E13: Bouncing back from burnout
with author, podcast host, and burnout expert Caitlin Donovan
Key Takeways
I built an entire business around saving female entrepreneurs from the grand success of their own businesses.
This repetition is why 'bouncebackability' is so important to me. It's not just even about if you're going to burn out again, or if you do burn out again, it's just about life in general. Things are going to happen. No matter who you are, no matter what circumstances you have, things are going to happen. We get stuck in these moments of life that really get us down and understand that. But deep down, we do have the ability to bounce back is more important to me than anything else.
I wasn't actually focused on recovering from burnout. I just skated through the same motions all over again. I over gave to my patients. I was overly concerned with giving people more than they were asking for. I was trying to be everything to everyone. I was taking care of old ladies on the tram who were not asking for my help. And I was so busy being the same person that I was and not adjusting my own behaviors. That I ended up in the same place a couple of years later. And that's when I finally read the word burnout and thought oh, okay. Time to do something about that.
To me, it's about actually practicing and implementing the things that you're reading. It's nothing more than practice because you can read a book like mine and not do any of the exercises in it. And it might make you feel better while you're reading it. But if you don't actually take the time to do the thing. You're not making forward progress. You're just finding a thing that says, oh, thank God. This sounds like me. I'm not alone, which is helpful on a neurological level. It makes your nervous system feel safer. So that's not a terrible thing. But if you don't actually practice any of the things, you're still doing the things that you've always done.
I ask this question to my coaching clients constantly because they say I would love to have whatever it happens to be. And I say it, but what does that mean? How are you going to know when you get it? What does it feel like in your body? Where is it located?
The first time I did a values exercise, at least 10 years ago and it was nonsense. I was like, so generic with my values. They had nothing to do with what I really wanted and everything to do with what I thought people expected of me. So it took probably three or four times for me to start getting honest.
I practice habit stacking because that's the easiest way to get things done. Habit stacking is it's taking something that you are already doing and adding one more event to it. So if every morning you make yourself a cup of coffee and you then sit down and enjoy your cup of coffee. And you'd really love to add in, two minutes of breathing before you start your day, but you can't seem to fit it in, then you build it into your coffee.
I don't subtract behaviors, especially in the very beginning because it's too hard and it's not successful and it doesn't work. I also don't usually go at things directly. If you're trying to reduce your level of fear, so you've decided to use an affirmation that says, I am brave in the face of whatever. I haven't found that to be really successful for people, especially people that are burnt out because the research keeps showing that there's a disconnect between our animal brain and our executive brain. And when that disconnect is there, we're not really processing our emotions properly. So just saying, oh, I feel brave. It's not actually connecting in your brain.
So it's not really doing much is the same reason that gratitude is such a hard thing. When you're burnt out, you don't actually feel it. So it doesn't have the benefit that it can have on a nervous system level when you're burnt out.
So instead of saying, I feel brave and trying to push your way through to a new way of being forcefully. We don't make you courageous. We make you feel safe so that your fear becomes lessened.
We're taught so often to go straight into something, we're always like just stand in the mirror and tell yourself that you feel beautiful. But when your brain is not primed for that kind of action, our first step is always we need your nervous system to know that you are safe. And in order for your nervous system, to know that you are safe, we need to make your internal speak as safe as possible. We need to make your exterior, your environment as safe as possible. And what safety means to you is going to be different than what safety means to somebody else. So then we have to explore that. How do we add safety to your life so that your body is not on high alert all the time so that you can actually start to hear and move on with your life?
I think since we were talking about the gratitude, I think it's important to give people something to do in its place. So if you're trying to do gratitude exercises and you feel like you're lying to yourself and it's not making you feel any better, then instead of gratitude, the focus should be on resentment.
If you take the time to notice where you're feeling resentful, that will clue you in as to where your boundaries are being broken, either by yourself, mostly by yourself or by someone. And then you can decide what you need to do in order to adjust that. So either you'll need to adjust some sort of internal over-giving mechanism or meddling mechanism.
I was so over involved with doing a lot for other people, because I thought that was what made me valuable. That I was tired all the time because I couldn't give myself what I wanted, needed, desired, preferred, because I didn't know what those things were because my energy was always up in somebody else's business.
No, you need to stop giving stuff where you're not being asked for anything. And you need to start speaking up when you need your friends to fulfill something for you. Those are the boundaries that need to be put into place. You need to do less and ask for more, mostly. And resentment will help you get there. So where are you feeling that resentment? What is it doing for you? What's the real message underneath it. So again, we're going backwards. So instead of going through gratitude and trying to force ourselves into this positive place, that doesn't feel real to us at the moment, we actually use the emotions that we're having to get to a place where we're safer.
Unspoken agreements will trip us up every time. There's tons of unspoken agreements, especially in relationships where you just started doing something one day and 15 years later, you're still doing it. And you never spoke about. It's just happening and then you're mad about it, but you've never spoken about it. These unspoken assumptions are a massive boundary issue that really don't always involve another person. Like we just we make this stuff up all in our own little space and then we get mad at people for stuff they don't even understand. Didn't you get the rule book that I did not give you?
In the States, we have this idea that if people are gone for five weeks, a year, everything is going to fall apart. I never took less than six weeks’ vacation a year when I was living in Europe ever. And it was normal people expected it, it was just like, great have a good time. You deserve the time to recharge. What a different attitude.
For holiday stress, before you go to be with your people, check your resentments and see if there is something that you can do for yourself in your own behavior. That might adjust that relationship a little bit, because oftentimes we fall into patterns really quickly, and we do things that we assume other people are expecting, but they might not be. Learn to ask more questions ahead of time. Get more clarity ahead of time. And not automatically assume that you're always going to fulfill the roles that you've always fulfilled, just because you've always fulfilled them, especially if you hate them. So getting clear on your resentments before you go, so that you have the opportunity to make adjustments is key.
I feel that this really is my work. I'm supposed to say things a little bit different for all the people that are getting left behind by the typical advice. I feel like that's the role I'm supposed to fulfill. Like I don't like no soldier left behind on my watch. I feel like if we just flip the script a little bit, we can be more inclusive and we can be more helpful and we can be more understanding and we can create more safety. So my field, like my job with my information is to make people feel understood, seen, heard, and safe.
Bio
Cait Donovan is one of New York City’s leading burnout experts, host of “Fried – The Burnout Podcast,” and author of the book "The Bouncebackability Factor: End Burnout, Gain Resilience, and Change the World". Cait offers 1:1 coaching, corporate workshops, and keynotes for companies such as PTC, Lululemon, Nexthink, Teradata, Marsh and Mclennan, and Workplaceless – all with a focus on ending burnout culture.
She has been featured on podcasts and online magazines such as “Forbes”, “Elephant Journal,” “Thrive Global,” “Addicted 2 Success”, as well as quoted in Oprah Magazine.
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