Latest / RHYTHMS OF REST℠ Leadership Podcast / Episode 9: You're Not Burned Out From Too Much Work (You're Burned Out From the Wrong Rhythm)
Transcript
- Kent: Why did I collapse and burnout on the kitchen floor and why did it nearly happen again twelve years later? You don't need balance. You need the right rhythm. Much like a heart where all four chambers work together, real success depends on four key rhythms working together in harmony: relational, emotional, spiritual, and tangible. I'm your host, Kent Muroski, and welcome to the Rhythms of Rest Leadership Podcast, where we build rhythms for sustainable success, the kind that doesn't cost you your soul. Before we dive in, if you're achieving by every metric that matters and you still feel like something's off, the rhythms of rest assessment will show you exactly where your rhythms are breaking down and where you are in the burnout scale. In less than five minutes, you can have real clarity. Just go to KentMoroski.com forward slash rest assessment. Let's go. There I was on the kitchen floor at twenty-seven years old in a puddle of tears. I was supposed to be headed for a weekend leadership training conference, but obviously I didn't make it. ⁓ as my body heaved, as I ⁓ you know, set as I laid there on the floor, I felt like I was in a dark cocoon. ⁓ I couldn't hear anything, I couldn't see anything, I felt completely alone, even though my wife was right there beside me. I didn't know what was happening and I didn't know how long it was going to last. I was having a full fledged nervous breakdown. The most dis disconcerting part, though, wasn't the breakdown per se. It was that I had no idea why it was happening or what was happening. I wasn't lazy. I was hustling. I was successful, at least in whatever terms I thought that meant at the time, or however I defined that. I was making things happen. And that's what made it so confusing to me at the time. It took me nearly two months to crawl out of that hole and start to gain a little clarity over what had happened. Unfortunately, it would take me another ⁓ 15 years or so to fully comprehend it. ⁓ but that's that's a another story, I'll get a little more into that as we go. You know, twelve years after that initial burnout, ⁓ that full that nervous breakdown, it nearly happened again. And I almost didn't see that one coming either. But I did, fortunately at that time, I had developed a built-in alarm system. So when I started getting close to the edge, ⁓ it would start my anxiety levels would peak to the point where I knew I had to back off or it was imminent. Now between those two breakdowns, twelve years apart. ⁓ the first one being full fledged, the second one being a near miss. I tried every single thing, maybe not every single thing, but most of the things that the wellness world told me to try: exercise, meditation and prayer, eating better, early morning routine, more time off, ⁓ a a tw a day of rest. ⁓ and I kept ending back, ⁓ ending up back on the same version of that floor or a similar version of that floor somehow. Now here's what 20 years finally taught me. And what no one in the wellness industry was willing to say out loud or is willing to say out loud. I had been working very hard for a long time at the wrong question. So sit in that for a moment. The question isn't how do I work less? The question isn't how do I balance things better? The question itself was broken. Now, for over a decade, the wellness industry has told leaders that ⁓ you know, one thing about burnout that the answer is balance. And it's a promise that doesn't deliver. See, by every measure that matters, balance does not deliver. It has not delivered for me, and I doubt it's delivered for you. If you're a business owner or senior leader, your odds of feeling burnout today are higher than they were when you started. That's what research shows us. The money's been real, the numbers haven't moved. The global wellness industry has spent over, is over a $6 trillion industry that comes from the Global Wellness Institute. Corporate wellness, it's now the largest single-line item in a lot of HR departments. Deloitte did some research and they found that more than three-quarters of its senior executives report symptoms. Of burnout. Three quarters, 75% of senior executives report symptoms of burnout. The APA recorded the highest workplace anxiety ⁓ and chronic stress that they've ever measured. Now I've watched this from both chairs. ⁓ you know, I I've watched ⁓ 25 years I had of leading ⁓ organizations or 20 years, and then the past six years of coaching executives, and I tried the menu myself. And I've watched dozens of CEOs and executives try it before they ever walked into my virtual office. And I've personally, personally watched leaders crash and burn and take good people down with them. And I was almost one of them. And I'm just gonna let you know up front, that pisses me off. My belief is that whole people make better leaders. And leader, I wanna I just wanna tell you something straight. It's not just about you. Your leadership is not just about you. It's about the people that you've been privileged to serve and work with. But whatever the menu was supposed to do for people that were running things or that are running things, it has not done it. Now, here's why balance is the wrong frame. Let me just do a quick exercise with you. I want you to close your eyes for a second. And I want you to say the word balance. Sorry, your eyes closed, just say the word balance. What's the immediate picture that comes to mind first? I can almost guarantee it's some form of a scale with equal weight on both sides. That picture you've always you always see of the old scale where you're trying to have equal weights on both sides because the word balance means equilibrium. And that's the whole problem. ⁓ you know, the whole problem is that balance means equilibrium and life is not equal. The problem is in the word itself. Balance is borrowed from physics. It's pulled out of physics. It tells you your body, your marriage, your team, your company, their weights on a scale. And that if you just adjust things hard enough and optimize and tweak enough, that you'll find that point where it's perfectly equal. The thing is that nothing in nature really works in a balanced way like that. the body doesn't balance its cycles. Seasons don't balance, they rhythm, sleep. Waking, hunger, and meal, tension and release. The most productive things on earth aren't balance. They're rhythmic. See, balance isn't the gift that keeps on giving, it's the lie that keeps on taking. Now, there's four chambers. I call them the rhythms of rest. I stopped chasing balance and I built something that actually matches how life works. I call it rhythms of rest and just It's four cadences that ⁓ that humans run on, the same way that a heart runs on four chambers. So you've got the four, these four cadences I call the rhythms of rest, R-E-S-T. Relational. The R stands for relational. That's my inner circle, my coaches and counselors and mentors, my community and tribe. Those are those the most important relational, ⁓ significant relationships in my life. The E stands for emotional, that's my mind and my feelings, and the fun and hobbies that refill my emotional tank. The spiritual, that's my identity and purpose, my rest and Sabbath, or day of rest as you might call it, and my practices or disciplines. And when I say spiritual, I mean faith or a robust philosophy of life. And then the T is for tangible. That's my vocation and my finances, my service to others. And my physical health, how I eat, sleep, and move. Now, here's the part when one chamber is out of sync, the whole system then suffers. So you can't exercise, you can't out exercise a relational rhythm problem, can you? You can't out-earn or earn enough money to take care of a spiritual chamber that's empty. It just doesn't work that way. And when all four are actually working together, performance and presence, stop competing with each other. That's the whole game right there. I want to show you what this rhythms of rest framework looks like. I'm going to put a picture on the screen so you can see these four chambers and what they lead to. Here we go. Okay, you can see it on the screen there. You've got the four core rhythms, the the rhythms of rest, relational, emotional, spiritual, and tangible, the same as the four chambers of the heart. And what they lead to when they're all working together in harmony is a whole person. So if you're if you can't see the screen, ⁓ you know, feel free to go to YouTube and check out the check out this video. You can also watch it there. All right, I'm gonna stop sharing that. And ⁓ continue here. So here's the line I wish somebody had said to me on that floor that day. Or actually before the floor, I think, ⁓ even though I probably wouldn't have listened to it at the time. I wish somebody would have said this to me ⁓ then. Most people think they're burned out from too much work, but they're actually burned out from the wrong rhythm. I think that's worth saying again. Most people think they're burned out from too much work. But they're actually burned out from the wrong rhythm. Now, I certainly worked too much, too much at the time when I had that that breakdown. I had ⁓ you know, two different jobs, actually three different jobs, two volunteer and one full-time role. So I was working too too much, but it's not always the volume. Often it's the cadence. ⁓ it's the it's which chamber you've been ignoring for years while you've optimized the one. that was already working. So for me, that was work. Now I'm gonna be honest, ⁓ we especially men, ⁓ we use volume of work to cover up for other things. We cover up we cover up important relationships that need mending or not wanting to confront a real problem that we have or this is a big one because we don't want to admit that we use work to tell us we're important. or significance. We get our worth from work because it's lacking in other areas. And so often we use volume of work to cover up for these things. So, you know, if if burnout doesn't happen from too much work, at least not much of the time it's cadence, and we're actually burned out from the wrong rhythm, ⁓ what do we actually do? How do we fix this? Well, let me give you three moves. I want to keep them concrete. And ⁓ they're simple, but not always necessarily easy. So move number one: stop optimizing for balance and start auditing your rhythms. Now, the useful question, the most useful questions aren't, am I balanced this week? That's a horrible question. ⁓ you know, a better question is which rhythm is most out of sync and needs attention right now? ⁓ one of them. Is dragging down the other three. One of those four rhythms, R-E-S-T, is dragging down the other three. It's your job to name it. It might be two, but there's probably one particular pain point ⁓ that's dragging the rest down. And it's often the pain. Pain is often the way that we know ⁓ which one is dragging us down because pain tends to scream at us while pleasure tends to whisper. So the problem is rarely workload. More often than not. The real issue is going to be someone else, or something else, sorry. ⁓ I had one business owner I coached and he was working 12 to 15 hours a day ⁓ out of the fear that if he took his his foot off the gas pedal, if he stopped for even one day, he was gonna get buried and everything was gonna fall apart. But the real issue wasn't work. It usually isn't. It was the emotional and spiritual chambers of the fret of the rest framework. So what do I mean by that? Now the emotional chamber was his faulty mindset about work. I can't stop or things will fall apart. That is totally untrue. In fact, if you stop, things will be just fine. Now I'm not saying you stop at a crucial moment, but don't let a lifestyle ⁓ don't let a a lifestyle, don't try to call a lifestyle a season. If it doesn't have a beginning and an end, it's a lifestyle, not a season. And if you haven't stopped In in three to five years, like this guy I was coaching, it was no longer a season, it was a lifestyle. So, faulty mindset. Now, the spiritual part, I said it was emotionally and spiritual, the spiritual part was his unwillingness to stop. Now we dealt with the mindset first. ⁓ the the world's not gonna fall apart because you stop. We often think that, but that when we think that. We're overstating our importance. See, there's a belief behind every mindset. And the belief is that I'm too important in this process to let go. And if I do let go, everything's going to fall apart. Well, I'm going to challenge you right now. Try letting go of something that you think if you do, everything's going to fall apart and see what happens. I I can almost guarantee that that thing won't fall apart, and you'll probably come back better with more clarity and being more rested. So We dealt with that first. We overstated our importance. We don't hold everything together. We're not that important. We're we're the glue that's ⁓ that holds everything together. ⁓ and if we are, that's that's some other issue. So I won't go any further on that. Then the spiritual. In his case, he was also ignoring what he knew to be true about his faith. ⁓ in Christianity, God gave an example in creation. He created for six days, and he rested on the seventh. giving us permission to do the same. Now I remember saying ⁓ saying something along the lines of this, ⁓ you know, when we rest, God works. And something in his mind clicked ⁓ that he realized that ⁓ the part of the problem was spiritual too. He just wasn't listening to the advice that that ⁓ you know that the scriptures gave and which he claimed as the as the belief that he embraced. And so so what did he do? ⁓ I basically gave him permission to do the same thing that God did. Stop productivity for 24 hours a week and recharge. ⁓ rest, worship, delight, enjoy. So he decided from from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday that he was going to stop working and do things that were replenishing. And because he figured he could do some work on Saturday night, because it was sundown to sunset. That freed him and something shifted in his mindset. Now, the results were transformational, and there were some other things at play too in his mindset and that were happening at that time. But he two to three months later, his mind was clear, and he was working not 12 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week, but two to four hours per day, six days a week. It was that radical of a transformation, a 70% drop. And the amount of time work. Now, I checked with in with him not long ago because we had stopped coaching a while ago because he had he got amazing results. And he was down to one to two hours a day a year after our coaching and doing some of the things that he had always wanted to do, like writing a book and launching a podcast. So that was a long explanation for move one, which was stop optimizing for balance and start auditing your rhythms. Move number two is pick one keystone change in that single chamber. Not a five-pillar overhaul, sorry, four-pillar overhaul, not a new morning routine with 11 steps, one structural move in one rhythm that changes everything downstream. That's what I mean by a keystone rhythm or a keystone change. It's one move that that ⁓ spurs on change and a bunch of other areas. So Let me give you some examples of what this could look like. Maybe in the relational ⁓ chamber, it could be a weekly meal with your family that does not move, or however many times a week you want to do dinner with your family that does not move. I know for me, ⁓ even in the height of my leadership role when I was ⁓ leading ⁓ leading a church and ⁓ they often had meetings at night, my goal was not to be out of the house more than one night a week. The most two. I couldn't break two. So that means we had dinner together five nights a week. Maybe it's start with just a weekly meal with your family that doesn't move, a Sunday dinner. ⁓ it could be in the one regular hobby that refills your emotional tank. I don't know about you, but I find that the emotional tank's hard to replenish. And one thing that I found that replenishes it is having a hobby, having some fun. Maybe in the S chamber, the spiritual chamber, it's five minutes. Of silence and solitude every morning, before you pick up the paper, before you pick up your phone, as you sit down with your coffee, five minutes of clear thinking, meditation, prayer, silence, solitude, whatever you want to do for that spiritual practice. Maybe in the tea chamber, it could be a weekly day of rest, like the the coaching client I just shared about. A day where you stop productivity and you do things that actually replenish you with. People you enjoy. Or maybe in in that tangible chamber, it's a full night's sleep most nights. I had one client that she decided that she was gonna get eight hours of sleep at least three nights a week, because up to that point she had not been getting eight hours of sleep any night a week. And that changed the dynamic of things and increased her clarity and her rest and her outlook on life. So just pick one. in the in the rest chamber, the four chambers, R E S T, either the one that's lowest, and you probably know what it is, know which one it is right as I'm talking about it, or the one that you have the most motivation to work on right now. It could be either one. And move number three, stop calling it self-care. Please stop using that term. I hate that term. It's stupid. ⁓ I get the the sentiment behind it, the self-care, but Self-care is what we call wellness when we're standing inside the frame that already failed us. Okay. Call it structure, call it cadence, call it rhythm, call it the way the world actually works. That's the language your team's going to understand. ⁓ and frankly, it's the language that you'll respect enough to keep yourself. To be fair, the wellness industry isn't totally useless. ⁓ you know, there there's practices and disciplines within the wellness ⁓ industry. wellness industry that are are good and you've gotten some real value for from those. Keep what works. I'm not saying throw it out. I'm saying put it in a better frame. The goal isn't just little tweaks and optimizing your life. The goal is wholeness and whole people make better leaders. Well, I think a lot about the version of me on the floor at 27 years old. ⁓ that guy thought that pushing through was the answer until he just couldn't anymore. He was living one dimensionally in a life that required four dimensions. What he needed was not a new approach, he needed an ancient approach. He wasn't actually after balance. He was after wholeness. So let me give you an example of what I mean. Twenty five hundred years ago, there was a young, bright Jewish guy named Daniel, and he gets dragged out of Jerusalem or out of Israel into Babylon and ⁓ when they were conquered by King Nebuchadnezzar. And he's he's young and bright, and he was chosen for training in the king's court, where he Or he's basically handed all the regimen of the kingdom, the king's diet, the king's schedule, the king's productivity system, all of it. Well, he turns it all down and he keeps his own rhythms, the rhythms that his people had been using for centuries. Now, the the Hebrew scriptures record that at the end of the trial period, and there was actually several, but the first trial period was ten days. Where he said, I want to eat the way our people eat, not all the rich food in the king's court. And there was other other things that happened. But at the end of the trial period, he outperforms everyone in the room in wisdom, in knowledge. ⁓ he, you know, in in the way that he approached things. And he ends up being, later in the story, being elevated to one of the most powerful people in the kingdom. And he does this time and time again. Over the course of several different rulers in the kingdom. Now, so here's Daniel, all the same pressures, ⁓ you know, that came with high profile political jobs, but a different rhythm. Now, that's an example of an ancient frame that I'm talking about. See, the answers are already out there. We're not inventing new answers as we go. There's things that have worked for not. Not just decades, not centuries, but millennia that we we can tap into and they can become a part of our rhythm and we can approach life holistically. Now, I want to speak directly to you. If something has felt caught as you've listened to this episode, if if there's been tightness or your heart's kind of pounding out of your chest and you're saying, that's me. You're describing me right now. I want you to hear me. ⁓ you are him or her. You're that person that I was talking about. ⁓ it may have been my story, but I want you to take ownership of it as your story. That the things that you've been trying have not worked. ⁓ the frame that you've had has not been the right frame, and you want to try something, not it's new to you, but it's really something ancient. Stop chasing balance. It doesn't work. I want you to start naming your rhythms and living from a place of wholeness in these four core areas. I promise you it will help you. Okay, take a deep breath. Here's how we close every episode. Each rhythms check zooms in on one of the four rhythms of rest and gives you one action step you can take in the next 24 to 48 hours. It's going to leave you with a reflection question to take you deeper and help you discern even further and more specifically what's at play, what's really happening. So this week's focus. Is your most out of sync rhythm? That big one, the mega one, because the first move is naming it. So in the next 24 to 48 hours, here is your action step this week. If you haven't done this, go to Kentmaroski.com forward slash rest assessment. We'll put it in the show notes and take the rest assessment right now. You're gonna once you take it, you're gonna get a report. You can download it. You'll be able to name the one rhythm, the relational, emotional, spiritual, or tangible that's most out of sync right now. And it will also help you pick one keystone change in that chamber. Okay. So you define an action and put its first instance on the calendar right then. Once you get the report, you read it, you set that keystone rhythm in your calendar. Not a whole overhaul, one move put in your calendar. ⁓ that week, block the five minutes of silence, you know, set the family meal that doesn't change, protect the full night of sleep. I'm not talking about hacks, okay? I want you to understand that clearly. These sound like some of the same things you've tried before. Only you now have a holistic framework, those four chambers that when you put them all together and you work on one rhythm at a time, and then you move on to the next one. It starts to move the flywheel so that you are moving and living from a place of rest, from a place of wholeness, rather than a place of balance that doesn't work, a place of burnout, and a place of overwhelm. And so that's the move this week. Take that rest assessment, get your report, and schedule that one rhythm that you're going to. That's gonna move move things forward in a bunch of other areas this week. Here's a reflection question. What is the one rhythm in your life that if you protected it for the next 30 days, could change how everything else functions? I actually want to hear that rhythm from you. Could you just respond back to me? Would you just put a comment on the YouTube video or send me a DM on social media? Or if you're on my email list, just go ahead and hit respond to one of my emails and tell me the rhythm you named and the one move you're making in the next 48 hours. Putting it in writing makes it real and I read these. So let's build the habit of naming it out loud together. Can we do that this week? All right. Well, if this resonated with you, this episode, you're gonna love my bi-weekly newsletter. Every other week, I send out honest practical insights to help you live and lead from internal rest instead of burnout. No fluff, just simple tools from my rhythms of rest framework and stories from people that have tried them to help you slow down without moo losing momentum. Just go to Kentmuroski.com forward slash newsletter. And sign up. It's absolutely free, and you'll be the first to hear about exclusive offers and bonus content. Have a great week.