Have you ever experienced burnout? If you have, you know the pain that is connected with burnout. You know that it sneaks up on you, and before you know it, you have anxiety, you can't even catch your breath, you don't even know how to get out of the situation. You just know you want to escape. Well, I think we've all been there, and that's exactly what we're going to talk about today how to recover and prevent entrepreneurial burnout in today's podcast episode of the Resilient Faith Online podcast. Welcome, I'm Marissa Shatterick, host of the Resilient Faith Online Show. I'm a digital strategist and certified copywriter, but more importantly, a woman of faith. In this podcast, you'll find a biblical perspective to the external and internal challenges we face as online content creators. Join me for some inspiration and practical tips as we let our faith shape and work to create positive change online. To connect with your private Facebook group of faith-based online entrepreneurs, go to MarissaShepherd.com forward slash faith. And before I know it, it sneaks up on me, and I realize that I have burnt out. So we're going to talk about this important topic because I think many entrepreneurs can struggle with this. I've recently had conversations with people from different industries, from the medical industry, service-based business, even ministers that have experienced burnout, even people of faith that are in ministry experience burnout. So it's an important topic. And we're going to talk a little bit about how to first recover from burnout and also how to prevent entrepreneurial burnout. It's an important topic. And I think one of the things that makes burnout so terrible is that it affects every part of us. It affects us physically. We literally have no energy. We have shortness of breath. We feel anxiety. It affects us emotionally. We start doubting who we are and what we're doing. And it even affects us spiritually. There are times where we wonder, God, where are you in the midst of all of this? So it can really be devastating when we're attacked from all ends and we didn't really see it coming. We've been just busy and all of a sudden it's like an empty tank of gas. We just stop. It's a slippery slope. And you don't just burn out again in one area of your life. It spills into other areas of your life and it affects your relationships as well. We can't really move forward and we end up in a dead stop. And it's really hard to dig ourselves out of it. So not only do you have the anxiety, but the other things suffer. You stop enjoying. It's really hard for you to be grateful for things. It's almost like this filter is there and you can't really see things clearly. You stop really appreciating. Not that you don't want to, it's just you don't even have the energy or the desire. And you stop dreaming. You lose hope. And without a dream or belief and hope, you lose sight of your vision, of your life's vision, of your work and the things that you're doing. It's really a painful, painful situation to be in burnout. There's a great uh saying from Corey Temboon, and you probably know who she is. She's a Holocaust survivor, and she has this wonderful quote that says, Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength. That is so good and so true. I'm gonna say it again. Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength. That's Corey Tanboon. So we're gonna touch on this topic, and I'm gonna speak from just very honestly and candidly from my own experience. There's lots of articles out there, and there's counselors, and there's people that um can support people that are struggling with depression or burnout, and I don't claim to be an expert in this, I only claim to be a victim of it, and how I've been able to get myself out of that and also prevent it from happening again. But I journal a lot, and that's why I journal, and that's why I tell you to journal because it really helps me with the prevention of burnout. It helps me really, it's almost like a gauge where I can turn down or turn up depending on my emotions. I let that be kind of a trigger of what's going on in my thoughts and false beliefs and limiting beliefs. And if I do it on a daily basis, I'm able to kind of like check the thermometer and see how I'm doing. And it's really helped me in so many ways. One of the things that all of us need is we always need to be able to have hope in any situation. And when hope is jeopardized for whatever reason, whatever circumstance, that's when it becomes really taxing on us. John Maxwell uh puts it this way: he says, if there is hope in the future, there is power in the present. If there is hope in the future, there is power in the present, and that is so true. So when we think about burnout, you know, even in scripture, it it tells us to have a day of rest. God created the Sabbath for man, and we're supposed to have a day of rest. But even though we know we're supposed to have a day of rest, circumstances happen. Things happen that we have to give it our attention. Emergencies, just things happen. Our car breaks down, some home repair is needed, something needs to be done, a friend needs to get a hold of you. You know, there's things that come up that we don't really have control over. And even in the scripture, you know, when you think of the day of rest and having a day allocated to refresh ourselves spiritually, physically, mentally, even in Mark 6.31, it's uh the scriptures of Jesus feeding the 5,000. And I found it interesting that in these this passage, the intent was to go off and rest, but circumstances did not allow them to. So let me read it to you. The apostles returned to Jesus from their ministry tour and told all they had done and taught. So they had been gone doing ministry, they had been doing a lot of things, they were excited, they were reporting back. Then Jesus said, Let's go off by ourselves to a quiet place and rest a while. He said this because there were so many people coming and going, and Jesus and his disciples didn't even have time to eat. They were busy. They were busy, busy, busy. So as we continue to read, they're trying to go to a quiet place and rest. And it says in verse 32, so they left by boat for a quiet place where they could be alone. But many people recognized them and saw them leaving, and people from many towns ran ahead along the shore and got there ahead of them. Jesus saw the huge crowd as he stepped off the boat or from the boat, and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things. Interesting, here they were going to go off and rest to a quiet place, and circumstances did not allow them to do that. Now, I think this is a really good point because sometimes we try to talk about, you know, work-life balance, work-life balance as if it was linear, but work-life balance sometimes that there's just not any balance. Things are out of balance. And I think the main thing is not to have that be the normal, not to let it be chronic. There's some times where we have to put our foot to the pedal and there's things we've got to do because of circumstances, but it's not the way we're supposed to live every single day. We need to make up for that. We need to be flexible and pliable and recognize the times where we need to really bring it. Then at the same time, we need to make sure we put in our schedule time to recover from that. So as entrepreneurs, there are times when we're busier than other times, when we're preparing for launches, when we're doing some public speaking, when we're preparing for an event. And then there's other times where perhaps it's not as busy in front of people necessarily, like coaching or teaching or doing those type of things, but you're doing more of the back-end type stuff where you have maybe a little bit more flexibility and you can actually schedule it out and break it down into chunks so it's not overwhelming. But this work-life balance, I've always thought about that. And I thought, you know, I think what we need to do is be very flexible, pliable, always leaning on the Lord to help us know what to pick up and what to put down, and be aware that the compassion is what led, you know, Jesus to continue to minister to the people. He had their best interest at heart. And sometimes we burn out because we have our own best interest at heart. It's a little different. We're not really doing it necessarily for someone else's sake. We're doing it because we're trying to grow our email list or increase our revenue or whatever it might be. And maybe in those cases, sometimes we have to chill and really trust that the Lord will bring those things that we're looking for in its good time. Now, some of the things, now again, I'm speaking from a lot of my own personal experience of burnout. And, you know, I've looked to the scriptures and I've thought, you know, work-life balance, we can aim for that, but it's it's always going to be imperfect. We're going to do the best to recover when we have to give out a lot of energy and make sure that we bake in some time to recover. So a day to abstain from work was brought into existence by God for a reason because he knows us, right? He created us and he knows us. So how do you recover when work needs to continue? That's the tension. When I burned out, I couldn't just take off for a week or two. I still had to show up. I still had commitments. So how do we recover when we still have to work? Obviously, the workload is going to have to be tailored to give us some margin to recover. So one of the things that's really helpful for me is to get sleep. And I don't know if that helps you or not, but it helped me a lot to just get enough sleep and go to bed early and be able to allow my physical body to recover. And then that helped my mental state, and then that helped me to have the time to spend in God's word and just feed my spirit as well. It became like a domino effect. So let's talk first about some of the signs of burnout. I listed seven signs of burnout. And again, sometimes they could sneak up on you, but oftentimes we can tell when there's a lack of interest or motivation. So that's number one. There's a lack of interest or lack of motivation. And you may even resent your work a little bit, or you may feel like you're complaining more than usual. Maybe that's not you, but you find yourself with a lack of interest, a lack of motivation, maybe complaining a little more than usual. Number two is you have fatigue. You're just always tired. You wake up tired, you go to bed tired, you're tired in the middle of the day, you're drinking a lot more coffee because you're tired and you're fatigued. Number three is you're emotionally on edge. Now, for women, that could mean you can be on the verge of tears, or it could be maybe anger, you're emotionally on edge. In other words, you're reacting to all your emotions that are on rapid fire, and you're not really taking the thought and renewing the mind. You're just kind of living from one emotional moment to another. So you're emotionally charged. Number four is there's a feeling of hopelessness, and you gotta have hope. And when you feel this overwhelming sense of hopelessness, that can be a sign of burnout as well, because we do have hope in Jesus, but it feels that way when we're going through burnout. Number five is procrastination. When we want to procrastinate and think, you know what, I just don't feel like doing this right now. I'll do it tomorrow or I'll do it next week. I know I got to get it done. I'll just cram and get it all done in a couple of days. I just won't break it down and do a little bit each day because I just don't feel like doing it. So you procrastinate. And actually it makes things worse because then work piles up. The sixth thing is the negativity. You feel very negative because you don't have that hope. Hopelessness, you know, will trigger negativity in the things that you're doing. You may look at something and think, well, didn't work before, probably won't work again, and you're not optimistic anymore. You're pessimist, you're very negative. And sometimes number seven is you can be in depression. And depression is interesting because I'm not someone that suffers from depression. So I really, I didn't even know what that looked like until I burnt out one time. And I realized that I think this is depression because I I'm not usually, I'm usually a very optimistic person, kind of the Pollyanna kind of gal. But I noticed that burnout because of the hopelessness, because of the fatigue, you know, I was starting to get depressed as well. One of the things to do is to just recognize that something is off. That's why, again, when I journal every day, I never let it get to that point anymore. And that's the beauty of journaling and having strategic questions that you ask yourself is because that's my maintenance. That is my spiritual, it's my mental maintenance. It helps me tee up and plan the things that I need to do physically. And I track the physical activity that I do, the walking that I do every day, the standing that I do, because I'm trying not to sit as much at my desk. So I'm trying to mix it up. But if I didn't carve out that time in the morning to journal and ask myself some serious questions, it would be really hard to implement that. The application to be able to start coming out of it and also to recover from it, for me, this is what worked for me. Now, again, a lot of there's a lot of psychologists out there, and I'm not claiming to know, you know, psychology, but I know for someone that has gone through it a few times, this is what's worked for me, and maybe it'll work for you. The first thing, like I said, is to recognize either that you are in burnout or recognize the warning signs that maybe you're headed toward burnout. You have to recognize and be very honest with yourself and know that you need to make some drastic changes in what you're doing. The second thing is to look at the entirety of all the work that you have to do and take a good look at it. Maybe look at the past month and the upcoming month and look and see where your time is going. And I've had to do this to actually look to see what it was that was eating up all of my time. I love education, I love learning, but I have to put a cap on it and I have to have only a certain amount of hours a week where I'm learning. Otherwise, I can be on audiobooks, I can be on um digital courses, I can be on every webinar, I can be scheduling myself in learning so much that it burns me out because then I got to catch up on other things. And so a lot of times I will watch the replay of something simply because during primetime work, I need to focus on what I need to get done, and then I'll watch whatever training I want to watch. If it's still important to me, I'll watch a replay of it. The second point, you know, once you recognize is you need to learn to say no. When you look at your past month and you look at your coming month and you see where your time is kind of leaked out, and you need to include everything. And for people of faith, you know, their volunteer work is very near and dear to their heart. You need to figure out how much time, volunteer time you're gonna commit to. Because maybe you can't do as much as you used to do when you didn't have a business. And so you have to see how much time am I actually going to allocate to volunteer work? How much time am I actually realistically going to allocate to education? That means listening to podcasts, that means reading books, that means doing digital courses. How much time can I allocate to that? And then this is still number two, you learn to say no. You say no to some of the things that you know are not really needle-moving things that you can just put off to another time because right now, you know, the time that you've allotted is already filled up and you can't go beyond that. So again, number one is recognize first the warning signs or that you're in burnout. Number two is begin to look at your calendar and see where the leak is, see where you're putting too much time and start saying no to some things that are just eating up your time. The third is schedule your recovery time. You need to schedule that, whether it's to take a day off, because some people work seven days a week, right? Whether it's to take one day off, two days off, whether to cut work early and end at three in the afternoon, or maybe you're working 70 hours a week and cut it down to 40 hours, whatever way you want to look at it, it's easy to look at it by day, how many hours you're working each day, and begin to cut back and give yourself enough margin to get enough sleep and be able to do real focused work and the amount of time you've allocated for work. And so you schedule in there your recovery time first, because that's important. You schedule your recovery time, you schedule your family time, and then you look and see what you have coming up, and you schedule that in. So, number four is you need to reconnect with your beliefs. So if you're giving yourself some margin, some recovery time, that's a good time to get in the word of God, or that's a good time to maybe um read a book, an inspirational book, or maybe um a devotional of some type, or maybe even just Christian music. I've been so burnt out at times that all I could do was listen to really faith-filled Christian music. And that was healing to me because all I could do is just sit and listen. And that was so soothing, and that was like food for my soul. So you need to reconnect with your beliefs and whatever way that looks, that's not overtaxing for you, and start building up that muscle again so that you begin to connect to your values and your beliefs. Number five is to guard your thoughts. It's really uh important when you're in burnout to guard every thought that's going through your mind because your thought is going to stir your emotions. Your emotions are going to lead to choices, and the choices are going to result in action. So you guard your thought while you're this in this mode of recovering and assessing, you know, where you've done too much, you know, where you have to adjust and maybe change your schedule a bit. You guard your thoughts during that season and you protect yourself from negative thinking, from limiting beliefs, from uh self-deprecation, from all those things that can wear you down. And you use as much energy as you can to focus on positive and focus on recovering. Number six is you begin to create small new habits that will turn into a healthy rhythm. Small new habits. It's best to start with one. And maybe that one is before you work, you're going to pray, or you're going to listen to inspirational music, or you're gonna do yoga, whatever it might be. You're gonna spend 30 minutes or so in the morning journaling, being quiet, you know, develop one habit that's going to eventually become a healthy rhythm for you. That will help you not to get into burnout again. Maybe it's walking in the morning. Just one little habit that you're going to begin to do for yourself. And as you do that for yourself, you're going to be able to show up so much better for your family and for others and for the work that you do. Number seven, the last one, is to share your struggle with someone. Share, be honest with someone, whether it's a friend or a spouse or a colleague or counselor, if you're able to go to a counselor, you know, share the struggle and then share with them some of the changes, at least the first change that you're making to help you come out of burnout and prevent burnout. And it's a way of getting it out in the open. There's just power when we speak out what we are doing. It sort of solidifies it in our soul when we speak it out. We create it in our lives. And so when we speak it out to someone else, we're confirming to ourselves that yes, this is what we're doing. And I'm no longer whatever it might be that got me there, whether it's overachieving or taking on too much or whatever caused me to do that. And that's another thing, too, that you need to see why you fell into that rhythm. If you follow me in the podcast, you know that I had a lot of insecurities in the past that I had to overcome, a lot of fears, public speaking, writing, everything. I was just, you know, trying to overcome all those things. And so I work so hard to overcome it that I need to take my foot off the pedal and not work so hard at overcoming things and just enjoy the things that I have done. And now I create, you know, a quarterly calendar that I explained about before in another podcast, where I set one thing that I want to accomplish in that quarter, just one in a quarter. And oftentimes that gives me plenty of time to be able to work on it without burning out. It's really important to do that. Right now I'm working on a new training that I'm developing and I'm really excited about it. And it's, you know, it's a big project. And I just spend 30 minutes every day in the morning when I'm most creative, just brainstorming, mind mapping, and it is coming together so quickly without me overtaxing myself and using up my weekends to figure all this out. I think it's going to even be better than if I would have just focused and do it all in one sitting. Now I get it how people batch their work and I understand that. And sometimes that works, but sometimes it can be hard to block out hours to do one thing because there's only so much brain power and energy that we can put out, and it starts losing its freshness and its clarity as we're trying to grind it out in these four hours. And sometimes it loses something that it could have been added had we just done a little bit every day with a fresh mind and fresh eyes and be able to see things clearly. So you just have to see what works best for you. For me, it seems like it works better now to just work a little bit at a time each day and chip away at it. And I'm able to shape it like soft clay and get it shaped rather than just trying to chisel it out in a three, four-hour period. So anyway, here are the seven again. And this is what helped me. And so I'm just sharing it with you to see if it would help you. The first one is first to recognize the warning signs of burnout. The second is to learn to say no once you reviewed and kind of look to see where your energy leak was. Look at your past calendar and future calendar and see where is it that you're doing too much and start saying no. The third is to schedule your recovery time. The fourth is to reconnect with your values and your beliefs. The fifth is to guard your thoughts. Let your emotions be the triggers to tell you that something is you're not thinking right. If you're feeling anxiety, stop at that moment and consider what are you thinking? And that's part of the awareness process. And then once you do that, you can then see is it true or is it false? What is it that I'm thinking about? And perhaps you need to reframe those thoughts and align them to truth because your thoughts are going to trigger your emotions, your emotions are going to influence your choices, and your choices are going to end up being your actions. The sixth is create a new habit, something that will turn into a healthy rhythm for you, not only to get out of burnout, but also to prevent from falling into burnout again. And the last one is to share your struggle with someone, have someone come alongside you and support you or keep you accountable. And also, it's an opportunity to voice out what you've decided to do, and it kind of solidifies that into your soul. So here, this is such an important topic, and I know how painful this is because I this has happened to me twice. The last time was last year, like around summertime, about a year ago. And I made it a point to journal every day after that because it was so horrible and so painful. And I don't know if perhaps it had something to do with the pandemic. I hate blaming things on the pandemic, but it was probably my own fault, right? For and I needed to just assess every day what I was doing, practice gratitude every day, nip things in the bud rather than letting it, you know, just turn into a big snowball. So, in closing, Zig Ziggler has a great quote. He says, it's not the situation, but whether we react negative or respond positive to the situation that is important. So true. So we're we're always trying to find a healthy rhythm, but it really isn't about life balance. It's really by those moment-by-moment decisions that we make. And we need to align them to our values and truth. And God often uses our out-of-balance life to bring us into balance with Him, which is so beautiful. And He begins to do this, you know, just with a whisper, just by speaking to our hearts when we're still. It's important to be still and take that time to be able to be quiet and be able to allow our soul to speak. So you start with a single decision, one small tiny decision, a positive decision for yourself because you have value, you are important, and you need to do this for yourself. We stop managing everything and we start surrendering things to God. We don't run from change, we implement change for the good of everyone, for ourselves and for our family and for the people that we're going to serve. We stop trying to find our destiny, right? Our destiny isn't in successful business or money or status. Our destiny is to know God intimately. It's a journey that continues indefinitely, it's an eternal journey. We don't have to wait to live out our destiny. We can begin today, and it won't burn us out. So I hope that helped you today. I was really anxious to share this particular podcast. And I thought, well, I'm gonna have to just confess and be very vulnerable and share, you know, my struggles with burnout. And I haven't had it for over a year, so praise God for that. But I would love to hear from you. Um, I have now something new in each podcast episode. If you scroll down after in the show notes, you'll be able to see a little headline that says send a voice message to Marissa Shadrick. And it says, I would love to hear from you. And there's a little orange button that you can click and you can leave a 90-second question or a comment. So if you want a shout out, I would be happy to do that. So I will listen to some of those and I may play those. So it'd be a just a great way to hear from you if I can feature that question in the podcast and answer it. So thank you so much for joining me today. And if you are going through burnout, just know you are not alone. God loves you, He's with you. Um, just know that this too shall pass. And I think we become a little wiser moving forward after an experience like that. So I just thank you so much for this time, and I will talk to you soon on the next podcast. So take care. Bye-bye. If you found this podcast helpful, then subscribe from wherever you're listening today so you never miss an episode. Every subscription, review, or rating means so much to me. So keep them coming and share this with a friend. For more free content, go to marissashadrick.com and remember keep cultivating resilient faith online to create positive change in the world.