I'm Effie, a life coach who profoundly gives a fuck about
you feeling better for good. I teach people how to cut the
crap and live according to their own rules.
It's a crime we don't learn this stuff in school, but it's
simpler than you think to break the pattern and start living the
life you want. Listen on to find out how.
Well, Hi and welcome to episode 85.
We're going to be talking about burnout, breakdowns and
breakthroughs and how when things fall apart, it is a big
opportunity that we don't tend to see as opportunity.
We tend to see it as a major liability.
So today I want to unpack why so many brilliant women hit that
wall and why it's not a sign you failed.
It's a sign you're being invited to rebuild differently.
It's an invitation because the goal isn't to bounce back.
Typically when we have a burnout or a breakdown, we think, oh, I,
I got to be able to bounce back or I got to come back and, and,
and prove myself. But that's not what we're doing
here. The goal really, as I see it, is
to come back better aligned, clearer, and a hell of a lot
more honest. So in this episode, I'm going to
show you how burnout and breakdown can be breakthrough in
disguise if you let it. So whether it's that little
fizzle you feel on your way to burnout or a full on Roman
candle, you're going to know exactly what it looks like to
mine the gold out of a crisis and come out ahead.
So if you are one of those superwoman who prides herself on
holding it all together, but you know you're at risk of cracking
under the pressure or maybe you are already capsizing, stick
around. This one's for you.
This is the third installment in an 8 episode series I'm doing on
reinvention. I'm so excited to deliver it to
you. Just so you know, episodes will
be coming out twice a week until further notice.
And I have a very special offering coming up for you in
December that I will be announcing right here on the
podcast. So make sure you are following
the show and that you're tuned in to every episode.
All right, let's dive in. So First things first, it's
really important to understand the burnout arc, and your own
arc is going to be a version of this, so take note on how it
shows up for you. But the general sequence that
happens that leads to a grand burnout or a breakdown is that
you're at more or less peak performance, meaning you're
executing at a high level, maybe even a higher level than you've
ever have before. So your capacity has expanded,
meaning you have pushed up and maybe even passed the limits of
what you believed was possible for yourself.
And that period of peak performance gives way to silent
depletion. This is a contraction where, for
example, small things start to feel taxing, you start to build
little resentments and or yourself care falls off.
And then that after a period of incubation that can be shorter,
it can be more prolonged, leads to a crash, an inevitable crash.
And we all know what that feels like.
It's a breaking point clear as day where it's like, I cannot
keep this up, this is not sustainable.
So you stop spinning all the plates in the air as diligently.
One falls and then another and another.
Maybe you thought you were being diligent, but then something
comes crashing down. Sometimes they all come crashing
down at once, and then if you let it, the crash leads to
clarity. It's really hard to see clearly
until you're regulated from the crash.
That's one of the things that I help with as a coach.
But once we take the edge off and soften some of your more
toxic thoughts and feelings around the crash, cause
typically there's shame, embarrassment, guilt, grief, a
lot of kind of big emotions all wrapped up around that.
But once we have taken the edge off, we can evaluate, we can
study your unique burnout cycle and look for the opportunities.
Where was the moment when things started to slip?
What was the stimulus? What were the warning signs or
the red flags of a burnout on its way, if there were any?
What were the symptoms of your silent depletion and what were
they trying to communicate to you?
Were you aware of their presence at the time, and if so, how did
you respond? Did you work through any of them
successfully? If so, how?
And finally, knowing what you know now, what would you do
differently? What did you learn about
yourself and how can we use that?
How and where can we interrupt the burnout arc to cushion your
fall next time, or prevent it altogether 'cause really,
breakdowns are information. They're your system saying
something needs to change. And a really helpful analogy is
getting sick. Like your body is going along,
doing its thing, performing well, you know, more or less
optimally and you're enjoying life.
And maybe you stay up late and miss out on your full 7 hours of
sleep, like, I don't know, two or three nights in a row.
Or you're so busy you forget to eat a couple days.
Not, not that you haven't eaten for a couple days, but you know
what I mean. You start like missing meals
here and there or pushing things and you become vulnerable.
Then there's a breach in your immune system and you get the
signs, that little scratchy throat and that kind of achy
feeling in your shoulders. So you drink some extra water,
but you otherwise ignore it. You tell yourself, you know
what? No, I I don't have time to get
sick. Not happening.
And you just keep moving through your week at your normal clip,
but before you know it, you're flat on your ass with a case of
strep throat so bad it feels like razor blades every time you
swallow right. This is your body delivering a
message, a very clear message that says it's time for you to
slow down. Now, I know you had other plans,
but we need to conserve our energy to fight this infection.
And we're going to make it really hard for you to betray us
this time, which is not a bad thing.
You know, no matter how well you take care of yourself, sometimes
you will get sick. What if that's just part of the
cycle of being alive? I call this up cycle and a down
cycle. They're very normal aspects of
being alive. So just because you have a down
cycle after a period of peak performance, that doesn't mean
that you've burnt out or that you're having a breakdown.
We're talking about the more extreme where you've actually
neglected some of your self-care and some of the warning signs
along the way. And one thing about peak
performance is you know it's a wonderful thing to challenge
yourself to grow and to push beyond self-imposed limitations,
to blow your own mind with what's possible and what you're
really capable of. I am all for that, and this can
only happen by challenging your capacity.
But when the need to achieve becomes more important than your
well-being, it's time to reassess as most women in the
Western world have been socialized to push past our
boundaries for the quote UN quote greater good.
And when we do, when we do this, it's almost a compulsion for
many of us. When we do that and end up
crashing as a result, we actually feel guilty for being
compromised, for being out of the workplace.
This happens for a lot of us when we get sick, we think that
we shouldn't or we think that we should like be at work even
though we're sick. That's why you have such an
issue with like my school right now, my kids school is giving
out awards for like perfect attendance and stuff.
And I'm like, well, you know, that's it's great for kids to
have good attendance, but are you encouraging parents to send
your kids to school sick? It is kind of a weird value of
capitalism. Is that, like, you just kind of
put up with it, you know, and you work through your pain?
So yeah, our mentality as a culture, I think, is just like,
let's get on with it, hurry up and recover.
And what I want to offer you is that burnout is a huge
opportunity. We just don't treat it that way.
But if you choose to see it differently, as a chance to
rebuild better and stronger, instead of just something to
bounce back from, how might things change?
Too many of us shame ourselves in our crash and try to catch
up. Make up for it, prove yourself
again, or get back to where you are.
But you cannot optimize your way out of misalignment.
Your breakdown, if it's truly a breakdown and not just a blip in
the radar, Your breakdown is your teacher, and she's got some
really important wisdom for you. So stop skipping class.
We don't want to skip this part, OK?
When you do, you miss out on all of the valuable learning that's
just waiting there for you. You don't capture the gold.
So what I would love for you, for me for for all of us is to
normalize hitting a wall as the beginning of true self
leadership. If you take it as that, you will
become so much freer and much more powerful in your life.
And I want to give you some examples of this.
First, let me tell you about Sally.
OK, Sally's marriage was breaking down, and I don't mean
it a little bit. I mean like actively in a
breakdown. And she was seriously
questioning if she should stay or go.
Now she was getting individual help.
She was also getting help in a combined capacity.
So with her husband, they were getting couples counseling and
he was getting help on his own. And there were some encouraging
signs, mainly that her husband was owning his bullshit.
He was committed, he didn't want the marriage to end.
And she had started to see some changes in his behavior that
were good. You know, her brain still told
her it was a little too little, little too late, but change was
happening. She had to acknowledge, too,
that she had her own shit that she was working through, even
though he's the one that really fucked up.
And she also had to acknowledge that the difficulty level was
really high in this moment. She was having a hard time
letting go of hurt and blame and resentment, and the answer to
her wasn't clear. But then she started thinking of
it differently. She thought, OK, I'm going to
have to deal with my stuff with or without him.
I'm going to have to go through my own healing process, whether
it's alongside him or not. So that that's a given.
And from there, it seemed to her there were three options.
Of course there's an option not to do your work, but she was
committed to doing her work. So the three options that she
saw for herself were A, do this work with him, meaning in tandem
alongside. So I've got my work, he's got
his work, and we have our work together, but we're doing it as
a team, as a committed unit. B do the work with myself, by
myself and or C do this work with my next partner.
Because wherever I go, there I am.
If I'm on my own, it's going to be challenging in certain ways.
My baggage comes along with me. If I'm in a relationship, that's
going to be challenging in other ways, maybe some of the a lot of
the same ways actually, but my baggage is going to come with me
and lots of different kinds of baggage in Sally's case.
So she started asking herself more helpful questions from
there instead of should I go and what does that mean about me?
If I stay, can I even do this? She asked herself, Am I willing
to do the work to create an incredible relationship?
Do I want a relationship? And if so, am I willing to do
the work to create an amazing one?
What's the context I want to do this work in?
Cause for her, the answer was yes, I do want to be in a
relationship. I do want to be partnered.
So she asked herself, what's the context I want to do this work
in? Do I want to do it with him or
do I want to do it with the next guy?
Or for a time? Do I want to do it alone, having
let go of this marriage? Or maybe, you know, be separated
or just flat out single? And she asked herself the most
powerful question of all. And that is, what would I do if
I could be happy anyway? If I could be happy with any
decision? And when Sally asked herself
that, almost immediately her choice became crystal clear.
She decided to stay. That was what she decided was
right for her. And when she decided to stay,
she did it powerfully because a lot of people decide to stay and
it's begrudgingly, and they really hold a lot against their
partner and make the work so much more complex and difficult
than it needs to be. So she decided to stay, knowing
there was plenty of work to do and loving her reasons for
choosing to do it with the man she had history with.
So anchoring into this version of herself, she wasn't afraid of
future breakdown because she knew she would be able to find
clarity, take responsibility for her part, and make powerful
decisions for herself. It's going to be hard one way or
the other, but this was the problem set that she chose and
she loved her reasons for choosing it.
And I want to point something out here is that lots of women
and lots of people just in general want to blame their
circumstances, which we can call the stimuli or scenery of their
life as the reason they can't be happy, as the reason they can't
feel better. The reason they can't trust, the
reason they can't be free, can't get ahead, whatever it might be.
This is very common thinking in the silent depletion and the
crash phases. So performance has started to
wane, most often because we stopped taking care of ourselves
or we abandoned our boundaries and we get caught up in
unhelpful behavior like people pleasing or trying to prove
ourselves. We're trying to keep up and it's
challenging. It's really challenging to pause
and examine our own thinking and behavior as being potentially
destructive or at least unhelpful and optional.
It's so much easier to say, oh, I have to burn the candle at
both ends because of my boss, because of the demands of this
job, because of my husband, because of my family, because of
this mortgage or the economy or the political climate.
And it's not like a change of scenery isn't called for.
Sometimes you might actually need to leave your partner.
You decide that's the best decision for you.
You might choose to leave the country.
You might choose to sell your house, but focusing on the
things you can't change, like the way that my partner is or
the way that my family is, or the way that the economy is, is
going to lead you down a dead end road every single time.
And for the things that you can change, like your job, who
you're with, where you're living, changing the scenery
cannot change your character. Sometimes it is a relief,
sometimes it's the right thing to do.
But it's an expensive experiment.
So if you're not sure, we work first with changing the
innermost things. You have power over your
thinking, your responses, your attitudes, and that clarifies
everything. Let's talk about how this can
show up in the context of work. I had a client, Stephanie, who
was burnt out, like to a crisp. He'd been having big time
anxiety, even panic attacks around showing up in her
leadership role at work. And it was so bad that she took
a medical leave from her job. And that's when she found me and
hired me. But she was dreading going back
to work because of course, she was telling herself that was the
source of all her problems. And for several years, she'd
been nursing this dream of maybe hanging a shingle as an educator
or a coach. So she told me, hey, what if I
either just don't go back to work or I'm gone at the end of
the year doing my own business full time?
And we explored that together in depth.
And she decided that with my support, she was gonna go back
in to her job with a different orientation toward it while
building the other thing on the side.
So it was, it was an experiment and one decision at a time.
She learned how to lead herself and her team at work.
As if she was the boss. She needed to learn how to take
care of herself first, then the business.
As a conscientious employee and an organizational leader.
That's what all bosses are anyway, right?
So as she did this, her anxiety melted away.
The dread left her body. She felt so much more empowered
around work. She started feeling fulfilled in
her work for the first time in many years, and fulfilled in a
way that she'd never actually felt in this particular role.
She discovered opportunities for coaching and mentoring certain
members of her team in a lot of the same kind of way she
imagined doing in a full time practice.
And she found that running her own business was substantially
more demanding than working at the firm that she was at.
So while she loved delivering the coaching, she didn't so much
love marketing and sales and back end systems and structure
work and all the other stuff that comes with being an
entrepreneur. So she organically started
feeling immensely grateful to have her job, along with the
seniority, flexibility and benefits that went with it.
Which really is a total 180 from where she started, right?
This kind of breakthrough is what's possible when you develop
the ability to mine the gold from every failure, every dashed
expectation, burnout or breakdown.
And this isn't just a skill, it's an identity.
When you work with me in a coaching relationship, I teach
you how to build a self concept that insists on extracting the
value from every hardship and turning burnout cycles into
growth cycles so you never have to fear the breakdown ever
again. You're going to know how to
connect to a new version of you. The version that doesn't have
the problems literally doesn't have the problems you currently
have. She has higher quality problems.
She doesn't have the problems that you have now, even if her
circumstances are the same or very similar.
This is profoundly life changing work.
And in December you will have the opportunity to apply for my
brand new reinvention program. This is a private coaching
program that I'm putting together.
I'm so excited about. So if you're in that blurry
middle where you're not burned out enough to quit but not
fulfilled enough to stay, you are exactly who I made this
program for. I cannot wait to share it with
you. So next time we're talking about
how to read the more subtle cues that it's time to change course
so that you don't actually need to get to the point of burnout
or breakdown to get the feedback you need to grow in big and
impactful ways. So stay tuned.
I will see you there. Until then, take good care of
your bad self. Give yourself credit for the
ways that you're showing up, for the ways that you're changing
the small decisions that you're making that are more aligned
with the person that you want to be.
And I hope you have a beautiful week.
See you soon. If you're ready to do the work
to move forward on what you want and actually get it, I can help
you. I'm offering my podcast
listeners a free consultation with me to talk about what
coaching can do for you this year.
Just visit effielavor.com to get started.