Healing Burnout Through Self-Leadership: Part 1
The Sound of Burnout: My Wake-Up Call in 2012
Beep, beep, beep.
What’s that sound? What’s sticking out of my arm? Why is there a nurse here? This isn’t my room.
Oh, I remember now—it’s 2012, and I’m lying in a hospital bed.
But how did I end up here?
For the 10 years leading up to that moment, I was chasing my professional dreams. I built a thriving fitness center focused on improving lives through wellness habits, creating a vibrant community of people I was genuinely helping. I was proud of what I had accomplished.
The High Cost of Professional Success
However, all this success came at a steep cost. While I coached clients on healthy diets, exercise routines, and positive mindset shifts, I neglected my own well-being. I worked over 100 hours a week, never took vacations, and devoted all my energy to my career and the people I served. This frantic pace couldn’t last forever—I eventually crashed and burned. Getting out of bed in the morning became a struggle, and I was too exhausted to coach. I pushed myself through each day, only to collapse from exhaustion in the late afternoon. By 2012, I was depleted, burned out, and alone—I needed serious help.
The Problem with “Self-Care”
Burnout is an overwhelming experience, and recovery can be just as daunting. Most advice on burnout recovery centers around “self-care.” We’re told that the right diet, exercise routine, or meditation practice will heal us.
During my recovery journey, I tried every remedy imaginable. I practiced breathing exercises, explored homeopathy, and tried various diets. Despite my efforts, I still felt the same. While some lifestyle changes provided temporary relief, they didn’t address the root cause. I realized that I was approaching my recovery with the same perfectionism and drive that led to my burnout. I hadn’t addressed the fundamental beliefs and thought patterns that caused my burnout in the first place.
Why Self-Care Isn’t Enough
Lifestyle changes like diet and fitness are essential for well-being, and mindfulness practices such as yoga and meditation can be powerful tools for managing stress. However, these alone aren’t enough to tackle burnout. To resolve burnout for good, we must focus on the root cause—our mindset.
The Thought Patterns of Burnout
When we want to transform our lives, we often focus on changing our habits. Many of my clients dealing with burnout have asked for a quick fix, hoping to avoid making significant changes. But real change is impossible without addressing the underlying mindset.
Back when I was heading toward burnout, my initial thoughts started with centering around doing more or being tougher:
“I need to start meditating.”
“I need to work out more.”
“I need to get more sleep, start journaling, eat better, quit coffee, try Bulletproof coffee, switch to green tea, or finally start running.”
These ideas felt even more overwhelming. Then, the next thought would pop up fast. “No way. I don’t have time for that.”
At times, I fantasized about escaping to a different life:
“If only I had a different boss, better job, worked for a different company, lived in a different city, or had a different spouse—then I could finally be happy.”
Eventually, I got so discouraged, it was tempting to turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms like a cocktail, a bag of chips, a gallon of rocky road, the latest drop on Netflix to binge to make us feel better, or all of the above.
Why do we get to this point? Because contemplating change is scary. And, changing something outside ourselves feels so much easier than changing something within.
Like many of my clients, I was tempted to find a new routine or life circumstance that would magically heal me. But after selling my business and starting a new partnership, I found myself working long hours again. I realized that I couldn’t change my habits or build a new life with the same mindset that caused my burnout. Without a mindset shift, I was destined to repeat the cycle of overworking and neglecting self-care.
The Power of Mindset in Overcoming Burnout
One of the most valuable lessons I learned from martial arts is this: Where the head goes, the body follows. Real change isn’t just about building new habits—it’s about where your mind is focused.
When I finally started working on my mindset, everything began to fall into place.
Self-Leadership: A Path Forward
If you’re currently dealing with or approaching burnout, I encourage you to explore self-leadership as a path forward. Self-leadership is about understanding who you are, what you uniquely need to thrive, and guiding yourself to achieve your goals.
Self-leadership isn’t about eliminating work or pursuing life balance to perfection. Instead, it’s a skill set that helps you adapt and maintain focus in an ever-changing world. The real solution to burnout is a lifestyle mindset reinvention through self-leadership. It’s not a quick fix, but it’s sustainable, repeatable, and adaptable.
Think of self-leadership as a continuous journey rather than a final destination. Just as there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to healing burnout, there’s no single path to self-leadership. Life will always throw curveballs you can’t anticipate. While you can’t avoid every setback, you can stumble less and recover faster.
The Lifestyle Mindset Model for Self-Leadership
We live in an era where many people are disconnected from themselves, bombarded with ads for things they don’t need. In such a world, it can be challenging to identify what you truly need to thrive.
When crafting my self-leadership plan, I returned to my training as a scientist. I love physics because it explains how things work and what combinations yield desired outcomes. In physics, understanding cause and effect requires considering the whole system, testing assumptions, experimenting, and staying open to unexpected outcomes.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to healing burnout. Instead, develop a holistic and realistic system that addresses your habits, environment, and relationships.
Life is complex—the human experience is complex. We must treat ourselves as the unique individuals we are.
The three components to successful Lifestyle Mindset Reinvention are:
- Managing your energy
- Mastering your mindset
- Creating your system: a personalized roadmap that helps you navigate what derails your well-being, throws you off track, and leads to burnout.
Ready for more?
Read part 2 of this blog series and learn how to put self-leadership into practice!
