Mistaking Burnout Signals for Failure | Work Stress & Nervous System Recovery

Emily’s Laptop Finally Fails

0:21 Speaker: This great story teaches us something about being human. I'm Cheryl Paris and this is Work Stress Anxiety. Together let's borrow a little wisdom from a story to help us navigate a very modern world.

0:43 Speaker 1: Emily's laptop had been warning her for weeks that it wasn't very happy. It was slower than usual, it kept freezing. You know, when laptops make that really weird noise that makes you look at it and think, okay, please don't do this today. And because replacing it felt like one expense too many, she kept, you know, putting it off, putting it off. And then one morning she really needed it, and guess what? It gave up completely. She had to see a client today in a few meet uh few hours, and she promised a proposal to the client.

1:24 Speaker 1: And some of the notes were backed up, but some weren't. They were still on paper. Some were probably sitting in that very unreliable filing system called I'll remember, I'll remember it later. And suddenly the thought arrived. Why does everything keep going wrong? And of course, it wasn't really about the laptop. There were emails she hadn't answered, um, admin that she hadn't really touched, a client who had already been difficult, a deadline that had slipped, she hadn't been sleeping properly, and Emily that morning she snapped at her daughter over something really small on the kitchen cabinet and then felt awful about it afterwards.

2:17 Speaker 1: That often how these periods feel, right? Nothing is catastrophic on its own, but everything is arriving into the system where there's no spare room and there's no margin for error, and this one broken laptop doesn't feel like just one problem. It feels like proof that her whole world is collapsing.

When Small Problems Start Piling Up

2:43 Speaker 1: So today I want to look at something that can happen when work stress has been kind of built in for a while. You know, you start saying to yourself, I'm just the most unluckiest person, or everything happens all at once, or everything comes in threes. And sometimes that really is how life behaves, and sometimes there's just the completely other layer to it because you're probably depleted or unsupported, or trying to carry too much, and that means ordinary things just become far more expensive. So this episode isn't really about luck.

3:29 Speaker 1: I hope it's about agency and the difference between trying to control everything and recognizing that you still have a choice. Before we go any further, I want to thank you, that listener in Boynton Beach, Florida, who listened to when perfectionism and anxiety eat your identity. You know, I love seeing where you guys are listening from, um, whether it's, you know, the office or the car or the kitchen table or inside business that looks perfectly functional from the outside, and everybody's business looked functional too, until you look at what it was costing her to keep it that way.

4:16 Speaker 1: She knew.

The Hidden Cost Of Delaying Decisions

4:18 Speaker 1: I mean, I had this the other day. She knew her laptop needed replacing. She knew that those administrative things um she needed to do. She knew some of her clients were weren't working with any particularly good that she, you know, the clients, some of the clients that she was working with weren't particularly a good fit for her. But every everyone knows, you know, you get tangled with those distinctions because it's all about money. You know, I can't justify a new laptop. I need this client because I need the income.

4:54 Speaker 1: And that word yet, you know, can become very persuasive because you think you're putting off a decision, but sometimes you're really doing is um building your work life around consequences of not making it. And I think Emily was kind of doing that, was doing more and more to compensate for the things that she knew weren't working. You know, I recognize the idea of emotions getting kind of entangled with business decisions.

Clarity Versus Noise In Spending

5:29 Speaker 1: Um, you know, when I first decided to become a stress coach uh about 20 years ago now, or maybe a bit longer, I had I had my website done, I bought some merchandise, I spent money on all sorts of things. And looking back, some of it was um to be fair, some of it was probably a distraction because it made me feel as if I was moving forward. I didn't doubt my ability to do the work. What I was doing was that I think was allowing far, far too much outside noise to influence me. And sometimes, you know what it's like, out noise, outside noise makes us spend money we don't need to spend.

6:11 Speaker 1: And sometimes it makes us to refuse the money we should probably be, should be spending, right? The direction changes, and the iron the underlying question doesn't, I don't think. And I am making this decision from clarity, right? Or am I trying to quietly um do something that's maybe a bit uncomfortable for me? So I get what where Emily's coming from. For Emily, the uncomfortable thing sounds like responsibility. You know, if I'm running the business, I should be able to manage it. If I spend money before I've earned enough, am I being irresponsible?

6:51 Speaker 1: And that's where something subtle can happen because, you know, responsibility or being responsible for a business becomes being personally responsible for every task inside it. You know, and are they the same thing? I don't think so. One is about leadership, and the other can become a very expensive way of proving you're committed.

Responsibility Is Not Doing Everything

7:16 Speaker 1: And that one person in your business gets tired, right? And you know, this is where, you know, me and my um, if you don't know anything about me, I am so mad into period dramas. And you know, when I was uh thinking about Emily, I was thinking about Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre comes definitely comes to mind. Not because her book, her life looks anything like Emily's business, because of course it doesn't. But Jane had very little money for much of Jane Eyre. Very little status, very limited control over her circumstances.

7:59 Speaker 1: But what she did have, I thought, was a remarkable, clear sense of who she was. And that matters because she doesn't hand over her identity over to the people who have more perceived power than sh than she does. She doesn't say, well, they have money, position, or authority, so I must get to they must get to decide who I am. Um Jane's circumstances are constrained, yes, but her sense of self is certainly not. And perhaps that's the distinction I think maybe Emily has lost sight of.

Control Questions Versus Agency Questions

8:39 Speaker 1: How do I stop anything going wrong? Is a control question. Whereas with agency, what is still mine to decide? Okay, so Emily can't decide these things, I suppose. She can't control whether her technology fails, she can't control whether her client becomes demanding, she can't control the economy. I don't think any of us can do that. She can't guarantee what the next three months of income is going to look like, but she can decide whether she keeps depending on unreliable equipment, or if she needs to do every single bit of admin, or she can decide whether a client relationship is worth the amount of energy it's consuming.

9:32 Speaker 1: An agency to me is not control with better branding, it's knowing where your choice actually begins. Now, I appreciate for some of us, pressure narrows everything. It's almost like coarse blinkers. The immediate problem becomes the whole problem. And the safest thing feels like sometimes feel like doing is not doing anything. Keep the client, keep the old system, do all the admin yourself. Work every evening until 11 o'clock. Keep yourself or tell yourself you'll sort everything out when things calm down a bit, you know, you need this client.

10:17 Speaker 1: So that's why I'm not interested in standing outside everybody's life and saying, well, obviously, she should delegate. Uh uh. Obviously, is a very lovely word when you're not the person who has to look at your bank balance, right? And of course, money matters. Sometimes you really can't afford the ideal solution. Sometimes a laptop does have to last another month. Um, sometimes you need to keep that client because that invoice is paying for something important. But there's still a difference, I think, between I can't afford every option I want and I have no options.

11:02 Speaker 1: The two sentences can feel identical when you're exhausted, but I want to remind you, I don't think they are. And perhaps the first return of agency is simply, I don't know, moving them apart. What do you think? I am much clearer about that in my own work now. I made a conscious decision that I won't work with someone simply because there's money attached to it. Yeah, I know you think I'm mad, but seriously, I that's the decision I made. That doesn't mean somebody has to be easy. In fact, most of my clients probably would agree with me.

11:43 Speaker 1: They're not easy to work with. Working with me is, I think, if I'm honest with myself, action focused. But I need to be, I need to feel that my client is really aligned with that. And what I mean by that is they're willing to engage with the work. They don't have to believe it 100%, because that's what my job is, to for them to borrow enough beliefs. Um, but I'd much rather supplement my income doing other something else than taking someone on just because I need to pay a bill. That doesn't give me um control over money, it gives me something that I think is so much more important for me, and that's clarity about what I'm doing and what I'm willing to trade it for.

The Inside Out Shirt Wake Up

12:37 Speaker 1: And I would call that agency. So, in terms of Emily, Emily's moment of clarity was considerably less polished. She got the client meeting, okay, she's stressed, she's flustered, she's already feeling as if the day has declared war on her personally, and then she realized she put I don't know, her top on inside out. Have you ever done that? There are moments when life gives you insight with such elegance, and then there are moments when the label on your clothes is doing the presentation for you, and she went to the bathroom, she had a little cry, and then she laughed.

13:22 Speaker 1: And I'm all about laughing. Not because we're laughing at people, we're laughing with them, right? Somewhere in that ridiculous little moment came a thought that was much more useful than why doesn't why does this always happen to me? Was I can't keep running my business like this. And notice what that sentence does. It doesn't say I'm useless, it doesn't say I should be coping better, or I need to be more organized. It's to me, it says this way of doing things is no longer working for me. And that creates room, space, whatever you want to call it, because if the problem is you, there's nowhere to go except self-criticism.

14:10 Speaker 1: Right? If the problem is the way the work is being organized, the choices I think become visible again. What genuinely needs your skill? What are you carrying because you believe you should? And what are you tolerating because you're convinced? Or at least you've convinced yourself there's no other alternative. And to me, that's where agency can start reappearing in your mind.

Mine Not Mine Next Exercise

14:38 Speaker 1: So if you recognize this, you might experiment with something very small. You know me, I like small steps. I want you to take one work problem, just one, not your entire career or business, and write three headings on a sheet of paper. And the three headings are mine, not mine, and next. And under mine, I want you to write what you can genuinely influence, decide, communicate, delegate, renegotiate, or stop. So genuinely influence, decide, buy, delegate, renegotiate or stop. Right? And then under not mine, write what belongs to someone else.

15:32 Speaker 1: The market, technology, uncertainty, all the circumstances that you can't control. And then under next, I want you to choose one useful action from that first column. That's all. Alright? It's to put responsibility back in the right place. So for Emily, the laptop failing belongs partially, I think, under not mine. Technology fails, it fails all the time. But whether she continues building her work around equipment she no longer trusts belongs in mine. A difficult customer's personality may belong in not mine.

16:18 Speaker 1: Whether she keeps accepting the same terms with the client belongs in mine. Okay? She doesn't need to turn this into evidence at all, right? It's all about information. And she can ask whether every task that she may have to do, especially in the black block, actually requires her. You know, one of the most interesting things is that once responsibility goes back into the right columns, the situation starts to feel less like an enormous wall, right? I'm not saying it's easy, I'm just saying it's clearer.

17:00 Speaker 1: And that kind of brings me back to Jane here. Jane does not wait until life becomes fair for her before deciding who she is. She doesn't need control over every circumstance before she makes a decision that this is true to me being myself. And perhaps that is part um part of that is I think is worth borrowing from Jane. Absolutely. You may have few options or fewer options than you would like. You may be tired, money may be tight, other people may still be difficult, but those things do not automatically get to make every decision for you.

Follow The Podcast And Close

17:44 Speaker 1: Hmm, okay, now if if episodes like this help you make a sense of what's happening underneath work stress, can you please follow the podcast? Yeah, at follow the podcast.com forward slash work stressanxiety. And that way the next episode is easier to find when you need it. You know, sometimes the trap to me is not that we don't have agency, we just get so bogged down with the pressure, the pressure, you know, of having to make choices harder for ourselves. And perhaps you don't need to solve everything today, you don't need to have the perfect business system, you don't need to have the perfect client list, and you don't even need to have the perfect laptop.

18:39 Speaker 1: No, you don't. For today, just take one work problem and give yourself three minutes. Mine, not mine, next. And then see what happens. Your circumstances may limit your choice choices, it may limit your option, but but they don't get to define your your choices for you. Remember, every step you take, no matter how small, is a step towards a brighter and more balanced future. Trust in your journey and remember, progress is progress no matter the pace. Bye for. I hope today's episode gave you something useful to carry into your week.

19:24 Speaker 1: Now finish your coffee, take a breath, and remember progress is progress no matter the pace. Until next time, bye for now. For now.