On your financial freedom journey, there will be various times in which you may experience some burnout. Alleviating this can be tough and could even deter you from moving forward with your plans. There are many ways to cope with burnout so it doesn’t become overwhelming. When you become savvier, there are ways that you can actually use feelings of early-stage burnout as a sign you are headed in the right direction, but you might need to make some tweaks moving forward. We will discuss that further in a short while, but first, what exactly is burnout and how do you deal with it?
What is burnout?
The feeling of burnout is unmistakable. It is when you lose motivation, lack energy, have a hard time focusing, and have a general feeling of wanting to give up. This is the breaking point for most people on their financial freedom journey. The feeling of burnout can be so uncomfortable that most people will resort to what feels easy and in their comfort zone. Burnout is not an uncommon thing, and many people experience it in today’s high paced society especially where I’m from (Long Island, New York). Those who have the drive and ability to move past burnout have one thing in common, they recognize that their body is trying to tell them something and they need to do something about it in order to get back on the right track. This can be done through many methods, and sitting down to brainstorm the pain you feel will help you create solutions.
Successful people solve problems
When you give your mind a second to get in touch with itself, you should be able to pinpoint why you feel burnout, and come up with solutions to remedy it. What most people will say is that they need a vacation, and while that it probably true, the problem or reason we are experiencing may be deeper than that. Successful people leverage burnout to grow their businesses because whenever they feel it, they know they need to take a step back and analyze their businesses and lives. This will help them pinpoint their pain and remedy it accordingly instead of going vacation and coming back to the same problems that you had before you left. Problem solving often comes from delegating or elimination of tasks entirely. Systems are what prevents burnout and without them you don’t stand a chance.
Delegate or eliminate
After careful analysis, you should be able to identify what is making you feel burnout. It is from this point that you have a decision to make. Are you going to delegate this or can it be eliminated completely? To determine this, it is important to ask a few questions. Does this task directly affect your ultimate goal (whether than be to make money or anything else)? If the answer is no, the easy fix is to just eliminate it as it was obviously a time-waster rather than something valuable. If the answer is yes, then you now have the job of finding a way to delegate it. This can often be done by hiring someone to do it for you such as virtual assistants and creating processes for them to follow to ensure it completed in a satisfactory manner. Developing these systems will provide efficient solutions to your problems, and automate your business or life-tasks that have been weighing you down.
Developing systems
Systems are crucial for sustainability. As you’ll learn quickly if you haven’t already, you can’t and shouldn’t do everything yourself. This is a one-way ticket to burnout that’ll make you want to give up completely. Systems need to be created for those tasks or activities that need to get done but don’t require a massive amount of skill so that you can focus on the bigger picture and not be faced with inability to scale and eventually burnout. A great way to create systems is through checklists. Write down the process of completing the task you are assigning and have the person you are assigning it to check each box off as they go down the task list over and over again. This will ensure they don’t miss a step and that everything that needs to get done is getting done. For example, if you hire a virtual assistant to cold call for you in your business, you may want to develop a daily checklist for them that looks something like the following:
- Pull a list of 100 contacts.
- Call them all and leave a message for those who don’t answer.
- Follow-up with the 100 you called yesterday.
- Record notes for every conversation you had and add it to the database to review later
This simple checklist has created a system that is easy to follow, and ensures that the VA knows exactly what they need to do every day to be successful at what they are doing. By setting these expectations, you are setting your systems up to run like machines. Perfecting these processes while refining and optimizing them is the best way to keep your systems producing the highest quality results. Use burnout as a tool to help you set up systems that ultimately help scale your business and eliminate tasks that don’t.