Latest / The Kathie Owen Perspective Podcast / 196. Day 4: Why Your Brain Feels Fried: A Hypnotherapist's Controversial Take on Burnout

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196. Day 4: Why Your Brain Feels Fried: A Hypnotherapist's Controversial Take on Burnout · The Kathie Owen Perspective Podcast

• 0:00
  Kathie Owen: Hello.
• 0:00
  Kathie Owen: Hello.
• 0:00
  Kathie Owen: And welcome back to the 12 Days of Holiday Burnout.
• 0:05
  Kathie Owen: Today I bring on another special guest.
• 0:08
  Kathie Owen: One of my friends, her name is Pam Butler.
• 0:11
  Kathie Owen: And As you've noticed everybody has different words for burnout and different ways of dealing with it.
• 0:19
  Kathie Owen: So today we're going to have Pam give us a little tidbit of how she coaches with dealing with burnout and things that we can learn and have a quick win today.
• 0:31
  Kathie Owen: But before we get started, I'm going to let Pam introduce herself to you and tell you a little bit about what she does.
• 0:37
  Kathie Owen: Hey, Kathie
• 0:38
  Pam Butler: thank you.
• 0:39
  Pam Butler: It's so great to be here.
• 0:41
  Pam Butler: And what a lovely invitation.
• 0:42
  Pam Butler: And what an important thing to be talking about.
• 0:45
  Pam Butler: So, um, so thank you for leading the call on the burnout aspect.
• 0:52
  Pam Butler: So yeah, I'm Pam Butler.
• 0:53
  Pam Butler: I'm a hypnotherapist and I'm also a hypnotherapy trainer and an NLP trainer.
• 1:00
  Pam Butler: I've spent a long time coaching.
• 1:02
  Pam Butler: I've been coaching for over 25 years using various techniques and methodologies and approaches.
• 1:11
  Pam Butler: And mostly I work with entrepreneurial women who are starting their own businesses or working in their own businesses.
• 1:19
  Pam Butler: Many of them are solopreneurs.
• 1:22
  Pam Butler: But in a past life, I actually worked in corporate and I worked in an agency, but I also worked with corporate, with not for profit, organizations in an, Place in Toronto called the Center for Social Innovation, where there were a lot of not for profit, people who were running businesses, but they didn't dream of running businesses, they dreamed of their vision and their vision having the impact.
• 1:47
  Pam Butler: And so their ability to manage and their understanding of what employees needed and how to move it forward and keep their people happy and productive and contributing and all of those pieces was really important.
• 2:05
  Pam Butler: And so I would come in as a communications trainer.
• 2:08
  Pam Butler: I had a variety of processes that I would bring them through, and that's the bulk of my experience with burnout is in that kind of an environment as well as, of course, with solo entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs who are always trying to go for the next thing and often working real hard at it, but not always going in the direction that they wanted to go.
• 2:31
  Pam Butler: Yeah.
• 2:31
  Pam Butler: So that's, that's
• 2:33
  Kathie Owen: a little bit about
• 2:34
  Pam Butler: me.
• 2:35
  Kathie Owen: Awesome.
• 2:35
  Kathie Owen: Thank you so much.
• 2:37
  Kathie Owen: A great segue.
• 2:39
  Kathie Owen: So as you see, she's got all these different little pieces of expertise in dealing with corporate wellness in general.
• 2:48
  Kathie Owen: And all of us in general have to deal with burnout.
• 2:52
  Kathie Owen: We call it different things.
• 2:53
  Kathie Owen: It can be anxiety, it can be overwhelm, procrastination, things like that.
• 2:58
  Kathie Owen: So, um, I'm going to set the stage for Pam to kind of talk about what she calls burnout and then go into simple solutions to help deal with burnout.
• 3:12
  Kathie Owen: And again, we'll have her back on the podcast and.
• 3:16
  Kathie Owen: In the future, so we can dig a little bit deeper, but today I just want to hear a little bit about a quick win we can take home with us today to break through that burnout.
• 3:29
  Kathie Owen: I'll give it to you, Pam.
• 3:30
  Pam Butler: Perfect, Kathie and, and burnout is distinctive because It, it is burned out.
• 3:40
  Pam Butler: You're not just fatigued.
• 3:42
  Pam Butler: You're not just anxious.
• 3:44
  Pam Butler: You're not just frustrated.
• 3:46
  Pam Butler: There is an element of burnout.
• 3:49
  Pam Butler: Many years ago, just seems like an aside, but also going back, I was at a, uh, an event and I had took melatonin, actually, which is a supplement that causes you to relax and causes your body to relax.
• 4:04
  Pam Butler: And I took too much of it.
• 4:06
  Pam Butler: And I went to this event.
• 4:08
  Pam Butler: I took it the night before, cause I was having trouble sleeping.
• 4:10
  Pam Butler: And there was a lot of friction at this event.
• 4:12
  Pam Butler: It was really a toxic environment and it was, it was a rough, rough.
• 4:17
  Pam Butler: And by the end of the day, I literally felt like my synapses were burnt.
• 4:25
  Pam Butler: Like I felt burnt out and so it is a real thing.
• 4:32
  Pam Butler: Like, burnout is a real reference and people, they lose sleep.
• 4:38
  Pam Butler: There's, you know, there's, there's a lot of pieces that, you know, are symptomatic of many things, but distinctive about burnout is a loss of empathy.
• 4:50
  Pam Butler: It's a loss of connection.
• 4:52
  Pam Butler: It's a loss of interest and motivation in people who would not normally present that.
• 5:02
  Pam Butler: And so that's kind of the burnout piece where you know you're not just dealing with stress, you're not just dealing with a rough road, you're not just dealing with some sort of, stress is a normal up and down, but you're dealing with something that's even more kind of significant.
• 5:19
  Pam Butler: And in my experience, that always, that, that fatigue, that exhaustion.
• 5:27
  Pam Butler: That lack of connection, that sort of withdraw that is, is not productive generally comes from a lack of clarity.
• 5:40
  Pam Butler: That's really the source of it for people that they're not clear about where they want to go.
• 5:48
  Pam Butler: They're not necessarily clear about what they're doing.
• 5:51
  Pam Butler: They're not being clear about what they need.
• 5:54
  Pam Butler: They're not setting their boundaries.
• 5:56
  Pam Butler: So those pieces, those communication pieces, contribute to it, as does just the general perception of self that's easy to lose as you start to sink under that burden of burning out, if you know what I mean.
• 6:13
  Pam Butler: So, I don't know if that answered your question, but yeah, that's kind of my position on burnout.
• 6:19
  Kathie Owen: Absolutely.
• 6:20
  Kathie Owen: I love that.
• 6:21
  Kathie Owen: And because I, I really want to hone in on this, it's lack of clarity, lack of clarity of our purpose, lack of clarity of why we're doing what we're doing because we're in such a fog.
• 6:33
  Kathie Owen: I love how she said her synapses felt burnt.
• 6:37
  Kathie Owen: They just felt burnt.
• 6:39
  Kathie Owen: And that is a great description of it.
• 6:42
  Kathie Owen: And when you feel that, that's what burnout feels like.
• 6:46
  Kathie Owen: It's just burnt everything.
• 6:49
  Kathie Owen: You don't have any clarity on why you're doing what you're doing and you're just overwhelmed.
• 6:54
  Kathie Owen: There's no boundaries.
• 6:55
  Kathie Owen: I love how she mentioned boundaries because that's really, really important.
• 7:00
  Kathie Owen: I want to touch on one thing and that is, um, one thing that Pam does is tarot card readings which helps us identify our clarity.
• 7:11
  Kathie Owen: And so this could be really beneficial for somebody inside of burnout and working with Pam and understanding your tarot card readings.
• 7:21
  Kathie Owen: As mystic as that may sound, I really want to touch on this because she said there was no clarity.
• 7:29
  Kathie Owen: So let's go back to that and let's talk about how we can find clarity with our tarot card readings.
• 7:34
  Kathie Owen: I want to hear about this.
• 7:36
  Pam Butler: 100%.
• 7:37
  Pam Butler: Thank you very much.
• 7:37
  Pam Butler: As you know, I love tarot and I feel it is, I realize it sounds incredibly woo to people and it is woo.
• 7:46
  Pam Butler: One of the things that tarot really captures well is archetypes.
• 7:51
  Pam Butler: That it's all talking about archetypical, um, information and that it's easy to grasp.
• 8:00
  Pam Butler: When you think that there is an archetype of mother, right?
• 8:05
  Pam Butler: There is an archetype of maiden.
• 8:07
  Pam Butler: There is an archetype.
• 8:08
  Pam Butler: And they're not stereotypes, they're archetypes.
• 8:10
  Pam Butler: We all can kind of agree with certain aspects of it.
• 8:15
  Pam Butler: The way that I use the tarot cards is to help people identify their strength.
• 8:21
  Pam Butler: So I don't predict with tarot.
• 8:24
  Pam Butler: I don't.
• 8:24
  Pam Butler: I feel like that's, I don't think it's karmically a good idea.
• 8:28
  Pam Butler: I don't think it's energetically a good idea.
• 8:30
  Pam Butler: And, and it's not how I use them.
• 8:33
  Pam Butler: I use them archetypically to indicate to people what they're working with.
• 8:42
  Pam Butler: Sort of, perhaps limiting ideas that they have about what they're working with.
• 8:47
  Pam Butler: And then personal strengths that they can bring to bear on the circumstance.
• 8:53
  Pam Butler: That will bring them through to a successful completion or will improve the results that they're getting or direct them, um, in how to move forward with what it is that they would like to accomplish.
• 9:06
  Pam Butler: And it's really important for burnout because it's easy to lose track of your strengths, and especially in the workplace, especially in a corporate world.
• 9:15
  Pam Butler: And especially now, I mean, you know, when you think about it, I was thinking about AI the other day.
• 9:22
  Pam Butler: And how Businesses and employees are, it's getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
• 9:28
  Pam Butler: So not only are there fewer people for you to actually be involving yourself with, fewer conversations to be had, fewer of, you know, inspiration of ideas from people other than yourself, that tool is getting smaller, but also there's the pressure of doing actually more work and doing work that other people used to do.
• 9:53
  Pam Butler: So that's a real issue.
• 9:55
  Pam Butler: I think in, in corporate now with burnout.
• 9:58
  Pam Butler: And so when people don't understand their own strength and work to their strengths and over focus on their weaknesses, which it's easy to happen.
• 10:10
  Pam Butler: If you're kind of, you feel like you're losing ground or you feel like you're not being enough, or you're not doing enough, or it's not working out or all of those things.
• 10:17
  Pam Butler: You know, ruminatory conversations that can really run us off the rails.
• 10:23
  Pam Butler: When you fall into that, it's hard to keep track of your strengths.
• 10:26
  Pam Butler: And for many managers even, they don't necessarily have tools where they can evaluate people's strengths and play to people's strengths so that people are, they know what they are, they can assign them accordingly.
• 10:42
  Pam Butler: Or, partner people who have complimentary strengths so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
• 10:52
  Pam Butler: So, so that and clarity.
• 10:56
  Pam Butler: About that is actually sort of prescription that I would give people to really bring their attention to what they do well, you know, everybody's done probably these personal development exercises where it says, what are your strengths?
• 11:11
  Pam Butler: What do you do?
• 11:11
  Pam Butler: Well, what do you what do you unique about?
• 11:13
  Pam Butler: What are your gifts?
• 11:14
  Pam Butler: That's really true and important.
• 11:17
  Pam Butler: That in combination with knowing where you want to go and not just where you don't want to go because that's not a productive way to move forward.
• 11:27
  Pam Butler: Your brain is Going to, it's like saying don't think of a pink elephant.
• 11:32
  Pam Butler: Well, good luck.
• 11:34
  Pam Butler: Now that I've said that, you must think of a pink elephant, even in order not to think of it, right?
• 11:40
  Pam Butler: So declare, it's important to know where you don't want to go, because that gives you the contrast, but you must identify.
• 11:49
  Pam Butler: You do want to go, and if you do that and you identify the strengths that you can rely on, that can take you there, that can lead you there.
• 12:02
  Pam Butler: Not just your strengths, but also things that you like to do, then it really smooths the way for for an easier process.
• 12:10
  Kathie Owen: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
• 12:13
  Kathie Owen: Here is the one thing I really want to hone in on, I want to focus in on.
• 12:18
  Kathie Owen: What she said is we focus when we're in burnout, when we're under stress, we focus on our weaknesses.
• 12:26
  Kathie Owen: And it's hard to not think of that pink elephant weakness that we've got going on because that's the way our brains are wired.
• 12:36
  Kathie Owen: So we want to focus on Strengths.
• 12:40
  Kathie Owen: And that's where the card reading can come in and you can see, oh, I forgot I had that strength.
• 12:48
  Kathie Owen: Another thing that she said that, that's really helpful when it comes to burnout is we've, we want to find what we like to do, what we enjoy to do.
• 12:57
  Kathie Owen: Hobbies are a great way to counterbalance your burnout.
• 13:04
  Kathie Owen: And when you find out what you like, what your strengths are, and you work on those.
• 13:10
  Kathie Owen: It kind of puts that pink elephant in way, way far away in the zoo where it belongs.
• 13:17
  Kathie Owen: That's exactly.
• 13:19
  Kathie Owen: Wait a second.
• 13:20
  Kathie Owen: In the circus
• 13:21
  Pam Butler: where it belongs.
• 13:21
  Pam Butler: The circus where it belongs.
• 13:23
  Pam Butler: That's even better and even truer actually.
• 13:25
  Pam Butler: Yeah.
• 13:27
  Pam Butler: Definitely.
• 13:28
  Pam Butler: Yeah.
• 13:28
  Pam Butler: All right.
• 13:30
  Kathie Owen: All right.
• 13:31
  Kathie Owen: This was really, really great.
• 13:33
  Kathie Owen: Really helpful.
• 13:34
  Kathie Owen: I hope you got a quick win today.
• 13:37
  Kathie Owen: Before we end, I always say this, I include a blog post that includes all of the links and actually bonus resources in this blog post.
• 13:48
  Kathie Owen: So you'll be able to find Pam, and find bonus resources.
• 13:53
  Kathie Owen: Maybe you want to work with her.
• 13:54
  Kathie Owen: She does these Lunch and Learns that are Tarot card readings that help you identify your strengths inside your program, inside your business.
• 14:03
  Kathie Owen: What phenomenal way to really build on this and help prevent that burnout.
• 14:12
  Kathie Owen: So Pam, tell us where we can find you and we'll
• 14:16
  Pam Butler: close out.
• 14:18
  Pam Butler: Perfect.
• 14:18
  Pam Butler: Thanks so much for the chance.
• 14:19
  Pam Butler: I'm at pambutlerhypnotherapy.
• 14:22
  Pam Butler: com, pambutlerhypnotherapy.
• 14:24
  Pam Butler: com.
• 14:25
  Pam Butler: You'll find all of my offerings on there.
• 14:28
  Pam Butler: I do do hypnotherapy.
• 14:29
  Pam Butler: I'm a hypno coach.
• 14:31
  Pam Butler: I do tarot reading.
• 14:33
  Pam Butler: I do something called a quick, clear mindset.
• 14:37
  Pam Butler: reset that is very quick if you just have a singular problem that you want to deal with.
• 14:42
  Pam Butler: So it's, it's like they always say, you know, the best defense is a good offense.
• 14:48
  Pam Butler: And so prevention is a great way to intervene and keep things kind of moving in the right direction.
• 14:55
  Pam Butler: I do clarity kickstarts with people and I do do programming evaluations so that people can understand this is what I did with the, um, with the not for profits.
• 15:06
  Pam Butler: is showing behaviors along an entire spectrum.
• 15:09
  Pam Butler: Not that either end is good or bad.
• 15:13
  Pam Butler: It just creates so much more understanding all the way around and so much more empathy and connection.
• 15:19
  Pam Butler: So you can find all of that kind of information on pam.
• 15:23
  Pam Butler: wisconsintherapy.
• 15:23
  Pam Butler: com.
• 15:24
  Kathie Owen: Okay, great.
• 15:26
  Kathie Owen: I hope you got a quick win today.
• 15:29
  Kathie Owen: I know I sure did.
• 15:31
  Kathie Owen: That clarity is, is king when it comes to dealing with burnout and finding your strengths, your purpose, your reasons why you're doing things, and also to balance life out.
• 15:47
  Kathie Owen: All right, so that's today's episode.
• 15:51
  Kathie Owen: in the 12 Days of Burnout Breakthrough.
• 15:54
  Kathie Owen: And, um, I will see you on the next episode.
• 15:57
  Kathie Owen: I trust that you found it helpful.
• 15:59
  Kathie Owen: Again, the links to all of this, including bonus and other episodes as well, will be in the show notes and description below.
• 16:08
  Kathie Owen: And until next time, I will see you next time.
• 16:11
  Kathie Owen: Peace out and Namaste.