361: How to Finish What You Start Without Burning Out

• Why getting a lantern lit can feel more exhausting than it needs to
• How to make necessary extra work feel more humane
• What inherited rules about time and effort may be costing you
• How to protect your creative energy near the finish line

Transcript

Welcome to the Superabound Podcast, where vision-led entrepreneurs learn to build a generous business without sacrificing what matters most. You are listening to episode 361, how to finish what you start without burning out. Hello, welcome. I'm recording this for you today in the hot, hot summer. I really wanted to follow up to some of the conversations we've been having over the last couple of episodes, because I realized that one of the struggles for many business owners, visionaries, leaders who do creative work is that not all of us are incredible at finishing what we start. In order to achieve a certain level of success, you've definitely figured it out. But what I've noticed over the years of working with entrepreneurs and what I've noticed with myself is that often the way visionaries kind of get to the finish line is not very humane. It is not always loving. It is often pressure fueled because there's a deadline. There's often self-scolding involved. And I wanted to create a very practical episode for you today about how to finish what you start without sacrificing your wellbeing or your happiness or your joy. So I'll share kind of where I'm at just for a little bit of context, but I have been in the middle of a very creative process over the last little bit of time. I think the combination of taking the emotional sabbatical this year and really giving myself a lot of space to think about what I want the next chapter of my business and my life to really look like, I think it's given me some interesting paths to try out. So one that I've been talking about a lot is the new Superbound Oracle deck that is so close to the finish line. So close to being sent to production. But here's what happened. I was going through today. Of course, you know, the fun part was creating the art. The fun part was coming up with the cards and the descriptions and all of that. But as I was going through, I am not a visual artist by training. I've never done any digital work at all. I'm working with Photoshop right now, which is not a software I'm very familiar with, but I have to get all of my files to be the correct size. And I realized that some of you listening to this are saying, why wouldn't you just pay someone to do that? It may come to that, but I really wanted to at least play with and see how hard is it to pop some files into a template. I wasn't totally sure what I want the box to look like. I had some ideas that were just not flushed out enough to bring someone else on board and say, hey, can you take this over? I very well might do that. But I had a moment as I was going through all the artwork today, I came across a card. And, you know, again, I'm not a trained artist, but. I actually think most of the cards are really neat. And I think the fact that they came to me kind of in a more intuitive, channeled, spiritually contacted way, I think there's a lot of energy in them. But I was going through them today and I came across this one card and I just kind of went, no, it's not capturing the essence of what I had intended or visualized this card to be. And I was like, it could be fine. I might just leave it and say like, oh, well, don't be a perfectionist. But there's a big part of me that just said, why wouldn't you just sit down for an hour and see if you could create something that you will be very happy and proud of? And so I had that kind of inner dialogue and I had been thinking like, oh, I kind of miss doing the pastels. Like I haven't had any brilliant ideas come to me. So over the process of, you know, maybe 10, 20 minutes, I'm walking around the house. The kids are home this summer. So we're kind of doing things together. I came to the decision that, okay, it'll take me about an hour probably to try some new artwork. If I don't love it, I will just stick with what I've got and I will move on because my intention is that by the end of this week, all the files are ready to go to the printer. We'll get a test. And then. when we are confirmed and we love the cards, the way that they look from the printer, I can start the pre-sale. I can start getting them ready. I can start talking to shipping partners. Like there's just so much on the other side of this, but I am in that part. I'm not a runner either, but I'm, I've heard from clients who have done ultra marathons and things like that. You know, you get to this point where you are really far into the race, but You just don't really want to do it. You start questioning like, why am I doing this? Does this even matter? All of that sort of stuff comes up. And yes, I am a coach. I have a lot of mindset tools. I understand the static that can come up when you are doing one of these long-term high output projects and you have no idea how it's going to be received on the other side of that. investment into making this happen with no guarantee of any return, whether that's financial or, you know, maybe it won't have the impact that I'm hoping it will have. Maybe it won't help the people the way I hope it will. So I was kind of just having this little internal moment as I'm walking around and I was watching it happen and I decided, okay, I am going to take an hour. I'll find it in the day, today or tomorrow. It will get done. I'm going to move on with what I was doing. But it occurred to me that I know many people where that speed bump, that pothole might really derail them. And I think that is maybe the difference between business owners who've been around for a while, leaders who have seen a lot. people with a lot of experience coming up against challenge after challenge after challenge, and somebody who is maybe brand new to this particular spiritual path of running or leading a business, there's a certain amount of resilience that gets built up that helps you figure out for yourself how to get to the finish line. And as I already mentioned, a lot of people get to the finish line by just like putting their heads down and saying, I'm going to do an all-nighter. I'm going to push through this. have been there. I have done that. Don't recommend it. It's not the most fun, but there is kind of, there's something a little bit alluring. Like you feel like totally a badass when you push through and fight through and all of that. Um, I used to really think I thrived on that kind of energy as I am getting older and hopefully a little wiser. I am now seeing just what lies on the other side and the amount of recovery that that approach takes. So I'm going to kind of really start with, I assume you already know how to burn the candle at both ends and push through to get to a certain milestone or to cross the finish line. I want to give you some other potentials because I know that there are going to be probably times, you know, if you are writing a book and you are working with a publisher, there may come a time where if you don't get your manuscript in by that deadline, you no longer have that deal. There may be times where you are doing client centered work and there's a big project and there's a big push and you're working maybe a little more or a little harder than what you would on a normal week. I understand that those moments exist and we sometimes have to rise to the occasion but I am more interested for at least for myself and for my clients in how we make sure that in those very hopefully we make sure that those instances are rare first of all but in the rare instance where that is what you need to do that it is not so depleting and you are not like you know the the cliche of like you're not pouring from an empty cup or burning fumes or any of that. So how do we cross the finish line without burning out? I will say, in case you are new to the podcast, I'm not a naturally organized person. When I am about to tell you that one of the keys to this is good planning, I don't say that. coming from a place where that's like a natural skill that I have. I have really had to train myself to work backwards, to go to a place where, okay, if I want to hold my Oracle deck in my hands and be selling it and talking to people and producing the videos and the bonuses, by the time my kids are back in school, I don't know that that can even happen because I'm not in charge of the printing schedule, but if I want to have it out for the holidays, let's say, there are things that need to happen between now and then, and I need to start working backwards with that. One of my kind of internal lanterns that I'd like to light is having the project out of my hands and to the next stage of its journey by the end of this week. How am I going to do that? without burning up. I'll share one idea that I just gave a client and they were really surprised at how well this worked. But if you feel like, okay, I am going to have to work outside of my normal hours. If there's a way to make some of that feel a little kinder, a little bit more luxurious, I'm all for that. So for my client, it was reviewing It was more of an admin task that she really just didn't feel she had the time and the energy to train somebody else to do. But she also didn't want to be sitting at her desk until 9 p.m. every night. She decided, and we talked about this, that it would be fine to do this type of project watching a TV show. Maybe with a glass of wine. So we called her wine down at the end of the night. And she had given herself actually two weeks. to complete the project. So she was going to do a couple of these admin tasks every night and think of it more as decluttering in her business rather than some vital stressful thing. The very next day after we had discussed her approach, she told me, oh, I actually did five times more than I thought I was going to do over a glass of wine and a TV show. This project will be done by the end of the week. And that kind of brings me to the second part. So the first idea is to try to pair some of the extra work with something that you find delightful, soothing, comforting. I have a client who has a special chair that she will sit in when she is doing, you know, kind of busy work, but she makes sure that her space is very cozy and that she's very comfortable so that it doesn't feel like some rigid, strict thing she's doing on her desk. The second part of that is actually a mindset tool. It is thinking about how you want to really approach yourself around time. Maybe when you've had people around you, you've had team members, you've had other businesses, you might have fallen into the illusion that Various things take a lot of time. I was under that illusion when I started my business. Someone told me that it took them a week to write a blog post. And so I thought, oh, this is a serious blogger. So if they do the writing on the Monday and the research on the Tuesday and the editing on the Wednesday, and then they send it to their person and they said, that totally worked for that person with that schedule. But I believed that blogs take a week. That didn't help me. I also used to believe podcasts take eight hours to create. And some of you I know do this. If you have a podcast, you think you have to write a whole script for it, that you have to, you know, line up interviews. You have to do some really deep editing. This is just like such a myth of podcasting. And I didn't realize that until I was about a year into my very first show and I had to get on a plane. And I was like, I don't have eight hours today. I have 30 minutes. I turned on recording. I said what I had to say. I didn't edit out my ums, my ahs, my spaces, or, you know, just when I had to take a breath to think, I just let it be. And nobody noticed and it was totally fine. So, or maybe they did notice and they stopped listening. I don't know. I don't care. But I realized that I could do this in a different way. And I think that that relationship with things don't take some standard set amount of time. There are certain professions where that's not true. You know, if you are a massage therapist and someone buys a 60 minute massage, it should take 60 minutes. Don't say, oh, I can get this done in 45. You will not have happy customers. But there are so many other tasks where we have let other people often direct us to how long things take. We have probably overcomplicated systems that don't need to be so complicated. That is something that I'm saying it like it's easy to get out of that habit, but I think it's something that requires working with a coach, working with somebody who doesn't have those. mindset restrictions that you might have. It's something I do with my clients and I save them a lot of time because things don't take a certain amount of time. So that's the second piece is like rethinking the relationship with how long something really has to take or how detailed something has to be or how complicated something has to be. I think a lot of companies have made a lot of money. selling us complicated things in our business. Think about a marketing person who says, oh, here's what you need. You need this back and forth. You need three people on your team. You need somebody, you know, creating something every day. You need someone else to be commenting. These are all just rules that are made up and they might serve somebody. But if they don't actually fit into your business and they're not actually supporting the bottom line, they may not be true for you. So don't let yourself get tripped up on the speed bumps or thinking things have to take a certain amount of time because that's often that energy and that mindset is where people start to burn out because they have to think they have to do everything. They have to do all the things. And it has to be absolutely perfect. And you cannot put something out. It's really not true. And if you come at this actually from the perspective of being a visionary, when you have something to give, something to say, something that's going to help your people and help bring your vision into the world, you're probably going to want to do that as quickly as possible. You probably don't want to wait six months to launch something because you had to sit and look at like, should we make the font 12 or 13 points? It's the little tiny things that someone has trained us to care about that probably don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. And you might disagree. And if you do, that's okay. But maybe you have more time than I do. Okay. And then the last. piece of this that I will speak to today. I think we could talk about this for ages. It's really thinking about how you are feeding your creative process, how you are feeding yourself as you get to the finish line. You know, people who are distance or endurance athletes have to think about their recovery. They have to think about how they are literally fueling themselves and I know it's not like popular for business owners to talk about this, but we are also endurance athletes. Thinking and creating may not take the same physical strength as being an Olympian, but you are going through energy. You need to be fed. And of course, like your body, you need nourishment, you need sleep, you need water, you need all the good stuff that we know. for our sustaining rituals and our wellbeing, you also need things to inspire you. You need joy. This is my whole theme for the next book I am writing is the return on joy. Because if you are constantly generating and putting things out into the world, but you are not feeding yourself, you know, you're not finding things that make you smile, that make you laugh. You're not letting yourself. consume the goodness in the world around you and you're only in problem-solving mode or output mode, at some point you will wake up and your well will be dry. That is how people burn out is when you're not feeling some kind of reciprocity from what you are putting out to what you are getting back in. And I know that that's very tricky often for visionary people because we're the lucky ones, right? Like we figured out what we want to do in the world, what our purpose is, what we want to contribute. There's often like so many ideas and lots of inspiration flowing through. But there comes a point where you also need to make sure that your personal filter is very solid. Because you cannot say yes to every idea the muse offers you. You cannot say yes to every opportunity, hoping that it's going to take you further. You have to learn to filter out the things that are not for you or not for you right now. And really care for your well-being to the same depth, to the same level as you care for. everything you're putting out. And I know that that is hard. It's not as exciting to say, oh, I really need a nap right now as it is to like, you know, go work on an Oracle card. One is definitely more exciting than the other. But I know for me today, when I look at how much creative output that's been happening in the last couple of months, I have to kind of rein myself in and say, Maybe we do that after laying down for 20 minutes. Maybe we do everything else that is needed. We take all the pressure off and we do it tomorrow. You give yourself grace. That's actually, I think if I just had to sum it all up, how you get to the finish line without burning out is with grace, with room to breathe, not by going easy on yourself. I think that's the thing people hear. but give yourself grace. They think, oh yeah, that means go lay on the couch for seven hours. That's not what I'm saying. It's saying, how can you make progress and make sure that you have what you need so that that happens in a way that is as gentle and flowing as possible? I guarantee you'll approach this differently if you try that. So I hope that this has been helpful. I'd love to hear what you think. And if you do feel like, I struggle with this. I struggle with finishing what I start or I struggle with finishing what I start without taxing my system. This is exactly what I help my clients with. And the best way to open up to figuring out what... strategies, what mindset tools, what you actually need is to begin with a discovery session with me. This is kind of like a mini retreat. So we get a lot of time together. It is a real session. It's not, not a sales call, like pretending that it's a session. It's an actual session where we get to the bottom of what it is you need, what it is you want to create and how to do that. while you have the whole life success that you want and what I believe you deserve. So you can learn more about that over at thesuperbound.com slash consultation. This is what I'm doing these days. Instead of consultations and sales calls where we talk about coaching, you start with this start session. You learn what you need for that day. We coach. We talk, I might even pull some Oracle cards for you. And you walk away with a real plan and real mindset tools. And then of course, if you love it, we can talk about what it looks like to work together in the longterm, but that is not the main event. It is not even really part of this session. It is about getting you. on the path you want to be on and figuring out how to do the work that you want to do in the world while you enjoy your life. So if you're interested, I can tell you all about that over at the superbound.com slash consultation. You'll get all the information. You can ask me any questions you have by emailing me and I will talk to you again soon. Take care.