Purposeful Social Selling

Bounce Back from Burnout Ep #41

Mar 29, 2021

Kristen is sharing more about her experience with extreme burnout–along with the subtle burnout signs you may not notice and what you can do once you realize you’re burned out. 

People in the social selling industry are taught to hustle their way to business success and they almost always have some form of burnout along the way. And so many don’t know any other way to run their business. 

Kristen wants to share this important episode so that more people can hit their big business goals in a healthy way–physically, emotionally, and mentally. 

Listen to this important episode to help you bounce back from burnout: 

  • How to know if you’re in burnout and the different ways that burnout can present itself
  • How Kristen went from chronic disappointment to chronic detachment
  • The stories she had to heal about her business to get her out of burnout
  • What to do if you suspect you are burned out
  • The key questions you have to answer to move from burnout to a sustainable business
  • Why doing the deep work of knowing why you’re here and who you serve will help you stay in alignment and out of chronic hustle
  • Some of the key thoughts that keep us in burnout

If you’ve ever thought that working more in your business will produce better results, you’ll likely find yourself in burnout at some point. Today’s episode will help you prevent getting into deep burnout or how to move out of burnout.

Interested in Kristen’s exclusive mastermind for six-figure earners in the network marketing industry? Find out more and get on the wait list: click here

If you’re ready to learn the simple process of running your social selling business online, you have to check out Kristen’s live group coaching program! The Social Selling Academy: www.thesocialsellingacademy.com

Do you have a question about network marketing? Kristen can help! Drop your question here, and she just might answer it live on the podcast: https://kristenboss.com/question

Transcript of Episode #41: Bounce Back From Burnout:

Kristen Boss (00:05):
Welcome to purposeful social selling with Kristen Boss. I’m your host, Kristen Boss. I’m a mindset and business coach with more than 15 years experience in both the product and service based industry. I believe that social selling is the best business model for people wanting to make an impact while they make serious income. This is the podcast for the social seller, who is tired of feeling and authentic in their business and desires to find a more purposeful and profitable way of growing their business in today’s social media landscape. In this podcast, you will learn what it takes to grow a sustainable business through impactful and social marketing. It’s time to ditch the hustle and lead from the heart. Let me show you the new way. Hey bosses, welcome to another week of the podcast. Listen,

Kristen Boss (00:52):
I am so excited about hearing about your transformations, hearing, how you apply the principles from this podcast. And I am just so thankful to be here with you. Week after week, I read somebody’s review or somebody posted, maybe on Instagram. They say, I fear the day that Kristen’s going to discontinue this podcast. I was like, I would never discontinue it. Well, I don’t want to say never, but I just so enjoy and consider it a privilege and a blessing to be here week after week and sharing with such a loyal and awesome audience. The podcast isn’t even a year old and it has just been exploding in growth. And so thank you for showing up week after week and telling your friends, if you haven’t already left a review, please do. I would be so appreciative. All right. So let’s go ahead and get right into the topic for today.

Kristen Boss (01:42):
And I want to talk about something that I believe is an epidemic among women in this industry. And I’ve been talking about it a little bit in my Instagram stories, just a little bit about reclaiming my health reclaiming self care and nourishing my body just after years of being in chronic amounts of stress from being in hustle mode from overworking too many hours, not managing my stress. This is that really was just my way of life for so long. From about 2015 to roughly 2019, I can tell you, I just, I was burning the candle at both ends impossibly late nights lots of stress. And there, there was just many, many stressors in my life, but a lot of things that I felt was normal. I thought it was normal to to work 80 hour weeks. I really thought that was what I heard was like success tax.

Kristen Boss (02:47):
Like I thought I’m just paying the tax on my future success. And really all I paid tax on was the future stress. And I was going to inevitably cause my body. And I’ll never forget when I came to a moment where, and this is what the topic’s is going to be about today, where I realized I had completely hit complete and total burnout to the point where I felt so emotionally detached from my life, I felt like I was having out of body experiences. I felt chronically. I almost moved from like chronic disappointment to chronic detachment. It felt like I was so removed from what was going on around me. I felt a lot of apathy. And I remember just feeling so discouraged and wondering if, if this was really I’m like, is this worth it? And so what we’re going to talk about today is burnout.

Kristen Boss (04:00):
And I believe that is an epidemic. I see everywhere. A lot of times, people, students that come to the academy, our students that have had a measure of success on some level and they are extremely burnt out and they believe in this business model, they, they love network marketing. They love social selling. They believe in what this business presents and what it can offer, but, and quitting is not an option. However, they are so burnt out. They are so tired that the idea of working this business again, exhausts them. And it’s almost like they don’t know how to work this business from a place of joy and purpose and doing it from a place that feels light and not so emotionally heavy, physically heavy, mentally heavy. And maybe that’s you, maybe you’re listening. And you’re like, dang, she’s got my number. I’m in total burnout.

Kristen Boss (04:58):
First of all, I just want to offer you just my empathy and understand, I know exactly how that feels. I’ll never forget. I was in a, in a parking lot feeling like I was at rock bottom. I called my mom and I just remember telling her, like, I just wish it wasn’t so painful for me to dream. Like I remember thinking, I wish I’d never had big dreams for my life because then I wouldn’t be so content discontent with my reality and the massive difference, like the gap between my reality and where I wanted to be in my life. It just felt so far away from each other. I just felt such defeat and despair. And I, I couldn’t find joy in my day to day anymore. And I couldn’t even tell you what I loved anymore. If people were to say, what’s your hobby, I would say, I don’t know.

Kristen Boss (05:50):
I can tell you anything about my business, but my hobby who knows can’t, can’t tell you. And that’s really, that was when I knew something. This is not okay. What, how am I only able to tell people what’s going on in my business? And I’m not able to identify things that bring me life and bring me joy and make me happy. And so that was when I had a real turnaround. As a surely, there has to be a different way to working this business, to having success. No one was talking about like, I know everybody else is talking about going about it these ways, but who’s doing it from a place of joy and purpose, and they’re not sacrificing their family, their health they’re, you know, not working 90 hours a week. It was just, I couldn’t find anybody doing it. So I was like, well, I’m going to have to figure this out on my own.

Kristen Boss (06:38):
So I want to, I want this episode to offer you some hope. So if, if you have, you likely have experienced burnout at one point, maybe it’s a pattern for you. You will run yourself into the ground. You’ll experience burnout. You’ll, you know, kind of check out for a while and then eventually you’ll start to feel bad, judge yourself that you’ve checked out for a long time and kind of beat yourself up and be like, oh, I got to show up for my business. Again, you’ll show up, you’re running into yours. And then you’ll work out of guilt and obligation and you will hustle to, to make up for that guilt. You feel because you checked out, you’re like, oh, now I feel bad. Now I owe it to my team, to myself, to my family. What’s wrong with me? And you overcompensate because of that judgment you have on yourself and you burn yourself out again.

Kristen Boss (07:25):
And so you stay in this burnout cycle. And I talk about this in my three-day training, I talk about how, you know, the hustle cycle is, is a burnout cycle. And really, I believe the core emotion that perpetuates burnout is shame. The shame of I’m not enough, or I don’t have enough or there’s, I’m not doing enough. And I’ll never forget when I was in a therapy session and this was years ago and she handed me a slip of paper and I just fell apart. And she said, I think you just need to say these three things to yourself as often as possible. And she said, you know, and it said, I have enough, I do enough. I am enough. And oftentimes we are perpetuating we’re, we’re throwing ourselves into our work, or we’re throwing ourselves into productivity because we’ve stopped believing that we’re enough in one of those categories.

Kristen Boss (08:17):
And as long as we don’t choose to have like, believe that we are enough, have enough or do enough, it’s going to consistently invite shame. And then we work from our shame. And if we never heal that shame, we’re always going to be working more working harder and not really healing the story. That’s perpetuating this hustle. And then we burn out and it’s, we stay in that cycle. So maybe that’s you and I, and I want to kind of give you a few signs of like, how to know when you are starting to move towards burnout. And I feel like the first, the first sign of moving towards burnout is when you feel yourself, start to emotionally detach, almost like where there is cognitive dissonance between what you’re doing and how you’re feeling like it’s, it’s very separate and you feel yourself start to emotionally close off and feel very distant.

Kristen Boss (09:11):
And kind of, to me, it almost feels like an out-of-body experience. It’s like, I see my life happening to me, but I stopped feeling involved in my life. That’s definitely a sign that you’re about to start burning out. Another one would be just tired, like I’m so emotionally spent, and I’m gonna say a meant mentally spent. Like, it just feels like your brain feels foggy. Your, your thoughts feel scattered. You feel it feels like you can’t access creative thinking, like even thinking feels incredibly depleting. You can’t muster up the energy to show up for yourself. So the, the, the mental depletion and then I’m going to say there there’s physical depletion of, and eventually it gets to the place where your body starts showing signs of burnout. So it could be fatigue, like waking up even after eight hours of sleep and still feeling tired, coffee, not making a dent in your exhaustion going to bed and you feel tired, but your brain is so wired that it’s not letting you sleep.

Kristen Boss (10:19):
And I thought that was, that was normal. And that’s not, that was just a sign of my body. Just being like, we’re so tired. You’re, you’re not taking care of us. We’re just gonna start shutting down. A lot of times for people, burnout can actually result in sickness. It can look like your, your immune system will be suppressed. If you are running rampant and hard all the time, it actually takes a toll on your immune system. So it could be getting sick and being knocked out for a bit. It could be just, it could be small things like your hormones could start to get out of whack. So there’s all these phases and parts of, of burnout. And, and then I also think like relationally, the people around us start to suffer with us because when we’re burnt out and we don’t have the emotional capacity or the mental capacity for things, and we’re physically tired, we’re not giving our best to the people we love most.

Kristen Boss (11:17):
And they get like the short snappy caddy, frustrated tired, grumpy, exhausted version of us. And then what does that do then when we do that, then it invites more shame. Just see how the cycle of shame, perpetuating shame. It’s like, it’s just the perpetual shame spiral. So I think, you know, so if you’re like, oh, dang, that’s me. Let’s just acknowledge it. It’s there. It’s okay. It’s it’s happened. But now we have to really evaluate how are we going to get out of this? And this is where I see people very stuck as is they are complete and totally burnt out, and they really want to work this business. They want to live their life differently, but they don’t know how, because they only know the exhausting cycle they’ve been in. They don’t know how to work any other way. They don’t know how to work, you know, 30 hours a week instead of 80 hours a week, because there is that perpetual story of you got to do more.

Kristen Boss (12:16):
You must not be doing enough. And I know for me, I, I carried a story around for a really long time that you have to suffer for your success. And if you don’t suffer for it, then you’re unworthy of it. We hear these stories of like, oh, you have to. I mean, and I did this clip on my Instagram, kind of talking about my own journey journey. And I show these, these clips of the things I was going through in my life, but it wasn’t like self suffering. I wasn’t like putting suffering on myself. It was like, things were sort of circumstantially hard. You know, things in my business results didn’t come the way I wanted them to in the beginning. But prior to this, I would say I added to my suffering thinking, if I work more, I’ll have better results.

Kristen Boss (13:00):
If I add more hours, if I add more exertion, then I’m going to make more. And that just made me more tired, less creative, and made my results less good because it was exhausting me again. If we’re working hard all the time, your brain isn’t meant to operate that at that level all the time. And then its productivity, its efficiency and its creativity really starts to dilute. So we actually get less, like our results are not nearly as high quality as if we were working with purpose and intention and joy and integrating rest and breaks and having rhythm. And if you’re like Kristin, but how it starts with the story you tell yourself about your worth. It starts, it starts with the story of what you make hard work mean about you. That you’re, that you’re infinitely more worthy or that you have to have recognition to matter in the world.

Kristen Boss (13:56):
You have to first heal your, your story with yourself. And I know for me, the part of the story I had to heal was that, you know, I’m not worthy of success unless I suffer for it or work really hard or it, you know, and I, and I realized I was trying to compensate for a story from from my childhood where people would make remarks or comments like, oh, you know, you only have what you have. You know, my dad is a very successful entrepreneur and a lot of people kind of was just like, must be nice to have a dad that can do that for you. Must be nice to have that money. And so I was almost always most of my life trying to disassociate myself from my family because I felt like people looked at me like I didn’t work hard enough for the things I had.

Kristen Boss (14:42):
It was just given to me and I was spoiled. So I overcompensated for that story by throwing myself into more work. Like if I’m working 78 hours a week, no one will think that I’m spoiled or that this was handed to me. So notice how that is my, my shame, that that was a shame story I was holding on to thinking, everyone must think I’m undeserving of this. So I’m going to overcompensate and work 80 hours a week so that anybody looking at me or watching me will think, okay, well, I guess she deserves it because she worked herself to death for it. So notice that that was like a self perpetuating story I had. So I, I had to heal that story and I had to challenge the thought this firm belief I had, that you had to work harder to make more or work more, to make more.

Kristen Boss (15:36):
And I think we, that’s a conditioning. We have. It’s just like, if I want to make more, I need to work more hours. And that’s not always the case. You need to work smarter and efficiently, but just adding hours for the sake of adding hours is not true. And I really want to challenge you if you’re holding onto that story, ask yourself, but what if that’s not true? So the first thing to heal is the story you have about your work and yourself and what you think that work will bring you. So if you think, oh, when I finally hit my goals, then people will accept me or all accept me. I’ll love myself. You have to arrive there. Now, before you get back into your work, you cannot look for yourself in your work. You have to find yourself before you enter your work.

Kristen Boss (16:25):
Our most purposeful work is when we have a deep understanding of, of who we are and what we have to offer the world. And this is, I have an entire module in the academy devoted to just this, into this deep understanding and that deep work of, of who we are and what we have to offer the world and finding our purpose. And our, a lot of times when people come up with there, why in this business is they think, you know, I want, I want the time freedom, and I want the financial freedom. I want the vacations. I want the car. I want the paycheck. That’s not a why that’s an outcome, whereas a purpose. And that’s a very external thing. That’s something outside of us, the house, the rank, the paycheck, the airline ticket, those are all external things. And I just want to challenge you.

Kristen Boss (17:15):
What do you think those external things will bring you internally that you can’t have access to. Now, if you think, you know, I’ll feel more joy, I’ll feel more peace. I’ll love myself. I help more acceptance. I want to challenge you to start finding those things about yourself now and finding things you can love about yourself now and what you want to offer the world before those external material things come to be. And I really had to get there and be like, well, what’s, I know what I want in the world, but I haven’t found my purpose. And I’ve been operating from a place of those are my goals and those are outcomes I want, but what’s my purpose. And what’s my, what’s my work in the world. And who am I meant to impact? And who am I meant to serve? When I understood that I was no longer working from a place of like striving for my worth, I was working from a place of knowing my worth already and contributing to the world in that way.

Kristen Boss (18:21):
And so I want to challenge you. What if you believed you already were worthy of, of love and acceptance. And what if you believe you were already worthy as you are with what you have today and you didn’t look to your work to bring that for you or to you, right? So it’s that idea of that self validation before I went out and put myself in front of others, right? Because when I’m striving, when I’m working from a place of, of re self-worth, like that, I already have in this place of self-love and self-acceptance, it becomes less scary putting our content and our value out in the world, because I already love myself. I already accept myself. So if someone doesn’t like my content, I don’t feel shattered when that happens. Right? Because I I’ve, I’m operating from my purpose rather than like, oh no, this is the outcome I want.

Kristen Boss (19:17):
Who do I need to be in order to have that outcome? And we kind of like shapeshift ourselves and we feel counterfeit. We don’t feel ourselves. But when we do that healing work and we show up from a place of self-love and self-acceptance, and knowing our worth and knowing who we were created to be, and how we were made meant to make an impact in this world. Our work becomes a vastly more meaningful and joyful, and we find joy in the work, not join the outcome for me. I know before I burnt out, I only found joy in the recognition and the outcomes that will always lead to burnout. So if that’s you, if you’re only finding joy at the rank up, or when you get recognized on your team page, or when you hit that paycheck, you’re going to continue continually set yourself up for, for heartache and disappointment, because how are you operating in between the outcomes as the milestones start to separate out?

Kristen Boss (20:13):
You know, even as you advance more and more in the company, and it’s in this, you’re not ranking every week and it’s now ranking once a year, where’s your joy? What are your thoughts about yourself? So again, healing your story, healing, your shame, finding your worth, working from purpose. And then you have to ask yourself when you’re, when you’re entering back into this, when you’re bouncing back from the burnout, you have to really ask yourself what is working my business with joy, look like, what would that need to look like? What would I want my business to look like? Because a lot of times the only thing, you know, and that you think of is the way your business has been. So it’s hard to picture it differently, but what if you can write the rules and write the terms for how this business would have to look so ask yourself, what would this business need to look like in order for it to feel purposeful and joyful for me, again, for me to want to show up and to show up to this consistently, even before I see the result, I want to see, it’s like, we forget that we can name the terms and that you can design it.

Kristen Boss (21:17):
So a lot of times with a lot of the clients I worked with that were coming back from burnout, one of the things I would ask them is, well, what would you want this to look like? How many hours a week do you want to work? How hard do you want to fight for those, you know, 20 hours a week? What would your days need to look like? How would we need to structure those things? And we would work on designing the business to where they’ve, they’ve kind of made the terms on. This is how this business can look. And this is how I will feel in that business. And because they feel like they have ownership and they’re in control of the business instead of the business happening to them. And they feel helpless. Now, they feel a lot of courage going back into the business and feeling confident, going back into the business saying, Hey, what if I can do it differently this time?

Kristen Boss (22:06):
What if it can feel different? What if I can operate from this place of purpose? And oftentimes that is when I see purpose born, I see purpose born after people have really burnt themselves out and they’ve realized, okay, I really burnt myself out chasing that, that rank chasing that paycheck, chasing that trip. And some people get the paycheck, get the trip, get the rank, and they still burn out. And then some people burn out before those things, everybody burns out at different times. Right. But then they have to decide, okay, if it’s not for the rank and the recognition and the paycheck, and I know I still want those things in those outcomes, then what would it have to be for? And how would I need to show up? And what would I want that business to look like? So I just want to encourage you that coming back from burnout, it takes, it takes a lot of courage.

Kristen Boss (22:54):
It takes vulnerability, but I also want you to know it can be done. And I think it’s important to come back with a lot of grace, a grace for yourself and giving yourself permission to figure it out and to do it differently and to be willing to explore the stories that come up for you as you work your business. Because we are all always working with a story that is perpetuating, how we show up in our work. And mine was, you know, I don’t want people to think I don’t deserve this. So I’m going to work myself into the ground. So it’s never questioned, or I have to, I have to suffer for this success. Or, you know, people will think I’m a failure. If this doesn’t go well, you know, I was always trying to heal a story I was carrying. So I think it’d be good just for my listener today.

Kristen Boss (23:44):
Take a minute and just ask yourself, what story am I trying to heal through my work that I can heal outside of my work? And when you heal that story, your work becomes way more joyful and more purposeful because you’ve done the healing before the work. I know that sounds really deep, but it really is kind of the key to bouncing back from this perpetual shame spiral that keeps putting you in a place of burning. So I hope that you will do the healing work and that you will find the, or a story for yourself and why you want to show up in the world and, and operating from that place of purpose, because it’s far more joyful and far more fun to work your business. That way on that note, if you are ready, you want to learn how to identify your purpose. Work with joy work with consistency, do the hard work.

Kristen Boss (24:44):
It’s still going to be hard work, but joyful and purposeful hard work feels completely different than scarce. Needy, terrified, panic hustle. It feels so different. And my students, every day inside the academy, they experience that they feel a lot more joy. And I was just saying in the academy, you know, a couple of weeks ago that people joined to learn how to grow their business and they do. They get massive results. If you’ve listened to the last two episodes, you’ve heard amazing testimonials from my students because they’re operating from a place of joy and purpose and fulfillment, and they get much better results while they are also living their life. But one of the things one of the pillars of the academy is, is I teach people to raise their emotional intelligence because when we raise our EKU, we actually become more mindful and aware business owners.

Kristen Boss (25:36):
And when we’re mindful and aware, we become, we are able to notice when we are starting to work from our shame rather than working from our purpose. So a lot of people, when they join the academy, not only notice a change in their business, but they notice a change in their marriages, their friendships, their relationships how they parent their children, how they show up in their nine to five. It just enriches every area of their life. Because when you learn to become a more mindful person, it shapes all areas of your life and people in the academy. Notice that. So today if you haven’t seen from the last episode, if you haven’t seen in my emails, I have a double book bonus going on. I have not done a book bonus since black Friday. I don’t do them often, but we have a double book bonus going on so that when you join the academy, it ends tonight at midnight.

Kristen Boss (26:28):
I’m not extending out further than that because we can only send out so many printed books. But when you join through midnight tonight, you get the confident copy copywriting book so that you can learn exactly how to speak to your leads and speak to your audience. And then you also get the brand new book that just released. My academy is totally freaking out. I mean, everybody’s running and getting ink cartridges, but as the purposeful organic marketing book where it’s everything you could possibly want to know about attraction on organic marketing, Facebook strategy, Instagram strategy, how to make meaningful connections, engage how to leverage Facebook groups and hashtags. It is, it is a very tactical, extremely valuable buckets, 50 pages. So when you join the academy up until midnight tonight, you get both books mailed, printed, and mailed to you when you join. And then you will also get to join us for your first live coaching on Wednesdays. We do it every Wednesday. You get on the live coaching call with me and you get tons of value. If you raise your hand, you get coaching or you get massive amounts of value watching somebody else get coached. Who probably has the same question you do. It is so fun.

Kristen Boss (27:46):
Every week we celebrate breakthroughs, massive victories, massive celebrations, and people working from purpose and learning to leave the hustle behind. So if you’re ready, we’ll see you inside the academy. Otherwise, we’ll see you right back here next week. That wraps up today’s episode. Hey, if you love today’s show, I would love for you to take a minute and give a rating with the review. If you desire to elevate the social selling industry, that means we need more people listening to this message so that they can know it can be done at different way. And if you’re ready to join me, it’s time for you to step into the Social Selling Academy, where I give you all the tools, training, and support to help you realize your goals

Kristen Boss (28:24):
In the academy. You get weekly live coaching so that you are never lost or stuck in confusion. Whether you are a new in the business or been in the industry for a while.

Kristen Boss (28:33):
This is the premier coaching program for the modern network marketer go to www.thesocialsellingacademy.com to learn more.

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