Episode Description:
In this insightful episode of What If For Authors, Claire tackles one of the most pervasive issues facing authors (and anyone) today—burnout. With her characteristic blend of empathy, humor, and hard truths, Claire dives into the complex topic of burnout, explaining how it’s often a signal to release old ego-driven patterns and a chance to truly liberate ourselves from self-imposed limitations. Drawing from Enneagram insights and her own experiences, Claire offers practical guidance on identifying, understanding, and addressing the root causes of burnout.
Key Takeaways:
Burnout and Ego Death: Claire discusses the idea that burnout often feels like a kind of “ego death,” a signal that some of our deeply ingrained patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing are no longer serving us. Instead of pushing through burnout, she invites listeners to consider the possibility of letting those outdated parts of themselves go.
Understanding Ego Armor: Claire introduces the concept of “ego armor,” the protective patterns we build over time to shield ourselves from pain. Using the metaphor of a knight’s armor, she explains how we develop this armor for survival, but as life changes, that same armor can begin to weigh us down and limit our movement and growth.
The Importance of Support: Recovering from burnout often requires support. Claire emphasizes that this is not a journey you should expect to navigate alone, whether that means talking with friends, consulting a coach, or seeking help from a therapist.
Healing Beyond Superficial Fixes: True burnout recovery isn’t just about saying “no” to one extra project; it requires addressing the deeper patterns and fears that created burnout in the first place. Claire encourages listeners to be honest with themselves about these patterns and to pursue meaningful, sustainable change.
Why You Should Listen: This episode is a must-listen for anyone feeling the weight of burnout or nearing it. With a compassionate but no-nonsense approach, Claire offers insights that go beyond quick fixes and aim to address the core reasons behind burnout. If you’ve ever struggled with balancing your passion for writing with the realities of self-care, this episode will provide a roadmap for creating a healthier, more fulfilling relationship with your work.
Join the Conversation: Have you experienced burnout in your author career? What patterns and fears might be contributing to it? Share your story with Claire by emailing contact@ffs.media or connecting on social media.
Happy Writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If for Authors. I'm so glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor and I'm an Enneagram Certified Coach for Authors as well as a humor and mystery writer. You can check out my latest book, Sustain Your Author Career by going to ffs.media/sustain. Okay.
I wish I could offer you a solid explanation for why it took me 25 episodes before I was like, Hmm, I should probably. Do an episode on burnout. Uh, you know, burnout is a hot topic. It's one of those things ravaging our industry. Although to be fair, I do feel like for the most part we're moving toward the other side of it.
Now we're not completely on the other side of it. So don't worry if you're in burnout right now, you're not being left behind. But what I mean is the worst part of burnout is not realizing you're in burnout, not recognizing what it is. It's when you're feeling like, There must be something wrong with me because I [00:01:00] can't do the things I used to do, but I have no idea what's going on.
That not knowing is often the most unpleasant part of burnout. But thanks to the work of people like Becca Seim, shout out, my girl Becca, burnout is getting much more awareness in our industry. It's being talked about Uh, it's being de stigmatized and people are learning about it. So you may not feel just completely comforted by the knowledge that, oh yeah, this is just burnout.
You might not be like, yay, burnout. Now that I know what it is, I feel completely better. But, you know, we'll just be for real here. Sometimes burnout feels like dying. And actually between you and me, just friend to friend. It's just us. No one else is listening. Uh, it's just me and the six drunk people at an AuthorCon.
Between us, I actually think that burnout is a call for ego death. It feels like dying because it's a call for a [00:02:00] part of your ego to die and to not come back. Now, you don't have to run out and do copious amounts of LSD or MDMA or anything like that to speed along the process of ego death, but I, I think it's important to know that you're not alone.
that a lot of the time when we get into burnout, it's because a part of our personality is no longer working for us. That part of our personality needs to die and be reborn into something more useful and more relevant for the time we're living in and the age we're living in. Okay. I am getting, wow, I'm getting way ahead of myself here.
Okay. Let's talk about what this episode is about. How about that? Mm hmm. Okay. So today's episode, we'll ask and answer the question, what if I'm in burnout? Now back to ego death. I do want to clarify what I mean when I talk about ego because there are a lot of colloquial uses, uses of it. And you know, you see it used in various ways.
So what I'm talking about and what we talk about in the [00:03:00] Enneagram circles , is a more specific use of the word ego. In Enneagram, we talk about there being for each person, the essence or the true self, and then the ego. And that's a different thing from the essence or true self. The ego is the culmination of our patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing that are used to protect our true self from pain.
I find it really useful to visualize the ego as a suit of armor. So it makes a lot of sense to put on armor in a world that keeps trying to jab you with pointy sticks, right? There really doesn't need to be any shame around how thick or total our armor has become.
As we're starting to do this work, right? As we're starting to look at our armor, we really don't need to feel like, Oh man, I have thicker armor than the person next to me. If we're comparing, we're already off track, but still the goal is to dismantle our armor piece by piece so that we have a little bit more movement in our [00:04:00] life.
That's what success looks like in this work. It's called. Liberation. So taking that armor off piece by piece is what brings us toward this idea of liberation, the ability for a true self to move around more freely.
You may have heard me use this example before, but I like to think of us as these jousting knights. So if you've ever been to a Ren Faire or watched any sort of medieval type movie, I guess, you know that when knights are jousting, , a suit of armor that has a lot of weak spots Exposing your vital organs is not the kind of armor you want to be wearing.
Now, a knight tends to have a whole ground crew of people in charge of putting the armor on them, either once they're on the horse or before, and then helping them up onto the horse because that armor is fucking heavy. And once that armor is on, There's very little, , movement allowed by it. And this is [00:05:00] important because if there is movement, then there are joints and there are parts of the armor that are not there, that are not metal, that are soft and vulnerable.
So the design of the armor for a knight who's about to joust is intentionally limiting. It has to be this way. There's a trade off between movement and protection. And this is a really important consideration for someone who's about to ride their horse as fast as they can towards someone else who's riding their horse as fast as they can and carrying a pointy stick.
But once the joust is over, the knight can't do much else until they get that armor off of them. They can't even turn their head in it. So that armor is appropriate for a situation where they don't need to turn their head, but it's not exactly protecting them in something else. Some other situation where the ability to turn one's head is useful for survival or just useful for having a good time.
So this is a little bit like [00:06:00] what happens with our ego armor. Somewhat ham fistedly, we put it on to protect ourselves from a particular situation. It's usually designed for us after the fact, as in, we went into our first joust without any armor on.
And got slightly maimed as a result. So this would be like those deep wounds we feel as children, right? We didn't have the armor then, and we also didn't know how the fuck to joust. So we got really hurt. Then we designed some armor to protect against that particular kind of hurt. Over time, we've designed an entire suit to avoid that particular kind of wound.
So maybe that wound is feeling rejected, feeling betrayed, or feeling worthless. Could be all kinds of things, but we've designed a suit of armor for ourselves that we hope has no weak spots to that kind of pointy stick. And then what we do is we forget that there's a whole hell of a lot more to life [00:07:00] than jousting.
And then we wonder why we're struggling with anything that doesn't feel like a fight, and why we're trying to turn everything into a joust when it doesn't need to be. Like, why can't, why can't we just enjoy the victory parade? Oh, because we're still in our jousting armor and it's a hundred degrees outside and we can't turn our head to see the people waving at us.
So you get the picture here, right? I won't belabor the metaphor too much. We all build these suits of armor and the things that happen to us when we're young will determine how thick and impenetrable we've decided our armor needs to be. So some people's armor won't be as thick going into adulthood as other people's.
It won't be as complex or as limiting to its range of motion. Is that fair? Nope. But it's also out of our control. It's in the past, it happened, it doesn't have to be fair, it just is what is. So what is in our control is gaining awareness of the armor we're wearing and how much it's limiting our movement and everything outside of the [00:08:00] jousting arena.
These pieces of armor may have even been designed so long ago that it's not even helping us in the jousting arena like we thought it was. So what does this have to do with author burnout? Great question. It has everything to do with it because we burn ourselves out by carrying that armor around all the time and thinking that the only tool we need is our lance.
We stop being adaptable to the situation. We're unable to see the reality as it is and we always think we're in that jousting arena. And then we try to treat everything like it's a jousting arena and then we wonder why the fuck we're so tired all the time. Now this is not to blame anyone for their burnout because I don't think it's you.
Useful to blame anyone for something like this. Sometimes we get into burnout because life deals us a straight flush of shit. We don't have time to adjust to the onslaught of shittiness. We don't have time to [00:09:00] decide what armor needs to come off. And so life just kind of knocks us onto our side where we're stuck on the ground until, you know, our ground crew comes along and lifts us up, or we figure out how to take the damn armor off ourselves.
It's really important, really important when talking about burnout to find a balance between taking accountability for what we can control in this and not beating ourselves up for not knowing better previously. So yes, in this episode, I'm going to explain how you got yourself into this mess, but there's no point in being mad at yourself because there was no way you could have known.
Nobody teaches us things like this when we're younger, and even if they did tell us about it, even if they did share important wisdom, there's a certain amount of having to learn things the hard way that goes along with this sort of work. So even though I may tell you how to avoid getting into burnout, and it may be exactly what you needed to [00:10:00] hear, you may not listen if you haven't experienced enough pain from the patterns that I'm warning you about.
And that's okay. I do the same thing. A lot of the times authors will come to me and ask, Hey, what do I need to know so that I don't make any missteps so that I can avoid ever experiencing the pain? And I could, I could tell them, sure. I'm like, Oh, you're a seven. Here's some things that you may run into, but they're gonna run straight into those things anyway.
So a lot of the time, I won't tell you the thing before you're struggling with that particular issue. Outside of this podcast, obviously, but that's because the pain isn't enough for you to listen to me yet. We have to go through the pain before we're willing to change.
So if you're in burnout, Or you're heading into burnout. That's a signal that you're almost ready to try something new. You're almost to the point where the weight and the [00:11:00] burden of your existing armor is less tolerable than the pain you're worried you'll experience if you take it off. The armor we're wearing lies to us.
It tells us that this is the only way for us to survive by wearing it. And maybe it had a point about that when we were younger and first formed that armor. Maybe that armor was exactly what we needed as children to survive on whatever breadcrumbs of our basic needs we were getting to survive off scraps in a scary world that didn't make sense and that maybe we weren't properly prepared for by the grown ups in our life. But that armor is not designed for you to thrive.
If you've read as much Arthurian erotica as I have, you know that those suits of armor weren't designed to have sex in. I mean, you could probably leave the helmet on if you're into that, but otherwise you gotta take off the rest of the stuff to enjoy the richness of the armor. of life.
Another reason I like to think of our ego as a knight's jousting armor [00:12:00] is because when you look at the idea of the nine different lenses of the Enneagram, you have to ask the question, how broad is the field of vision of this lens? We run into the problems of our type the most when we start to really narrow our field of vision.
We can only see a single path forward. So this may look like a mentality of success is the only option, right? Narrowing that lens. Or not acknowledging that there are other ways to publish a book that are just as equally good and respectable as doing eight rounds of revisions and hiring multiple proofreaders to make sure that not a single typo slips through.
So those ways that we narrow our lens and our field of vision could also look like immediately believing a project has no potential or is not worth our time. And then skipping to another project and a brand new shiny project over and over again, without ever finishing a single project. So it's these patterns of our type that are somewhat predictable.
That narrowed [00:13:00] lens, that narrowed field of vision is made up of patterns of our type that are somewhat predictable. But we start to really begin that they're the only way one can properly proceed through life. Looks like believing that you can only make money in this business and really, really wanting to make money if you publish a book every two months.
So a belief like that will narrow your field of vision very quickly. And this draws my mind back to that suit of armor. And I know you're still thinking about the Arthurian legend, Erotica. Huh. That's alright. Enjoy. Uh, but this draws my mind back to that suit of armor, because it's not designed to let us turn our heads.
You only have a very narrow slit in the visor. Because the larger that slit, the more you risk a lance tip taking out your eye. So more vision is dangerous in the jousting arena. Even a small slit for your vision [00:14:00] could mean a splinter makes its way through and takes your eye out. Okay, so if you let that fear take over, you're going to keep narrowing that little bit of Slit that you can see out of, you're gonna make it narrower and narrower if you're afraid of losing an eye.
And eventually you won't be able to see shit. This is what happens. If we believe what we learned when we were younger, is the only way to survive life.
What happens if every time a little splinter makes its way through, rather than getting used to the pain of the splinter, we decide to armor up even more?
The first thing that we really need to remember is that we are not jousting knights. Write that down on a piece of paper and postmark it to your nervous system. We are not jousting knights. You are not in a fight for your life. As I like to say, there's no such thing as a life or death publishing [00:15:00] emergency.
What we think are lances, with tips that could drive straight into our hearts, tend to be things like rejections from agents, one star reviews, an author we admire not wanting to be our friend. Yeah, those things won't kill you, but they do hurt like a bitch. So it's important to recognize pain is not harm in this case.
And we may need to tell our bodies that. So yes, these things do hurt. But if we convince ourselves that we won't survive them, which is what we do every single time we reinforce that fear by avoiding it, and armoring up more against it, we'll end up never experiencing the pain that we need to be free of those fears.
Or at least free enough to live beside them rather than as their servant. If you're in burnout, it's very likely that the cause is carrying around too much armor all the time and wearing a helmet with too small a visor to see through [00:16:00] anymore. Usually what happens is that the patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that we followed our whole life, maybe they worked okay for the most part.
Maybe that got you some sweet rewards when you published a book every two months back in 2015. Maybe in that environment, it launched your career into something you didn't know was possible.
Congratulations! You've just enforced an incredibly unsustainable pattern. Nice. But of course, the environment changes, and you are now nine years older than you were in 2015. Sorry to be the one to break the news. And you've also lived through the stress of a pandemic. Maybe you have long COVID.
Maybe you've lost some people and you're carrying around some grief, or you just don't have the capacity to continue carrying around the weight of that particular pattern of workaholism. It can be really confusing when something that worked for us before stops working. Our first impulse as human beings.
It tends to be to simply [00:17:00] do a lot more of it to see if it starts working again. So if publishing a book every two months in 2015 worked and it's not working anymore, then probably what I need to do is publish a book every month or two books a month. And then the question simply becomes, well, how the fuck do I do that?
Because that is wild. All the people I went to college with would dislocate their jaws with how quickly those jaws would fall to the floor if you told them that there were people out there publishing even just a book every two months. I've seen it. I've told them. Their, their jaws become dislocated.
It's, it's horrifying to watch. But you can see how publishing a book a month doesn't actually solve the problem that you're faced with.
Because, yeah, maybe that's getting your career going again. Maybe you went from a book every two months to a book every month. Okay, we've accelerated this pattern. But what about when things change again in [00:18:00] nine more years? You haven't addressed the problem. The problem is that you believe you could ever truly feel worthy and valuable by working so hard that you fall over.
Will it actually make you feel valuable by devaluing so many parts of yourself as a human being? Does it make you feel valuable to devalue your heart center and your emotions and shove all of those to the side? To wring every ounce of productivity from your body until you find one day that you can't get out of bed and you're in a deep depression wondering if you've just broken yourself forever?
Or is the problem that you developed armor at a young age to protect you from feeling worthless and without value, and that armor took the form of shutting out your emotions to get more done and produce more things that other people thought were valuable.
So that's probably what this particular armor looks like if you're thinking, okay, I need to write books [00:19:00] fast, things have changed, I'll just write them faster. And I'll be honest, sometimes it's only when this hypothetical person is unable to get out of bed, that they'll even consider holding up this particular piece of armor for inspection.
So if you're ever wondering why I don't actually seem too concerned when people come to me and say, Hey, I think I'm in burnout. This is kind of why, yeah, I'm concerned about you. I care about you, but I'm not actually worried when people experience existential pain. It's an essential part of life. It's an essential part of being awake to life and growing.
And it's only when we're in pain that we can no longer avoid that we're willing to have a real honest discussion. And we feel ready to try something drastically new and make no mistake. If you're in burnout, you will not be getting out of it. through superficial changes. You're [00:20:00] not in burnout because there was one project you said yes to that you shouldn't have.
You're in burnout because there are dozens of things you've said yes to that you should have said no to.
If you go and say no to a few of those things, you might start to feel your energy come back. But until you address the patterns, beliefs, and fears that are telling that you but until you address the patterns, beliefs, and fears that are telling you that you must say yes to these things again and again, you'll just end up back in burnout all over again. So I tend to be a little bit of a hard ass when we're talking about burnout, because if I try to protect your feelings and your ego here, If I try and protect you from the pain that's required, I'm not actually helping you.
Feeling the pain of these patterns that have existed over the long term for you and that have not actually helped you thrive, [00:21:00] that's essential to trying something new. I would be doing you a disservice if I provided your ego any relief from this pain.
What I will offer you is something for your true self, and that's hope.
All of this can be changed. All of this can be overcome. But anyone who promises you that this is a fixable situation without pain is absolutely full of shit. They either don't know what they're talking about, Or they don't actually care about you. They may also know that our ego will absolutely dump some money on the promise of things getting better without going through the pain that's necessary for transformation.
Ooh, our ego loves that promise and it will convince us that this is the way, but it's not.
All right. So here are Some of the pieces of armor that tend to be stuck to [00:22:00] people of particular types, and that cause us to really start to carry around more than we can. So if we start to see how much we're armoring up against these particular pain points, these fears, and if we start to see the patterns we're using.
We can then start to bring our decision making skills to the party and begin to decide, each time we feel that pain or fear, do I want to armor up more, knowing it'll save me from this pain but limit my mobility? Or do I want to take the curious approach and see if this is something I can get through without the armor?
So I can maybe build more confidence in my ability to handle it in the future.
Alright, here we go. Buckle up. Ones, your fear of criticism is burning you out. Think about all of the things you do in your author career to avoid feeling criticized by others or by yourself. Where do you overburden yourself and your writing and marketing process [00:23:00] simply to try to be completely above reproach?
So this can look like the pattern of perfectionism. for listening. That's what the armor tends to look like. It can also look like self righteousness.
Twos. Where is your fear of rejection and your anxiety about being unworthy of love causing you to do too much for too many people in the author world? Have you taken on a maternal role for your readers? Are you treating them like children who can't care for themselves? How much of your daily energy is going towards serving others, just to avoid feeling like you're unwanted?
So this often takes the form of porous boundaries and not having a clear idea of what is yours and what is others to take care of. Threes, where is your fear of failure causing you to spend extra energy? Building and maintaining a public image of [00:24:00] success. Where in your author business have you spent your energy covering up and glossing over things that feel like failures, rather than sitting with the negative emotions that come up from not achieving a goal, moving through those, and maybe cleaning up the mess?
Where has your need for success kept you from even trying things? That you're worried you could easily fail. Where have you suppressed the energy that comes from expressing your authentic self to avoid your fear that the audience won't approve? So this often takes the form of the armor of spinning everything into a win to create a false image of being comfortable with failure.
What do I mean? Well, first of all, if you do that, the audience can tell. But it looks like, you know, those kind of cringy LinkedIn posts, right? Like, here's what having my wife leave me and losing custody of my [00:25:00] kids taught me about being a better author. So that's obviously an extreme example, but even the, the more subtle examples, people can see through it.
Right? So you might as well just accept the failure and, and just spend a little less time spitting that image of success, uh, because beyond just people being able to see it, most importantly, doing that is disconnecting you from your true self and you deserve to get in touch with your true self. So you can finally recognize your inherent worth and value.
Fours, your fear of abandonment is leading you to spend a lot of energy trying to prove that you're special and irreplaceable and that people ought to keep you around. So think of all the ways you've structured your author business around trying to prove that you're different from every other author.
Have you started marketing yourself so incomprehensibly that people maybe can't even [00:26:00] connect to the message in the first place? Sure, that's almost a guarantee that you won't be abandoned by readers, but it's also not getting you the deep connections you're looking for. It takes a lot of work. And you may just not have readers in the first place.
So this fear of abandonment often takes the shape of the armor of complication. Making things more complex and complicated than necessary to prove to yourself that there's nothing like it. That is completely unique and therefore irreplaceable. So imagine, if you will, the benefits of being abandoned by the right people.
You don't want everyone to stick around. You want as many fresh eyes as possible on your work so that you can find the right audience. So that fear of abandonment is keeping you from telling people about your work.
But if you weren't so beholden to that, think of the numbers game you could play. If it didn't bother [00:27:00] you that the wrong people for your work were abandoning it,
you might feel freed up to show your work to a million people. let's say, in the hopes that 10, 000 would like it.
Fives. Your fear of ridicule and looking incompetent or foolish is probably limiting your scope of what you'll admit to yourself that you don't know. So you probably think of yourself as a learner, most fives do, but ignorance is a prerequisite for learning. So if you won't admit your ignorance on matters related to writing and publishing, you may have unwittingly closed off your path to learning with your desire to already know.
So maybe ask yourself, where, where has that fear of looking foolish cut off your curiosity? in your author career?
Where has it disallowed you from connecting to your emotions and intuition knowing that doing so may open you up to ridicule from [00:28:00] others?
Where have you narrowly defined what it means to know something, keeping you from exploring mysteries that could inspire your work and delight you with new ideas for sharing your work with others?
Most importantly, where has that fear of ridicule stopped you from asking what you would consider to be dumb questions? Dumb questions are often the ones that Give us the most insight. And where has the fear of ridicule caused you to cut yourself off from others and isolate as a way of armoring up?
And where has this fear of ridicule caused you to cut yourself off from others and isolate as a way of armoring up?
Sixes, where has your fear of betrayal caused you to waste energy staying on high alert for any signs of disloyalty? Where has your need for safety in numbers caused you to hastily make alliances that weren't right for you? Creating a sort of self fulfilling prophecy of someone betraying you. Where has that fear turned [00:29:00] into doubt in your mind?
How much time and energy do you spend doubting your next move in your author career? Because you don't really trust yourself, but you also don't trust others. Where has your fear of betrayal caused you to mislabel allies as enemies, turning your view of the industry into a hostile place where people don't have your back?
This often takes the form of armoring up with cynicism and suspicion.
Sevens, where has your fear of limitations caused you to run in too many directions at once? Where have you opened too many doors in your author career without shutting any? How has your fear of missing out caused you to never reach true satisfaction? This usually looks like distraction and novelty.
Eights. Where has your fear of being controlled tricked you into believing that the world itself is a jousting arena, and if you don't carry a big stick, you'll get knocked off your horse. [00:30:00] Where has your fear of vulnerability caused you to take on an excessive number of challenges just to prove to yourself that you're strong and nothing can take you down.
Where has that fear led you to all or nothing thinking in your author career? And where has that need to avoid being controlled begun to take control of your life? So this often takes the form of seeing moderation as weakness or being half assed and trying to force your way through any challenge, regardless of whether there's Really a possibility of overcoming it on your own.
Nines, where has your fear of conflict kept you small, quiet, and numb? Where has that fear of conflict convinced you that parts of your author career are not worth the trouble? Where has that fear convinced you that authentic and important parts of yourself are too controversial to show the world?
How has putting those parts of yourself to sleep [00:31:00] made you feel listless? throughout your life, leading you to drift through a series of tasks that you believe may prevent conflict, but that you don't feel actually add value or meaning to your life. So this usually looks like armoring up with, hmm, it's no big deal.
And then downplaying the very bold and alive parts of you that give you the vitality you need to move forward. Remember your own wants and needs and let those energize your career.
So there's a little tough love for everyone. And honestly, that's just the tip of the iceberg because burnout is usually a complex thing. I've worked with a lot of authors dealing with burnout, and it's never a surface level change that needs to be made. Okay, so you might be wondering, alright, what, what's the solution?
I pointed out why you're in burnout, what's gonna lead you there, but wouldn't it just be helpful if I told you how to get out? Well, sure, I'll tell you, but you won't like [00:32:00] it. It's simple, but not easy. The first step is to notice all the places where these draining patterns are taking place. Start to notice your armor.
So some people will spend a week on this and think they have it, and I can guarantee you that is not correct. You don't have You've only begun to see where these patterns are showing up because they're so essential to your foundational operating system. You're going to be noticing these patterns like perfectionism or lack of boundaries or downplaying your own wants and needs.
You're going to be noticing them possibly for the rest of your life, but definitely for at least the next few years. So that's step one. Notice where these things are happening. Step two is to give these patterns a real hard time. When you notice them kicking up as soon as you notice them, you need to interrupt them.
Every time you repeat these patterns, you reinforce the fear behind them, making it seem [00:33:00] true and worthy of avoiding. So set some rules for yourself on this. If you're a four, for example, it may look like this. When I notice that I'm making things complicated to avoid being ordinary and therefore being abandoned, I'm going to stop what I'm doing and work toward making the process as simple as possible.
Shift your attention toward simplicity. If you don't go searching for examples of where simplicity is the most profound, though, can you really? Convince yourself that it's the best move. So step one is notice the pattern. Step two, interrupt the patterns and say, no, we're not doing that. And step three, become obsessed with finding evidence in the world that disproves the logic of those ingrained patterns until you start to value not doing them.
And then step four, do literally anything other than what you were about to do as part of that [00:34:00] deeply ingrained pattern. Anything, just not that, you know? So sometimes it's actually best to swing hard in the other direction, just so you can see for yourself that the result isn't necessarily better or worse than the one you were getting.
For instance, one of the common pieces of advice for type 1s is to use the word, uh, Who want to be perfect and follow the rules is to intentionally break a rule and not just a rule that you think is stupid to begin with. Intentionally break a rule and do something bad. Not a murder. Don't do that. But there's a lot in between.
So do it with full consciousness that that's what you're doing. What you may find, and what I've found is that it doesn't really change all that much about the world, and that can sort of break the spell that we create for ourselves as one that says that, oh, it's up to me to make everything work perfectly.
I have to control all of the things. I have to control [00:35:00] my urges completely. If the world is not gonna spin off its access.
But you have to disprove that. So I can do a bad thing here and there just because it's a little fun, and it doesn't drive me as crazy when I see other people aren't doing exactly what I believe to be the right thing. So that's a nice result. And listen, this can be something small. Like, ooh, I didn't wipe down the gym equipment after I worked out.
Ooh. Right? But try something that's contradictory to your initial pattern. Okay? Whatever your type, whatever your initial impulse, try doing the opposite just to see that things can still work out. And then step five. Okay? Bye. Ready? Do all of those steps over and over and over again until you die. Forever?
Claire, you want me to practice these five steps forever? Yeah, it's called changing practices. You've been doing particular practices your [00:36:00] whole life, but calling them the way things gotta be. So now all we're doing is replacing those faulty practices that got you into burnout with new ones. that are healthier and support your freedom and well being.
Over time, and if you maintain these new practices, they will start to feel nearly as natural as the old ones, but with way better results. Now you may be asking, is this really the solution? Are these five steps really how I get out of burnout? And the answer is yes, absolutely. I know that seems like a big promise, and I don't usually make promises that big, but for this I will.
It'll take time, no doubt. It may not take years to get out of burnout, and it's going to be little by little that you get there. But you will get there if you start to question these practices and follow these five steps that are just sort of the process. So you will get out of burnout. It'll take time and it will [00:37:00] also take support.
That's important. It's almost impossible to get yourself out of burnout without support from other people. But we burn out on life at that time. Deep core spiritual level when we cling too hard to beliefs that are just plain lies. These beliefs worked for us at some point to help us survive, but they're smothering the life out of us and keeping us from thriving.
Over time, that will burn you the heck out. The problem is the armor. I would rather see you go too far, see you running around naked, metaphorically speaking, than to wear all this armor and continue to keep it on.
We do have to adjust to some of the painful realities of life when we start to take that armor off piece by piece. But good God, does it feel amazing to be free of it. If you've experienced one of these moments, and most of you have, where you've deconstructed a belief and realized that life was just much better once you did that, [00:38:00] you know why this is worth the pain of doing it.
You know why I spend hours every week putting this podcast together for zero dollars? To help people avoid things like burnout. And if you're in burnout, I want to help you find your way back in such a robust way that you're less likely to end up there again.
Because I genuinely believe that this world is better for everyone when we take our armor off and stop pretending that life is a joust. It's a hell of a lot more than that. Thank God. So if you're wondering. What if I'm in burnout? My answer is that you're positioned for one of two things. You can either try a superficial adjustment and wonder why it's not working or you can finally be honest with yourself that your ego armor has dragged you down.
The scariest thing is pulling off some of those pieces of armor, but do it. Do it. It's scary, but you [00:39:00] can do it. I've gone through it myself. Now, you may not be able to do it alone, so if that's your expectation, get that out of your head. You need support, but more importantly, you deserve support. So this may look like friends supporting you.
It may look like a tough conversation with your spouse, where you tell them about your needs or ask if you can temporarily quit your job that you hate and try something new. And yes, burnout comes from mental and emotional patterns, but it also has a very real effect on your body. Similarly, if you have an unaddressed issue in your body, like maybe you're going through paramenopause or menopause or you have an undiagnosed illness or anything chronic, anything like that is going to intensify your existing mental and emotional patterns.
So maybe you need to go see a doctor. Maybe that's part of this recovery process. But figure out what support you need. Maybe it's asking someone, Hey, I'm actually too burned out to figure out what I need. Can you help me figure out that first [00:40:00] step? That's fine too. There is a path forward. A path forward that will last for a meaningful amount of time.
So it's up to you. Are you ready for the challenge? I promise it's worth the pain. Thanks for listening to this episode of What If for Authors. I'm really glad you stuck with it. And if you have any questions about this complex topic, you can reach out to me at contact@ffs.media. We can set up something to get more into the individualized nitty gritty of your particular situation.
Thanks for joining me. I hope you'll join me for the next episode. Happy writing.