Why You Feel Exhausted in Business

Hi Pretties welcome to this episode. Today I’m going to talk about one of the things that I think is super, super important for your well being, and for actually your success and your opportunities and business as well. 

So I’m going to dive straight in here today, no messing, I have been talking to a number of clients who are absolutely exhausted. And when I say exhausted, I mean exhausted in every possible way of the word, they are tired, fatigued physically, they are mentally drained. And they’re at that place where they’re feeling very fragile and emotional. Because all things are connected. 

So my main kind of mentality when it comes to this area, is that we all are really, really good at throwing ourselves at things, or we’re really good at procrastinating and giving ourselves a hard time for not getting all of the things done. And one of the terms I’ve used recently is the unachievable to do list. Because I, I will hold my hands up and say that I am amazing, I am so talented at creating to do lists that are not attainable, like it’s just not possible. And I used to do time blocking. But I used to be really, really bad at giving myself the right amount of time versus the task. So now I tend to look at things a little bit differently and I try to give myself a bit more freedom and area of flow whenever I’m creating a task. And also my semi ADHD brain likes to skip between tasks. So I like to skip about and do a bit of variety when it comes to things like that as well. 

But what I’m also learning to do that I didn’t used to be very good at but I’m getting better at is actually stopping and allowing myself real quality scheduled time to do nothing other than be me and spend time with my children, or read a book, or have have some time out. I wrote a blog recently about how you can look for things that may be considered red flags for burnout. And I really enjoyed writing that blog because it was so therapeutic for me to write down all of the little triggers that I noticed within myself when I’m heading in that direction. And it really is a personal thing. So I’m hoping when people read that blog, they may find something that they go, oh, okay, I do that too. I wonder if that’s right for me. But I don’t expect that that list will be universal, I do think that we all have our individual things. 

For me, I’m really good at denying myself the right amount of time to take care of my just basic self care. So instead of going and washing my hair, I will throw it up in a mum bun. Or instead of doing a full face of makeup even though I want to have a full face of makeup on. I’ll just quickly do my eyelashes and then leave everything else. And it may seem that these are just like tiny sacrifices and for all of us that are really busy especially if you are running a business as well as being at home you may have children, you may have parents you’re looking after, you may have other responsibilities in your life alongside your business, can be really super easy for us to just completely ignore these things and let them mount up. But one of the things that I realised when I was speaking to my clients recently about their level of exhaustion wasn’t just about how we don’t give ourselves that time to relax and recoup and re-energise, which is super important. But it was also about the fact that we’re not great at giving up control. We have real fear about outsourcing, delegating, and referring to other people, we just tried to do everything ourselves. And we’re not great at holding our hands up and saying, hey, I need some help here.

 So this was really interesting to me, because it made me look at how we have structured the agency. And actually, when I think about the amount of clients that we service, and the amount of team that we’ve had through the agency in the last few years, I have only in this last six months or so actually created an internal structure to support me stepping away from the day to day things, the day to day tasks. And I was having this fantastic conversation with Stephanie, my business operations manager, and Sue, who is also a Project Operations Manager within the business. And we were talking about how a year ago, it was just me and Sue that was managing everything. And three months before that, it was just me. And it’s so crazy that we find ourselves in spaces where we are scared, we’re scared to let that control go. And we don’t want to let other people in. And we have real difficulty with trust. And we have real difficulty with just delegating and asking for help. 

So with that in mind, it’s interesting to consider what the alternative is. And this is a really interesting exercise that I’ve done with my clients. Whilst we’ve been talking about this and this feeling of fatigue and exhaustion. Like how long can this actually continue? I’m really good at saying like, hiring a social media manager, for instance, will cost you money. But how much money do you lose by not having that person in place. And that has always been a great example that we’ve been able to use in the agency. Because if you’re a business owner who’s trying to grow, if you’re trying to take on more clients, you’re actually trying to do more, you can’t do more than what you have available to you, you might be able to be at your optimum best. And you might be able to create efficiencies, and you might be able to cut down on your admin spend. But essentially, without more people, and without more minds, and more energy, you actually can’t grow in a way that you may be imagining you can if you’re doing it all by yourself, if you’re doing it all alone. So how much do you lose by not allowing yourself the opportunity to relinquish some control. And I think that’s a really interesting way to look at it. For you to strategize, actually, what it is you want to achieve with your business, how many sales you want, how many people you want to work with, what you want to be earning, how often you want to work, what type of projects you can take on on which type of projects you would have to reduce or reject. Also opportunities because if you’re always at that highest level, if you’re always, your cup is always full and about to spill over, then you haven’t got any scope for opportunities that you may not even know are there yet, you know, like if somebody, some amazing person was to come to you and say I want to collaborate on this amazing thing. Could you take that amazing thing on or are you so, so far down the pecking order because of the weight of all of the responsibilities that you’re already at? You can’t do that. 

So from a business perspective for you as business owner, like how long can that really continue alongside the dream that you have for your business? How long can you maintain that? Before it all goes boobs up?

 And the truth is probably not very long. So if you find yourself in a state where actually it’s not just about the fact that you’ve had your hair in a mum bun for five days, and there’s been takeaways every single night because you haven’t got the scope to cook after you’ve done your day in the office or if you are looking at your diary and wondering how you’re going to make it through another day of back to back zoom calls, then, you know, it might be time to consider what area here can I outsource? What can I do to relieve some of this pressure? Now, I appreciate that at this point, you may be thinking, well, Dawn, I don’t have the budget to outsource, I don’t have the money to outsource. But I bet if you counted up how many times you have ordered a takeaway rather than cooked, or how many times you have spent hours and hours on a task that could be completed by somebody else in minutes, there are probably areas of your business that you are bleeding money, for lack of a better term, because you’re having to fulfil this area of control.

 So, I would really consider how you feel about the growth of your business, how often you’re giving yourself the time and space to actually be the business owner, the founder, the managing director, the CEO, whatever it is, you’ve given yourself in terms of a title, how often are you allowing yourself that genius space where you can step back and actually see the business for what it is, and what needs to happen at that bird’s eye view level. Now, all of us when we’re going through the stages of creating our businesses, we do get to that stage where we are all in we’re all the way in it. We are completely consumed often by admin and paperwork and client work and all sorts of fantastic things that we’ve always wanted that we’ve strived for. We’ve got what we wanted, you know, this do Universe has served us up exactly what we asked for. And we covered ourselves kind of going okay, this is not quite what I had in mind. And that is your opportunity for growth, that is your opportunity to really truly understand that it might be time to get some other hands on deck. 

And you’ll be surprised how easy it actually is to relinquish control over to somebody, when you have the right person to outsource to when you have somebody, who can just take on that task for you. And keep it ticking over in the background so that you don’t have to worry about it and you can get back to the things that are really, really important for you. 

So Pretties take some time, have a little consider how you feel about where you are in your business right now. Are you getting fatigued quite regularly? Are you feeling emotionally exhausted? Because your output of energy is not balanced with the energy you’re getting back? Have you had to shove your hair in a mum bun? I’m using that term, but it’s the best one that I know. Are you relying on caffeine? That’s another great thing to consider. And yeah, just see how you feel about that. And I’d love for you to think about how you could change one thing in your business, to give yourself, to free yourself have a bit of time to step back, draw back and give yourself the space to actually become the business owner, the founder, the director, the MD, the CEO, that you need to be.  

Okay Pretties, thank you so much for listening today. Don’t forget to subscribe and join our free group Social Pretties on Facebook. We would love to see you in there and continue the discussion. Until next time. 

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