S2/E1 – Overcoming Burnout: Lessons from Olive on Building an Aligned Business

[00:00:00] Welcome to Season Two

[00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome to the lucky pup podcast, where we’re taking big ideas and weaving them together in a way that makes a big picture relatable and hopefully a bit inspirational and educational too. You’re going to find candid and authentic conversations about the struggles we’ve encountered as we try to live more full and happy lives.

[00:00:17] I’m your host, Morgan Weber, and I want to welcome you to the official first episode of season two of the Lucky Pup podcast. Now this season, we are going to talk a lot about burnout, and I think this is a topic we do not talk about nearly enough in the pet sitting world and really in the business world overall.

[00:00:34] Olive’s Story: A Journey of Love and Loss

[00:00:34] And I’m going to introduce you today to my dog, Olive. Now, Olive is probably the biggest reason that I have focused so much of my work around burnout, because, well, Olive has a long story, and I’m going to warn you, it’s a bit of a sad story, too.

[00:00:50] Way back in 2018, we had been casually looking for a third dog. And if you’ve had multiple pets, you probably know that feeling where you’re interested in adding another pet to your family. And maybe you haven’t figured out exactly what kind of pet, what breed of dog, that kind of stuff.

[00:01:05] And so you just kind of have some feelers out there and you’re waiting for something to feel good, to feel right, to feel like this pet has been sent. just to you. And we were really in that position. And I kept searching pet finder and looking at local rescues and none of the pets that I found really spoke to me or, I had this moment of, yep, that’s my dog.

[00:01:25] But one day my husband gets a text message from an acquaintance of his, and she says, Hey, we have a situation where a little puppy was dumped outside of my work, and we’ve had a couple of folks try to take her home. It hasn’t quite worked and we really need another solution for her.

[00:01:40] Would you be interested in taking her, maybe fostering her, helping her find a right home if she isn’t a good fit for you guys? So the next day we went and pick up this little puppy and. I thought maybe we were going to be getting an eight, nine, ten week old puppy, but really we picked up about a four week old puppy.

[00:01:56] And it turns out that this puppy had been stuffed into an Arby’s takeout bag and then put into a bag of garbage and then dumped out of a car in a parking lot. And you can imagine that once we got her home, it really did not take long for her to become our puppy.

[00:02:12] And what I loved about Olive is that she loved life so much. She was an all in kind of dog. She was easy to train. She loved our other dogs. She loved going out. She loved everyone that she met and everything that we threw at her until one day we realized she was not enjoying these things anymore. And it really felt like we were chasing this many headed monster, and we were always fighting this growing battle and slowly and surely everything that Olive loved to do, everything that brought her joy in her life, she could not do anymore. And I as her person was really struggling with how to help her.

[00:02:54] We were doing all of the things and we were checking all of the boxes and I started to realize that despite our best efforts, Olive’s quality of life was getting really low.

[00:03:03] I started researching quality of life. And what I found out is there’s a lot of good scales for when our pets are getting old. Maybe they can’t walk very well. Maybe they’re not eating. Maybe they’re having a hard time controlling their body systems. Well, none of those things applied to Olive and the situation in our home, and I really could not find a great quality of life scale if anyone saw us on the street, they would think that we had a perfectly healthy dog and we were having these really big struggles and I was starting to really consider what does quality of life mean to a dog who is only two and a half years old and is struggling so greatly?

[00:03:41] After her death, I was absolutely devastated. I had poured so much of myself into this little dog and to keeping her healthy. And we only had two and a half years with Olive. And I would say that the last 18 months of that was spent trying to keep her happy and healthy. There’s these quality of life scales for old pets in that last stage of life. But what does it mean to live life with a great quality? How does that apply to us as the humans to have a really good quality of life? What does it mean to be in love with life and as a business owner, to be in love With our business and what we do and how we do it. And how do we make sure that we are enjoying our own lives while we’re also making the world a little bit of a better and happier place.

[00:04:24] And so I really realized that a lot of us get into this point where we start to question quality of life, or we start to question why we’re doing things the way we’re doing them because we’ve hit a major catalyst in our life that has either forced us to make a change or made us realize we can’t do things the way we’ve been doing them in the past. And for me in 2020, within six months, well, one, we had the pandemic. So our business was on the toilet. Things were starting to slowly crawl back. We had two family members pass away. We had to put our dog down. And then two weeks later, we found out that my husband had cancer and the stress of trying to manage all of these major things that happened in our lives all together just got to be too much. And I realized that I could have made changes sooner in our business. I could have made changes to make my life better, but in a way I had to wait for these extreme things to all pile together to make me realize that I needed to make a change. My world had to be turned completely upside down and unexpectedly for me to realize that I was actually at a breaking point. Even though I didn’t realize it before.

[00:05:32] Understanding and Combating Burnout

[00:05:32] And I thought to myself, why do we force ourselves to the edge before we’re willing to make a change? And I really grappled with this and thought about, well, why? Why don’t we decide to act more proactively? And I think the short answer is it’s human nature to want to stay where it’s safe.

[00:05:49] The harbor is known. And even though the harbor might not be the most exciting place, we think that it’s the safest place. And it can be very scary to go outside of that, to try something new, to do something different. It’s human nature to say, why would I go to the unknown, even if it could potentially be better? Like, the unknown is more scary than the known that isn’t quite right for me. And sometimes we have to be pushed before we’re willing to go and do that.

[00:06:17] And so, when I looked at my own situation, thinking, I got to make it through this hard season of life by just going harder. And I realized that if I kept going down that path, I was going to work myself to a point where I just wanted to throw it all in, burn it all down and quit. And so instead, what if we were able to build some kind of structure and strategy around these ideas of living a fuller and happier life? How do I apply this idea to my business and help make sure that my business is allowing me to live a great life. And I created what I call my live full live happy framework.

[00:06:52] This framework is really a quality of life scale, but for living. For choosing to have a better, more fulfilling, happier life. And it has four main components.

[00:07:02] The first is relationships, which means having connections and loving and trusting relationships with those around us.

[00:07:09] The second is our health, which for us as business owners, as entrepreneurs, a lot of that is self stewardship around mental and our physical health. It’s making time for hobbies and friends and family.

[00:07:21] Our third component is joy and purpose. Because there’s happiness around meaningful, fulfilling work that makes an impact. Work that really fits our skills and our passions and our goals in life.

[00:07:33] And then lastly, there’s support and acceptance, finding community and belonging and space to be boldly you within a network that supports you.

[00:07:41] And all four of these things come together to support what I think is a full and happy life. So I took these four principles and I started applying them to my personal life and I my business. And I thought, well, if I’m going to make things better for myself, what am I doing now that’s not really working, you know, first we have to identify what’s not working before we can make changes to make things better. And one of the big things that I realized was that I was giving everything to my clients and to my business and leaving nothing for myself and my family. And I had to have some really hard conversations with myself. When my husband was diagnosed with cancer I had to confront myself and say, I have been spending our time up to this point prioritizing work. And is that the legacy that I want to have with my husband? Am I being a martyr for my business? And I realized if I’m going to prioritize my own happy life, my own full life, that’s incompatible with being a martyr to my business. And I don’t think any of us should have to be a martyr to our business. I don’t think any of us signs up as a business owner and says, you know what? I would really love to give up all my weekends and my holidays and my hobbies and my family time in order to start this business.

[00:08:51] If you were a new business owner and I gave you a piece of paper with a little signature line and said, Okay, great. I’m so proud of you. You got your tax ID. You got your insurance. You’ve got your clients. This is amazing. Oh, but by the way, I’m going to need you to sign this little piece of paper here first. No big deal. You would say, no way. There’s no way any of us would sign up for that. But it is so easy for us to end up in that situation within our businesses because we feel like we have to give it all in order for our business to be successful.

[00:09:19] So how can we do things differently? And for me, a big part of that is that my business needs to serve me and it needs to serve my team. And it has to serve my clients. And sometimes we forget that as the owner, our well being is one of our business most important assets. Because, can I take care of my team if I’m not taking care of myself? Probably not. Can my team take care of our clients if I’m not taking care of my team? Probably not.

[00:09:46] And so it all comes back to our own health, our own well being, our own life that we enjoy living without burnout. And what I’ve learned, especially in those last six months of Olive’s life, is that I was completely burnt out. Now, I didn’t realize I was burnt out. I thought everything was working, even though it was 2020, and you know, things were very hard. I was under this impression that if I just kept going harder, it would continue to get better I had conditioned myself to believe that living in a state of constant overexertion is a good thing. And once I stepped back, I could see that I had been living in burnout for too long. . I do want to talk a little bit about the definition of burnout, because I think it helps us understand and maybe see in ourselves How close we might be getting to burnout.

[00:10:33] So burnout is actually a state of mental and physical exhaustion, and it can really zap the joy out of every aspect of your life, your business, your friendships, your family. And the most difficult part about burnout, I think, is that it’s multifaceted. one of the biggest facets of burnout is that there is a continual exposure to stress and stressful situations.

[00:10:52] how many of us as business owners understand how stressful being in charge of everything can be? Especially when we are habitually, chronically fatigued. Ordinary fatigue means you take a nap, you get a little extra sleep, maybe you do a little bit of exercise and then you start to feel a lot better. But burnout makes it challenging for us to cope with the stress and to handle the day to day responsibilities that come along with being a business owner. It can look like starting to resent our business.

[00:11:18] So why do we burn out? As a business owner, I think one of the biggest things that contributes to burnout is what I call the backpack concept think of it as business owners have a backpack and we keep picking things up and we keep putting them in our pack and we’re loading it up because we like to do it all.

[00:11:33] This is what I call being a chief everything officer. We’re just going to keep loading up that backpack with all of the things. That backpack it’s going to start to feel kind of heavy, right? We’ve got our marketing in there. We’ve got our bookkeeping, we’ve got our team management, we’ve got our client management, all of the things that we do as a business owner is loaded up in that backpack.

[00:11:52] And when it gets heavy, we can take that backpack off and we can put it down for a little bit. We can take a day off, we can have a vacation. We can go get a massage, but the thing is that that backpack is right there waiting for us, and we’re going to have to pick it back up again. So instead of just looking for breaks to put down our pack and have a little rest, we really have to figure out how to not put so many things in our pack to begin with.

[00:12:15] So instead of picking things up, we need to consider who else can help us share this load. Because there are things in our businesses that we don’t really like doing, and we’re not really good at, and we do them anyway, because we feel like we’ve got to put them in our own backpack.

[00:12:30] Sometimes that might look like we’re doing the wrong work. And I’m going to put wrong in quotes here. Because it’s work that doesn’t serve us and we’re doing it anyway, because maybe we feel like we have to do it. Maybe we feel like we can’t afford to have somebody else do it. And we’ve accepted this idea again, that overwork and overextension is just the way of life as a business owner. And we’re going to keep holding this really, really heavy backpack because there’s no other way to do it. And usually what gets sacrificed for this backpack that we carry is all of the things that we love most in our own lives. We get rid of our hobbies. We get rid of our friend nights. We don’t have that family dinner. We don’t have that coffee date.

[00:13:08] I think one of the biggest lies we tell about burnout is that if we just had that day off or that vacation, it was going to solve our burnout. How many times have we told ourselves, Oh, I just need a vacation. I just need a break. And then I’m going to come back refreshed and everything’s going to be great.

[00:13:23] But the problem is that backpack is still going to be there loaded up. And so the only cure for burnout is to make a change. And sometimes change can feel like failure. Right. Makes us feel like we’re not good enough. If I have to give some of these rocks out of my backpack to somebody else to manage my business, that means that I wasn’t good enough. But that is the farthest thing from the truth.

[00:13:43] And burnout prevention really means that we’re going to shuffle and shift our work in a way so that we don’t feel like we have to escape our business in order to be okay.

[00:13:52] Introducing the Align Cohort

[00:13:52] And this is the biggest reason why I’ve created the Align cohort.

[00:13:57] when I think about Olive’s Ripples, they are here in the cohort. I have taken everything that Olive taught me, everything I have learned about business, and I’ve put the best parts together into the aligned cohort. in this cohort, we’re going to take a small group of business owners, and we’re going to create a business that is more aligned with what we want, with what we’re good at and what our goals are.

[00:14:18] So the first thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to define our own version of success, and we’re going to create a business that works for us. And the work that we love to do, and that lights us up because each of us have our own version of what a successful life and a successful business is going to be.

[00:14:33] Once we have that definition of success, we can create guiding principles to help our business work well. And each of us have to decide again, what does that mean to me? What am I going to do to help create this good life for myself? How can I feel confident in this path that I’m going to take with my business? And how do I get there?

[00:14:52] One of the fastest ways into burnout is trying to borrow somebody else’s dream. And I’ve lived this multiple different ways over the years. When I was working as an almost architect, I was trying to be a project manager and that was the work that I liked to do the least, but it was the largest part of my day.

[00:15:08] And every time I got a new project at work. I just felt dread, like, Oh, I’ve got to do this again. And this idea of being a project manager, that was somebody else’s version of how to be successful in that industry. It wasn’t for me. And I was borrowing somebody else’s map, somebody else’s idea, of what success meant.

[00:15:25] And I realized I was never going to feel that level of satisfaction in somebody else’s journey, And so how can I create that for myself? Burnout prevention says we have to live our own true and authentic life. So if we’re going to live our own journey and we’re going to create our own guiding principles, We can create a business that is true and authentic to ourselves.

[00:15:44] And with that, we’re also going to create our own targets because each of us has a different idea of how big or how small or how we want our business to run, which is my favorite part about being a business owner. You get to create something that works for you. And we’re going to give ourselves permission to hit those targets, whether you want to grow to a giant business or you’re happy with just a couple of team members or just with yourself. We’re going to remove the feelings of failure and shame and coulda, woulda, shouldas of why we are or aren’t trying to build a business that looks like somebody else’s business. We’re going to create this for ourselves. We’re going to give ourselves permission to set our own pace, to set our own targets, to let go of things that aren’t serving us, and to reach for new things that are going to serve us better. we’re going to create a plan for actually going out and hitting those targets.

[00:16:32] We’re going to talk about metrics. We’re going to talk about clients. We’re going to talk about the different kinds of profits. We’re going to look at what’s not working. What is going on in our businesses that is not a good fit? What are those secret contributors to burnout that are happening in our businesses right now that we don’t even know are happening? What is making us feel stuck and disconnected between what’s happening in our business and the way that we actually want to be living.

[00:16:56] It can be hard to determine what to change in our businesses to make something work better when we really can’t picture that for ourselves. And that’s where I can help you understand what’s working in your business. What’s not working, what’s contributing to burnout and how we can make things better, how to make your business more efficient.

[00:17:14] We’re going to talk about business operations and white space and planning and leadership and management. And the administrative work that goes into having a great business. We’re going to create a business that not only works well, but that helps prevent you from going into burnout ever again.

[00:17:28] So we are packing a lot into this cohort. We’re going to meet for seven months or 26 active weeks together, We’re starting in October and we’re going to April. And this is a time for us to really dive into your business together.

[00:17:40] My favorite part about this cohort is that it is two parts. We have 13 different group sessions where we’re going to learn about all the different aspects of a successful business. And then we’re going to have one on one implementation sessions with each member of the cohort to actually understand what that looks like for you and your particular situation and how to actually implement it.

[00:18:02] If you are anything like me, you have taken a course, you have read a book, you’ve listened to a podcast, but understanding what we’ve just learned and how to actually implement it are two different things. It’s one thing to read the book. It’s one thing to take the course. And it’s another thing to understand how to apply that in our own business. So every cohort member, it’s going to have one on one sessions with me well, we’re going to look at the specifics of your business and how do we make it happen. There are no cookie cutter solutions here because each of us is unique and I am the person who is holding the map and you’re going to tell us where to go.

[00:18:37] In between the group sessions and the one on sessions, they’re also going to be coworking times, which think of it like office hours where I’m there available. And if you come to work, we can work on something together. You can get those extra questions answered right there in real time. We’re also going to have a private community for support and access to me in between all of our sessions.

[00:18:55] So while this cohort on the surface feels very high level, how to create a business that works, the undercurrent for all of this is actually burnout. How do we create a business that actually works for you in a way that you don’t feel like you have to escape from.

[00:19:12] Business becomes easier when we’re doing the work that serves us. We can have an operationally great business and also live on the edge of burnout consistently and continually, and this cohort is going to tackle that head on.

[00:19:24] Now I’m creating this cohort very intentionally. And just like in this podcast, everything that happens in the cohort is going to be about the authentic, candid, and honest conversations that I have had to have with myself and in my business in the last decade. This is the place where you’re going to get all of the resources that I’ve created for myself. If you’ve got a question about how I do something, I’m going to show you how I do it.

[00:19:45] The biggest component of this cohort is the one on one time together. Members are going to have my commitment to helping them make as much progress as they would like to make while we’re together. They are the captain and I am their trustee season guide. I’m going to help hold the map while giving advice and encouragement and way finding lessons and sharing my unvarnished experiences, helping avoid the sandbars. I’ll be asking questions and gaining deeper insights into where the members want to go and how to get them there. I’m calling it the aligned cohort, because it’s really about how do we get our business to be in alignment with us, because you are not your business. Your business is not you. You have a relationship with your business. So how in aligned are we with the way that our business is currently working?

[00:20:25] now I’m not a big believer in coincidences. And To me, it’s no surprise that I’m having these conversations about the cohort and living a really great life at this time of year, because all of this is really about olive and her impact in my life, we said goodbye to olive on September 15th, 2020, and depending on when you’re listening to this, you might realize that that is this time, four years ago.

[00:20:47] a lot of things have changed in my life in the last four years, but so much of who I am now and what I’ve done and the changes that I’ve made and how I’ve decided that I want to live my life has been my little love letter to Olive and the dog that she was and the lessons that she taught me and the life that we had together.

[00:21:02] Her ripples and her impact have been so very large. If you’ve ever bought one of our memory flame candles, if you’ve listened to this podcast, if you’ve been to any of the business presentations Everything I’ve done from how to have a great business, how to live a full life, how to avoid burnout has been because of Olive.

[00:21:19] If you could use a little help with your business, I hope you reach out about the align cohort. Because I practice what I preach, I can’t guarantee that this cohort is ever going to come back again. I am making a big commitment here to spend seven months with a small group of business owners, and I might not be able to run this cohort again. So if this is something that sounds good to you, I have to recommend that you reach out.

[00:21:38] So with that, I’m going to close out this first episode of season two of the lucky pop podcast.

[00:21:43] Thank you so much for joining me and thanks so much for listening. You’ll be able to find show notes, transcripts, and more on our website, luckypuppod. com I’d love it if you can comment, like, and share this conversation with your friends. I hope you’ll connect with me over on social media at luckypuppod. Until next time, don’t forget to live a more full and happy life. We’ll talk to you soon.