My Best Advice On How To Recover From Major Burnout

Welcome back to the listening lifestyle. I’m your host, Igor Kheifets. In this episode, I’d like to talk about burnout, because burnout is real. And ever since COVID, I think burnout has become even more dominant in our lives because we have lost this fine line between working and resting. And if you’re working from home right now, you’ve probably been feeling like there’s no more black and white, there’s just basically one gray mush. So in this episode, I’m gonna give you a few tips that you can implement right away to eliminate some major burnout if you’re suffering from it, or to prevent it if you’re not suffering from it just yet.

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I’m Igor Kheifets and this is the list building lifestyle. The podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process. This podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my bestselling book, the list building lifestyle Confessions of an email millionaire at www.igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email, swipe files, and traffic blueprints, visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

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I remember experiencing major burnout when I started making about $250,000 a year. It was a really good time for me, I was up and coming in the industry. I was making about $20,000 a month and I was loving it because just to compare to where it was at the time. $20,000 a month was about double my annual salary in Israel at the time. So I was virtually a one man operation with maybe another one other assistant or something from Lithuania, which ended up firing later because I found him stealing my leads. And I was doing everything myself, almost everything myself. And I was making great money. And I really thought that’s the way. But what it didn’t consider is just how difficult it gets when you realize you can’t really take any days off. And what’s interesting is, I love the idea of working from my laptop, I love the idea of not having to commute. But I barely had time to breathe, I ate at my computer, I slept next to my computer, I even spending time with my at the time, a girlfriend, who will soon become my wife, and the mother of my children, even spending time together was next to a computer because I couldn’t afford to take my eyes off the ball. I remember going to a restaurant with her and whipping out my laptop in between meals. So I can change a link or redirect a link. Because there was no one who could do it for me. And it really all came kind of crashing on me when I didn’t even notice that Anastasia just left. This was crazy. Like she actually left because she called me for something or she wanted to know something. And I completely ignored her that day, that night. And she just said, you know what I’m done. And she just left the building. And I only discovered that six hours later, when I was done working or, you know, came out to pee or something. It was embarrassing to admit, but I was so focused on what I was doing and was so obsessed with it. And I was such a control freak, that I just didn’t pay attention. Now, I’m not gonna give you the whole spiel of our cheese, the reason why I live and breathe and bla bla bla bla bla, like, I still wake up in the morning, and I love what I do. And even if we were to separate, I would kill myself. You know, I wouldn’t like to do that whole drama thing. I’ll figure out a way to live my life and I will continue to do what I do. However, it was becoming a bit toxic on my relationships, both with Anastasia and my parents and my friends, which at the time didn’t really have any friends because it was working so hard and I didn’t really have time for anything other than my work. So what really helped me battle this burnout situation where it was working around the clock and I really felt like it was going a million miles an hour and still falling behind. Constantly chasing my to do list and constantly trying to put out fires was coming to realization that I absolutely had to start hiring people. And that yes, no one will do it the way that I will. No one will be able to do it as well as I will do it and no one will care as much as I care. However, it’s inevitable, you still have to bring people in to replace you, and to give you your time and sanity back. And I really used to think in terms of, you know, dollars and cents, where, you know, if I’m paying someone a salary, and they’re not bringing at least double that amount of money, I should get rid of them. But that’s actually an incorrect way to think about it. What you get back when you start building a team is the ability to think, because, for me, one of the biggest problems with burnout is not physical drain, it’s not, you know, physically being drained or being tired all the time. You can be that and not work, it’s, for me, those are not connected. Plus, I’m working behind my computer, it’s not that I’m like shoveling horse manure all day, it’s, you know, it’s a relatively easy job to just place your ass in a chair and type, it’s not a big deal. But it is a brain intensive kind of work. So if your ability to think is damaged, because your mental bandwidth is constantly occupied with everything else other than the important things, then that ends up hurting you and you get stuck. And so for me, the moments when I’m most, you know, burnt out, even today are usually the moments when I hit a plateau when I hit some kind of glass ceiling in my business. And usually that means I am trying to take on too much. And I’ve recently hit that point, again, where you know, our business is already growing because we released a new offer, it really took off. And I found myself, you know, doing a million things and really falling behind, you know, with and then starting to fail people, right? That’s actually a big deal for me, where I hold myself accountable to people in my life, be it people on my team, or people in my family. But as soon as I noticed that I’m failing. And I’m being well, my accountability to these people gets hurt. That’s when I started looking outside and looking at what I could delegate, signing up bringing several new faces into the company, I brought in the GED Manager, I brought in an outreach person and in house content producer person, we started to bring in more people, for our internal team. And

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it helped to free stuff from my plate, and not in the way that oh, now I have an extra two hours a day that I can sit here and do nothing with no, it’s more about being able to not think about certain things, which means they don’t take up your space. Because in my understanding of who I am as an individual in terms of my, my mental capacity, or my battery, I’m kind of like a computer with lots and lots and lots and lots of apps running in the background, eating up all of my operating memory. So if you’re a geek, you know, you know what RAM means, right? It’s the operating memory that stores information that’s, you know, that you need right now to keep running all your apps. So kind of like, on your phone, if you’ve got a million different apps open, your phone slows down. Well, in my experience, my human experience showed me that for me, it’s times 1000. If there’s more than three or four clinical apps, they’re running in the background for me. My brain not only slows down my whole system, including my nervous system, starts shutting down, my back pain flares up, and I am physically tired all the time. I am cranky, I have less patience, I basically become a different person. And that’s something I don’t like. I mean, I’m all for success and, and making money and being the big dog and everything. I’m as ambitious as any other entrepreneur. But if I do it at the cost of personal well-being to a point where my personality changes and therefore changes their relationships in my life and then my health, that’s when I started questioning. Am I taking on too much? That’s how burnout shows up for me. So my best. My best tip is to bring people who can take things off your plate. However, if you’re just starting out and you don’t have the budget for it, if you don’t want to bring the people then the only other best thing to do is to start saying no, it’s to cut things from your day to day. It’s being able to discern okay, I’ve got these five things here that I’m working on. I have to get rid of at least three to get my sanity back to not feel so burnt out and overwhelmed and it does happen to me as well. Remember one time it was three years ago Um, I launched a project where I was teaching people how to build a webinar. And, you know, it was a great project, people paid me 1000 bucks each, so I made some good money. But I quickly learned that between everything else I had going on, I just couldn’t take on this one extra project. It was putting so much pressure on me that I just went back and I refunded everybody, and I said, Hey, guys, honestly, I just took on too much. Here’s your money back. I do apologize. But this program is now shut down, you get your money back. And I know I kind of let you down. But you know, I’m just human, I made a mistake. That’s it. I had no backlash. I had no complaints. No one left me, no one filed a complaint to the Better Business Bureau or anything like that. It just, you know, kind of let go of that project. I never relaunched it, I ended up moving on to different things. But that moment, I felt a huge relief. Because I was like, it felt like a physical weight was off my shoulders. So these are really the two ways you can deal with burnout. In my opinion, I don’t think dealing with burnout, the way most people would deal with where they would go, like a seven day vacation and disconnection. But they come back to the same chaos. So what exactly like theirs didn’t really solve a problem? You kind of tried to put a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. Because you’re basically saying like, I’m not just going to not think about it for seven days. We’re never going to come back straight into it straight into this hill. And do you think you’re gonna feel better? No, probably not. I really think that your inner battery deserves a lot more attention than most people would give it. And the burnout can create long lasting stress and health issues that you really don’t want to deal with. Thank you for listening to the list building lifestyle, get access to the previous episodes transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, remember to clean your free copy of my bestselling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch. Plus, I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email, swipe files and traffic booklets go to www.igorsbook.com. Now to claim your free package.