Wendy McCallum (00:00.706)
Hi there, welcome back to The Coaching Edge. I am your host, Wendy McCallum, and I'm gonna be talking about something that's actually really near and dear to my heart today. So this is a topic that I have coached in my personal coaching practice. I have coached around burnout, especially burnout for professional women for well over a decade now. And it's something I know a lot about and both because of that experience professionally as a coach, but also for my own experience with burnout.
I actually think I've been through burnout twice. Took me a while in hindsight to notice, to recognize the second one as an actual burnout. But I think the first burnout was really obvious for me and that was in my first job as a lawyer. I was nearing burnout at the point that I had my children. My children are seven months apart. One was adopted when I was pregnant with the other one. So that was a really intense period of caregiving burnout for me and also professional burnout because I made partner in the large law firm that I worked at.
right in between my two kids. So just a super, super busy time for me, led to burnout, led to me leaving that job. And that is actually what was sort of the catalyst for me going back to school, getting my very first certification as a registered holistic nutrition consultant, which led to me starting to coach around food and wellness. And then eventually that morphed into a burnout, a burnout coaching practice.
and my other trainings and certifications as a coach. Now, what I do is I support coaches in preventing burnout because burnout from small business, running a small business is really, really common. And I like to like remind people right at the outset when I start talking about burnout that it is absolutely possible to burnout doing something that you love. And I see that all the time with coaches. And so this is a topic, I'm recording this actually at the beginning of January, won't air until probably
end of February, early March, but it's come up a lot in the business building bootcamp office hours calls this week because we're back from the holidays now. And a lot of coaches are starting January feeling differently than they thought they were going to. They thought they would start feeling really energized and excited about the new year, but instead they're feeling exhausted and depleted. And so we've been talking a lot about burnout and burnout prevention in the BBB, which is again, my.
Wendy McCallum (02:23.042)
business program for coaches that I run. If you're curious about that, you can get information on that through my website at wendymcallum.com. But I thought it would make a really great topic for a podcast, because I haven't talked about preventing coach burnout yet. And of course I could do, I mean, I could talk about this topic for hours and hours. I do corporate presentations on this all the time. I have so much to say about it. But what I wanted to focus on today in this bite-sized episode was really more some-
unconventional things that I do myself and that I recommend my coaches do to prevent burning out as they are building their coaching businesses. So I'm going to talk about the stuff that probably isn't as much talked about out there that you can't just Google easily and find for yourself. So obviously when it comes to preventing burnout, which has been described by the World Health Organization as an occupational phenomenon, it's basically chronically unmitigated stress is the definition of burnout.
The World Health Organization calls it an occupational phenomenon and really relates it to stress in the workplace. But what I see as a professional coaching this sphere, supporting women who are burnt out is that it is often actually a combination of caregiver burnout and professional burnout that leads women in particular to burnout. And I think it's really important when we're talking about burnout to not just be thinking about workplace or business related stress, but to be thinking generally about all the stress that we have on our plate.
because all of that stress together is contributing to stress and to elevated cortisol levels for us. And when it comes to preventing or mitigating burnout, what we need to be doing is a combination of reducing and managing better the stress, no matter what the source of that stress is. So if you're listening to me today and you're thinking, well, I'm not so stressed about my business, you know, it's not become really stressful. I'm not busy enough yet for that to be really stressful. Think about the other pieces of your life right now that are contributing to stress.
What I want is to help you create a business model that does not contribute to your overall stress load. That feels really manageable to you. Of course, there are going to be times when it is going to be stressful and that is okay. We are built for stress as humans. Stress is not a bad thing overall. Stress is the thing that actually helps us to get stuff done, right? If we didn't have stress, we didn't have deadlines, then we would get very little done as human beings. What we're looking to prevent is
Wendy McCallum (04:49.202)
stress that is allowed to get elevated, to grow, and is not in any way mitigated, it's left unchecked, okay? So the obvious things about preventing burnout as a business person, I don't wanna talk about today. I don't wanna talk about like block time blocking and turning off notifications and set business hours, and not working on the weekends, like that kind of stuff I think is fairly obvious. And frankly, as a small business owner, it's kind of...
almost impossible to not work sometimes on the weekends or to not work weird hours sometimes. And for a lot of us, we're actually really okay with that because that works better for us. So I don't wanna talk about that stuff, but I do wanna talk about some of the unconventional things that were solutions that I have found over the years that work really well for me as a very busy, successful coach in the coaching industry. So the first thing I wanna talk about is
something that has happened naturally for me over the years. In the early years, I think I resisted this a lot because it felt imprudent, it felt risky to pay anybody to do anything for me if I could do it myself. So if there's something that I knew I could get done myself, I always wanted to do it myself if I had the time to do it. And eventually what happened is I got so busy that I couldn't obviously do all of the stuff. And that's when I started to outsource things and pay people. But now when I look back on it and when I'm talking to my coaches, I always say, look,
If you gravitate towards the parts of your business that you love, which is gonna naturally happen, you're gonna figure out what parts of running a coaching business you really, really love and what parts you don't love, if you start paying attention to that and the parts that really don't feel good to you, the parts that feel like energy drains instead of energy gains for you, if there is a way for you to start outsourcing some of those things earlier, that is going to help you prevent burnout. So...
Of course you have to be careful in the early days. You don't want to have your expenses too high because if your expenses are too high, then you're not going to be profitable. And if you're not profitable, then you're not going to stay in business. But I do think taking a look at, okay, how much would it cost me to get somebody, for example, to manage my books for me, you know, to just do the basic small accounting stuff that needs to happen every month that I absolutely hate. Or how much would it get, how much would it cost for me to get someone to post on Instagram for me a few times a week, if that is something that I really, really hate and is a major energy drain for me?
Wendy McCallum (07:12.194)
start looking into that stuff sooner because those little things, the parts of the job that you don't like, those are the things that are going to start creating stress really early on for you. So just as a general rule of thumb, like the things that I gravitate towards, the things that I feel like I'm excited to do and I want to do and I'm not procrastinating on all the time, those are generally the parts of the business that really light me up and not the parts of the business that cause tremendous negative stress. If there's stress involved, it's positive stress.
It's the stress that actually helps me to complete the project and to do that in a really, in a really, you know, really good way. But the things that I don't like are often the things that do are contributing to stress and are just sort of chipping away at me and getting me closer to burnout. So that's the first thing that I wanted to mention. The second thing you may have heard me talk about on Instagram, if you're not following me yet on Instagram, go follow me at Wendy McCallum Coach. I do little kind of bite-sized,
tips and tricks regularly on there. And I did talk about this not too long ago, this idea of how you do your goal setting for the year financially. This actually can help to reduce the likelihood that you go into burnout. What a lot of people do is they set a goal for the year. They will set usually like a net goal. So this is how much money I need to live on for the year. And of course there are things you have to do to make sure that that,
goal is actually if that number is the right number. So you're gonna wanna gross it up, right? You're gonna wanna figure out what the expenses are. They're gonna be associated with actually taking home that much money and then also including that, the tax that you're gonna have to pay. So you're gonna end up with a gross overall number and a lot of people make this mistake. They take that number and they divide it by 12. They say, okay, well, I've got 12 months in the year and so if I divide that gross number by 12, that's gonna give me the number that I need to make every month in order to meet my target.
That is a recipe for burnout because what you're doing is setting your monthly targets based on working 12 months of the year and nobody works 12 months of the year. If you are working 12 months of the year, you're going to burn out. You need to take a vacation just because it's your business doesn't mean that you don't need a vacation just as much as you need a vacation if you're working for the man. So what you don't wanna do is take the gross amount, divide it by 12 and say, that's my monthly target for revenue. What I always do is divide that number by 11.
Wendy McCallum (09:37.398)
So I set the gross goal, how much do I need to make gross in order to make this much net a year that gives me this much net a month. And then I take that number, the gross number, and I do a second division exercise with it, and I divide it by 11, which means I am accounting for four full weeks of not working and not having to make any revenue, which allows me to take vacation during the course of the year and not feel the pressure to earn during those weeks.
In the early years of practice, you're not going to make very much money when you're on vacation, probably none at all, right? As you build your practice, hopefully, especially if you're following me and some of the strategies that I suggest, you will actually put in place some passive streams of revenue for your business that will allow you to make money while you are away, which is amazing when that happens. And I'm now in a place where my revenue doesn't really shift very much when I'm on vacation. But it took me a while to get there and it'll take you a while to get there too.
If you follow this suggestion of taking that goal, that annual goal and dividing by 11, you're going to raise your revenue targets for the months that you are working. Those are gonna go up, but it is going to give you that break in the month that you are off. Whether you take that month all at once, you take it, you know, four separate weeks over the course of the year, it doesn't really matter. You're just, you're taking that pressure off. In the months that you are working, working.
you are going to need to make more money, but that is going to mean that when you do take the time off that money will already be in the bank. So that is a simple, but very important strategy when it comes to preventing burnout as a small business owner. In my opinion, it's worked very, very well for me over the years. Boundaries, I mean, obviously guys, boundaries are a really important part of not burning out.
But let's talk about some of the boundaries that I've put in place that might be a little less conventional, some of the things that I do. So first of all, I realized a long time ago that I don't wanna work during the summer in the way that I work the rest of the year. So the months of July and August are the months that my kids are off school. They're now older, but when they were younger, this was really important to me. And it was also impossible for me to work as hard because I had more caregiving responsibilities when they were out of school. And the other thing about the summer,
Wendy McCallum (12:01.954)
for most of us in most coaching practices is that the summer is usually less busy. So it's usually a time where you're gonna have less discovery calls, less new clients, it's just a harder time to earn revenue. I decided to lean into that instead of to fight that. So I take my vacation in the summer and I also change my hours in the summer. Every summer I go from working four or five days of client days a month to down to like three days of client days.
I reschedule my clients in early June. I say to them, look, you're still working with me in July and August, my hours shift. Let's find a time for you that works within these time slots. The other thing that I do in the summer is I never record podcasts. So this is my second podcast. My first podcast went for three and a half seasons. And I decided after the first season of my other podcasts that I would not continue it over the summer months. And I remember feeling really nervous about that.
worried that I would lose my followers and listeners. But the truth is, everybody else is on vacation in the summer. And I think people care a whole lot less than you think they're gonna care about things like that. People notice a whole lot less. So I just announced it and I announced it in a really positive way. I said, look, I'd be a terrible burnout coach if I didn't take care of myself. And one of the things that I need to do in order to recharge and restore for the next season of this podcast is take a little hiatus from it. So I'll be doing that this summer and every summer after.
And here are the archived episodes that you can listen to over the course of the summer if you're looking for something to listen to. I'm gonna do the same thing with this podcast. It will not run 12 months of the year. If it does, I will have prerecorded the episodes for the July and August months. It'll just be because I have some in the bank and it's easy for me to do that. But I will not record over the course of the summer months. So you get to do that. You get to create boundaries. You can not run group programming over the summers. In my BBB program,
We dial it back in July and August, just because of everything I'm talking about. I want my coaches to take a break too. I know that a lot of them are gonna be on vacation. I know that they're less likely to be wanting to show up for live calls in the months of July and August. And so we don't do master classes in July and August. We do them the other 10 months of the year. Our office hours calls last summer got cut back to one office hours option a month or a week instead of two call options a week because.
Wendy McCallum (14:22.818)
the calls were just less attended in the July and August months. I get to do that because it's my program. It works better for me, it works better for my clients in the program. So just a reminder, you're in charge. This is your business and you get to decide what works for you and you get to set boundaries. You get to make decisions around when you're gonna work and when you're not gonna work. But if you don't plan for that, it can feel really, really stressful.
which again, takes me back to the point that I just made about the financial planning piece. Planning for that by making more revenue in the months that you know you wanna work and they're probably going to be busier just based on the natural seasons of coaching can make it a whole lot easier for you to take the time off when you do wanna take it off and have that feel less stressful. Okay, another thing that I do, and I talk about this all the time as well on the Instagram page and in the BBB, is I...
apply a beta mindset to everything I do as a business person. Everything. So a beta mindset just means that every time I do something for the first time, I treat it as though it's a beta, which means it's a test. It's an opportunity for me to try the thing without a lot of pressure to knock it out of the park. I do my best with it. Obviously, the first time I launch anything, try anything, I'm always going into it.
with the goal of doing my best. But I also really wanna learn from that experience. And I wanna gather feedback and I want to then take that information that I gather through the feedback process and just through the doing. And I wanna apply that to the things so that I can tweak it and make it better the next time. The beta mindset is like an antidote to burnout for me. Going into things without putting that tremendous pressure on myself to make it absolutely perfect.
has been so, so helpful to me. And honestly, this does not come naturally to me. I really had to work at this. And you may be somebody who already knows intuitively that you're gonna have to work at this too, because a lot of us are raised with that sort of perfection as the standard mentality, especially women, I think. And so this can be one, you know, like a neural pathway that you have to kind of break and replace. But when you do take it from me,
Wendy McCallum (16:47.45)
man, is this ever a relief when you start treating everything as a beta. I must say that at least five times a week in the BBB, in our live calls, you know, reminding my coaches that they're doing this thing for the first time, whether it's like the first time they've guested on a podcast, or it's the first time they've done an Instagram live story, or it's the first time they've recorded you know, a content module using this particular platform, or it's the first time that they have
launched a group program or the first month of their membership. It's all a beta. Everything is a beta. You go into it with the best product that you can, knowing that product is going to change, knowing that it's not perfect, and actually looking for and excited to get the feedback so that you can make it better just takes so much pressure off, especially if in the case of, for example, a group program, you let people know it's a beta.
So you let your members in at a beta price with beta expectations, which is, look, this thing's not gonna be perfect. I know that, it's a work in progress, but I think it's an amazing program and I'm really looking forward to your feedback so that I can tweak it and change it and make the next iteration of this even better. That takes so much pressure off when you're launching something new. So a beta mindset on everything is one of the key things that keeps me out of burnout as a really busy small business owner.
Okay, this kind of goes along with the beta mindset, just a different way of saying it, I guess. Done is better than none.
write that down on a Post-It note and put it somewhere in your office. Put it on your laptop, put it on your bulletin board, stick it on your desk. Done is better than none. And that is generally almost always the case in business. So in small business, like getting the thing done, actually doing it is better than not doing it at all. And what stands in our way for a lot of the time for getting things completed and done and up.
Wendy McCallum (18:49.202)
is this, again, standard of perfection that we have for ourselves, that we have to get it just right before we put it up there. There's some fear that we'll screw up, there'll be a mistake, a typo, somebody will criticize it, there'll be too many ums or likes or whatever in it, and we won't do it. And what that does is paralyze us and nothing gets done. And if we spend all our time trying to make perfect stuff as coaches, we never get anything out there, which means we never build an audience and we never make any money, which means we...
fail as business people. It also means we are carrying around a tremendous amount of unnecessary stress around the not doing, right? I want you to start thinking some is better than none and done is better than none, right? Just doing your best with it and getting it out there. A lot of the time, it's just the fear of actually doing it for the first time that keeps us stuck in it. And when you just put it out there, even if it's not.
perfect, which by the way, it never will be because there really is no such thing as perfection in coaching. But just getting it out there oftentimes is enough to reduce the fear, calm down that anxiety and get you going, get you into some state of flow with it, which is what we want because that's what you need to build your audience and to actually get some paying clients and make money and succeed as a coach. Okay.
This one probably won't come as a surprise, but I would be a terrible burnout coach for coaches if I did not talk about the drain that is social media as a small business owner. So this is probably the thing I hear about the most from the coaches in the BBB in terms of the part of the business that drains them instead of lighting them up. And it is the feeling that they need to be constantly generating content for social media. And I get it. I get it.
I don't love it either. I've been doing it for a really long time now and social media has shifted since I started using it for my business. It was really effective in the early years of building this coaching business to be using Instagram and Twitter and those platforms. But of course, algorithms have changed. It's really challenging now for small business owners to get their content out there and everything shifted around social media.
Wendy McCallum (21:07.75)
And it can feel really exhausting and it can feel really stressful for business owners. Therefore, it can be a big factor in contributing to burnout. And I really wanna encourage you to hold social media lightly. So I wanna remind you, social media, your social media account, your followers, even that content, it doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the platform. You don't own any of that. That is not an asset for your business. You are
borrowing a platform and using it. And you're at the mercy of the platform. You're at the mercy of the algorithm and at the of the platform. And so I think it's important to remember that, when you find yourself going down like the rabbit hole on social media and thinking, oh, I'm not doing enough. I'm not doing it as well as this person. I'm gonna lose all these followers. I need to post every day.
You don't even own that asset. It could be taken away from you at a minute's notice. This is why I'm always encouraging my coaches to be focusing on building assets that they actually do own when they have more control over, including a newsletter list, like an email list and a legitimate following. And I mean, it's one of the reasons why I'm such a fan of podcasts because it's much more within my control. And I do own this podcast, it's mine. And so,
That's the first thing I wanna say about social media. But the next thing I wanna say is like, hold it lightly. I want you to, I wanna encourage you if you haven't done this yet, to take a break from social media from your business page. I know that probably sounds terrifying to you, but do it for just like three days. If you're feeling up to it, do a week. If you need a break, definitely take at least a week. Just don't post for a week. I want you to pay attention to how many people unfollow you as a result of you not posting for three days or for a week. My guess is it'll be
Zero. Because the thing is nobody is paying attention like you think they are. They're not even going to notice if you don't post. I take breaks all the time from social media. Sometimes they're conscious, and sometimes it's just because I have too much other stuff going on, and honestly, it's not a priority for me, so I forget about it for a while. Now, I do have a social media person now who helps me with social media, because this is a great example of something that I find really draining. And so as soon as I was able to outsource that, I started outsourcing it, but I do a lot of social media still myself, obviously. And so,
Wendy McCallum (23:29.75)
For me, taking a break from social media happens organically when I'm busy and sometimes I consciously decide to take a break from social media. The most amazing thing I have learned from this is that nobody cares. Nobody's paying any attention. Think about it, you're following all these accounts on Instagram, for example. Do you ever unfollow anyone because you haven't seen something in your feed for a while? No, the only time I unfollow someone on Instagram is if they've offended me.
if I'm done with them. If I think this isn't serving me anymore, or I'm doing a lot of comparison stuff in my head and it's just not good for me, but it's never because I haven't seen something from them in a while. I don't even notice. We are so inundated with stuff. You get to take a break. And I'm almost willing to guarantee it won't have any major impact for you. In fact, it can be incredibly, incredibly positive.
to get on your social media account. And I've had a couple of my coaches in the BBB do this and say, look, I need a break from this stuff. I'm like you, I find social media to be draining. I need a break. I am not willing to sacrifice my own mental health for this. And I am taking a conscious break. So, and I encourage you to do the same. I'm gonna pay attention to how this experiment goes for me. And I'll check back in with you in two weeks when my break is over and let you know how it went.
That actually will probably get some really great response from your audience because everyone else is feeling the burnout of social media too. So that's what I wanted to say about social media. Hold it lightly, hold it lightly. People don't care nearly as much as you think. And I guess the last thing I would like to say is this, this is a really good time. If you're starting to feel a bit run down, burnt out, exhausted with your business,
and you're feeling like, okay, it's time for me to make some positive changes to try to get myself out of this space that I don't burn out, which I highly recommend. And again, I could do so many different podcast episodes on tools for stress management and maybe I'll do some coming up. But now if you're feeling that way is a really great time to start tracking what I call red flags. So these are the things that happen when you start to feel stressed, overwhelmed and burnt out. These are the things that you don't like that you start seeing.
Wendy McCallum (25:43.506)
in your life more often when you're feeling this way. Now, that might be a surge of a higher reliance on an unhealthy coping mechanism, whether that's your stress eating or maybe you're drinking alcohol or you're finding yourself like going down the rabbit hole of social media for hours on end just to distract yourself.
or many other things, online shopping. We all do have different things that we use as sort of coping, numbing, escaping mechanisms. If you find there's been an increased reliance on those, that might be a red flag for you. But oftentimes for people, it's actually that things are disappearing and those are the red flags. So stuff is not there anymore that is there when you're feeling balanced and good. Things like regular exercise, things like meal planning or food prep.
If you find you're like, oh, I'm just ordering pizza all the time. I'm no longer making meals. For me, that's a really big red flag that things are kind of out of balance and the pendulum swung too far the wrong way. Sleep interruptions. That's another really big one for me. If I'm waking up in the middle of the night thinking and worrying about business stuff, I've taken on too much and it's time for me to pare that back, right? So pay attention to those red flags and start writing them down. I look back to when I was practicing law.
And I have a whole bunch of red flags from when I was practicing law. And when I left law and started this business, I knew small business was gonna be hard. My husband had been a small business person for by that, at that point, probably for about five or six years, I knew it was hard. And I knew there was a chance I could burn out doing it. And so I had a very clear set of red flags from my last burnout. And I thought, I'm not going down that road again. And I have been very good overall at paying attention to those things.
I did, as I hinted at the beginning of this episode, I did have a second burnout, but it was really largely outside of my control. My dad got very, very sick and eventually died. And we had about two years that were really intense, acutely stressful years of taking care of him and taking care of my mom. And then obviously his death. I did quit drinking then, thank God. That's the thing that saved me. But I did actually have, I think, a sort of a second smaller burnout as a result of that caregiving stress, largely not professional stress.
Wendy McCallum (27:52.534)
But I still use my red flag system during that second burnout, which is like, if again, if I was up in the middle of the night, worrying about stuff, that was a sign that I needed to change something and let something go. If I wasn't cooking my own food, which I really love to do, and I was just finding myself relying on process, take out stuff far too often, that was a sign something had to give. If I wasn't exercising regularly, that was a sign something needed to shift.
And then I start working on applying what I call the 4Ds, which I teach around time management for business, my coaches, but also any professionals that I'm speaking to. And the 4Ds are just a tool for time management, not my tool, but a tool that's a really helpful tool. Delegate, defer, delete, or do. So again, that's delegate, defer, delete, or do. And when those red flags start popping up, I'm like, hold on, what can I delegate? Hold on.
What can I defer for like next month or maybe even next year in my business? What is something that doesn't need to happen right now that I can move forward? Secondly, what can I delete? Or thirdly, I guess, what can I delete? So is there anything that I have planned that I can just literally kibosh, I can get rid of right now that I don't actually need to do? And I'm gonna delete that. And then the do is obviously for the things that are left over that have to be done.
But I have a system of red flags, and when those red flags start to show their head, that is a sign to me that I am approaching burnout or at risk of burning out, and I'm not gonna go there again. So I start applying those four Ds. What can I delete? What can I delegate? What can I defer? What do I actually have to do? And I will continue to apply those four Ds until I get to a point where those red flags aren't showing up anymore. So I hope you found that helpful. That's my little...
Wendy McCallum (29:37.986)
unconventional approaches to burnout as a coach. I have lots more to say on this topic. If you like this podcast, let me know and I'll do some more on burnout prevention and stress. But I hope you found that helpful and I will see you in a couple of weeks for another episode of The Coaching Edge.
