3 Signs of Burnout (And How to Avoid It)

In this episode of "How To Sell More," we tackle a critical issue that often plagues entrepreneurs: burnout.

Julie Bee, author of "Burn: How Business Owners Can Overcome Burnout and Fuel Success," shares critical tips on preventing and overcoming entrepreneurial burnout. This conversation is vital for business owners who want to ensure lasting success and keep their enthusiasm alive for what they do.

• Recognizing burnout early is key to prevention and recovery. Julie outlines the three stages: attentional, emotional, and physical.
• Julie offers more targeted strategies than conventional advice, such as "take a vacation," which may not be sufficient for burned-out entrepreneurs.
• A supportive network of fellow entrepreneurs is essential, distinct from typical networking groups.
• Burnout often paradoxically follows significant success, highlighting the need for balanced growth strategies.
• Entrepreneurs can leverage burnout experiences for future growth by highlighting insights gained during challenging periods.

Julie Bee's journey from battling burnout to becoming a recognized expert highlights the transformative potential of overcoming challenges. Her experience demonstrates that addressing burnout head-on can pave the way for sustainable success and a more rewarding entrepreneurial path. Join us to discover practical tips for preserving your entrepreneurial spirit while avoiding the pitfalls of burnout.

"Burnout is not a failure; it's often something that comes after a massive success." -- Julie bee

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Links to This Episode

• Apple Podcast
• Spotify
• YouTube
• Audible

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Key Takeaways‍

• Recognize burnout early - Understanding the three stages (attentional, emotional, and physical) can help you catch it before it becomes severe.

• Plan for burnout prevention - Just as you plan for sales and marketing, create a strategy to avoid burnout in your business.

• Leverage burnout for growth - Pay attention to insights gained during burnout periods and use them as opportunities for future success and personal development.

Top 3 Reasons to Listen

• Burnout prevention strategies: Learn practical techniques to recognize and prevent burnout before it impacts your business. Julie shares her experiences and research-backed methods to help entrepreneurs stay energized and focused.

• Support network importance: Understand the crucial difference between networking and genuine support groups. Julie explains how to build and leverage a support network that can help you navigate the challenges of entrepreneurship.

• Post-success burnout awareness: This episode provides insights into why burnout often occurs after significant achievements. It highlights the importance of maintaining balance and self-care, even during periods of success, to ensure long-term sustainability in your business.

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Follow Julie Bee on Social

Website: https://www.thejuliebee.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejuliebee_/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thejuliebee

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejuliebee/

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More About Today's Guest, Julie Bee

Burnout Expert, Business Strategist, Assessment Nerd, Traditionally-Published Author, Chief Connector

Julie Bee is the visionary founder of TJB Media (established in 2021) and BeeSmart Social Media (founded in 2008). She is an award-winning podcast host, influential leader, professional speaker, and dynamic entrepreneur with significant contributions across various sectors. Julie holds a degree from West Virginia University and is an alumna of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program.

Julie's professional journey began in accounting, but her creative spirit soon led her to explore new avenues. In 2008, after losing her job, she launched BeeSmart Social Media, where she continues to lead a remote team in delivering exceptional services to clients.

Currently, Julie dedicates her efforts to helping business owners avoid burnout and achieve their goals. She offers Momentum calls, conducts workshops, creates original online content, speaks at various events, and provides short-term coaching services.

Her expertise and insights have been featured in renowned publications such as FastCompany, Forbes, and Thrive Global. Julie has been a finalist for several prestigious business awards, including two Stevie® Awards for Women in Business (Best Young Entrepreneur and Best New Company), NAWBO Charlotte’s Rising Star award, and NAWBO’s Woman Business Owner of the Year award.

In addition to her entrepreneurial endeavors, Julie is a passionate advocate for small businesses. She actively supports and mentors locally-owned, minority business owners through her involvement with community colleges in the Charlotte area. Julie's dedication to her community and her industry continues to inspire and empower those around her.

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A Transcription of The Talk

Mark Drager: So Julie, on your website, I couldn't help but notice that you have this big, bold headline that says being an entrepreneur is hard. Like, no kidding. Yes, I want to start there. I mean, welcome to the show. But being an entrepreneur is hard. You have been an entrepreneur for a long time, I've been an entrepreneur for 17 years now. We both spend all day every day working with business owners. It is really hard, very, very hard. It's one of the harder professions, I think, to pick as a career. And you don't really know it until you get into it until you're doing it. But I tell you what, the entrepreneurs I know who have been at it for a decade or longer are probably some of the most resilient people I know.

That's part of what I love about it because it almost becomes a bit of a badge of honor at a certain point. I can't think of another career profession other than, I do have friends who were professional athletes. And I know people who have done very, very well for themselves, let's say on the entertainment side, or what have you. And I think that if you're a professional athlete, you know that you're surrounded by the best coaches, the best resources. I mean, the organizations that you're playing for will put everything behind you to make sure that you are the best of the best.

Honestly, I think entrepreneurship is the only other opportunity or career where we get to decide who is on our team, who is for us, and what resources we need for us to be our best and to be able to really perform. And then you go through the grind, and you win or you lose, and then you pick yourself back up. And you keep going. I don't know of any other career that does that. Do you?

Julie Bee: No, and I've done some other careers in the past. So I know that this is one of those rare, I feel like just being an entrepreneur, you kind of get into this rare air kind of club. And then the longer you're in it, the more of that you get into the people that you surround yourself with. You know, people who have been in business for 15 years just are moral. I love talking to those individuals because their perspective on everything, business or non-business, just always fascinates me.

Mark Drager: Now, I'm going down this path. Like, wow, Mark, you seem really optimistic. Today, I thought this episode was on burnout, what are you talking about? I mean, I can't help but overlook the fact that the very strengths or weaknesses, the fact that we will keep going, that we will get back up, that we will get knocked down, that we will build for ourselves a structure, a team, processes that aren't quite perfect, but we'll jump in and we'll roll up our sleeves, and we do what we need to do and we make it happen.

What I did not realize until I met you, and you were nice enough to have me on your podcast, I did not realize that after 15 years of running an organization, I was so burnt out. You and I met three or four years after I decided to burn my entire company to the ground. Because I hit the point, and I've spoken with some other business owners, and this is what I'd love for you to share with us today.

But I've hit the point in my business, and I've heard other business owners as well, where you just go, going to work is not fun. It's not even that it's not fun. It's just like, it is such a terrible period where you are disappointed, or you're upset, or you're apologizing, or you're not living up to expectations, or you're making mistakes, or you've worked so hard and you think things should be further along than they are, or you've built stuff and then they've crumbled. And it's just like when I hit the point where, frankly, I did not care whether it succeeded or failed, no amount of money could get me to go into the office. I would come back from vacation and I'd be driving in the whole time thinking I do not want to go here. I do not want to do this. I did not realize that was coming from just the fact that I was burnt out.

Julie Bee: And most business owners go through something like that in their careers as entrepreneurs. I will say, that I think it comes from we are high achievers. I don't think I've met an entrepreneur that hasn't had that gear. And I don't know how else to describe it. Unlike professional athletes, though, I think we are a special group of individuals who cannot go into it knowing we are going to fail more than we win. But the wins, we hope and we bet on the wins being much bigger than any of the failures that we ever had to make up for it.

So I think when you have that gear, and it's just go, go, go, and then you know, we don't have a boss to say, "Hey, you are burning the candle at both ends." You know, there's nobody above us. Who do you go to when you're burned out? When you're a business owner? There's nobody to go talk to. Even if you do have an HR arm of your business, you don't want to go talk to them. So there's also this level of shame that comes with it.

When I was doing my research for my book, it shocked me how much burnout equals failure in the minds of a lot of business owners before they go through it the first time. They don't ever want to admit that they're burned out because, in some ways, they think that that's a failure, which I don't think that that's true at all. As entrepreneurs, we just have to be aware that we're wired this way. We go after it really hard. Burnout is not a failure; it's often something that comes after a massive success.

That's the other big thing that I've seen in my research is a lot of the time burnout happens after a huge, huge win, which makes sense because you're working so hard to get there. But you have to have some ways to deal with it. You have to have some ways to deal with it when you go through it and then figure out how to prevent it. Hopefully, not go through it again, at least to the extent of some of the stories that I've heard and my own story about going to the emergency room with it and all of that came with that. But you've got to catch it. My hope is to catch it before it gets to the point where you want to burn your business to the ground.

Mark Drager: And that is why I wanted to have you on the podcast. You just 100% articulated why. The whole idea behind how to sell more is we want to be able to help anyone who's listening figure out how to fix the revenue challenges in your business. Maybe that's lead gen or maybe that's working the leads, or maybe it's your team or systems or processes or marketing or positioning or whatever it is, we can go on and on. And we're gonna go on and on because we have many episodes ahead of us.

But I thought when you came to me, you said, "Hey, Mark, I want to talk about my new book Burn: How Business Owners Can Overcome Burnout and Fuel Success." I was lucky enough that you sent me an advanced copy. I read it while I was on vacation with my wife in Scotland last fall. I read it on the plane ride home. It's a fantastic book.

One, I've never thought of this. Again, I've never come across this and I've never read a book on this. It hits so hard. It was so easy for me to work through it anyway. I'm just a really big fan of yours. For anyone listening here, I'm like, I'm a really big fan. But what the heck does getting burned out have to do with selling more? If you are going to take 10 steps forward and push and push and push and push, but you hit the place where you're like, "Fuck it, none of this is worth it." That's not sustainable. And that's not going to carry you for the long term. I had to take two years off, honestly.

I read about JD Rockefeller. I'm a huge fan of JD Rockefeller, Standard Oil. His book Titan by Ron Chernow was amazing. But guess what? At 31, he pushed and pushed and pushed so hard, he had to take two and a half years off. He had to step back from his business. If you're a business owner, and you are feeling stressed, or you're feeling burnt out, or you're feeling all the things we're going to talk about today, what is the point of working so hard and pushing so hard if you're going to hit that wall and decide that you're just going to walk away from everything? I mean, that's no good.

So help us understand. If we're not quite sure, I wasn't sure. You wound up in the hospital. So you didn't know you were burned out. What are some of the signs that we may be facing burnout?

Julie Bee: Yeah, and I broke it down into three stages in my book. The first stage is attentional, then emotional, and then physical. When we think about burnout, physical is what we think about the first time around. That's "I can't get out of bed. I'm sick all the time. I'm in the emergency room for who knows what." Those types of things. But attentional is where it really first starts. That's when you have a hard time focusing, you have a hard time having a coherent thought with your team and having conversations. You can catch it there.

But if you don't catch it there, it tends to go down to the emotional level, which is you're irritable, you're frustrated, you're angry. You wake up and you're angry, and you're like, "I don't know why

I'm angry. I have to go to the office today and that's making me angry." Those types of things start to happen. Unfortunately, if you don't catch it there, then you get into the physical stuff where you're tired, you're sick, you're getting injured. Some people have gotten random injuries and they didn't know what was going on, or their back hurts and there's just no answer to that. It's all because you have this overwhelming stress that you cannot see.

That's kind of how I define burnout. There's a lot of definitions for it, but for business owners, I think it's when you have overwhelming stress and you don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. You're like, "This is my everyday. I don't see this ever ending. No matter how many people I hire, no matter how much I automate, there's always going to be something." When you feel like that, you're really getting close to burnout.

Mark Drager: Sometimes I feel like that two or three times a week. Maybe that's just fear and anxiety and not necessarily burnout. I was curious though, I know you went through your own journey, but why write this book? Why dedicate a year or two of your life to this very theme, this very topic? Because writing a book is no easy feat.

Julie Bee: No, it's the way that I've gone, it's at least a five-year commitment. So I'll just start out with that. And I didn't do that go ahead. But that's a commitment of at least half a decade. So I had burned out once in the past. That was pretty epic. And the second time that I had my burnout, I knew it was going to happen. My friends were telling me, "Julie, you are going to burn out if you don't stop." And I was like, "No, I'm fine. I'm fine. Just really busy. I just gotta get through this, just gotta get through that."

I mean, I basically had a panic attack, thought I was having a heart attack, went to the emergency room, got out of the emergency room, and took about two solid straight weeks off from work. My team was great about it. But I started looking for resources online, Mark, there was nothing specifically for business owners and entrepreneurs. This was August/September of 2021. So we had already gone through the first round of COVID, and you would think that there would have been something about burnout for business owners. I couldn't find anything specifically for us.

The more I researched, the conversations were "relax and take a vacation." Well, that's great, but when you come back, you know, telling a business owner who is burned out to take a vacation is probably some of the worst advice you can give that business owner in my opinion. So I just started documenting my process. I did research and read a lot about how other books and other experts approach burnout. I was like, there needs to be something that speaks specifically to entrepreneurs and business owners.

I mean, that's why I wrote the book. Because I've seen my friends go out of business because of burnout. I've seen seven-figure businesses go out of business because the business owner got burned out and got to a place where they couldn't get out of the business. So they literally walked away from it. That happens way more than it should. I think if we can just kind of accept that we'll probably go into burnout as business owners and plan for it. We've got plans for sales, we've got marketing plans, so why not have a strategy around burnout as well? If you know it's probably going to happen, plan for it. Hopefully, we won't have to have businesses going out of business because the business owner is burned out.

Mark Drager: And I want to get into those strategies. But if you're listening, and you're thinking, because this is what kept me trapped for a bunch of years, you know, I'm running a multimillion-dollar marketing agency, I have families and employees and people counting on me, I have to have projects coming in to make payroll, and I need payroll to deliver on the projects. And for me, I never had an MBA, I never went to college, I never went to university, you know, I'm a guy who at a young age started getting into this and have just learned by making mistakes.

But this was the first time that I found myself on this hamster wheel where I was even saying to someone for like a year or two, I would say to people, "I have this machine that I have to keep fed. And I don't know how to slow the machine down to fix the things that are wrong with it." I just don't know what to do. Like I have to keep the hamster wheel going. If I slow down, if I take a break, if I take my foot off the gas, the whole thing will fly apart and crumble.

I didn't realize that's not true until I did some hard things and made some hard decisions and had to deconstruct things. I had to let clients go, I had to avoid lawsuits, and I had to face a lot. I put it off way too long. But I didn't realize that you can actually do this. So what would be the tips? What would be the strategies? You mentioned that you started documenting your approach. If we're feeling this right now, and we think it's all or nothing, help us understand why it isn't all or nothing.

Julie Bee: I think that we have red flags and we have triggers that if we know what those are, we can know if we're approaching burnout. I'll give you an example. Sleep is something that is universal, we all need to sleep. Most of us, I guess all of us need to sleep. I need eight hours of sleep at night. I track all of this. So if I go, let's say, two weeks where I'm not getting an average of eight hours a night of sleep, I know I'm about halfway to full-on burnout.

Now, that may not be the same for everybody but we all do things in our day-to-day life that indicate we're healthy we're taking care of everything and we're not going to approach burnout. Or we might be approaching burnout. My first piece of advice is to know what that looks like for you. Know what your baseline is, just like you go to the doctor and you get blood work done. You have things in your life that you know are your baseline. If you get too far off--

Mark Drager: Entrepreneurs do that. They don't go to the doctor. I don't trust, I don't get blood work done.

Julie Bee: As you get older you do, I don't know. But that's actually one unique sign for me of burnout when I start canceling doctor's appointments. If I start putting off doctor's appointments, for example, just my yearly physical, if I start pushing that back and putting that off, I'm like, "There's something going on here." Because I'm not taking care of this thing that I know is important to me.

Now, some people don't like doctors, but there's, like, if you exercise, if you normally exercise every day, or if you... One thing that I always measure is if I have a laugh with my partner every day. If we go longer than a few days without having a hearty laugh, I'm like, "Okay, something's off with me." And I need to get back to that. So it's different for everybody.

But I think that starts with most business owners liking to measure, liking to have KPIs. I look at this as a KPI. What are your key performance indicators and measurements that you are at your baseline level? What does burnout look like? If you start to slide towards that, you know, half of this is just knowing what it looks like when you, you've got to know what burnout looks like. You want to try to catch it in those two phases, the attentional and the emotional before you get to the point where you can't get out of bed.

So I think that's a big part of it, just knowing what it looks like. If people ask me what one or two pieces of advice I'd give, that's one of them. The other part would be, you've got to have a support group. Support is different than networking. That's something I'm really big on right now, the difference between support groups and networking groups in business.

We may join a networking group, and they may say, "You can get support here." But do you really feel comfortable walking into that group talking about the shit going on in your business? Most of us don't. So you've got to have a group of people, other entrepreneurs, not your spouse, not your best friend, people who know business that you can talk to. I tell people, you should be able to walk into that room and say, "I'm going bankrupt," or "I've got a bestseller," and they're going to treat you the same. That's what your support group should look like.

Mark Drager: I'm part of a few groups. But recently, I joined a group called Genius Network. That's Joe Polish's group, and it's out of Phoenix. It's interesting, that he poses this question, and I don't know if this is his question or someone else's. But a few meetings ago, he said, "Let's all take five minutes." He said, "I want you to write down every single person in your life where if you called them up, no questions asked, and said, 'I need 25 grand,' they would say, 'Okay, I got you.'" Now, it's not a question of whether they have the 25 grand or not. It's a question of whether you're close enough to be able to call them up and say, "I need this." No questions asked, and they trust you. And they're there for you, whether you have them or not.

I started writing a list, and it actually surprised me. I was like, well, I think I had like eight or nine people on my list, a collection of friends and family and business owners and other people. I thought, wow, I am well supported. I never ask them for help. I never give them the chance to help me, or I never reach out to them. While doing this exercise, I realized these names were here. The purpose of the exercise was to show the importance of the people. But what struck me is I never reach out and ask for help.

Julie Bee: Why don't you?

Mark Drager: That's not this podcast.

Julie Bee: I can guess what it does when we can go to.

Mark Drager: Okay, why don't I? Because I'm the personality type that wants to fix things and wants to diagnose things and wants to get better. I've been doing that for a few years now post-burnout. I've questioned a lot. I've had a lot of clarity. Now I'm at the point where it's not time to talk about it. It's just time to do it. So maybe I'm rationalizing that even in the doing, I still need that support and help. But I don't need to spend time with people talking about what could be. It's like, cool. We've done that. Let's go. It's action time now.

That is actually where I get more stressed and burnt out. Now that I'm in a therapy session, now that I'm talking to you about this, I'm more worried about the action. Most entrepreneurs don't. Most entrepreneurs are fine with action, and they run into problems because I don't think they strategize enough. I'm really good at strategizing, and I get very, very concerned about the action. So that's probably where I do need to reach out more and give people more opportunities to help me.

Julie Bee: I think a lot of entrepreneurs are kind of different then because I think most entrepreneurs get into analysis paralysis. They overthink, they want things to go--

Mark Drager: Don't get me wrong. No, that's me. 100% perfectionist. I analyze everything. I think of every which way. I came up with something. In January, I wrote at one of these meetings, I wrote in my note, "Just pick something and stick with it." Someone else looked at my book and went, "That's great advice. You should do that." It doesn't matter what you pick. Just go.

Julie Bee: Just do it. Yeah, I mean, there's a reason that that's probably the most famous slogan ever. But I think part of the reason what you're describing is possibly, we come to work every day. It doesn't matter how many people you have working for you or what you've delegated. I feel like I work with business owners who are solopreneurs, all the way up to people who have 50 employees or more. We come to work every day riding 15 different trains. We wear all these hats all the time.

I think sometimes when you're getting into what you're talking about, I think sometimes you just need somebody to say, "This is the hat you need to be wearing right now. This is the thing you need to be working on today." Because if you're constantly, you got sales, you got marketing, got HR, you got all these things going on, you got your team, you got leadership, you've got all of these things going on every single day. We walk in the door wearing all those hats, and it's really... I haven't seen a business owner who was able to delegate everything. I feel like once you get one thing off your plate, something else comes on your plate, or you do more of something else, you know, you go deeper into the leadership role or deeper into the sales role, whatever it is.

I think that's what you're talking about is when you have, you know, you know what your mission is, you know what your vision is, but you still have to, you know, you're riding 15 different trains, you're like, "Which train do I get on today?" That decision by itself is, that can be mentally exhausting just to decide what am I doing today.

Mark Drager: I've learned over the last few months, actually, I've been practicing this. We're recording this on a Monday. Yesterday, I turned to my wife. It was a rainy day here, and I planned to work outside. I said, "It's raining. I don't know if I should do this thing on the business, do this thing for our family, or do this thing in the basement of the house." She was like, "Oh, you should probably do that thing in the basement of the house." I was like, I don't want to do that. Right? But it helped.

I was like, in that reaction time, I was like, oh, no, I don't actually want to work. It's not a priority right now. Nevermind. And with my CIO and with others, what a great opportunity to be able to surround yourself with people where I can come to them and say, "Listen, I have 17 different things I can work on. I can come up with the pros and cons of the business case for each. They're all really important. I'm not quite sure what to do." If you don't have that person on your leadership team, or you're not part of a mastermind group, where you have the opportunity to do that, I would definitely recommend connecting with a productivity coach, connecting with a business coach, connecting with someone who can at least help you prioritize the areas of focus.

We can't fix it from the inside. As much as I can help other entrepreneurs, and other business owners, and give them great strategy and great tips, I cannot figure this stuff out for myself, and it drives me crazy.

Julie Bee: That's why you have to have perspective. You've got to have people who, no matter who it is, whether it's leadership, team, coach, or whoever, you've got to have other people who are able to give you perspective on what's going on. But in order to get that perspective, you've got to be willing to open up and share with them what's going on in your business so that they can help you. I think that's one of the things that causes burnout for business owners, as we are hesitant to open up and be vulnerable. Rightfully so. Nobody wants to be the Eeyore of the group, but sometimes you're the Eeyore. Sometimes you need that support.

My thing is, just pay it forward. Be the person when your friend needs to be the Eeyore, the person who's just having the struggles, be the person who's there to say, "Okay, it's alright. We're going to get through this. I went through this, or I know somebody who went through this." Pick them up and help them out. I think that's a big part of it, though, is we've got to be able to put the ego down to be able to get the help and to be vulnerable enough to ask for the help that we need when we're facing burnout.

Mark Drager: The last question I have for you is about the idea of leverage. Part of what I was talking about, professional athletes and entrepreneurs and us getting better, I mean, every breakthrough we've had, every breakthrough I've had, I'll speak for myself, has come on the other side of having to face the uncomfortable decisions, the uncomfortable letdowns. I mean, those terrible events shape and inform my thinking to be better and be able to show up better next time.

So obviously, growth mentality. But you mentioned that there's the opportunity to leverage these breakthroughs that you uncover when you're dealing with burnout. We've talked about pre-burnout, we've talked about how to avoid burnout, but how do you leverage burnout to be able to come out of it on the other side, even stronger and even better?

Julie Bee: You have to pay attention to the things that come up as you're going through it and make note of those things. There are always silver linings, I think, in every massive failure or burnout. You are going to have some things that come up that you're like, "I need to pay attention to this or that," or "This made me feel a certain way," or "I never want to experience that again."

Maybe for me, it was, "There's nothing out there for business owners and burnout. I'm going to write a book about this." I think if we can start looking at it as on the other side of it, there's usually an opportunity. It starts with while you're going through it, just paying attention to that. If you're going through it, that's the silver lining. There's got to be something great on the other side of it, as long as you're paying attention as you go through it. That also helps you get through it too, in some ways.

If you know, like, whatever's on the other side of this is going to be better, and it's going to make... I'm going to be in such a good place after this. It helps you go through it more. Just makes it easier to get to the other side and have something to look forward to. But you've got to pay attention to what comes out while you're going through it and listen to it. Don't ignore those gut instincts that come up and guide you in certain ways.

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