[00:28:19] Amaze yourself. Understanding how your thoughts contribute to your own misery is gold because you can control your own thoughts. So if that's all you do, you're winning. And here's the final huge bonus. You might notice about all this, Jim's thought created his feeling. The circumstance was a neutral fact, meaning it could not of itself create a feeling in Jim.

[00:28:49] Jim only felt angry because he had a thought that inspired anger in him. When he changed his thought, he changed his feeling to resolve. So logically, this means no one can make you feel anything. Only you can do that with your thoughts. And you can choose your thought. So don't take my word for it. Try it yourself.

[00:29:15] How would it be though to exercise that much control over your feelings? What do you think will happen to your burnout when you practice this skill? When you even get halfway good at it, you'll be changing the trajectory of your life and your experience. And that's why it's number two of my power tools for resolving burnout.

[00:29:35] I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you're in burnout and need personal help, come and talk to me for free and let's make a personal recovery plan for you. Revive your performance, leadership, success, and most of all, enjoyment inside work and out. You can book an appointment at DexRandall.

[00:29:57] com. If you'd enjoyed today's episode, I'd love you to share it with your mates. This is how we can reach out to help more people who suffer in burnout. And as always, thank you so much for listening. Tune in next week for the next Power Tool number three.