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. Dex here. I hope you're well today. I am recording this in December, and I trust therefore that you're looking forward to whatever your holiday season is gonna bring for you. And I'm having a bit of a change of direction on the podcast episodes from what I've been talking about. I've been mostly talking so far about the negative experiences of burnout, chronic stress, anxiety, frustration, exhaustion, people problems and all of those things. But today I'm gonna shift up a gear, and I'm gonna look at how we create the life we actually want from kinda the ashes of our burnout. Because make no mistake, if you want a new life, you're gonna have to become a new person. So let's think about it like this, if you wanna create a new experience in your life, without changing the external factors like your job, your boss, your workload, then you're gonna have to change the way you respond to all of that, the way you respond to the world, you have to become a new person. And when I think about this, I think about it's been estimated that, let's say we have around 60,000 thoughts per day. And almost all of those are subconscious, they're subconscious, because we've already learned how to do things, we already know how we're gonna respond to what happens from our experiences. So the brain uses about 20% of our energy, our calorific input each day, so it's pretty heavy on the juice. And as a survival strategy as animals, we're wired to seek pleasure, avoid pain and save energy. So guess what? Our brain loves to default to subconscious thoughts to keep us on track, to keep us alive every day. And those subconscious thoughts are what we call habits, that's why we like routine to save brain energy. If there's no kind of immediate survival threat, if we're not being attacked, if we're in a situation our brain knows how to deal with, we're gonna roll out the same habitual thoughts, the same behaviors, the same habitual responses as always. Because you never think about how to drive a car, right? And when you tap in your bank code into your banking app, you can do that even when you can't remember the number. Even when you can't consciously bring to mind the number, your fingers will just kind of remember where to go. So our brains love to take the easy way and just keep doing what we've always done. We know how to do regular things. We know how to navigate to a familiar destination. We know what to think when our boss drops a new task on us on a Friday afternoon, right? We know what to say when our spouse asks us to pick up the kids. We know how to fill when that guy in accounts wants our expense forms. And those familiar patterns, those habits, those skills, they're just really well practiced thoughts that become unconscious competence. And when we repeat habits over months or years, they become our personality. "This is the way I handle milk spilled on the floor." "This is the way I close my front door.""I'm a person who doesn't like historic dramas." "I get stressed when I'm late for work." "I'm this kinda person." Whatever we do, we identify ourselves with our habits, and therefore we become them. And the reason that's important is, 'cause we want to emerge from burnout, we're in chronic stress. And thinking about changing our habits is a pretty big ask when we're a bit flattened, we're a bit exhausted. So what we do is we've been tucking ourselves away in burnout, in a cocoon of our habits kind of comfortably, this is how I think about it, comfortably uncomfortable in a familiar stench of stale thoughts and habits and behaviors tucked away in this cocoon. And emerging into the light seems vaguely threatening and almost certainly too much bother. Change of any kind, although in one way appealing, seems overwhelming, impossible, too tiring to consider. We're in chronic exhaustion and desperately conserving energy, mental and emotional energy particularly. We're kind of worn out and battered, so we just keep going in our own unconscious behaviors, always creating the same results, the ones we don't like. We resist all kinds of change. And it feels like hell, it is hell. We want the world to change so we'll feel better, definitely not us. After all, the world owes us a better life than this, doesn't it? Otherwise, why are we even here? And while all that is happening, we've really worn down our self image. We think of ourselves more and more as useless, unworthy, valueless, helpless. We experience profound disappointment in who we are, who we've become and our inability to fix all these problems. And we talk to ourselves with increasing derision, don't we? Criticising ourselves at every turn. And in time we can begin to think, "Oh," that other people would do better without us, that our work team is against us, that style of thinking, the desperation thinking. And when that happens, we're in victim state, a state, when you think about it, it's a state of induced hopelessness, it seems hopeless, it is hopeless, we've created hopelessness. And I'm not victim blaming here, this is just what happens when humans run out of gas. When we're suffering at too much of a level, when we're too depleted, we can't think of anything else. We basically, we just curl up and hope it will all go away or that someone else will rescue us. And so if you're in that state, if you're feeling like a bit of a victim of everything, don't blame yourself for that. Don't be hard on yourself for that, there's no use in doing that, it doesn't help anything. But by maintaining that steady state, repeating behaviors that create suffering, I mean, it's not gonna work out, we can't emerge from burnout that way. So really the only purpose in noticing that we are in a victim state is to make a fresh decision, a decision to grow, to intentionally change, to create a new experience for ourselves. And that option is always open, we can do that at any time. No one can do it for us, but we can do it, we can always do it. And if you're in burnout, that possibility exists for you right now. Instead of being jammed into recreating experiences from our past, by repeating the thoughts and behaviors that we've had in the past, we can decide to become new, and that is the only way to make new things happen. If our misery comes from repeating our past, our joy comes from creating a new future. And in burnout, we're not experiencing any joy, it's inaccessible, right? But from recognizing, from clearly seeing our patterns that create results we don't like and purposely deciding to change them, that's where we create change. We aren't locked into responding to our world like we always have, we can think new thoughts, we can create a new personal reality that way. And in doing that, what we're really doing is creating a new personality, we become more than the sum of our old habits and beliefs. Neuroplasticity, right? We can think new thoughts any time, we can create new habits. And as I record this episode, I'm doing a goals workshop in about an hour. And the biggest secret to achieving a goal, if you're not historically good at doing so, is to create a new way of being, to develop a new relationship with your desires, with yourself, with your abilities, is simply to shed old habits and become the person who achieves goals. And I can say this as a person who's learned the skill of setting and achieving any goal, I trust that in myself now. And notice that any, any goal, it doesn't matter if I know how to achieve the goal or not or think I can achieve the goal or not, I just decide to achieve it anyway, and I look for the how. I create belief, I act on that belief every day, I don't entirely see how I'm going to, how my goal is gonna come to fruition, but I just trust that it will, I live in certainty about that. And I trust that I'm gonna keep going until I hit my goal, it's that simple. I'm really being the future self who's already achieved this goal. And I learned this skill through coaching, and I used it to become a person who no longer experiences burnout. If I don't wanna repeat the past, then I have to stop being the me from the past. When I believe in myself, I become the me of the future, I start operating from that place. So naturally my results come from that place, they come from new competences that I'm developing, I can kinda borrow that from my future. I'm creating a new future by already living from that future, bringing it back to now. And I'd also like to mention flow state, the state where we temporarily forget who we are. Isn't that how it feels when you're really in absorption and in concentration? You forget all of your surroundings, you forget who you are. We shut off actually, physiologically, we shut off the signals in our brain from our body from our thought habits, from our environment, we stop noticing all those things, we turn them down. We're really only paying attention to what we're doing. We're fully absorbed, we're in problem solving mode. We are the architect, if you like, of some wonderful idea. So we don't notice the passage of time, we've escaped our old world. And that's our creative state, that's how we leave the past behind and create the new. Creating new things can't come from our past, we must put ourselves in flow, let go of the past to make room for the new. And when we get into flow state, that's coming from our prefrontal cortex, our problem solving brain. We're in active thought now, conscious thought. And guess what? Meditation pushes more blood into the pre frontal cortex, it stimulates us to be in the now, the present moment. And notice that this is the creative state. We're not dragging our sorry past along with us, we're not anxious about the future. And meditation, because of this, it connects us with joy. Just as a flow state creates joy, the joy of creation, we kinda fall in love with our new idea in the creative process. In burnout of course we don't live in the now, we fret endlessly about bad things that we've done or unfairness and injustices that we've experienced in our past and also anxiety about stuff that could go wrong in the future. In the present moment when we meditate, it's almost certain that there's nothing wrong in the now, and we're certainly suddenly free to have a different experience of well being. And when we meditate regularly, when we cultivate a meditation practice, we cultivate our ability to be in the now and notice that nothing has gone wrong. We practice and strengthen that skill over time, we basically can become whole in that moment of meditation. And all of I've talked about today so far is, of course, it's the wisdom of others. I borrow and read a lot, and I stand on the shoulders of giants all the time, and chiefly in this case, Dr. Joe Dispenza. And for those of you who want a view into the science and method of letting go of an old life, an old self and create a new one, I very strongly recommend his books, particularly Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, and Becoming Supernatural. I've read and re read those books, and I apply the neuroscience of beliefs and behaviors he describes in my coaching and in my self coaching. There's a very practical, methodical way of doing this, and I've changed. I'm not in burnout, I don't need to be in burnout. I've created a new way of being. I haven't 100% left my old habits behind, I'm not godlike, I'm not special. I just learned a bunch of tools and I applied them, so I still have old thinking pop up. I just don't invest a lot of belief in it these days. I don't sit in here there. I don't think it's my reality. I basically have cultivated the skill in me, strengthened the skill in me of becoming the future me. And if you want to create a new you, I'm just gonna say, my Burnout to Leadership Coaching program helps people emerge from burnout, sometimes in as little as three to four weeks. It's a really reliable method. It helps people step by step, shed the skin of burnout and become the person they wanna be. And when you do that, you are in creation mode. You can create joy and well being. You can step up to leadership, performance and the deep satisfaction of working effectively with other people, connecting and rewarding in fruitful and productive ways. And all of that when you lift yourselves out of a burnt out past and create a new future of well being, it's gonna reflect in your life outside work as well, your family life, your relationships, and other parts of your world. So, if you're in suffering and you want to come and talk to me about change, I can support you in that. If you want to know the steps to take to create a new life for yourself, I can take you through them. I can lead you through all of those practical steps in your life, and that's what I have. It's a topic that's very, very dear to my heart. I really, really hope you take action for yourself if you're in chronic stress, burnout, exhaustion, and all of that. It is available to you. And thank you anyway, for listening today. It's been really great to speak with you. This is my passion. And perhaps one day it will also become yours. As always, you can visit my website, burnouttoleadership.com for the show notes. Please subscribe and rate this podcast, or just tell other people about it on social media, if you would be so very kind, particularly other people who are in burnout or stress at work. I would appreciate that very much, and perhaps as a way of paying it forward. Thank you so much. If you're in burn out and ready to recover, come and join my burnout to leadership program. You can book and to talk with me at burnout.dexrandall.com. Just tell me what's bugging you and let's make a plan to fix it.