Latest / RHYTHMS OF REST℠ Leadership Podcast / Episode 10: Balance Won't Fix Your Burnout (These Four Rhythms Will)
Transcript
- Kent: idea what was happening or why. I had another near miss at thirty nine years old and by thirty nine I tried everything on the wellness menu, everything that they told me to do, and almost hit another wall anyway. Well, welcome to season two of the Rhythms of Rest Leadership Podcast. You don't need balance, you need the right rhythms. And much like a heart where all four chambers work together, real success depends on four key rhythms working in harmony: relational, emotional, spiritual, which could be faith or a philosophy of life, and tangible. I'm your host, Kent Morowski, and I've been so excited to launch season two of the podcast. The Rhythms of Rest Leadership Podcast is where we build rhythms for sustainable success, the kind that doesn't leave you coming home empty. Before we dive in today, if you're achieving by every metric that matters and you still feel that some something's off, the Rhythms of Rest assessment is going to show you which of the four rhythms is breaking down, which of the four is out of sync, and your highest leverage move to take this week. In less than three minutes you can have some real clarity. Just go to Kent Moroski dot com forward slash rest dash assessment. Let's go. Well, welcome to season two of the podcast. I'm super excited to be with you. I'm recharged, refreshed. I had some great time off this summer. In fact, against some marketing experts' advice, I took the summer off from doing my newsletter and from doing the podcast because I was feeling the burn a little bit and I know myself well enough to know when it's time to slow down. I didn't stop everything. You know, I I kind of retooled some old not old some newsletters from the previous season, the ones that were my most read episodes, and sent those out, encouraged, highlighted a podcast episode and encouraged people to catch up on the podcast. And I took eight weeks off from doing the newsletter fresh episodes from doing the podcast. my schedule changes like yours does probably in the summer. My 13-year-old son is home from school. I took a two two weeks off the grid, full vacation. that was wonderful. And I feel like two weeks is a good period of time to come back and feel like you're ready to step into things again. And so I feel good. I feel good stepping into season two of the podcast and the newsletter, stepping into the fall, which as we all know. fall really feels like the new year even more than January. Fall is when things ramp up in the agricultural calendar, fall is harvest season. It's the time when a lot of things are happening. And man, if you haven't taken some time to rest and recharge yet, you better do it before the fall hits because things change then. I want to encourage you today, just take some time to recharge and replenish before. September hits before the school year hits, if you have kids, before business ramps up, whatever it is for you. Well, I wanted to celebrate season two of the podcast by doing something special. So for the next three weeks, I'm doing something I don't normally do. I'm gonna launch an episode per week instead of every other week, which is my normal sort of rhythm for the podcast. So three arguments that the wellness industry will not make. So, first, today, why six trillion dollars and a decade of self-care, mindfulness apps, balance frameworks, why they left executive burnout worse, owner burnout, leader burnout, they left it worse, not better, and the four-chamber alternative that I've built instead. Next week we're going to talk about why the grind that built you at 32 and built your business and your leadership at 32 is the same grind that's dismantling you. At 42, 52, and maybe even 62, if you haven't gotten gotten that down yet. And the illusion that almost every lead every driven leader is still operating under. And then the week after, week three, I'm gonna talk about why confession was never changed and what performing vulnerability actually costs the leaders who do it wrong. Part of what the wellness industry has told us is that we're to be vulnerable as leaders. I I totally agree, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do that, so we're gonna talk about that. Now if you only have room for one of the three episodes, make it this one. It's the floor that the other two stand on. And but I look forward to seeing you on all three episodes. Well The morning that I was supposed to be driving to a weekend training conference for my leadership role at 27 years old, instead I found myself face down on the kitchen floor in a puddle of tears. So it was morning time. we were set to go to me and my wife were set to go to a weekend training conference for my leadership role. as a college youth, young adult leader in my church, running three different programs. And instead, I just collapsed on the floor in in a puddle of tears. I it was like I was in a dark cocoon. I didn't know what was happening, I didn't know anyone was run. I knew my wife was there, but I couldn't see her. It was like I was locked in this deep dark place, heaving in tears, anxious, crawling out of my skin, not knowing what was happening. And it lasted for what seemed like hours. I don't know looking back how long it actually was. but that's what was happening. Now, everybody around me probably would have said, in fact, I remember one leader saying to me, like, I just wanna grab onto your coattails because you're you're moving somewhere, you're going, you're you're flying high. And I I was an aggressive, ambitious leader. I was doing a lot of things, you know, seemingly making waves. in air quotes there. so from the outside everything looked great. I was working a full time job. I had this leadership role in my church, you know, and and I was I was leading several different programs out of that. And it looked like everything was going great until it wasn't, until I hit that floor and didn't know what was happening and couldn't get off the floor until whatever was happening cycled through, you know, an hour or two hours later. Now the confusing the confusing part was actually the collapse because I couldn't explain it. I didn't know what was happening or why. I wasn't lazy, I wasn't weak. Like I said, by every external measure, I was succeeding. That's what made it so disorienting. But in hindsight, I was a real mess. You know, looking back at that time, I was relationally I was out of sync. I was newly married. I was overcommitted to a lot of things. I didn't know how to have a great relationship with my wife. I came from a divorced family. We were fighting a lot. you know, I yelled a lot, I was emotionally abusive, and and all these things were happening. Our marriage wasn't good at the time. emotionally speaking, I had no idea what it meant to be emotionally healthy. Emotional intelligence, although that book had been out by then, I believe, wasn't even on my grid. No concept for what it meant to be emotionally healthy. spiritually, I thought I made the mistake of thinking that if I had my spiritual life together, that everything else would kind of fall into place. That was of the mindset that I was from and what I often heard echoed in the in the circles that I was in. And it just didn't work. As Dr. Pete Schizero reminded us. in his book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, you can't be spiritually healthy without being emotionally healthy. And so, you know, that was happening. And then on the tangible side of things, on on my work life and my physical life, I was working too much. but then physically I was out of shape. I didn't exercise. My idea of a of a healthy meal was a giant bread bowl salad with bacon and everything else and ranch slathered all over it. And I remember sitting with my doctor when I was twenty-seven and him telling me that can't you have high triglycerides? It's thirty or forty pounds of overweight overweight and so all those things were going on. My rhythms were all off and I had no idea how to get them on, and I thought I was doing great until I fell down on the floor. So what did I do next? Well, after that burnout, I probably did what all of us would do. I took it seriously. I was overcommitted, so I let go of a lot of things. I started to exercise, you know, maybe started to do a little counseling, redoubled my focus on prayer and meditation, to name a few things. but I want and I want to be clear, those things weren't wasted per se. Okay. Some of it genuinely helped. and I want you to keep that in your back pocket because I'm gonna come back to that later. But but 12 years later, after that initial burnout, I found myself dancing on the edge of burnout again. So 12 years later, fast forward, I was leading a nonprofit organization, doing a lot of things. I'll get more into that next week. Doing everything on the wellness menu, the exercise, the counseling, the journaling. Again, on the outside, things looked okay, they looked good. But if I'm honest, from my first burnout. To twelve years later, when I found myself dancing on the edge of burnout again, things had moved only incrementally. May like maybe from a three to a five, or may I wouldn't even say a six, a five point five tops. you know, so he here's how I look at it. At twenty seven, I broke because I didn't know any better. At thirty-nine, I nearly broke. while doing everything that people told me or everything I knew how to do. And that's a different kind of terrifying when you're tr when you seemingly have a lot of good rhythms in place, but things still aren't working right. because if the menu works, if the wellness menu works and you're on the menu and you still end up on the floor or near the floor, then either something's wrong with you or something's wrong with the menu, right? And so more on this near the second Breakdown and what I learned in the next episode. So I won't go too deep into that now. Now, I had been working for those 12 years very hard and for a very long time at the wrong question. And this is what I think is the crux of the issue when it comes to this. It's not the question isn't how do I work less? The question isn't how do I balance things better? The question isn't. How do I optimize my life? The question isn't which app or retreat or morning routine should I be using? Those are all just hacks. And when we try to just take hacks and patch them together, it ends up like Frankenstein, okay? The question itself was broken, and that's the part that stings for people like us because we're really good at effort, we're really good at doing things, driven, ambitious, high achievers. Effort is our whole identity. If something's not working, we're gonna throw more effort at it. But effort can be pointed at the wrong thing and in the wrong direction. And that's what I want to get into today. So for over a decade, the wellness industry has told leaders one thing about burnout that the answer is balance, or maybe it's evil twin sister, self-care, okay? So let's look at the return on that, the actual data, the actual stats on how balance and self-care is working. the Global Wellness Institute puts the wellness industry at more than six trillion dollars. I believe it's per year. corporate wellness is now the largest single line item in a lot of HR departments. Deloitte did a most their most recent survey of senior executives found that more than three-quarters report symptoms of burnout. And then the American Psychological Association is measuring the highest workplace anxiety and chronic stress among leaders it's ever recorded. Now, if you're a business owner, if you had a line item in your business that was consuming six trillion dollars. over ten years and the outcome metric was moving backward, how long would you keep funding it? You would probably stop on year two, you know, if you had any sense. Yet we've been funding this for over a decade in our own lives. So if you're a business owner, your odds of feeling burned out today are higher than they have been, higher than they were the year that you started your company or 10 years ago. You know, I've watched this from both chairs. I've 25 years of leading organizations and six years coaching executives. I tried the menu myself and I tried to put it all together and I've and it didn't work. And then I've watched dozens of leaders come into my virtual office and you know I've watched good leaders crash or be on the verge of crashing and not understand why. So I've seen it from both angles. Now, when we think about balance, you know, what do we think about? I want you to just close your eyes for a minute. And I want you to just have a picture. When I say the word balance, what's the first picture that comes to mind? You know, obviously don't close your eyes if you're driving or jogging or something like that. Maybe just stop for a minute and think: what's the first picture that comes to mind when I say the word balance? Well, I don't know about you, but for many people, for most people that I ask this question, it's a scale that comes up. Two sides. Equal weight, you're trying to balance out each side so it's perfectly equal, because the word balance actually means shocker equilibrium. the image is the entire problem, okay? It's been sitting in our heads, unexamined for long enough for our whole career. I still, it as much as people say I don't believe in balance, or or you know, some people say balance is dead or it's broken or it doesn't exist, I still hear. And see work-life balance all the time. And the problem is balance is borrowed from physics. If you pull it out of physics and drop it into a human life, here's what it qu quietly claims: that your body, your marriage, your team, your company, you fill in the blank. that with enough adjustment, with enough tweaking, with enough optimization, you can get it to level out and be perfectly equal. And then everything will be. Hunky dory, everything will be great, everything will be okay, and your life will be optimized. Woo-hoo. You know, the problem is that life doesn't work that way. Nothing alive works that way. The body doesn't, you know, obviously balances in some ways while you're walking and things like that, but life doesn't balance, it cycles. You know, seasons don't balance, they rhythm. Sleep and waking, hunger and meal, tension and release. Effort and recovery, the most productive things on earth are not balanced, they're actually rhythmic. So I built something different. I call it rhythms of rest, and it's four cadences that a human life actually runs on the way a heart runs on four different chambers. So here are the four chambers. Got relational, that's the people that are important, the marriage, the kids. The key friendships and your community. You've got emotional rhythms, and that's the things that refill your tank, okay? Fun, hobbies, laughter, feeling something other than pressure. You've got the spiritual rhythms, and this is either your faith if you have one, or a f in a philosophy of life. it's the thing bigger than you that you're oriented toward. And then you've got the tangible. This is the physical, the sleep, the movement, the food. And then your money and your actual calendar or your work life, the things that have tangible outcomes in your life. Now, here's the mechanical part, and this is what makes it a heart and not a checklist. The chambers are not independent, okay? When one is out of sync, the whole system suffers, including the ones you've been optimizing. If two are out of sync, which they often are for leaders, leaders take the rhythms of rest assessment. And many come up around fifty percent, which means that there's usually one predominant that's out of sync and then another sub chamber that's that's at close a close second. but when all four are working together, then performance and presence stop competing for space in your life, stop competing with your with each other. Your life stops competing with itself. So most people think they're burned out from too much work. But they're actually burned out from the wrong rhythms, okay? Now, a leader who was, you know, I have a story of a leader who was certain that the problem was their workload, only to find out it wasn't. And I this actually the the culprit is entirely different often than what we make it to be, because what we do is we treat symptoms rather than the roots. So Brand or Brandon was the owner, is the owner of an education and tutoring company that he started. And he thought work was The problem and part of him wasn't sure what the problem was, but he was working for the past five years before we started coaching. Brandon was working seven days per week, twelve to fifteen hours per day, eighty to a hundred hours a week, and he thought, if I take a day off, I'm gonna get buried. You know, I just so I can't take a day off. So he was working too much. He was burned out, he had no real clarity, his emotions were spent, he couldn't even hold a thought. in his mind or remember a thought that he had in one room when he walked to the next room. Okay. And those were all just symptoms. They weren't the real problem. The real problem wasn't in the tangible chamber of that four part of those four chambers that I just mentioned to you. Okay. The real part where the real work was was the emotional and the spiritual chambers. So you know, he started taking shortly after we We met, we he started taking at my encouragement a Sabbath day or a day of rest, a twenty-four hour period where he shut off work, shut off productivity, and did things he enjoyed. He restored some fun into his life, which he hadn't been doing for years. He restored some enjoyment. And he felt like he could do this twenty-four-hour period because it went from Friday evening to Saturday evening, and he could jump in and do some work Saturday evening to not get buried. Well, within two to three months, Brandon's life was radically different. His clarity had changed, his emotional rhythms were better. He started you know, doing fun and hobbies that he hasn't hadn't done in years, and his work hours he was able to cut. You're not gonna believe this, it's unbelievable, and I'm not proclaiming it's gonna be the same for you. You might have a different result, but work went from twelve to fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, to two to four hours a day, six days a week. That's a seventy percent drop in hours worked per week. It was amazing. And so, but the real issue that that he, you know, we if we would have went on we just gotta cut your work time, we wouldn't it wouldn't have solved the problem because that was the symptom, not the root. Now it's n usually not the volume of work, it's the cadence. It's the chamber you've been ignoring for years while you've optimized the one that's you think is already working. And so Often the real issue you know, presents as one thing, but it's something else. So let me give you two practical moves, not five, not four, not even three. I want to just give you two today. So the the useful question is not, am I balanced? Okay. the useful question is which of which of the four rhythms is most out of sync? That's the question I want you to ask right now. See, because one or two of them are dragging the others down. And your only job in this step is to name which ones out of sync. Okay. Most leaders already know, they just haven't said it out loud, or they think they know, but it's not actually the real one under the surface. So the way that you identify that, we'll talk about that in a minute. but it goes deeper. It's not just which chamber is off, because again, we can As high achievers, we can so easily slip into performance mode. Okay. It's not just which chamber is off. In my case, it was the way I was looking at things. It was the lens through I which I was viewing the problem. See, balance look at looks at things only in compartments and says, if I can just get them all right, then I will have balance. Or if I can just tweak this thing and add a little here and take a little away here and Do this and do it's all doing, it's all performance. Then I'll have balance. Then I've my life will be optimized and things will be cranking on all cylinders. But rhythm looks at things through the lens of wholeness. Now I know that word can be a little bit loaded in the sense of we we usually use it in the wellness industry, like like health and wholeness. But I'm talking about looking at life holistically. I'm talking about integrity. The word itself means completeness to be complete or whole. Integrity, when people say integrity, they think often of moral character, which it is that, it's not less than that. But the word integrity, you know, in the Latin comes from integer and it means to be complete or whole. So when we talk about integrity, it means that work and and life and family and relationships and And hobbies and all the things integrate together into a cohesive whole rather than being separate areas. So the big problem for me is the way I was looking at things. I was not looking at things through the lens of wholeness. So it's a perspective shift before we start tweaking and messing with things. The tweaking without the perspective or paradigm shift will leave you in the same place you were before because it's all performance. Oriented. Okay. So that's the first move. Look at things from a new lens of wholeness, not balance, of rhythm. Okay. And one of my favorite definitions of of of wholeness is actions that lead to a state of wholeness. Okay. that's one of my favorite definitions of the word shalom, which is another word for wholeness similar to integrity. And we can do things that lend themselves toward our becoming more whole. Wholeness is not a destination, it's more of a journey, it's more of a direction. Okay. Move number two. If but if you were to start somewhere, because I want to help you get some a tangible win this week, you don't start with a four pillar overhaul. You don't try to overall haul all the things in your life. you don't start with an eleven step morning routine. You don't Tweak this and tweak that. You don't try to do a relational, emotional, spiritual, and tangible at the same time. You pick one structural move that changes everything downstream. I call it a keystone rhythm. It comes from some of Charles Duhaig's work and the power of habit, where he calls them keystone habits. you know, if you're familiar with a keystone, it's that one different shape stone in the arch that holds up the rest of the arch. The idea of a keystone rhythm or habit is one area that you focus on that drives change in a bunch of different other areas. Okay. So let me get give you an example of what that actually looks like. It's one regular hobby or something fun that refills your emotional tank. We'll get into that more over subsequent episodes. But here's another one. Choosing one replenishing friendship outside of your dog and your spouse One replenishing red friendship to invest time in. Okay, that could be another one. Another one could be this: a weekly Sabbath day or a weekly day of rest, a real day of rest where you do things that replenish you, where you close your laptop, or you delete email from your phone, or you don't take phone calls about work. it's a day, a true day of rest. Doing things you enjoy with people you enjoy. And then here's another example: choosing one physical rhythm that drives progress in all the other areas. Now all the different physical rhythms have have elements of a keystone rhythm. So there's research on all of them that if you get adequate sleep, seven seven hours at least a night, you start to feel better and want to exercise, you start to want to eat better. The same way with exercise. When you start to exercise you tend to want to eat better. it drives cortisol at the right levels and stress hormones and all those other things and you tend to sleep better too. So they all have they're interchangeable, but you pick one. And you focus on it is my point. So the word Keystone is doing the work here. so those are the two moves that I recommend this week. Number one, stop looking at it as balance and start looking at it from a new perspective through the lens of wholeness and looking at this holistically rather than tweaks and optimizations. And then move number two: pick one keystone change inside a single chamber and work on that. So one quick other thing before we land the plane here, please stop calling it self-care. That's another word that we often use for work-life balance or in conjunction with it. Self-care is what we call wellness when we're still standing inside of that balance frame that has already failed us. So can we just throw it out once and for all? Call it structure, call it cadence, call it rhythm, call it whatever the heck you want. Call it the way the world actually works rather than that way. It's going to be language that you understand, language your team understands, language that actually resonates with the way that life works rhythmically, okay? Not in balance. So more importantly, it's language you'll respect enough to keep for yourself. And to be fair, I told you I'd come back to this and I wanna I wanna come back to it here. The wellness industry isn't useless. So so please don't misunderstand me. Some of you have gotten and I've gotten real value out of you know, whether it's things like breath work or meditation, prayer, gratitude practice, all those different things. Keep what works. I'm not telling you to toss them out, not throwing out all of it. I'm just putting it inside a new frame that can actually hold it. And and so that's the change. That's the difference. Well, I think a lot about that version of me that was on the kitchen floor at 27 years old. And you know, he thought that pushing through was the answer until he couldn't do it anymore. that guy was living one dimensionally in a life that requires four dimensions. And it wasn't and what he needed was what I needed, that I is he, what he needed was a new approach, or not a new approach, but an ancient one. Because he wasn't actually after balance, he was after rhythm and wholeness. So let me give you one quick example of what I mean when I say an ancient approach, not a new one. So 2,500 years ago, there was a man named Daniel. He gets taken into Babylon. he was a young, a young Jewish Jewish young man in his early twenties. Gets taken by the king of Babylon back to Babylon. He's put on the king's schedule, the king's diet, the king's language, the king's productivity. Productivity system and he turns a lot of it down and he decides to keep his own rhythms instead. So it at the end of this first 10-day trial book or trial period that Daniel practices, where he kept to his own rhythms rather than adopt the rhythms of this kingdom, the record says that he outperformed every peer in the room. you know, he became the most respected government leader in that system. And he did things his own way and he outperformed everyone else. The out the performance part is the result. It's not what we focus on. But he had the same pressures, he was in the same empire as everybody else, or the same way of thinking, and he had a different structure. So Daniel, of course, was you know, in the Hebrew Bible. There's a whole book named after him. You can read it if you like, but you don't have to read that as just a religious story per se. At its simplest Daniel was a man who kept his own rhythm inside somebody else's system and he outperformed everyone who took the default way. So that's one case study. I've had many case studies in my own life and working with clients, so there it is. Now, if something in this episode has felt caught in you the whole time, just inside of you, your heart's kind of. beating fast and there's that tightness in your chest and you know that thing you keep almost saying, you know, I want you to hear more clearly that you are him. You are that person. You're some version of that person like me on the floor or that version of a person who is maybe on their way there metaphorically. You know, you might not have a you might not have had or may never have a fall down on the floor nervous breakdown like I did, but If you're honest with yourself, you feel frayed around the edges. You're spending way too many evenings up thinking about things instead of sleeping. You feel a low or maybe mid or maybe even high level of anxiety all the time. you feel frayed around the edges, or like Bilbo Baggins felt in Lord of the Rings after having the evil ring of power for 60 years, he said, I feel like butter. I feel stretched thin, like butter, scraped over too much bread. And unlike him, you're still in time to make a move to change things, the move that I didn't know how to make. So stop chasing balance, start chasing, not chasing, start naming your rhythms, and let's look at life a different way. Now, every episode I close the same way with what I call your rhythms check. We where we zero in on one of the four rhythms of rest, and I give you one action step. That you can take in the next 24 to 48 hours and a reflection question to help you go a little bit deeper. So one rhythm, one question. But instead of one of the chambers today, I'm going to give you something a little different. I'm going to encourage you one last time, because I I really believe in this tool and we've spent a lot of time getting it to a really good place. If you have not taken the rhythms of rest assessment yet, that's the first place to start. Because if you're achieving all the metrics that matter, outside things look really good, and you still feel like something's off, that's not a discipline problem. That's a rhythms problem. Okay? And the rhythms of rest assessment, it takes less than three minutes, and it's going to show you exactly which of the four rhythms is breaking down: relational, emotional, spiritual, tangible. It's going to show you your scores in each area, which one's costing you the most right now. And you're gonna be able to, it's gonna give you one step to take right now to focus on that's gonna drive change in other areas. Just go to Kent Moroski.com forward slash rest dash assessment and take that now. That's your action step in the next 24 to 48 hours. Then simply it's gonna send you a report and just do what it says. And I wanna hear back from you, okay? I really would love to hear once you take that assessment. How it's working for you, what you thought of the report, if you've gotten to be able to put it to practice and what that's done for you in your life or how how it might be affecting or changing things right now. So leave me a comment on this video, shoot me an email if you're on my list, DM me on social media. I want to hear from you. I love to hear from you. I try to respond to every you know, every message. So I read everyone and I'll be reading them all season. So welcome back. To the start of season two. I'm so glad that you showed up and you stayed with me the whole time today. If this resonated with you, my weekly newsletter, my bi-weekly newsletter, I mean to say, will also resonate with you where every other week I'm sending out practical insights to help you lead from internal rest instead of burnout. So there's no fluff, just simple practical tools from my rhythms of rest framework to help you slow down without losing momentum. You can sign up for that at Kentmiroski.com forward slash newsletter. It's absolutely free, and you'll also be the first to hear about exclusive offers and get bonus content. I'll see you again next week.