Burnout is a common problem that has been normalised in a business journey by societal conditions and the history of building businesses. It’s a feeling of overwhelm mixed with feeling like you’re drowning and it’s becoming increasingly common.

I’m sure we can all relate to it from our business journeys but I promise you that having a calm, fulfilled balanced life while running a business is definitely achievable. It is something that we really do have to master because we need to understand that it’s not a necessary part of the process of having a successful business.

And I want to tell you why it shouldn’t be a result of working hard or any type of success.

The two types of burnout in our business journey

There are two main types of burn out that I see in the patterns of growth with different business owners. The first one is when you are in a place of growth as a business owner where you have taken on more roles or more income streams.

For example, because on one hand you feel ready and it’s been your decision. It sometimes sounds like “I’ve just got too much on my plate at the moment.” But ironically what we have to take accountability for is we put that on our plate because we are growing and we want that growth in our company whatever that looks like.

What I would suggest to you is that you need to learn how to prioritise. I always say to my clients that it’s like filing a cabinet as we progress and grow in our responsibilities and we build more income streams.

We need a stable mind setting our business and you need to tell yourself that you are not going to give in to fear. We have to acknowledge all of these things and prioritise them and we have to learn to be able to completely file them like a filing cabinet and close the drawer on some of them at different points.

This way you can truly focus on the ones that are a priority in that moment staying in the present for what really serves you. I’m not underestimating we still need to show up for the various actions but we need to work at detaching from the emotional energy that comes with them.

The worry, stress, fear, overthinking, frustration, racing mind as you lay down to bed. It’s normalised as ‘what comes with a business’, and it’s often easy to cope with when we first start out but leveraging a company will test you and this and if we don’t learn to quiet the mind you will lead to burn out.

Things changed fully for me and they do for my clients when they work at different strategies like meditation, yoga, being still, doing our own shadow work to see how we can move through our personal triggers and blocks always will help you find calmness in any chaos.

Learning to be patient is key

The next thing which I would recommend is to focus on patience. This is the hardest thing to do, especially for high achievers and entrepreneurs that can sometimes have a very chaotic mind.

The ones that are very creative, always full of dreams and goals, and most likely having 20 tabs open at once right now. I promise you that if you can’t master patience you won’t get anywhere because you will be distracted too often or you’ll have too many wobbly steps at once and you will fall and ironically if you’d be more patient one step at a time you would have got to where you needed to be quicker.

The best thing for you to do is to learn to be still and to accept that what is happening in the moment is part of the process. It’s important to also look back and journal, analise what happened there and how you can move forward better in this type of situation if this occurs again.

Burnout coming from the inability to say ‘no’

For my second version of the most common pain I see is which the business owner that is just full of gratitude and struggles with boundaries encase everything they have built is taken. The fear of saying ‘no’ or even how too…

Because of the gratitude they feel for their business growth they find it harder to say ‘no’. This comes from a place of fear that this could all go tomorrow and you are so grateful that you have pulled it off and gotten so far. You have now built up more clients, you have more customers and you’re getting consistent work, consistent sales and you just don’t feel like you can say ‘no’ anymore.

Most commonly all you are missing is a strong alignment. I see this happen most commonly with personal brands because you have evolved and you feel like you are a part of it. So you start feeling like when you’re saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a client or a customer you are responding to them from a personal point of view. What you have to do is to separate your brand from yourself.

This is also common with any brands in general as well so this might resonate to you even if you aren’t a personal brand. You have to separate and establish a separate entity because it’s a lot easier to talk on behalf of the separate entity and depersonalising from yourself the customer and the client.

Especially if they are family or friends. This will consequently allow you to be able to have better boundaries. It is especially apparent when you have worked with a client previously or a customer you know personally.

As an example some of my clients that I work with sometimes are in a position where they want to up their rates or they want to change the way they work, but they find it a very difficult to adjust. The skills to reset the bar. That’s what leads them to burnout so it is very important that you understand the separation from yourself and the business.

How to separate yourself from your business

To have a better understanding of the separation and to be able to really nurture that transition, we really need to understand what this business is without us. We need to understand what do you offer authentically in this company, what are your morals, what are your long-term goals and why does a customer or client require if there are a hundred different versions of you in your industry.

It’s so important that you can get back to yourself, this will also remove the fear and the lack around somebody not booking you or buying your products up against somebody else. Because you will know that what you offer isn’t the same as anybody else, if they are buying someone else’s thing or booking someone else, it’s because that is fine for them and when they are coming to you and when they invest in your business it’s because they truly believe in what you believe in or what your business has to offer.

The four level of consciousness

If you are my client or if you have read or followed any of my work previously, you know that I talk a lot about the four levels of consciousness. The thing is that we truly want to get to the third level where we work out of a place of power and a place of alignment.

A place of trust and trusting in the process that we really truly believe in our vision and mission in our business to get what we want to get to. It takes a lot of work because the second level of mindset is the place where you find burn out, the place where we can feel resentfulness, the place where we work or make decisions out of lack, or fear.

So you can see that now both of those types of business owners and sense of burn out all link into the four levels of consciousness. I promise you there is a way for us to move through the second and align into the third, so you don’t ever get this sense of burn out because you shouldn't and it isn’t something that we should normalise.

My best advice to you is to really understand when you are in a state of burnout as sometimes it can creep up on us without us realising. We move through the four levels of consciousness all the time because life happens and we are creatures of emotion, it’s a human experience.

So it will be impossible not to move in and out of the levels, but the best and most accountable behaviour is to recognise when you feel it. So you can process the emotion or event and move through it quicker and with more ease.

Why it’s important to learn how to avoid burnout

I often work with my clients to gain an understanding on how to pause and really readjust or realign what they are doing in that moment, to be able to move out of that level. The reason why this is so important as business owners is because if you truly want a life of fulfilment, ease and balance, you have to master this early on.

Going back to what I mentioned at the start, we have been really conditioned in business to live with this full masculine energy and to feel like if we are not working 12 hours a day we’re not working hard enough or unless we’re working every day and showing up and it’s at the forefront and we’re not going to succeed but that I promise you is all out of her place of old mindset and it is lack and there is no trust in that process all that highlights to me is that you’re not connected to yourself enough and this is really really important and it’s why I work so highly on mindset with my clients. A mixture of masculine and feminine energy will always serve us and is needed for a healthy life and mind.

I have learned all of this from experience of having a property business all out of a place of the second level of consciousness. There were sometimes moments of the third and fourth, but generally I was mostly in a place of lack, constantly being in a burnout hustle and high achiever mode, and none of that is serving in the end.

Because the end result of this is that you are left with feeling tired, resentful and overwhelmed. You are feeling burnout and you are not fulfilled. If money isn’t the end goal, and happiness and money is together, then If you can’t master this in the end you wonder what the point of this is and why I say it’s really really important that you recognise this at its early stages.

It all takes internal work and time..

You see now how this feels like there is a lot of work and I will be honest, I know that it’s easier said than done. This is why if you know that you are struggling with these things and you really look inward and you need support and help, it truly helps to have a mentor 🤍 I know this because I have a mentor myself. 🤍 And the reason why it so authentically aligns with me is because I built a company without a mentor and then I have built a company with a mentor.

And I see how it only elevates your experience and they talk you through the ways you can move through difficulties and to deal with them. I truly believe that every longevity business or brand has an army of people around them that are supporting the growth and I think as founders, co-founders or directors, sometimes we look for more resources or we look for people in our team as opposed to somebody overlooking us, and supporting us.

Supporting our mind moving through our limitations and pushing us through our boundaries.

If you feel like you are ready to move through your limitations or to have support or guidance in where you want to grow, I would love to hear from you.

With Love,

Laura x

How to overcome burnout as your business is growing